Werner Herzog
Appearances
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
We have to be careful. I said it. Yes, he was mad in moments of paranoia, but he had splendid moments of friendship and warmth and insight. So he had quite a few facets.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
And of course, since I lived in the same boarding house with him, directly with him, and saw the tornado laying waste to the entire apartment, so I knew what was coming at me when some nine or ten years later I invited him to play the leading part in Agere, The Wrath of God. I knew it was going to be difficult, but I said to myself, so what?
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
The real task now is, since he's such an incredible actor, since he has such a presence and dynamic and authority on the screen, I have to domesticate the wild beast somehow. All his crazy attitudes should not explode outside of the screen during a dinner or after dinner where he opens fire at a hut full of extras. It shouldn't happen. It should be all somehow organized for the screen itself.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
And I think that that was my achievement.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
No, not partially successful. I was successful because I made five films with him. And they all, when you look at them and forget about Kinski and forget about his private crazed personality and his egomania, forget about all this. There are five films out there that have something that you normally do not see in a movie. a presence and an intensity of a leading character that's unprecedented.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
I have only a few precedents are there, like the young Marlon Brando, for example. And no matter how difficult it was to tame him, to domesticate the beast, it doesn't matter. The only thing, the only, only thing that counts, what do you see on a screen?
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
Yes, but that was the most serious thing that ever happened. And, of course, it is serious. And you have to cope with it. And I threatened Kinski. Actually, there are wild rumors about it that I had a gun in my hands. And so that's not true. But I threatened him immediately. And he understood this was not a joke anymore. And he had to be disciplined from now on.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
And through all the other films I made with him, never anything of this magnitude ever happened.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
We didn't talk that much. My mother, it was obvious, she was very early on embarrassed about having been misguided. And she practically, of course, she had to raise all alone three children. There was no money. My father never paid.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
paid anything to support us and she became a completely different person and of course it was always lingering out there and of course I was fascinated by what happened to Germany how is it possible that within a few years such a cultured nation lapses into transforms into a world of barbarism
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
Yes, and it happened to many other educated families. There was no one spared. I mean, Germany was almost 100% Nazi. The dissidents, yes, they were out there, but they ended up in concentration camps very quickly.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
In a way, yes. But of course, in this village, there were also Nazis.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
Yes, there were also Nazis. Well, much later, it took some time. I thought, I didn't even know what Germany was. It was the valley where we grew up in this remote place and the waterfall in the gorge behind the house. That was our world. And of course, the daily struggle. We had no running water. You had to go to the well with a bucket.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
We didn't have any running water in the house, so my shower was the ice-cold water of the waterfall deep in the gorge, and hardly any electricity. I didn't know of the existence of cinema until I was 11. I think the first time I noticed that there was something like Germany, I must have been seven or eight years old. For me, the world was around me and that was it.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
I don't see it that much as extremes. You see, when you move a ship over a mountain, it is doable. And I knew it was doable, although quite hard. But I think it is such a big metaphor like extremes. In literature, you have it, for example, the white whale, Moby Dick, in the hunt for it, or Don Quixote attacking the windmills with his lance.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
And of course, I started to question and I started to understand how does chaos and barbarism invade a fairly organized country. And that's why I wanted to go to the chaos of Eastern Congo after its independence, which I never reached and I probably wouldn't have survived it.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
My mother and my father was always outside of my life. I hardly knew him.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
Yes, but not very much. It was fairly laconic and she said, look at me, that's me now. And I did a very, very severe mistake in my life. And my character had to readjust. I'm a different person. I think differently now. And so I accepted it. And, for example, she was never a racist, never deep into Nazi ideology at all.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
It is more the aftermath and the restrictions. For example, I noticed that we were hungry. That was the only thing that was really hard to take. Otherwise, that we lived in very deep poverty. I didn't notice. It was a normal thing. And everyone around us was impoverished. And so it was nothing really special. Only much later I understood what poverty meant.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
But that I had gone through it never affected me.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
Yes. You have somebody talking to you who grew up in the war. We were bombed out. There was a foot of glass shard and bricks and debris on my cradle when I was 14 days old. And then, of course, I grew up in post-war time, starvation.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
poverty and since I had this experience for me it's obvious that there shouldn't be any war I'm against any war at all and of course it is terrible what we are witnessing now it is terrible it is terrible and it shouldn't be but what can I do I cannot fight as a volunteer in this war
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
You know, why I would participate if in Germany all of a sudden neo-Nazis started a rebellion, an armed rebellion, a coup d'etat. You would know who would be first one to rush back and pick up a weapon. It would be me. I would fight. Because?
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
Because something like times of the barbarism of the Nazis must not repeat itself. You see, as long as there is breath in me, I would fight.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
And of course, having caused, having created the Holocaust, Germany has specific attention to Israel now. There's no doubt, but we also now, since it will be terrible what's coming, we also have to look after all the casualties on both sides.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
So there are big metaphors, a big vision out there, and then it doesn't matter if it's becoming difficult or not. And, of course, I disagree a little bit about what you said about risking things. Yes, I have risked personally things. I test things. the problems and the obstacles and the dangers. But in 80 or so films, not a single actor was ever injured, not one.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
Yes, the content, of course. And since then, I narrated my own writings, my own commentaries, and I had found my voice. But it's a stylized voice. When I'm talking to you, I'm talking like me in commentaries. There's a certain stylization, a certain performance in it, a certain hypnotic voice in it. I can't describe it easily. And it has caught on. Audiences love it. So I do it for them as well.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
I do films for audiences. I write my book for readers. So I'm enjoying it. And I have been good. in parts, in roles where I have to play the bad ass, bad guy, like in Jack Reacher, or where, for example, in a film by Harmony Corrine, which is called Julian Donkey Boy, I play a hostile father who harasses his dysfunctional family, and I'm good at that. But it's all performance. Don't believe.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
Don't ever believe. I'm like that as a private person.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
No, not really. But, you know, when Jack Reacher was released, it was released in France as well. My wife immediately gets frantic calls from her girlfriend in Paris. And she says, Lena, are you really married to that man? We can give you shelter if you need to flee France. We are only an overnight flight away and Lena laughed so hard and told me about it.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
And of course she will testify that I'm a mild-mannered, fluffy husband. She came up with that and I live with her happily now since 28 years. She will give you the right testimony.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
No, we do not know because I just heard somebody across the street on a veranda ranting about like road rage. And all of a sudden I heard some sort of a mild explosion in something like a glowing piece of metal, like a kilo weight of glowing metal hits me at my belt or near my belt. And I thought something at the camera had exploded.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
So it's my proof that I must be circumspect, that I must be careful. Of course, sometimes crew members were hurt, but they would volunteer, even push me. For example, let's go through the rapids with a ship. And it's a big one. I mean, 320 tons. And if it crashes into the rocks, it has a momentum and a kinetic energy that's enormous.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
But no, and I saw the man with the rifle ducking down and disappearing. And I did not know because I did not want to call police. I said to the crew, BBC people, you are frantically now dialing 911. consider it. We'll spend the next six hours filing reports at a police station and we will have a helicopter over us and a SWAT team arriving in five minutes flat. Do we need that? Do you want that?
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
And so we decided we'd just continue shooting, but at a safer place.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
Yes, it was outside and you can still see it on YouTube. It's funny because people think, ah, yeah, it was all staged and made up. No, it was not. It was reality. It was the real world. And, of course, in a world of fake news and inventions and embellishments, and so people believe that being shot and hit, not seriously, but anyway, that it must have been made up.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
Or having moved the ship over a mountain that must have been a digital effect and we are only pretending. No, I moved the ship. So you have to connect yourself to the real world and then all of a sudden my memoirs become the most natural thing. a man who lived a very normal life with a few things that were exceptional. And I think it's not exceptional to move a ship over a mountain.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
Every grown-up man should do something like that.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
No, because we could see I was bleeding, but I could see it was the bullet went through all my leather jacket and the folded up catalogue and all my shirt and T-shirt. But it did not perforate my abdominal. It did not perforate and go into my abdomen. If it had been inside of me, lodged in my intestines, in that case I would have gone to the hospital. emergency room.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
But I can distinguish what is serious and what can be taken and tolerated. So I do my best and I think in this case I did my best as well.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
Well, I just finished another book, The Future of Truth. which will be released next spring, but in its German original. What you have in front of you is a very fine translation of my memoirs, but it always takes until it's being translated, so it will take about a year, and I made also two films that are not fully released yet, and I'm working on some poetry now,
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
And I'm working on a translation of poetry by a Canadian writer, Ondaatje. And, well, I'm just plowing on wildly.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
Yes, I have long hours of sleep. I'm fairly lazy. My days of shooting are brief. My hours of writing are brief. I do my tax returns three hours in the morning, then I write three hours memoirs and I go to the pharmacy or whatever. But I write 15 pages. It goes fast. And next day, another 10, 15 pages. Because it's my life. I have lived it. And it's in me. You see, it's not foreign. It's in me.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
And of course, almost everyone who was on board for filming and they pushed me, let's go on board and let's film this. Almost everyone was injured, but that does happen and it's a risk that we knew and we accepted it.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
And because of that, I can describe it for you. And you will not be disappointed.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
The mind. All right, Bill. Let's take it easy, huh? Hey, Tony. You got a drink, Tony?
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
I hear you, yes. But I'm not searching for finding my boundaries or something. The extreme mountain climbers do that. That's not my thing. I know my boundaries and I accept them and I take no as an answer, for example. And I'm a professional person. I'm a filmmaker. And I want to come back with a film and I want to come back alive alive.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
because I want to edit the film and I want to show it to audiences. So, for example, at the edge of a volcano, yes, there were certain dangers and there was an eruption and glowing slabs or blobs of lava came down on us, raining down, and some of them very large. I mean, the size of... the size of a car, the size even of a truck. So you better flee quickly. You get out of it.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
But I'm not searching the dangers. The nature of my storytelling sometimes requires to go into extreme situations, yes. But I think to look deep into our human nature, to look deep into the darkest recesses of our soul or the hidden things deep in our soul, you have to put human beings at some sort of an edge.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
Well, I was too young. You see, number one, when my mother fled Munich, I was only two weeks old, 14 days old, when there was carpet bombing on Munich. Of course, there's no memory, anything. The childhood was very, very closed and very beautiful. But when I was two and a half, and it's my very first memory, my mother wakes us up abruptly in the middle of the night. It must have been April 1st.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
1945. And she says, you have to see it, boys, wraps us in blankets, rushes up on a slope. And at the end of the valley, the entire sky was red and orange, but not flickering because Rosenheim is 40 miles away. So the entire sky is pulsing slowly, red and orange. And that somehow is embedded in my memory forever. And of course, I knew all of a sudden there's something out there.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
There's a world out there. There's war out there. There's a conflagration out there. And I became curious. And it's strange because my two brothers who grew up with me did not move out and were that curious. They were very successful in their professions, but not like me. I was one who would move to Antarctica or to the jungle or to the Sahara Desert to do my work.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
It was from one moment to the next. I knew that something like that cannot happen again. And that's how a character is being formed, defeats, catastrophes that are created by And of course, that shaped my character. And from one moment to the next, I knew you have to control what is wild in you. You have to be disciplined. And until today, 90% of what you see when you meet me is discipline.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
People think, yeah, I'm the wild guy out there. And so, no, I'm a disciplined professional. And at that time, family, of course, was important because we grew up with our mother who raised us. We were three brothers and one mother. We lived in one single room in a sort of pension, we called it. It's a boarding house building.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
And of course we had clashes like brothers would have and until today it's mysterious to foreigners. Not long ago, a few years ago, I visited my older brother in Spain. where he had built himself a big house and he had a wonderful sailing boat. And we were at a fish restaurant and I studied the menu and he put his arm around my shoulder.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
And all of a sudden I feel some stinging thing in my back and I smell smoke. And I realize he has set my shirt on fire with his cigarette lighter. Wow. And we laughed so hard and everybody around on the table was appalled. But sometimes that's how brothers sometimes function. And I love him dearly and we do mischievous things to each other. It does happen and it's not that serious.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
You see, somebody gave me his T-shirt and we cooled my back with a few glasses of Prosecco. And that was that.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
No, it was hilarious. Come on, a shirt doesn't really burn. I mean, it glows and glimmers a little bit, but that was his joke.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
Well, that's my profession. That's my profession as a poet. And you look deep into who we are and you describe it. But you shouldn't make the mistake to believe that memoirs are confessional. I'm not into that business and I never liked too deep introspection. There's enough in my memoirs. There's enough introspection. There's no doubt it's in there, but to a certain limit.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
And I do not want to step beyond a certain threshold. It is not healthy if you circle too much. around your own navel. And it is not good to recall all the traumata of your childhood. It's good to forget them. It's good to bury them. Not in all cases, but in most cases. So psychoanalysis is doing that. I do not deny that it is good and necessary in a very few cases.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
Yes, I admit it, but it's not my thing. And I keep telling men. So you see, rather dead than going to a psychiatrist, but at the same time, rather dead than ever wearing a toupee. Yeah. You see, my hair is thinning and I just accept it as it is. So nothing, rather dead.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
And women would immediately agree with me. You cannot live with a man who starts to wear a toupee and thinks he is handsome now and rejuvenated.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
No, no, I know who I am and I know where I come from and I know where I'm heading toward. No fear and no regrets. Sure, I made massive mistakes and I'm in a way a result of my own defeats. So be it. They formed me. They made me thinking differently. beyond what I normally thought before.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
Well, they are somehow touching a chord that's in us, something mad or borderline mad, something of power and dementia and madness. And through such figures, all of a sudden we have it spelled out. We can feel it. We can touch it. We can read it and sense it and start to compare it. Where I am standing, how mad am I myself?
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
No, no. I'm the only one in the entire profession who is clinically sane.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
Oh, come on. I wouldn't have made some 80 films without having my wits together and my sanity and my professionalism. I'm the only one. When you look at the craze of Hollywood and all these red carpet events and the statements at the red carpet, which are all performative, it's all performative borderline insanity in a way, or saccharine... pink sort of vanilla ice cream emotions.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
I'm the only one who is sane. The only one.
Fresh Air
Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is
Please make sure. And you can read it. Every single line in my memoir shows you that I'm absolutely sane in an ocean of craze.