Chapter 1: What unique perspective does Werner Herzog bring to filmmaking?
So first of all, I just want to say it's really a pleasure to meet you. I've consumed a fair amount of your work, much less than some, more than others. And you strike me as maybe either the sanest crazy person on the planet or the craziest sane person.
No, I'm only sane.
I just want to hear you describe how you see the world, and I'll give you some leading questions. And I want to talk about your books, especially your recent book about truth. But I don't know, do you feel like an unusual being? No, I'm as average as it can get. That is Werner Herzog, the German-born filmmaker and writer and actor and a sort of citizen soldier. He is not average.
Herzog has made more than 70 films. All of them are spirited. Some are absurdist or pretentious. None of them are dull. There is Family Romance LLC about a Japanese entrepreneur who leases out humans to other humans who, for some reason, may need a stand-in family member or friend. There's Grizzly Man, a remarkable documentary about a man who loved bears a little too much.
And there are the five films that Herzog made with the actor Klaus Kinski. The Kinski-Herzog relationship was volatile and sometimes violent. Their two best known collaborations are Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, The Wrath of God. Both films are about an obsession that tips into madness.
In Fitzcarraldo, the Kinski character needs to haul a massive steamship over a steep hill in the Amazon in order to fund a new opera house. Herzog says that 20th Century Fox wanted him to shoot the film in botanical gardens in San Diego and for the ship to use a plastic model. But Herzog got his way. He shot in the Peruvian jungle with a real 320 ton steamship and a real hill.
It was a mad adventure, and all the madness of making the film is captured in the film. Today, you could use AI to generate a decent facsimile of something like that for a tiny fraction of the cost. So is Herzog worried about the competition?
I saw a film which was scripted by artificial intelligence and the images made by artificial intelligence. How was it? Completely dead on arrival. A stillborn baby. There's no spark of life in it. only mimicry of invention, only mimicry. So I'm not worried. There's no artificial intelligence that really would challenge me.
Herzog recently published a book called The Future of Truth. Here's one bit that captures the essence. He writes, I don't think truth is some kind of pole star in the sky that we will one day get to. It's more like an incessant striving. Today on Freakonomics Radio, here's to incessant striving and what it means, according to Werner Herzog, to be intelligent.
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Chapter 2: How does Herzog describe his relationship with actor Klaus Kinski?
I try to avoid it. This is why I believe that psychoanalysis is one of the great mistakes of the 20th century. Of course, it started earlier in the 19th century, but basically a phenomenon of the 20th century. I think it is not good if you... illuminate all the dark recesses of the human soul. It's good that we can forget and that we forget traumas.
We do not have to unearth them and articulate them in endless sessions with a psychiatrist. And the 20th century is full of very, very deep mistakes. Psychoanalysis is only one. monstrous mistakes of this century. I do believe that the 20th century in its entirety was a mistake. The entire 20th century? The entire, yes.
Good Lord.
Yes. And I have good reasons to argue. Let's hear some. I would speak of the demise of social utopias. It begins with communism. It had its demise, and of course fascism and the barbarism of the Nazis, which has been unprecedented, postulating a master race dominating the planet. So this social utopia, thanks God, has come to an ignominious end.
Atomic bomb, for example, and maybe the most significant of all that, In the 20th century, the population of the world grew from one and a half billion roughly to six billion. And that's the greatest of all disasters.
Both your parents, you said, were, I think, enthusiastic was the word you used, adherents of the Nazi party.
In the early time, yeah. And my mother more the socialist, the Nationalsozialismus, meaning what Röhm represented, whom Hitler had eliminated, executed fairly early on, because he was more in the mainstream of socialism and not so much nationalism. It's a long, complex debate, but that was more the sources of where my mother...
took her credo, but she was, shall I say, intelligent enough and she was so much rooted in the real world with three boys to raise all alone that she came to very sobering conclusions fairly early on.
You were born during World War II in Munich, yeah? Yeah, I was born 1942. So by the time that you're a thinking, sentient human, I'm curious what kind of conversations you had with your mother about the beginning of the war in the Nazi party.
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Chapter 3: What insights does Herzog share about the impact of artificial intelligence on film?
It's okay. It's challenging. You really are whipped into doing something Los Angeles is the city with the most substance in the United States. The most substance, you said? Yes. In what way? First and foremost, cultural substance. But don't forget that there's a huge amount of industry there.
When you fly into Los Angeles, you see all these industrial areas, flat roofs, gigantic factories, buildings. Reusable rockets are being built within the perimeter of the city. You don't have this factory in the Bronx. You don't have it near Wall Street. Of course, people immediately think the superficial side, glitz and glamour of Hollywood. That's what I don't mean.
But serious art, all the artists that made New York important, they were late 1940s, early 1950s. The last straggler, in a way, was Andy Warhol. It's a place where you consume culture, New York. It's generated in Los Angeles. The painters are living there nowadays. Not all, but some very important ones. Writers, mathematicians, all those stupidities, like crazy sects.
Yoga classes for five-year-olds. I mean, it's grotesque. Great universities. LACMA is going to open very soon. And all of a sudden, you will have one of the two or three most important museums in the United States. I mean, it has great museums already. And it's going to be big. You see, I'm the one who says it at a time when nobody believes it. Nobody notices it.
And it's wonderful to articulate it now.
Nobody believes it about L.A., you're saying?
No, you find it kind of funny when I say it. I see your face.
So I've been to L.A. maybe 20 times in my life, never for more than a week. And I love L.A. It's just so different from New York that I feel like I need to orient myself anew. But being a New Yorker, I do want to ask you, let's say that I consider it tragic. That New York has fallen behind in the arts, as you said.
No, no, come on. It's not tragic that Florence has fallen behind. It's not tragic that medieval Venice, Italy has fallen behind. So what? It keeps shifting. And it was shifting within Italy, Florence, Rome. Milan, Venice, Ferrara sometimes. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It's one country. It's one culture.
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Chapter 4: How does Herzog define the difference between accountant's truth and ecstatic truth?
And I made a remark, I wouldn't even know what to say to the emperor because I should say something of importance, something of gravitas, something formalized. I wouldn't know how to handle it. And there was complete silence. There are silences that are friendly, but it was a frozen silence. And then into the silence, all of a sudden, there's a voice asking, whom else then would you like to meet?
And without missing a beat, I said, Hiro Onoda, the last one. He'd been in the jungle for 40 years or something, yeah? and ultimately ended up by me writing a novel, The Twilight World. But I actually met the emperor. I invited him very kindly to attend the world premiere of the opera. And the emperor showed up and I asked for permission to shake his hand. So I came in the intermission.
I shook his hand and he said, stay for a moment. We should speak. And we spoke. And it was very pleasant, by the way. A wonderful short conversation. And it was at the right moment, I think. It was when I had to offer something which was visible. You could see it. And in 15 minutes, intermission was over and the second act would come. So I didn't come with empty hands.
And it was much better then.
It's always, I guess, impressed me the way that Germany, after the Second World War, assessed what had happened and and in its schools and its institutions tried to come to grips with why and how and to educate its successive generations. Can you just talk about that a bit? Did you see that as unusual among nations? Should it be a blueprint?
Because there apparently are going to continue to be wars into the future.
No, it shouldn't be a blueprint. As a German, you do not... give a blueprint to the Americans how to handle their educational system. You don't. And you don't tell the Japanese how to deal with their education or the Italians or the – you just name it. You just don't do it. You have to come with your cultural, historical identity. You will come to your conclusions.
But of course, Germany was consistent in it from the end of the Second World War until literally today. And it's not only education, it's translated into legislation. For example, it is a criminal offense to be a denier of Holocaust. If you're a fervent denier and go to public as a denier of the Holocaust, you will end up in jail in Germany. And I think it's good that it is like this.
I've heard you speak about living in a culture of complaint. My wife has a phrase for certain kinds of people. She calls them injustice collectors. That's a good phrase. characterization, yeah. I'd love you to say whatever more you can about what you mean by a culture of complaint, and especially what you think is the cost of that.
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Chapter 5: What does Herzog believe is the essence of being an intelligent person?
And I try to encourage all my friends who are not Trump supporters, I tell them, don't complain. It is a majority. It's not lottery that brought Trump to the presidency. He won the popular vote by a very significant margin. Both houses, Senate and Congress, and the Supreme Court is to some degree shaped by him. So it's significant. It doesn't come because he's a lucky man.
No, there's a clear worldview, a clear cultural worldview that he wants to wage. And it's evident. He really says what he means. It's not that there's anything hidden. And I say to everyone, if you do not agree, take America, the heartland of America. Take it seriously. That's where the heart beats.
When you say take it seriously, do you mean that as a political direction, an artistic direction?
In every sense. And many of my friends who are working in Los Angeles, I say, don't you come from Kansas? Yes, I come from Kansas. And I say, when were you... In Kansas last time. Ah, that was 20 years ago. Now you should be every year. When did you meet your high school buddies? Oh, no contact with them at all. You have to get in touch with them. Ask them how they are doing.
Ask them about their visions. Ask them about their grievances. Keep them engaged. They are your buddies, your high school friends. Do something. Don't complain. I don't like the complaints. I mean it way beyond politics. When I do a workshop for young filmmakers, they have to make a film within nine days, a short film. very short film, but it's a relentless push.
And they learn a lot because I'm behind them during casting, choosing some sort of a story, showing them locations. I'm with them going around when they are shooting, look over their backs when they're editing. and they have to come up on the 10th day with a finished short film. The mood in the beginning is always, ah, the film industry is so stupid, and they do not finance.
And I ask, from where are you? South Korea. And the Americans, they complain, they say the same thing. The Mexicans say the same thing everywhere. The Germans, there's immediately the mood of complaint. I say, you idiots, if you are able-bodied and have... the will and the vision to make a film earn a little bit money.
Today you can make a documentary that is cinema quality for under $10,000, a one-and-a-half-hour film. Work as an Uber driver, work in a lunatic asylum, work as a bouncer in a sex club.
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Chapter 6: How does Herzog view the culture of complaint in society?
That's what I always recommend.
Or as a German rodeo clown like you did, yes?
In Mexico, yeah, yeah, well, I earned money because I had to survive.
You earned money in a lot of interesting ways, yeah.
Yes, but I made my money really old-fashioned way. I really earned it. Where do you think that culture of complaint, where do you think that comes from? It probably has wide sources, broad sources. In the West, I see an educational system that immediately rewards you for everything. Ah, great job. And it can be a lousy sketch, lousier than anyone in class. And you have to be praised for it.
There's no way to tell a kid, well, this wasn't really good work, but I know you can do better. And why don't you work on this? Bring it to me tomorrow. All of a sudden, you have a good one. It's a philosophy behind education. And the philosophies make the children happy instead of making them strong. Just for God's sake, make them strong guys, strong young women. And they will like it.
They will like it. And the world out there is complicated and not easy and sometimes very harsh to you. Get prepared. Get yourself ready for it. And that's what is missing. So the reasons for it are quite diversified. But it's a very, very big trend. And I don't like it because when you're a filmmaker, you're out for relentless, relentless judgment. You will start a storm of negative reviews.
The audience will not like your movie. It may be financially a disaster and on and on. You better prepare yourself.
Hollywood is in the middle of one of its fairly regular existential crises. A lot of people say that this time it's really different, but of course that's what they always say. But it has become much harder over the past 10 years especially to make a living in film or TV. This would seem strange since people are consuming so much film and TV, but these industries have warped economics.
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Chapter 7: What challenges does Herzog identify in the current film industry?
Werner Herzog is 83 years old and remains productive. Among his recent projects, a documentary about a wildlife researcher who's trying to find the giant ghost elephant in the highlands of Angola. and a feature film with a spoonerized title, Bucking Fastered, which stars sisters Kate and Rooney Mara as two sisters who speak in unison, love the same man, and have the same dreams.
I asked Herzog how he thinks about the critical and public response to his work.
When I make a few films in a row, four or five films, not much resonance, bad reviews. It's okay. I can survive it because I know the film is good and it will eventually find its audience. I know that time... in a way, is on my side, because I'm not in a trend. I've never been in any trend.
A very good example is Aguirre, the Wrath of God, which was a very hard film to do, and it was rejected by everyone. The festivals rejected it. It got very bad reviews in Germany. I mean, really, really bad ones. It took five years until first audiences in France started to see it and like it. And they lined up in two theaters only, but they lined up around the block for two and a half years.
Ten years later, America caught up. I had three re-releases of that film. And today it's not a household name, but those who know about cinema know about this film. So time was on its side.
What has the streaming revolution done for you and your films?
Nothing. It has not changed the shape of my films, the substance of my films.
But people can discover older films easily.
Yes, that's a great advantage because you can see a film I did in the mid-1970s. You can find it on some platform. If it's nowhere, it's always somewhere pirated. Piracy is the most successful form of distribution nowadays, so be it. But films are accessible, and this is why very young people discover it.
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Chapter 8: How does Herzog reflect on the nature of memory and its role in storytelling?
Now I don't go to museums. Museums as a threshold. It's very hard for me to step over this threshold. Sometimes my wife manages to get me into a museum. I was, for example, at the Prado in Madrid once. But I walked through it. I hastened through it, through the entire museum, not looking left and right, because I wanted to go to one single room with Goya's black nightmare images.
I only saw that.
What was it about those Goyas that you wanted to see? I mean, he's particularly soulful. He's a very good technician. What is it about Goya in particular?
It's somebody who touches me as one of the true artists that I know. There's very few. I could name you only two or three, and that's about it. Who are they? Matthias Grünewald, for example, late medieval, the Isenheim Altar. It's something which is beyond belief, and I spent once a whole day in and around it. What did you feel during that day?
Just knowing that there's somebody out there who is the truest of true artists, somebody who touches me to my core. Same thing with Goya, the Black Nightmares, touches me to the core. How do you rate yourself compared to them? I do not compare myself, but I know I'm not alone anymore.
It's this profound feeling that I have brothers out there, and I don't care whether they are much greater than I am. It doesn't matter. But there's a brotherhood out there, somebody who reassures me of everything and makes every toil, every labor, every disappointment, everything worthwhile.
After the break, what makes a person an intelligent person? This is Freakonomics Radio. I'm Stephen Dubner speaking with Werner Herzog. We'll be right back. So your most recent book is called The Future of Truth. You write about the difference between what you call the accountant's truth and the ecstatic truth. I'd love you to walk us through that.
We do not know what truth is. Philosophers do not know. 2,000 philosophers in a survey couldn't give a clear answer. Nobody has it. But I know it's a quest that is human. A voyage, an expedition, hardship, a search. But we must not abandon this search, even though we never will exactly know what truth is. It has to do with art per se. I think every artist...
sooner or later is confronted with the question of truth. It comes inevitably at you. Filmmaker, painter, writer, poet, it doesn't matter. It will come at you. I've always seen the deepest insights, the deepest illumination, when it was not only carried by facts. I always use this as an example.
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