The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Werner Herzog

Episode Date: July 24, 2024

This is my second dialogue with filmmaker extraordinaire and force of nature, Werner Herzog. But after I read his amazing new memoire Every Man for Himself, and God Against All, which takes its name for the German title of his 1974 film The Enigma of Kasper Hauser, I had to have Werner back. I have known Werner for almost 20 years. We met when I was a judge at Sundance and we gave his film Grizzly Man an award, and Werner, his wife Lena, and I have been fast friends ever since. He even allowed me to be a villain in the movie Salt and Fire, which we shot in Bolivia with Michael Shannon and Veronica Ferres. So, after all of this time I thought I really had a good handle on him. I was wrong. So many people ask me about Werner, who has a reputation of being larger than life, and I always say what a kind, generous, pleasant man he is. All of that is true, but after reading his new autobiography, I realize that he IS larger than life!!If it weren’t Werner, I would never believe all of the amazing stories and events. That he is still alive is alone almost a miracle. For this dialogue I decided that rather than following his story chronologically, I would read him various quotes from the book and ask him to elaborate. What followed was a rollicking conversation that is one of the most amazing I have recorded to date, and that I think presents Werner has perhaps few other interviews ever had. In the process we covered territory from science to philosophy to history to religion and beyond. And in the end, what arose most clearly from our discussion was that while he is a world famous filmmaker, what he really is at heart, is a poet. And we are all lucky to have him. Enjoy! As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krauss. It's such a pleasure to have Werner Herzog back on the podcast again. In this case, on the occasion of his new book, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, which is a wonderful phrase that he created and is actually the title of the German version of his movie, The Enigma of Casper Hauser.

Werner is a remarkable human being, and I've known him for almost 20 years, and I've known him as a friend, and interesting man. There are many stories around the world about how wild and crazy he's been, and I've only experienced an insightful, poetic,

and very intelligent human being and a good friend and a good and loyal friend. But in fact, when I read the book, I was astounded. His life is perhaps the most interesting life I've ever read about. And if it weren't Werner,

I wouldn't believe half of the things in the book. but knowing Werner, it makes it even more interesting. His life has been a remarkable circuitous saga from his childhood on through his eventually becoming a filmmaker and a writer and a poet, as I say. And the stories are amazing, and we had a wonderful hour jumping through his life history and some of the stories in the book. I did it by basically taking quotes out of the book and asking him about them and allowing them to elaborate on those quotes. And it was a remarkable discussion, one of the most fun discussions I've had recently.

And I think if you enjoy the discussion, you'll find the book perhaps even more remarkable. But the discussion itself, I think you'll find entertaining and almost awe-inspiring. So I hope you enjoy this podcast with Werner Herzog. you can watch it ad free on our critical mass substack site you can do that by subscribing and your subscriptions

will go to support the nonprofit Origins Project Foundation that produces this podcast or you can watch the podcast on our Origins podcast YouTube site and I hope you'll subscribe to that or of course you can listen to it

on any podcast listing site no matter how you watch it or listen to it I hope you'll consider supporting the foundation, and I hope you'll enjoy this remarkable hour or two with the incomparable Werner Herzog. Well, Werner, it is so good to see you. Thanks for taking time to talk to me. It's always a pleasure to spend time with you. Thanks. It's always a joy with you. This was a unique experience because I just realized I've known you now for almost 20 years. 20 years I've known you, which is amazing. And I thought I knew you.

And I thought I knew you well and then I then I read your book and listened to your book. And I discovered that I, every time I learn about you, I learn there's a whole new world. And for me it was a revelation. I think it is one of the most amazing autobiographies I've ever read in my life. One of the most inspiring, poetic autobiographies I've ever read. And I like autobiographies. And I'm not just saying that because you're my friend. It really was haunting to me.

I listened to it first because it was so important to me to hear your voice, as it often is in the films. And then I read it. It was the best way to do it. And I recommend people to do both. What I want to do today, we've already talked before we've had a podcast. And I don't want to do the standard thing of going through your films and all of that stuff. I want to work through books.

And the book raised a host of questions. We're going to get a different perspective by having you talk. talk about it. And I've framed this as a series of questions. I don't know if we'll get through them. I have no idea how it'll go. There's no rhyme or reason to the questions. Let's just see. Let's just dig into it. Exactly. In fact, I said just let's see how it goes. I have 60 of them and we'll see how we get through. I have no agenda. Early on in the book, you say, what then did destiny have in mind for me? How did it keep changing the direction of my life? Do you believe in destiny? That's a hard question.

That is something like destiny, but you have to make yourself acquainted to it. You have to accept it. And I became familiar with my own destiny fairly early on when I was something like 14, 15. A time where there were massive changes in my life. I started to travel on foot. one thing around Albania in the mountains and I knew I was a poet and I started to write scripts for films

never got them off the ground and I knew I had to be my own producer and this was a reason why I rolled up my sleeves and I knew I had to make money and I worked the night shift as a welder in a steel factory for two and a half years. But in these two and a half years, I was in school, meaning from 8 o'clock in the morning I was in school. But I worked from 10 p.m. until 6 a.m.

And I only had two hours to take a shower and get cleaned up and take a short nap and extended my naps in school. And the third thing that had to do with my destiny, I started. started a very dramatic religious phase. Yeah, I want to get to that, in fact. I converted to become a Catholic against all odds. Somehow I became aware of my destiny and I accepted it and I knew I had to fulfill it. He never felt like raging against it. No, no, there was a sense of duty.

And sense of duty has never left me until today. Yes, well, okay, we'll talk about it. about that. That's interesting. A sense of duty. A duty to yourself, to destiny, to the world, to the people around you, what? Well, number one, of course, I have to make myself known to my own destiny. But of course, what do I have to do in the world? And I have certain talents. I know that I'm a poet. I know that I'm a storyteller. So do the best and serve. serve other people. It's not for myself. I do not write my biography just for sitting on it. It's for you. It's for you. Thank you. It was a gift.

Well, yeah. Now, okay, next question. Something, again, these questions are completely unconnected for the most part, although there may as a little bit of a story. I was intrigued early on when you, the book ends in a very interesting way. And you mentioned it in your introduction about why it ended that way. And you talked from that Japanese soldier who had bought the war for, I don't know how many years, 25 or 30 years. He taught you you could see a bullet in the early evening if it was heading towards you, like a trace around.

And you said, for in a split second, you can see the future. Yes. Is that just as trivial saying in a second you can see your death? Or is there something more to it than that? Well, I'm quoting Hiro Onoda. That's the Japanese soldier who fought the Second World War until 1974. So 29 years after the end of the war, he surrendered. And we knew each other and we met and we liked each other.

We had a profound connection somehow. And we talked about time and future. And he said, sometimes you can foresee the future, a bullet when the light is low, when the sun is low and it comes right at you. It has a glow, a copper glow. And no time for ducking. He just rotated his body 90 degrees and it whist by two inches would have hit his solar plexus and he would have been dead.

I'm describing it in the foreword of my book. Yes. Lawrence, I was actually sitting exactly here at this very spot. I was writing the last chapter of my book. I knew it was going to be the last chapter. And all of a sudden I see something shooting at me in some sort of copper color and greenish iridescent. And it shot right at me and I look up and I thought, is this a bit? bullet, but it was a hummingbird. And I stopped in mid-sentence. And then I looked what had I

written. And since it was my last chapter, I decided here and there, I stop it, as if a bullet, a stray enemy bullet had hit me. And this is why the sentence is unfinished and it's, I can read it to you. it's a strange enumeration of images and prose. It's pure, pure text. For example, no criminal confessing, no table, no chair, no lamp, just space containing nothing that is reflected over and over again. And I'm speaking about two mirrors that face each other. And if you are in between these mirrors, there's nothing.

The mirrors reflect nothing, nothing. And its absence, the end of all images. And the chapter is called the end of images. Nothing else, no living, no breathing. No Frenchman eating his bicycle. No second Frenchman switching into reverse and driving his ancient car backward through the Sahara Desert.

No truth, no life. No lie. No river called the river of lies Yoyapichis, the deceiving river that pretends to be the much larger Pitches river. No Japanese marriage agency ordering a bucket full of sand to be emptied out of a satellite so the bride can be astonished by a shower of meteorites. No more twins living in separate bodies, but thinking and speaking in unison. No parrots from Alexander von Humboldt's 1802 journey up the Obinoco, where he came to a village, all of whose inhabitants had been killed off by a plague. Their language had died with them, but the neighboring village had for the past 40 years continued to look after their parrot. This parrot still spoke 60 distinct words of the inhabitants of the dead village, of their dead language. Humboldt copied them down in his notebook. What if we taught those words to two parrots and the two would converse in them? What if we project ourselves far?

into the future and imagine things that we have created that still exist not forever but for two hundred thousand years let's say a time when humanity will almost certainly have died out but certain of our monuments might still exist indestructible the dam of in the viand gorge that wasstood the vast landslideslixtual of 250 million cubic meters of rocks and earth and gravel at its foot this dam is 28 meters thick and poured from specially hardened concrete this lower part would still almost certainly be there standing majestically without relaying any message no message for anyone there at the foot of the small concrete wall, there would be crystal clear water, a trickle of water from the rocks to the side. It would be sought out by herds of deer as though. And the text literally ends in the middle of the sentence and not even dot, dot, dot. The Italian translation made dot dot dot dot, which is wrong because I stopped in the middle of the sentence, there was no time to make three dots.

It was coming at me. Yeah, I read, you know, as I said, I read the, I read the introduction. And for me, it was compelling because I live on an island where I often lose reception when I'm driving, even though I download the book. And so I was listening and I heard to that last sentence and it stopped in the middle. And I, I stopped by the side of the road to try and figure out why I couldn't hear the rest of it. And it was only later on that I realized exactly what had happened. It's a beautiful way to end.

And you mentioned it in the beginning. As that bullet is coming towards you, what a way to end. It's kind of a brazen way to in the book. And I knew I anticipated that many of the buyers of the book would complain and go back to the bookstore, send it back. You sent me an incomplete text. That is why I gave a proper warning in the foreword. watch out the end of the text is in mid-sentence it is a brazen way to end but it's hard to imagine

you being brazen and i'm just joking there and it's people close you see it's yeah yeah that's i keep saying lawrence uh since 40 more than 40 years i keep speaking to deaf ears my books will outlive my films not that i'm saying they are better but will will have a longer life. And people are always puzzled, yeah, how do you explain that and so? And how do you reconcile being a writer

and being a filmmaker at the same time? And I have a very simple formula to explain it. Films are my voyage and my writing is home. Oh, wow.

Oh, that's fascinating. Hold that thought because there are a number of questions I have quotes of yours in a way related to filmmaking and that clarifies. But speaking of books, in fact, and you have many behind you as I do behind me, we both love books and it's well known

and I don't want to repeat things that are well known, but I certainly will at least say this one thing. And I remember when I was fortunate enough to be in your rogue film school teaching for a day with you, that you made the point that if you want to be a filmmaker, you have to read books. that books are the essential part of the first,

not learning how to use a camera, but read books. And not just read. You do not say it with the right emphasis. What I say, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read. Okay. That's what I tell you. Yeah. I cannot just sloppyly say you have to read books.

You have to really put the emphasis. And that's lacking, you see, for example, in academia, nobody reads enough anymore. It is overwhelming, even in humanities, even in the classics, where you should better learn ancient Greek and Latin, and they don't read anything. I mean, they read short Wikipedia entries, and they read tweets.

And they watch TikTok. look. Well, look, I don't want to psychoanalyze you, and I don't want to go too far in the background. But one thing that was interesting to me, I didn't know about your parents so much or your grandparents, you have claimed that you do not have academic intelligence. You have this fascinating family on both sides in different ways. But you have a, you basically had academic parents and at least on one side, academic grandparents. You come in, you come in many ways from a faculty of academics. Neither you nor your brothers. One half brother of yours has a degree, has a doctorate, but none of you have degrees, and you claim you have no academic

intelligence. I'm just wondering, reconciling those two things. Well, it's hard to explain what intelligent is. Nobody really knows exactly, but I would say roughly, just to give a rough idea. I think it's a bundle of things. The gift of speech, memory, combination of things, mathematics, associative thinking. So it's a whole bundle of intelligences. I was never the kind of bundle that you needed for high school or for academia. I never liked it. I was always outside. I mean, I had to learn Latin, nine years, ancient Greek, six years, and at the end, a little bit English. But of course, we had math and physics and biology and history and all the rest. But it was with classical bias. And of course, you learn something to understand

the origins and the roots of our Western culture. And that was invaluable, although I hate school while I was there. I returned to it much later in my life. And today I'm reading ancient Greek texts. So would you say you grew in academic intelligence? Because yeah, you're a person, you're a well-read, learned man who discusses ancient Greek, the classics, quantum physics in an act, in an intelligent way. So do you think it was buried inside of you? And it just the school wasn't the right time or place? Or would you still say you don't have an academic intelligence? No, for example, I have friends who are real good in analytical thinking.

I'm not very analytical, of course, in a way, yes, but I'm much more creative, a loose gun. That's why I was never really well placed in school or in academia. And when you read my biography in Wikipedia, and it says that I studied at the University of Munich literature and history and whatever. Yeah, but hardly ever I showed up once or twice during a whole semester at the university because I was making films already. And I was earning money at night shifts. Then in every single biography, you read that I studied at the university in Pittsburgh, Dukane as a matter of fact. But it was so bad when I had a scholarship. It was so awful that I left after five days.

So five days in my life that were awful and made me take off and run from academia. And that it appears in every single biography. I didn't read your Wikipedia and I didn't read any biography. I know better than that with you. But I have a few questions based on your background. I don't want to spend too much. I fell in love with your grandmother and your mother both when reading this. And your grandfather, of course, who by the time you met him, as you said, had already

been insane, although he was really dementia? Your mother worked menial jobs, even though she had a doctor. Was it the war? Why did she never have an academic job? Well, we were displaced. We were bombed out in refugees. So I grew up, I was born in the middle of the war. And when I was only two weeks old, 14 days old, the building where we lived was very badly damaged

by carpet bombing and everything around us was destroyed. And my mother fled to the remotest place in the Bavarian mountains. So that's we grew up in complete isolation. And there was no job out there and she had to, when we were 10, 11 years old, and we were 10, 11 years old when we spent 11 years, we had to go back to the big city. She had no apartment. She had no job. She had nobody to support her because my father, the good for nothing, never paid anything for his children. The women had to work. They had to raise the children and make the money. And so it was agonizing for her. And of course, she worked, for example, in a household of an American

an officer as a housemaid. And I mean, it was bitter, but she took it in a very, very incredible attitude, for example. She was really put down and humiliated when the family had a great meal, a big meal. The woman, the wife of the officer, would put it all in a bowl and said to my mother, and it's all the laughter was Elizabeth. This is for the dog and for you. And she just took it and never complained. And not complaining is a factor in your life, which I want to go through. And there's a somewhere I have a quote of you about your mother, which is quite remarkable.

You clearly respected and loved her. Your grandfather, as I say, was an academic. Your mother was a brave and resolute person. And there's one quote about here. I want to come to in a second. Your father was intelligent and dashing and obviously interesting to women. Total good for nothing. Which of these people do you think gave you most of the you that you are now?

I don't know. I always try to be different from my own father. But he was a great contour. He was a great storyteller, intelligent, had multiple subjects that he had studied. He spoke Japanese. he had a PhD in biology and all in history and so. There's no doubt you got your storytelling from your father, from your mother, bravery. No, I have to say one more thing about my father.

My father lived under a fantasy, a life in a fantasy that he created for himself, that he was a great writer and he would write a universal study. and he would study all his life, sometimes take a few notes or underline in books, always with a sharpened pencil between his teeth. But he never wrote a line. You see, it was all his fantasy. And because he was writing this big universal study, he was not able. He was, of course, he could not work, raising the children, earning money was delegated to his wives. It was a pure fantasy in which he believed. That was the strangest. Because sometimes when there were strangers in the house, he would tell them very eloquently about this study.

And in the kitchen, I cornered him and I said that, you're making this all up. You have never written a line. And so all of a sudden he's like waking up from a nightmare and realizing for a five second, that he lived a life of fantasies, but going back into the room with a stranger, he would continue.

I try to avoid that. When you, number one, take charge of your responsibilities. Secondly, finish what you started. You don't live in a pretext, but it's odd. Sometimes you see when I have a book like this, I can feel it, I can touch it, I can put some mark as yellow mark.

So it feels like something that I really did. But sometimes with all my films, I think, did I really make that? Do I fantasize this? Was it my brother, Lucky, who made it? And I claim that I'm the author of it. So it's a very odd sort of thing. That's interesting.

The worry that you, in the back of you, some in the back of your mind to worry that your father lurks there somehow. Now, something that occurred to me. I wasn't in one of my questions, but I know from my parents, some people grew up wanting to be like their parents, but for me, I viewed my parents as foils. I saw what they did. And it was an important guide for me because I wanted to do exactly the opposite.

With your father, certainly the case. Not with your mother, though. Your mother, as far as I could tell, was a remarkable woman. And as you point out, two things about her. One, one, you say, all her life she had scant regard for respectability, which is clearly something she taught you and something you got from her. And also later on, you say in a beautiful quote, which I'll find somewhere, about that she was the bravest, bravest woman you ever knew.

Courageous. Yeah, courageous. Rageous. She had this quality of leadership, but not by issuing commands or so. One example, she minded that my older brother and I had a motorcycle when we were 1819. And on a weekly basis, we had minor accidents. A scraped elbow, a broken midfoot bone. My brother was sliding under a bus that was stopped.

Thanks God. It was sliding under it. And she knew about it. And she said, boys, I do not want to see to bury any of you. my children I do not want to bury. I should die first, not you. And she said it will be good. It would be a wise thing to sell the motorcycle, give it up.

So we listened and she was smoking a cigarette. It took two puffs and stubs it out. And she says, all my life I've smoked. And it's stupid. It's not good for your health. And it costs money. And you know what? This was my last cigarette.

Because I know this is your last day with your motorcycle. We sold it within days and never had a motorcycle again, and she never ever smoked. That resoluteness, that discipline, which I know you value strongly, we'll talk about it, the sense of discipline which you realized that early on you needed to have when you hurt your brother, which I will get to. It just occurred to me, that sense of leadership. When you talk about your brother, Lukie,

you say the same thing, that he was a natural leader. That was my older brother. Oh, your older brother. You're all sorry, mixed up to you. Yeah, Till, Till. Till, yes. The boss, the family.

Yeah, the boss, the family. And so he had that natural leadership skill. Do you not think you have that? I mean, I've seen you on, I've been fortunate enough to watch you on set, the different man than I knew as a friend, to want to be your, working for you. You couldn't have made the movies you made, especially if it's Geraldo,

if you weren't a natural leader also as well, don't you agree? You have to have it when you make movies. To make your point, you have to lead from the front. You have to be credible. You have to have authority. Not that it comes automatically. You have to earn authority every single day. And that's what I do when I'm working on a film. Okay, let me change courses. We'll come back. to jump all around. But I was going to ask you, how can you tell if someone knows how to milk a cow? I can tell by looking at the face in the demeanor of somebody. And it has helped me in one case. I tried to convince six astronauts who were the crew of a space shuttle. 16 years after that mission that released the space probe, Galileo, among others, an incredibly complicated.

mission and I wanted them back in front of my camera because I had spotted footage that they had filmed at the time of their mission and they had filmed in 16mm celluloid, probably the only ever. And it was so phenomenal, so fantastic that it became the backbone of my film, science fiction film, The Wild Blue Yonder. And also footage under the ice of Antarctica, which is. like a foreign world. And I had to convince these astronauts, please be actors now in my movie, but you're only 18 years older.

You look only 18 years older. But since you traveled at such high velocities, 820 years on our planet Earth have passed. You return to this planet and it's uninhabited. No one left. They all died out. I was led into, it was Johnson, space center in Houston.

And I was sitting already in a semicircle in a fairly big hall. And I was asking, and I looked at them and gave my name. And my heart sank, how do I convince him? And I looked in the faces. And there was one guy who looked like a cowboy somehow. And I knew of him that he had be a command of a submarine, of a nuclear-powered submarine. and he was a test pilot for literally everything jet plane in the United States arsenal of planes.

And I looked at his face and I said to him, you know what? I grew up in Bavaria, in the mountains. And as a kid, just to make a little money, I learned how to milk cows. And somehow since then I can tell people who can milk cows. And I said, you, sir. And he laughed and slapped his eyes and made this milking the cow. But I didn't know he had grown up in a farm on a farm in Tennessee. And he learned how to milk cows.

And from that moment, the ice was broken. They cheered me on. And they said, what can we do for you? And I said something with the same kind of fantasy. You have to make things visible that we otherwise wouldn't see. It's a beautiful story. But Lawrence, in afterthought, my heart sinks if I had been wrong. Absolutely.

What kind of an embarrassment that would have been? You never thought of it at the time. You were so sure you were right. No, no, no, I was confident. Well, calm you pointed out somewhere that confident, well, there's a great quote about confidence. That's very important. It's very important to have confidence and also unconditionally appreciated in others. I think that is the quote in the book, which, you know, since we're going all over the place anyway,

and we might not get to it. I found that quote quite remarkable. It's important to have confidence and unconditionally gift or approve of it or something like that in others. And what do you mean by that last part? Well, it's not easy the kind of work that I'm doing. You have to know that you're good at what you're doing. But of course, it's a long learning process. But I had this kind of confidence from very, very early on. And I have been kind of relentless at looking at my own things and thinking, yeah, maybe others are much better than I am and should I really do it? And my answer always was, yes, I know what I'm doing and I'm a storyteller, I'm a poet. Do it. And that's a duty. There's a duty. We need good stories.

The second part also was interesting to me, not just that you need confidence, but you need to reward it unconditionally in others, which I thought was especially interesting to hear. And I just wondered if you could comment on that. Yeah, I've been asked about how I deal with actors. And of course, I have worked with world stars like Nicholas Cage, Nicole Kidman, Christian Bale, Glaus Kinski, Claudia Cardinali. I mean, and I always am very clear about my attitude. I don't like this kind of attitude of stardom and privilege and having an extra large trailer and this kind of competition of who has this or that privilege. I said on my set there are no stars, but everyone who appears in front of my camera is royalty. Everyone, and including you and Lawrence, and you remember that. You remember, and even kids who are blind. Yes. Kids who are blind and extras, they're all royalty,

and I let them know, and I treat them like royalty. You don't have to make a big fuss about it. You see it, you understand it. Yeah, it's an unspoken respect. And also, like your mother, it's a demand at the same time. I mean, to earn that respect, I mean, again, who am I to speak about this? but when I was on set with you, you were giving me respect, which maybe I felt I hadn't earned.

But in order to, because of that, you work extra hard. You work harder because of that, because it's unspoken. As you say, whenever someone's in front of the camera, the royalty, it causes you as the actor, me in that case,

to give more, to give more than you would otherwise. You give it all, you see, and that's what I do, and that's what I do when I do my rogue film school. That's when I write a book or a poem. That's what I do when I do a film. You see, I do not give lectures or a little charity.

When I give myself. And that's actually, I think Walt Whitman said something like that. There we go. It's something. I give myself. I can never understand why we get along so well. I know why I like you, but I'm always amazed you like me. But I think it's one thing.

I've always felt that way. If you're going to do it, do it as completely as you can. Otherwise, don't bother doing it. Here's a quote from you, jumping back to your childhood, which I found, you know, I'm going to pretend to be a psychoanalyst, I guess, in this. Rosenheim was a nearby city that was bombed by the Allies near the end of the war. Your mother woke you up, took you and your brothers, and to look at the sky, at the light in the sky,

and see that it had been burning. And you said, at that time, Rosenheim meant nothing to me. But from that moment on, I knew that outside of our tight valley, there was a whole world that was dangerous and spectral. Not that I was afraid of it. I was curious to know it. Is that something that stayed with your hero life? A whole world that's both dangerous and spectral,

that you want to know and that you're not afraid of? And the curiosity. And when you read my book, Every Man for Himself in God, against all. You see how I'm venturing out. I'm venturing up to Africa during the Congo crisis almost died. I moved to Mexico and I work as some sort of a rodeo clown in chariadas. Yes. In the arena. Alamein. And I venture out to move a ship over a mountain and I venture out to to Antarctica and I venture out to hypnotize a whole cast of actors. So it's one venturing out curiosity after the other and it has never left me. Besides, you see, I was only two and a half

years old when my mother woke us abruptly, I think at two in the morning, in the night, pitch dark and I still see this end of the valley and be used to. And, be used to be. Beyond that, the entire sky, not flickering like flames, but it was, since Rosenheim is 40 miles away. The entire city was burning in a total conflagration. And at that distance, the entire sky was slowly pulsing, slowly pulsing in orange and red like this. and this image has never left me and that's where my voyage started. But let me, I'm going to parse these words very carefully

because they're poetry. It was not just the curiosity. I was curious to know, the curiosity is so clear in everything you do. What intrigued me were the words dangerous and spectral. Is the world still dangerous and spectral to you? And has that sense been throughout your whole life or no? No, it hasn't changed much because the world has certain qualities.

And one of the qualities that there is danger. One of the qualities is there is a war, nobody of us, not a single human being on this planet individually wants war. And yet civilizations and countries and nations, we are leading wars. So this kind of danger has never left. And it's one of the qualities of life of the world out there. But what I'm wondering is it seems to me, I don't know what, again, I hate to be, seem like to read too much into things. I'm always wary about that, especially when it's art or film.

But it seems to me that's a characteristic of the world, the world you show on film, that the world is always dangerous and spectral. But do you think that's the image you're portraying at some level? Yeah. But spectral means also some sort of deeply inherent fantasies. Yes. Some sort of the spectres out there, ghosts out there, whispering ghosts in the forest and poetry while you are walking through the fairy forest, which was next to where we grew up and we had difficulties to it.

we knew there were the whispers of the voices in there. So, yes, we have to add the poetry of all of it, the beauty, the imagery, the imagery, the poetry. So I could rattle on forever. Well, I would say that, you know, the combination of danger and poetry in the world, I would say those are the two qualities, a combination of poetry and danger that's almost always ever present, either in front of the camera or behind the scene. But courage very often also comes from physical courage. Don't ride a bull in an arena, even though you're only the arena clown for the kind of thrills of the audience.

For example, there's a whole chapter on ski flying because I always wanted to fly. Yes. Want you to become world champion of ski flyers. and you see when you get off the ramp normally when you are airborne you are somehow leaning back and shrinking back from the abuse but here you have to lean your head into it

you have to go almost horizontally in the air to create an air cushion this is kind of crazy it's totally non-intuitive in something you have to convince your body to do of course I wanted to be an athlete when I was 10, 11, 12,

and that ended, as I described, with a catastrophic accident of my best friend, who almost died, and we were all alone at the ramp in training. He crashed sideways out from the track into the forest, and there were rocks. I saw him after 65 years for the first time. just a few months ago. I found him. I threw the book.

Because people alerted me. He doesn't live in Sachrang anymore. He's in some other village. And I found him. I had no idea how he looked like as a kid. And I didn't know how he looked like an old man now. When I parked my car and I stepped out, there were several people there. And I immediately said, Reina, this is you.

And he looked at me and he said, Werner, this is you and him. Isn't that wonderful? We recognized each other. And he's still alive, although he was three weeks in a cow. Of course, I'm mentioning it because for me it was the end of flying. Could not be close to a ramp for a long, long, long time. And this made a film about the greatest of all ski flyers, Walter Steiner, a Swiss artist. sculptor, the woodcarver, the great ecstasy of the woodcarver Steiner.

It's a wonderful story and a wonderful film. Ski jumping and mountain climbing seem to be two things that fascinate you and have fascinated you in both film and life. What do they share and, I mean, obviously flying itself is a wonderful feeling. But what is it about the two? Is it because they're both dangerous? No, no, no, no, because it's the deepest of all ecstasies that you can experience when you fly. But I mean flying without a plane.

Flying only with skis in the skis are only for acceleration and for landing. Otherwise, he wouldn't need the skis. But by the way, I've never been a mountain climber. But I've made a film about mountain climbers about Reinhold Messner, the great fall. But I've been traveling on foot and I've started very early like walking around Albania, always following the border. And I was only 15 or 16. And I walked from Munich to Paris when my mentor, Lotte Eisner, who was something like 80 years old, was dying. I was alerted.

And I looked at train schedules and flight schedules. And then I said, no, no, no. I'm coming on foot almost a thousand kilometers and I will not allow her to die and she didn't know that I was coming on foot and when I arrived she was out of hospital Yes and of course it was because you'd walked although I understand the rest of the story

when she was dying she was hoping you could cure her again Yeah well she was something like 80 years old and remarkable because she was Jewish had to flee the Nazis on the day Hitler took power, the varied Asi fled. Because in the Volkisha Beobacher and Der Sturmer, the two papers, the most vociferous Nazi papers, they said this Jewish Bolshevik writer Lotte Eisner is denouncing us again.

And if we take power, heads will roll. And one of the first heads that will roll is her. First, imagine that. Just imagine that. Yeah, yeah. And of course, you've got to be on foot to get her out of hospital. Yeah. And she was about 80, but we don't know exactly how old she was, because from 75 years old, she started to cheat.

We know that she celebrated her 75th birthday at least twice, probably three times. But when she was something like 88, she called me. me and she said, listen, come now quickly, come quickly, take a train, take a plane. So I came over my train and I came to her. And she said to me, very biblical, but very casual, she said to me, you know, I'm now old and I'm almost blind. The joy of my life to watch movies. I cannot see them anymore. The other joy of my life to read books and poetry, I cannot do anymore. And then I can barely walk only on crutches. And she said something very biblical, I'm saturated of life. Like Noah, like in the Old Testament, Noah, having lived 820 years, comma, saturated of life,

comma died. And she said, but there's still this spell upon me that I must not die. And she said very casually, can you lift that spell? And I said to her, also casually between two sips of tears, I said to her, not do you know what is, that spell is lifted. And eight days later, she died. And it was good. It was right. It was good. Yes. Yes. Yes. You're walking to see her. was a factor. You know, when it talks about, as you say, you're not a mountain climber, although in the context of your films and you're walking, you've often climbed, the walking and climbing are different,

but walking, as you pointed out, has been a central part of your life. And I think you said something about, I forget the exact quote, but you can only understand the world on foot or something like that. You know something more. More poetic, no. I know about the world itself. And it's like a dictum. The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.

World reveals itself. But you see, and I've never been into, let's say, this free solo climbing, which is ridiculously dangerous. I'm unsecured. I somehow understand these people who do it, but it's not my thing. Oh, no, I can see that. But I've always, yeah, but I'm fascinated you made films about the flying and the climbing. Hold the thought. Before we end this, I want to return to climbing in a different

way, okay, one of the last questions. But let me go and ask two questions. So you talk about your heroes, Fabius Maximus and Sika Hans. Who are your heroes? I mean, those are two. Do you have a generic heroes? Or maybe you want to explain why the two of them or maybe someone else? Seigl Hans was now a mythological, strong man in the village of Lumberman of incredible power. I mean, he looked like Mr. Universe. He was the boldest and did the most incredible sort of smuggling

things and fooled the police that was after him for a fortnight and eluded them. And the other one, Fabius Maximus, well, that's my ancient Roman hero, second Punic War against Cartlidge,

Hannibal, who had come across the mountains, the Alps with the war elephants. I mean, an incredibly bold sort of strategic move. And Fabius Maximus, after catastrophic defeats of Rome, that great brought Rome to the drink of extinction, took over. He was voted him as consul. And he led the campaign, and he was named the coward,

because he avoided the direct confrontation with Hannibal's army, which would have brought the very end of it. And it was a war of attrition until today. Until today he has the nickname Cuncator, the hesitant one, or the cowardly hesitant one, yeah, Cuncator. And I found him so important because he saved the Occident. He saved Rome. Otherwise, the Mediterranean area would have become cartilage.

And that means Phoenician in nature, like Lebanese, Mediterranean culture. He saved the Occident and being derided and being denounced and not being acknowledged. And he knew, he knew that he would be derided. And now, 2,200 years later, I'm the one who bears his torch and proclaims his greatest. of all heroes that I have. He's a lucky man to have you carrying his stories, let me tell you. Yeah, but there are, of course, some more contemporary heroes, Muhammad Ali, for example. Why Muhammad Ali?

Come on, you can't seriously ask this question. Well, I think I know why. I'd like to hear you. No, I mean, as an athlete, without precedence, as a character, as a human being, as somebody with principles, like no one. I mean, phenomenal, phenomenal, a wonderful man. And at the same time, the tragedy that the biggest rapper on God's White Earth was hit by silence. I think Parkinson and he couldn't speak anymore. And there's such a deep tragedy about him.

And I know I keep saying we should have Mount Rushmore. We have the American four American heroes. He should be number five. And number six should be Bust. Keaton. Okay. Also silent. You see, he worked in the silent era for other reasons.

Other reasons, silence. Is it a combination of boldness and principle and not caring what people think? Many other qualities. No, not just him. In fact, try and look at the heroes you've talked about. You've mentioned the world bold. In some sense, you've mentioned that they knew they'd be derided, but it didn't matter, as did Muhammad Ali as well.

A great vision that was not understood at the time and is not fully appreciated 2,200 years later. Okay, let's jump again. You converted to Catholicism. Your parents were both atheists. There was no religious background in your family. And you converted to Catholicism. Well, you describe it a little bit in the book,

but why did you convert and why did you leave? Lawrence, we need about five, six years for that. And there's a whole chapter. in the book, but I felt a void, avoid to participate in something beyond me, in something sublime, in something that defines a deeper spirit in us. And, of course, I had great problems with Catholicism, the dogmas number one, church history very very

suspicious when you look at inquisition for example that you just name it it's just one of the hierarchy on it so however I still for some other deeper

reasons I decided to become a Catholic but it faded it was a dramatic step because it almost made the small all rest of the family disintegrate completely and still I did it. The family didn't come apart over it. And for me, also for reasons it would need a long explanation, it faded away. Faded away and I am not religious anymore. Okay. Although we did have a, well, we won't do,

you mentioned in the book, I always amaze that you like Benedict the best, but but mostly because of his intellect. You describe your grandmother. Your grandmother was a remarkable woman. She wrote a history of herself for her grandchildren. What a wonderful thing to do. You write. Have you written anything for your grandchildren?

I'm just wondering. No, but my memory is something for the grandchildren as well. They lived together and they were in love. And there's two quotes I want to read. Her grandmother said more than 50 years later in July. 1966, she said, among them, she wrote, Rudolph and I lived happily together for almost 50 years. We never had a serious falling out, and yet our marriage was never dull. I hope you manage that one day. In his 82nd year, Rudolph left me for good. This is so poignant. His dying words after thanking me were,

life with you was beautiful. Then he set his hand on my head in med addiction and quietly slipped away. We should all be so lucky to have. that. This may be too personal a question, but I know I've been fortunate enough to know you and Lena, the last love of your life now, and to admire and love you both. Is that what you'd like to be able to say at the end of your life? Yes, I'm a lucky bastard. If I could, if I could have a moment like that, I gladly accept my end like this. But it's even better with my grandfather because the last eight years of his life he was demented or inside. And he did not recognize his wife anymore and he would sit at dinner table and

address her as madam. And my grandmother and I think it's in the book. Yes, it's a story. He, one night he dressed formally in suit and tie after the first appellatee for so he folded his napkin, put him. his cuttlery cleanly on the table stood up and bowed to her. And he said to her, Madam, if I were not married, I would ask for your hand. It's just beautiful. It is in the book. It was what I was if I were not a married man. I would ask you now for your hand in matroni. My heart aches when I just. Me too. I read it and my heart ached. And then then I

thought of a question. I'd have to you. Of course. you'll hope your rest of your life with Lena, as you can say after 50 years, or I hope that she says the same thing that your grandmother said. Would you be happy to have that ending for yourself, to have a dementia and have the love still there? No, forget about the dementia part of it. Okay, okay. I kind of figured. I'd rather die from a stray bullet that comes shooting to this very window here.

Yeah, okay, that's fine. And you have been shot. I have been shot a few times. One thing that surprised me is, early on it was the ski film that forced you to do narration and you resisted it. Now, I find it fascinating

because probably one of the characteristics that everyone in the world knows is that Werner Herzog narrates his films, the documentaries, and is such a central part of those films, but you resisted it at the beginning. I found it awful. I found it awful to,

not only that I had to be the comment I had to be the witness on camera. So I had to show up on camera and tell about the larger event that was unfolding. And I hated it. And then later during editing, I thought if I hadn't been on camera myself and only my voice, me as the one who tells a story, it would have been fine. and so I grew into it, into something that I didn't like it all at the beginning. But you see, I'm not making one film after the other always the same.

I learn, I adopt, I learn things, and I grow with my films. Certainly, well, one would certainly hope it. But surely you realize how important, in your documentaries, how important your voice is to those documentaries. It has become more now because I'm as an actor in movies as a character

normally as a villain. But now I really like to be as a character in fact three different characters in the Simpsons. It's such anarchy of humor in this

Simpsons and I like to be a character now. In a few days, I will be a character in an animated film that is made by a Korean filmmaker who did the parasite and won the Oscar. Bong Yongru. He invited me to be one of the characters in his animated film. Okay. That's going to be great. I'm going to do it because of course I look at the screenplay and it's a very, very beautiful screenplay and very very very interesting work. So I will enjoy to do that. In English, you'll speak English in it. In English, but if there is a German version, I will do the German version too. Okay.

Speaking of that, one of the things that's interesting to me, of course, people around the world, you can go online and just listen to people trying to pretend to be Werner Herzog with your accent, which is so unmistakable. But one thing I didn't realize, or I should have, is it's, it's, it's Bavarian. Right? Not German. Well, it's a hybrid because I grew up with Bavarian and my own father needed translation. It's such a heavy dialect. That's what I heard. Yes, but today what I'm speaking is high German. Actually, an invented language by Martin Luther. He created high German. Before him, it was all dialects. He created the uniform German language. So you learned high German when you went to school. You grew up speaking of Bavarian. I had to learn it.

That's my second language. It's your second language. That's right. Your German is your second language. So given that, I would assume it's sometimes possible to have an accent from your second language. But usually there's a residual from your first. So if I were a German, if I were a German listening to you, would you sound German or Bavarian? You would hear me speaking German, but you would immediately know.

is from the mountains. He has some sort of a hint of Bavarian in it, which I can't get rid of and of course my accent in English is awful. I know it and it must be funny for you, but I can make myself understood and want to be slavish and pronounce everything in Oxfordian English. Oh, what a loss for the world it would be if you don't ever lose. that accent. No, no, I can't. I'm too old for that. No, the world loves it. I do. Maybe you've answered this question, but it was about learning Latin and Greek, not just studying, but what if we talked about what we lost by not reading, but you were fortunate and forced, but initially fortunate to learn Latin and Greek. Your father encouraged it, among other things. What have we lost

by, you can't take Latin in school anymore generally in most schools. I took Latin and Latin for three years myself. I wish I'd taken Greek, but they didn't offer it. What have we lost by losing those dead languages, if you want to call them that? It would be a deeper understanding of our cultural roots. Yes. Like, let's say, you would understand the oceans, but you would not understand the oceans if there were no monsters in the deep. And you would have sleep only if you didn't have nightmares or dreams at night, it would be only sleep. And that's how I could explain it.

I love that. Okay, excellent. That's great. I have a deep question for you, but let's ask a simple question. Just tell the story of eating your first orange. I love the story. Well, I didn't know what an orange was.

I didn't know that cinema existed. I didn't know what a telephone was. I made my first phone call. phone call when I was 17. But I was in hospital. My mother, since we were all snowed in, dragged me all night long on a sled wrapped into blankets and a sheepskin and threw the snow on foot all the way to the next town Oshow, some nine miles away. And I was in hospital for a weekend and all of a sudden a nurse gives. me an orange and I didn't know what to do with it. And I didn't dare to ask and she sees me

next day still with the orange. And she understood and explained to me, I had to peel it. So I peeled it. And then there were these segments in it and you take them apart and I took them apart into these slices. And then there's yet another skin. I took that inner skin off. And there's this tiny little, choosy things in it, and I took them bit by bit. Pulp, I think we used it. Yeah, but it's contained in

and they're tiny like and I ate it that way because I didn't know how to eat an orange. And you said it was the most exquisite thing you'd ever taste it. Oh, I couldn't believe it. Yeah, it was a different world and I was six or seven years old, and I had no idea that such a thing existed.

I didn't know what a faucet meant because we didn't have running water. You had to go out to the well with a bucket and bring in water. We had no sewage system. You see, we had to pour out the bucket outside. Well, that leads you to the question. Again, it was down the road. Before I get to this rather deeper philosophical question, you were a child of war. I mean, that has affected you.

It's affected the way you eat, the way you spend money or not. But it's affected a lot of things. It also affected the fact, you know, by being a child of war and being put in a small village and being far away from everything, that also totally, I think, must have affected your growing up. Do you think being a child of war was, in retrospect, was good for you, bad for you? What lessons did you learn from being a child of war? I didn't choose the time I was born.

Of course, none of us do. We don't get to choose our parents either. Of course, it was very formative for me because being born in a war is an experience that was important. And of course, post-war period in the poverty of it and that I was always hungry and my brothers were hungry. That was important for us in respect for food. that I do not want to throw food away. I don't like to see that.

And what about the awe of new things? The fact that you, as a result of the war, it was the seclusion in some sense of the war that meant that you didn't see any of these things until you were much later. And that meant you didn't take them for granted. No, because fairly soon I understood that there was something out there

that I had to explore a world, a whole world. a whole world, which you did. Okay, well, look, now I want to read some quotes, and I just want you to elaborate on them. One, I think is particularly important, because people hear your stories and sometimes wonder if they're real, because they're so remarkable, the experiences in your life are so remarkable that I think I even read a review somewhere, which really upset me because I read the book and I didn't get the same thing, that basically knew it was probably a lot of it was made up. But the person loved the book anyway. But it's not. I'll read what you said here. I feel some relief in knowing my origins are somewhat swathed in mystery. Which surname is a nom de plune and which

isn't. The question gives me the feeling that people know too much anyway. My publication and film releases render me vulnerable enough. So many breaches in a fortification that stands unprotected. In some sense, you want to be a mystery. And only have very few things. I do not want to be too indiscreet. It's funny because a friend of mine said, ah, finally we hear everything about your love life. I said, not so, not so. You won't hear anything about it.

There's some sort of discretion about it. So a few things I do not mention very much, but Lawrence, many, many of those who might describe in my book, in my biography are still alive. My own siblings have read it, in fact-checked it, because sometimes I see things with different nuances. I spend more time, more time in fact-checking than writing the book. Months of fact-checking.

I didn't doubt it for a second. I mean, I've read this, and I listen to you. And there's some quotes here I want to get to where you talk about this sort of this common memory that somehow may, may, may, we all may have in certain ways that may transcend an individual life. And so the connection between myth and reality, I guess, I guess storytelling is important, but one gets a sense in some of the discussions, and I can find the quotes if I need to, that it's not so clear that reality or truth is, is completely objective for you, that there's a subjective nature to truth.

Of course, yes. and sometimes when I have doubts, I voice it. I voice it. Fairly early in the book, I think I'm writing about a dramatic episode with my first young love while I was in the United States. She married without telling me my own cousin. And I returned and she just came back from her honeymoon. And we eloped together. The freshly married bride elopes with me for a little less than a week.

And then it was clear this cannot work. It's, it's, we'll end in not, not well. So I decided I will bring her back to her own parents, which I did. And she had brothers who were all strong hockey playing. young guys full of, full of anger and power, and they were threatening to kill me if I, if I, if I showed up and I showed up and I said, I think it was four brothers. But maybe in my memory, I'm exaggerating the, the kind of threat waiting for me. It was probably only three of them. So I describe my doubts. And when there are doubts, I voice it.

everything else you read in the book is absolutely truthful. Oh, yes. And you know, and you make a point of saying it was your childish. You say when I was three or whenever I met God, but then, of course, you explained who God really was, was not God. It was a person who worked on, I think, the electrical systems. Yes, in the overall, full of greases.

Yes, yes. I think the facts, you can take it easily for granted. And when it comes to some deeper truth, some of it I do not want to I do not want to tell everything and I explain it. Here I have to explain and when it comes to doubts

I voiced my doubts and when it comes to incidents that were witnessed by many and you see Lawrence I've made one film after the other with lots of people around there were all witnesses

you cannot start to make up things and you cannot make up things vis-a-vis your own siblings, your own brothers, who are the wildest of all critics. Yes, absolutely. Your brothers would make sure you throw the line. I have to say, that's one of the features of the book, is you couldn't make this stuff. You could not make your life up. I mean, we'll get to some of the things. But each time, I remember I was reading and I'd come home and speak to Nancy, I had me, my wife, and so you wouldn't believe what happened to Werner this time. And you couldn't make these things up.

The things that the experiences in your life, I can't do them justice and we won't here. It's remarkable. We'll get to a one or two that I find so remarkable that we have to talk about. But before that, two more quotes from you that I want you to elaborate on. Again, these sentences drilled into me and jumped out of the page at me. This was after when you were the Ketjo, women, when you were up in the mountains and you were stopped and they thought you were engineers and then they discovered you weren't and they decided to treat you to a nice night.

But you said, I did not remotely understand this display of something so utterly alien. And this is the sentence I want you to elaborate on. I was excluded from the reality around me, but I still felt deeply immersed in its mystery. Again, I'm wondering how common that is to you. That sentence, I was excluded from the reality around me, but I still felt deeply immersed in its mystery. I love that sentence. Could you talk about it a little bit? That's very hard to explain, but I think...

Is it common? I want to ask, is it common? It seemed to me it wasn't just this time. Throughout your whole life, if I look, I see the same thing happening over and over again. Yes, it's something that occurs to me quite often. The idea of somehow being excluded, seeing it from the outside, which I guess if you're a filmmaker, you're in some ways always outside, and yet being deeply immersed in the scene and the mystery of the scene at the same time,

that dichotomy of being excluded and immersed. at the same time is a beautiful phrase that I've never heard before, but it seemed to me a lot became clearer to me when I read that about your work. And so I thought I'd point it out. Anyway, it's a lovely description. The story of Fitzcaroldo is so well known in so many ways, I don't want to harp on it here. The remarkable impossibility of making that movie. I told you when I first met you that I really was angry with you because I discovered you were not much older than me. and while I was just in graduate school doing nothing,

you had made this movie, and I couldn't, and I got, wow, you know, what was I doing? I was just sitting studying physics. There's a description which comes, I think, for your book Conquest from the Useless, maybe the last sentences. I looked around and there was the jungle, manifesting the same seething hatred,

wrathful and steaming, while the river flowed by in its majestic indifference and scornful condescension attention, ignoring everything, the plight of man, the burden of dreams, and the torments of time. The description of, as you said, God's anger, as you said, God's anger became so palpable. And of course, the title of your book is Every Man for Himself and God Against All. But what struck me about that sentence is the indifference of God, the indifference of nature. That's again something that's common because I remember the we both met because I was on

jury at Sundance that awarded you a prize for Grizzly Man. The scene, I think I've told you since then, the scene that made it for me was the scene of the bear, of looking in the bear's eyes where you say, I don't, you know, it's not a Disney world. You look in those eyes, you don't see caring, you don't see, you don't see anything. Kinship is a bearer. It's kinship, you don't see anything. Nature doesn't care about you. I thought of Grizzly Man when I, even though this, this description was probably related to Fitzcarold, It's a common thing that the majestic indifference and scornful condescensions, ignoring everything, the plight of man, the burden of dreams, and the torment of time, that the universe doesn't care about us. And that's okay. I mean, it's something I share.

It's, of course, different for people who are religious, who see themselves anchored in a greater plan of a creation that was. done by God and with benign intentions. But it doesn't occur to me. I do not see the world like that. So, and of course, it's an important moment and element in what I do. But it's nice that you read this short few lines because what I do is prose. You see the quality of the prose. and here in my autobiography, I remain for himself in God against all. Don't look for event, event, event. Yes, of course, there's lots. It's saturated with wild events.

Look for the caliber of the prose. Look for the poetry of it. Well, that's what I'm trying to extract out. It's the poetry. And that's why I said at the beginning, I didn't want this to be a chronology. I wanted to pick the language. That's why I keep saying. saying my poetry and my prose will probably live longer than my films.

Well, I hope they both live a long time. But I'm going to jump around. You said of your brother Till, the way I see it, he is the successful form in the family. Sure, he is. But I mean, you maybe must have said that partly tongue and cheap. It's not as if you haven't been successful, but explain it. No, he was phenomenally successful. And besides, at the age of he was.

He dropped out of high school at the age of 14 and had no education and had phenomenal gifts, intelligence and gift of leadership. And he rose like a shooting star in the world of business. By age 15 or 16, he was a breadwinner of the family. I owe it to my older brother that I could continue in school because my mother barely earned any money. He paid for the rent where we lived. started to work and earn money while I was still in school. And he was very, very successful and worldwide sort of financial deals,

but not just finances like, let's say, Lehman Brothers. It was real things, let's say, a gigantic factory in China, in Manjuria, with 30,000 employees. And he was the one who would finance and organize it. together with the Chinese, together with, at the time, Yugoslav companies. And so he, no, he truly, truly is the real success. And he's also, to be fair, partly responsible for your own success in his generosity of helping you out in hard times financially.

And you know, when you see him in the street coming at you, he's still 300 feet away from you and you know this is the boss. And he doesn't have any wild poses. so it doesn't come like the cowboy coming to the shoulder. He walks very unobtrusively. You can tell immediately this man is the boss. He's the leader. And as I say, people should know.

I mean, at a crucial times, in Fitzgerald to another, and Aguirre, when you needed, he made it possible in a sense, right? He saved me with a lonia. Yeah, which you paid back. Because you always pay back your loans. I always pay back. I don't want to belabor Klaus Kinski because he's a mythical figure in so many ways. And there's so many discussions of, you know, My Best Fiend.

You know, there's so many discussions of your experience with him. But I couldn't resist if you could explain how someone could get angry. If I told you, Werner, you were splendid. You were magnificent. Can you explain how someone would go into a rage when someone told them that? Well, it was an incident that I described. He was a young starving actor who was picked up from the street. Actually, he lived in an attic stark naked.

He wanted to be nature himself. No furniture. He had about knee-deep, dry leaves from the park and rustled around in the leaves. So when the postman rang, he would open stark-naked in the standing knee-deep in his leaves and do the signature. and he was terrorizing everyone, everyone. And one night he was a theater critic was invited to the dinner table, to the place where he lived for free.

And there was some sort of a boarding house. And we lived very cheaply, the four of us, my mother and my two brothers, three brothers, four of us, we lived in one room. So the critic said to him just to say something really nice, he were splendid. He were magnificent last night. And Kinney, with a shrill voice, jumps to his feet, throws a hot potato and cutlery in his face.

He yelled, no, I was not splendid. I was not magnificent. I was monumental. I was apical. Yeah, exactly. I love that. That was king. Splendid, I was epical.

I was monumental. Okay, well, look. I think we're coming to, there's four or five more things I want to do, but one is, I want to come back to this, to this quote that I found it. If you can explain it. It's relevant when you talk about caves, which of, I hadn't realized, you know, we actually, not only did we screen Cave of Forgotten Dreams together once, what we were on stage talking about it. And also with my favorite hour that I've ever done on radio was you, me and Cormac McCarthy. a book that had basically cave paintings, cave images that fascinated. He's a child. I'd never appreciated that until I read this. But there's a wonderful sentence here. I was always fascinated by the way collective memory is sometimes evinced from the depths of time. And then you jump

the next page. I say, I ask myself, though, is there something like buried memory within families? Or to put it differently, are there images that slumber within us and are sometimes set free by some sort of jolt. Talk about that. Again, a subject for the next six hours, but I try to make it short in the Chauvetave paintings dating back 32,000 years in time. For example, a pendant rock, and it's the only depiction of a human being. It's a lower body part of a female and a bull embracing a bison bull.

embracing the body. 32,000 years later, Picasso made a series of lithographs, La Famil the Minotaur, the woman and the minotaurs, the bull. And of course, Picasso died long before the cave and this image was detected. In other words, is there something dormant in us,

in our collective imagery, or another one which is some sort of, call it proto-cinema. There's another bison galloping and to show motion, the painter at that time painted it with eight legs. Now, a thousand years back in time in Iceland, old Icelandic poetry in the poetic Edda, there's a description of the main god Odin, who has the fastest of all horses. The horse's name is Sleipnir. And Sleipnir is so fast that he runs on eight legs. And that is only thousand years back in time. It's phenomenally. There are some things dormant in us in very simply. For example, Lawrence, when you sneeze, I say bless you. And we find it

very normal. When you cuff, I would never say, bless you. you. It is a collective memory of the times of the bubonic plague in the Middle Ages, because the first symptoms would be an unspecific sort of sneezing. And if somebody at that time started to sneeze, you know he was going to die. And you would say, God bless you. Until today, without knowing that anymore, we say it. We say it, of course. It's become a tradition. There are collective, collective memories that are dormant in us for a long, long time.

It's a very Jungian kind of picture of the world, sort of a Jungian view. I'm more pedantic. I guess I kind of think that it's not surprising that creative people from vastly different times often have similar thoughts. And it's constant. And it happens in science all the time. Two vastly different people at the other end of the world. have the same creative thought at the same time.

We all have a similar, at some level, a similar life experience. We're all different. But when we apply our creativity, that life experience, I kind of think that maybe it's not too surprising if two extraordinary people somehow come up with the same thing

at vastly different times. One doesn't know, I guess. Okay, there's one question I want to get to you here, and then we'll move closer towards the end. because my films to this day are preoccupied with questions of factuality, reality, and truth, in the sense of what I am pleased to call ecstatic truth. And then you talk about the fake news turned in its structure to truth because history has anchored its changes there as in an evolving truth. So this subjective truth, can you just describe ecstatic truth?

It's not subjective truth. It's something else that is, in fact, actually, I wrote a whole book about it, which is my last book. It published only a month ago, but only in its German original, and it's in translation into English and 18 other languages at the moment. So you will have the book in a few months for a half a year, also a penguin random house. And it's called the Future of Truth. And I'm speaking and of course I'm also speaking about what I call the ecstasy of truth. And it's a very, very complex sort of thing and has engaged my entire working life. What is truth that illuminates us, something that is beyond facts?

Facts do not illuminate us. And that's why I keep saying, if you really want to have facts and nothing but that, and you believe in it, please do me a favor, get yourself the phone directory of Manhattan and read it four million entries. Every single one factually correct. But it doesn't illuminate us. When you start to work on facts in a way, you have to be very careful what you are doing. If you start to manipulate, you create fake news.

But if you are a poet and you insert poetry into what you are doing and what you are showing, then you may reach this moment of which allows you ecstasy or illumination. And my best example, I always quoted, is Michelangelo, his sculpture of the Pietar in St. Peter. The Virgin Mary is holding the dead body of Christ in her arms. and you look at the face of Christ, it's a 33-year-old man. You look at the face of his mother. His mother is 15. The mother of a 33-year-old man is only 15.

So my question is, did Michelangelo try to give us fake news? Did he lie to us? Did he cheat us? Did he try to manipulate things? No, he did not. He reaches. an essence of truth. An essence by changing, by changing facts in a poetic way, in an artistic way,

with a very clear background of creating something of deeper insight. Then he reaches what I call ecstatic truth. And it has haunted me all my working life. And there's a long chapter about this in my new book, The Future of Truth. I look forward to seeing that. I was reading it. I think, I don't know if we've ever talked about it. And sometime after this, come,

well, next time we're together over beer, we'll talk about this. But that sense of ecstatic truth, I think, is something that I sense as a scientist, as a theoretical physicist when I'm modeling the world. And there are moments of ecstatic truth when you really feel, and it may be a different reality than we experience, but it's the same, I can't help but think.

It's the same sense that a poet feels when they capture or something about reality that was not captureable before. There's something like this in mathematics. Yes. In pure mathematics. And it fascinates me. Although I'm ignorant of what is really going on, I understand very basic conceptual things and that's about it.

Well, yeah. You may mention to me manhabal. This is, I think, which is in this book, which is, I bet most of your readers don't know what that is. So we'll leave that. Okay, one thing I cannot, when I talk about how Craves, how amazing your life has been in so many ways. There's one example that that blew me away,

and I need you to talk about it, which was your experience in, I think it was in Fitzcaroldo, or maybe it was Aguirra. I can't remember, but it was in Peru with the plane. To me, it's just so typical of your life, of this,

I wouldn't say charmed life, but remarkable, the experience of taking the images, the negatives or whatever to, you talk about it, because what happened is remarkable. And I think... Yeah, it's a complex story, but I was booked on a flight and some people with me. And in the last moment, I was taking off the flight.

And others were on this plane, and it was Christmas Eve Day. And the plane disappeared and was not found. And after 12 days, the search was abandoned because what happened, the plane disintegrated in mid-air. at 18,000 feet altitude and rained down in fragments over the jungle and one young woman, one young a girl 17 years old in a mini skirt

and high heels survived it, survived the fall and she found her way out of the jungle in an ordeal that is unbelievable and I made a film about her and by the way I can show you I still have parts of it. of that plane. This is a panel from the cockpit. Oh, wow.

Oh, wow. Oh, this is special. Oh, and the breaker circuits. Yeah. Wow. Which at the time, you were so disappointed that you couldn't get because you needed to get to work. You needed to get to Lima, I guess.

We had to find the area because they took that young woman who survived 36 years later to the jungle, and we located the area in these parts had come down over 15 kilometers square and there's another piece from the cockpit oh wow oh yeah there's oh the fuel gauge oh my goodness wow it gives me shiver to see that and it must be even harder for you to know you might have been on that wow look at that

and the first person to see the record when you were walking was your son simon who was eight years old, right? Yes, yes, yes. It was ill at the time. Amazing. So things sound like impossible, and yet there's some material proof. And of course, Juliani Kopke, the sole survivor of 96 other passengers. She, of course, confirms it. And we must have met

in the crowd squeezing, getting on that plane. And I didn't. Yes, exactly. You were all trying to get on it. You were so disappointed because you needed to get there. And everyone cheered because the plane was going to pick one of two routes. They only had one plane to either go, I guess, to Lima or to the jungle or somewhere. And they decided to go in the other place. And the people who didn't get on were so upset.

And the people who did get on were. To explain all the details. But I still remember the jubilation of everyone. And 40 minutes later, silence and it had disappeared. As it was Christmas Eve, people. with her suitcases with presents. And then when Yuliani Kupke emerged from the jungle half dead, emmanciated half dead, injured, stumbled out of it,

she described where she had come, which little side river and tributary she has come. And rescue teams were sent out. They found this vast area and they found, for example, jungle trees decorated as if, for Christmas. Suitcases had opened in mid-air, and there were garlands for Christmas on these trees

next to human entrails. You see, that's what they found. See, that's what I meant. You couldn't make this step up. No, you don't make things up like that. The last two or three questions I want to get at are, I want to come back to mountain climbing, because you say later in the book,

which I was amused by because I want to hear the rest of them. You only mentioned two of them. and I need to hear the rest. You said, of course, there was no chance of turning back the wheel of progress. Bruce liked my Ten Commandments, my catalog of the sins of modern civilization, among them the first domestic pig and the first climbing of a mountain. I want to hear your Ten Commandments of the sins of mankind, if you can remember him anymore. I can't give them all at once now, but let me elaborate on the first domesticated pig.

And it has to do with Bruce Chetwin's firm belief that all the problems of human civilization stem from the time we changed from a nomadic existence into a sedentary existence in Neolithic times, about 10,000 years back in time. And when people became sedentary and domesticated animals, including the pig, they created villages. in towns and science and education and all the things that we have created now with our technology has turned against us and it's imperceptively destroying us. And of course, the way we deal with nature, we are too many people. We are too much into consumerism. All that comes on top of it. So that explains that one dictum, one of the commandments and the other.

one was what... Mountain climbing, which amazed me because you're enamored by it, but it's a sin of mankind. But I'm not a mountain climber. I'm more somebody who travels some foot. Let me read it. And the first climbing of a mountain for the sake of it. You point out that mountain people like the Swiss,

the Sherpers, the Balties, never occurred them to climb a mountain. They do it, but they need to, but not just for the sake of it. Nobody of the Sherpas ever clomb a mountain. They didn't think about it, only when wealthy British aristocrats started to arrive and paid a lot of money for engaging them as porters.

They would start to move up and now they are up in the mountains, the Baltis. The Swiss never cloned, Marlore, Eiger, North Face or whatever. They only started it much, much later when mountain climbing started out with the British board aristocratic class it's interesting because the very first one who climbed a mountain

I like to say clob like old-fashioned the group walls were and Calderidge would describe it the first ones and that was kind of interesting

the first one was the Renaissance poet Petrach in a letter that is in Latin he describes that he climbs a mountain and he feels this kind of awe and that feels a shudder of doing something that is not right,

feeling that committing a sin somehow taking the dignity, the dignity of the mountain by us stepping with our feet on it. And I think the kind of lack of dignity you can see now on Mount Everest, it's a biggest garbage heap in a base camp. thousands of tons of garbage. People are lining up in their scary photos of mountain climbers. You see it nearby and they are along a rope. And you see them all the way down to the base camp. Hundreds and hundreds of them lined body to body to body lined up.

And all of them use oxygen bottles, steel bottles. All of them throw their waste away. all of them leave dirt and leave dead bodies. It's littered with dead bodies up there. Yes, and the mountains should rather but we couldn't help it.

It's in the human nature to take the dignity of a landscape, to take the intact sort of dignity, the majestic grandeur of these mountains. mountains. And Petrake, the first one who clover mountain, he describes it exactly like that. Well, you know, but that's what intrigued me, Werner, because it's this dichotomy. The understanding of that, taking the dignity away, but at the same time, you're all, you've made a

movie about Monclamers. So there's this awe and at the same time, there's a love-hate relationship there that I was trying to understand a little bit, I guess. Yeah, not hate. No, no, it's not hate or, well, you understand what I mean. And a similar, actually, I give you one more commandment. It's a simple dictum. Tourism is sin. But traveling on foot is virtue. Ah, perfect.

Bruce Chetwin always loved this. That's a great. I can understand that from everything you said. Well, I was going to have two questions, but I want to respect your time. So I'm going to ask you just one last question. You state that in the final, not quite the final, but near the end of the book, and it's the only page here, oh, there we go,

that hadn't written down, you say, to me, the deciphering of linear B is one of our greatest cultural and intellectual achievements, bar none. So that's compared to Shakespeare, quantum mechanics, operas, Mozart, the deciphering of linear B. I thought I'd give you a chance to just explain at the end of this why Linear B,

the Deciphering of Linear B is the greatest, cultural and intellectual achievement. One of the greatest. Yes. You'll say the greatest. One of the greatest. Yeah, and linear B looks. And it's a bronze age script of the island of Crete.

And the deciphering is not only using methodology of encrypted messages that German submarines use. and were deciphered by British intelligence, an incredible intellectual feat, just that alone. And the methods were applied to it. And at the same time, understanding language to the very, very depth of language,

because number one, we do not know what phonetic equivalent each sign has, and we understand it must have been a syllable, sort of, syllable alphabet because there are 74 or so signs. So probably syllables, but what kind of phonetic value do they have? It goes very, very, very deep into linguistics and understanding that certain forms have certain different endings. And hence derived from that, with all probability, is Indo-European language.

And then somebody from, I think, Oxford University, who is into very proto-Helatic languages, understanding some of these phonetic signs. And it's an unbelievable intellectual feat. And it gives us insight in a language and in a culture that was undecipherable before. Yes. Unfortunately, unfortunately,

we do not have great poetry in that. There's hundreds and hundreds of inscriptions that were deciphered, and most of it, most of it is bookkeeping and inventories. But still, it's phenomenal. Well, all I can say is, I hope in the 10,000 years from now or whenever, that besides the inventories and the bookkeeping, that there'll be some poetry and maybe some poetry. and maybe some poetry from you that's found

because the poetry is wonderful. I want to look, we just scratched the surface and it's impossible in two hours to do more than scratch the surface of the fascinating things you write and think about and the fascinating man you are. We've known each other for a long time and I've never had to come away from a conversation

without the same sense of awe and pleasure that I just had now. And I hope the people who've listened to this can get a sense of, How lucky I am to be your friend, and I hope how lucky we all are to be able to listen to you. And it's always a joy to talk to you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Ferner.

Hi, it's Lawrence again. As the Origins podcast continues to reach millions of people around the world, I just wanted to say thank you. It's because of your support, whether you listen or watch, that we're able to help enrich the perspective of listeners by providing access to the people and ideas that are changing our understanding of, ourselves and our world and driving the future of our society in the 21st century. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also leave us private feedback on our website if you'd like to see any parts of the podcast improved. Finally, if you'd like to access ad-free and bonus content, become a paid subscriber at originsproject.org. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation,

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