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Feb. 24, 2024 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
40:44
20240224_werner-herzog-on-putin-hollywood-cancel-culture-an
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Werner Herzog's Extraordinary Life 00:14:48
He's a filmmaker, an actor, a poet, an author, a philosopher, an opera director, and frankly, a living legend.
Werner Herzog's documentaries span the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I'm a German and the first German that you probably met wanted to kill you.
The aftermath of the Gulf War and the secret trauma of penguins.
Is there such thing as insanity among penguins?
Could they just go crazy because they've had enough of their colony?
You name it, Werner Herzog has been involved with it.
Most recently, he starred in The Mandalorian.
I see nothing but death and chaos.
I would like to see the baby.
Have you changed your mind about Putin?
I'm still against the demonization of a whole country, of a whole people.
You ate your shoe after losing a bet with a friend.
Is that true?
I cooked it in duck fat in a famous restaurant.
I swallowed down all the fragments with a six pack of beer.
You stabbed your own brother in a fight over a pet hamster.
I wanted to learn what discipline meant.
You apparently have a hobby of hypnotizing chickens.
It's not a hobby, but I've actually hypnotized actors.
Are you in the Barbie camp or the Oppenheimer camp?
As an audience, you can witness sheer hell.
And now, Werner Herzog is on Sensit.
Werner, great to have you on the programme.
Thank you for having me.
So my middle boy is an actor, doing very nicely in his mid-20s, and I told him today I was interviewing you, and he almost exploded with excitement.
And he began rattling off all the things that he loves about you, your body of work, what you stand for, but most importantly, I think, your personality and your character, who you are, and how important you are to the film business generally.
Are you aware of this huge burden of a claim that you must carry with you everywhere you go in your industry?
Let's not speak about acclaim.
I'm always very suspicious.
Touch it only with a pair of pliers.
But I can see that there is resonance.
I see it in the kind of mails that I get nowadays.
It is the 15, 16 years old who reach out for me to me.
And significant in this context is that much of what I have done in terms of films is available now online.
You can find a film I made 50 years ago, which never will play in a theater in Missoula, Montana.
You have to wait a year, 20 years until it may play.
And all of a sudden there's access.
And of course, the books that I wrote are accessible.
And you can see me in some acting roles like Jack Rich or Mandalorian.
By the way, I'm only good when I play the villain.
Real bad.
You've got a great villain face, if you don't mind me saying.
I mean, you're a natural villain.
Okay.
You should have been a James Bond's baddie, Vernon.
You'd be perfect.
I thought so.
Yes, I believe I would be good.
If you had, you know, five, six hours to live, and I don't expect this to be happening anytime soon, which of all the films that you've been involved in would you want to watch again?
And which of all the films in history would you want to watch again?
Oh, that's a difficult question, you see.
Don't ask a mother which one of your children would you like to see again.
basically all of them, but of the more recent ones, I would say Bad Lieutenant, part of Call New Orleans, because that's sheer fun, this kind of joy of filmmaking that you sense in it.
And of course, in all my films, you sense this immense joy of storytelling, the joy of filmmaking, the joy of passing something on to an audience to interact with an audience.
I could give you basically the list of all my films.
Let me phrase it a different way about your films.
Which is the one that you would be proudest of that people should watch, which most personified your art?
Oh, for God's sake, no, don't ask me.
We should leave it to the audience.
We have to leave it to the audience.
They have an autonomy.
They have their own desires.
And you see, if I know my audience is among, let's say, prisoners in a federal prison in the United States, show them even dwarves started small.
That's where they go wild for.
And I'm saying that because I showed the film to prisoners.
And if you want to show a film to very young people, show them Grizzly Man or Agari the Wrath of God or something where you can tell.
I try to be a good soldier of cinema and for that see, for example, Fitzcaraldo moving a ship over a mountain means you have to do still to do the doable.
People think, yeah, I do the impossible, which is not true.
I do the doable.
And to encourage young people to do the doable, dream big, but do the doable.
I think it's a great message.
And I'm going to spare you any more inquisition about your films, but I'm not going to spare you on the second part, which was if you knew you had a short time left, which is the greatest film ever made.
There's no such thing, but I can give you a hint, for example, a Bengal filmmaker in the 1950s, Satish Adrie, who made the so-called Apu trilogy, a boy growing up in rural India in a village, completely foreign to us and yet so human that we identify completely.
It's of staggering beauty and of staggering closeness to us.
So it's an ingenious filmmaker.
Bengal, or for example, Rashomon by Kurosawa, also made in the mid-50s.
It's just phenomenal.
And I can't even learn from films like that because they're so great.
There's always a mystery that enshrouds them.
What do you feel?
And I think I know a part of your answer to this, because I've read interviews where you've talked about this.
But the really interesting phenomenon of cancel culture, which I generally despise, but particularly in movies, in art generally, you know, you made some iconic films with this guy, Klaus Kinski, who was known as, you know, the most despicable human being to ever grace Hollywood stages.
But there were some great films in there, some great art that you made together.
You made an incredible documentary about him.
I mean, obviously he was an extraordinary one-off character who a lot of people really hated.
But then after he died, his daughter came out and said that he had for years abused and raped her.
And many people say, well, in that case, he should be cancelled and everything he was involved in should be expunged, which would of course include a lot of your films.
How do you feel about that?
Well, of course, it's a very serious question and I have struggled with it.
Of course, I heard about all this and I heard through his daughter herself about the abuses only after he had died.
And I must say I absolutely believe her because there were doubts in some media.
I absolutely believe her.
So he did monstrous things.
But I try to separate the person, the monstrous person who did extraordinary things.
And the question, I could answer it with two more questions to you and to those who are into cancel culture.
Would you remove every single painting of the painter Caravaggio from museums and churches because Caravaggio was a murderer?
Do you have to remove all his work from everywhere?
Secondly, second question, what do you do about the Old Testament, about the book of Moses?
And I'm saying that because Moses committed manslaughter.
Actually, when you read the Bible, it was, we call it manslaughter, but it was more premediate sort of first-degree murder when you read about it.
Do you dismiss, do you have to dismiss the Old Testament because Moses committed manslaughter?
Well, it's a very interesting question.
You know, Harvey Weinstein has been jailed for very serious sex crimes, and yet he's, I think, the most Oscar-nominated person for his movies there's ever been.
Do you remove all those films?
I think it's a really interesting debate about where you draw that line.
And I think it also runs to the kind of hypocrisy and deceit at the heart of cancel culture.
It really depends.
The people driving it, it really depends who you're talking about.
There's no consistency to it.
There's no one set of rules.
It's pretty much who they just decide they don't like.
Yeah, yeah.
Of course, let's not set the rules.
We are not God Almighty who sets the rules.
However, cancel culture, as much as I dislike elements of it, it has changed the climate on movie sets.
In a good way?
It is something that you can, in a good way, yes.
I think women are much more respected.
The tone has changed.
I mean, you don't have to look at my sets.
You see, in my films, I had stars and great ones, Nicole Kidman, for example.
And I said to her, and it's remarkable that we come up with that.
I said to her, on my set, there is no stars.
There are no stars.
However, everyone in front of my camera is royalty.
And I treat everyone like royalty.
And I have done it all my life.
Royalty.
And it goes all the way to the minor parts, even the extras in the background.
They're royalty because I show them on a screen that has and I have recorded them with my camera.
And it's an attitude that should prevail much more on movie sets.
If the behavior and regulation about behavior on sets is much better, which is a good thing, and I would agree with you about that.
What about the kind of, you know, people would describe it as a kind of woke attack on Hollywood, where everything has to tick a diversity quota box, or you have, you know, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
You can't actually use dwarf actors who then got angry, understandably.
It's like, these are plum jobs for them.
What do you feel about that debate?
Yeah, sure.
Of course, it has its excesses.
And when you look at productions in Hollywood now, if you have, for example, a scene where the leading character, the young lovers, have to kiss each other, you have to engage an intimacy consultant.
I mean, I think they're called intimacy coordinator.
What does that mean?
I can't even imagine.
Yes, okay.
So those are the excesses and those are the stupidities.
Much of it comes basically down to earth.
What is decent human behavior?
And I was never confronted with this question because in all my films that I have made, there's not a single sex scene.
And there's not a, I think only once or twice in films of mine, a couple is kissing but fleetingly.
Really?
So I've never been in...
Really, yes, and I have been asked about that and I don't have a real answer.
I think on a screen there is a certain discretion.
I don't like when a screen in the movies or on your TV or wherever becomes too indiscreet, where boundaries of humanness are somehow transgressed.
And if you really want to see a sex scene, just watch porno films.
But do you feel on a wider point that Hollywood is going down a perilous route when it tries to tick too many diversity boxes before it even makes a movie?
Or do you think that is a healthy progression?
Well, I'm not the judge of Hollywood and I'm not the judge of other filmmakers.
But of course excesses are visible and the pendulum will swing back and it will settle in a much more healthy way than we see it right now.
Don't worry too much about it.
It's very ephemeral.
The general tendency is right and the excesses, forget about them.
They will be the laughing stock of tomorrow.
Do you consider yourself to be a Hollywood director or does that phrase send a shiver down your spine?
No, not really.
Hollywood vs. The Real World 00:02:08
I've always worked outside of the film industry.
Although I live in Los Angeles and I'm here sitting in a van on Mulholland Drive.
Right next to me is Mulholland Drive.
But I moved here because I fell in love and that was 30 years ago and I do not regret a single moment.
I've been one of those lucky men, one of those lucky bastards who found a wonderful woman and because of her I moved to the United States and because of her I moved to Los Angeles.
I did not move to Hollywood.
I moved to Los Angeles and it's wonderful.
I do not regret a moment.
And Los Angeles is a great, great city where very important things are being done.
Things that determine the trends and the engagements and the ideas and the practicalities of the human race right now.
The internet was born here.
Reusable rockets are being constructed and built within the perimeter of the city.
So it's incredible what is happening here.
It's a great city.
I have a house in Los Angeles myself.
I go there all the time.
I think it's a great city.
And Hollywood is a world within a world really there.
So I completely get that.
We should not underrate it.
We should not underrate it because the collective dreams of the world are being fabricated here.
There's nothing wrong about it.
Well, what some people say of T. People like Martin Sculcesi would say that comic book blockbusters are not real cinema and that they're beginning to overdominate Hollywood's output.
We're not seeing anywhere near the volume of traditional great films.
Would you agree?
Yes, I do agree.
Avoiding Civilizational Collapse 00:10:42
And he has enough work behind him to have the authority to say such a thing.
You see, it's easy to nag and nag around and say the film industry has become somehow narrowed down to comics or whatever.
But he has the authority to say that.
And I see it in a similar way.
However, we should not underestimate the power of fantasies, the power of comic books.
There's something inherent in them that has to do with our collective fantasies, with our dreams, our aspirations.
So don't dismiss it completely.
It's not what I do.
And it's fine.
It's fine.
Let them do it.
They do it better than I would do it.
I get it.
You wrote a biography last year, rave reviews for this, Every Man for Himself and God Against All.
And in it, you talked very movingly.
Your father was a Nazi and later became a prisoner of war.
That in itself, that one fact in your biography is such a standout fact.
How big an impact has that had on your life, do you think?
It didn't have that much an impact because I hardly knew my father.
I grew up without the presence of my father because my parents separated, divorced when I was very, very young.
So I don't even remember those times.
And I hardly had any chance or time or meetings, encounters with him to discuss it with him.
However, I discussed it with my mother, who also was a Nazi.
But she fairly soon sobered and she saw this was leading Germany into destruction.
It was not good anymore.
And she became somebody who focused completely from politics and grandiose dreams of a German empire away to a private person who had to raise three boys all alone.
And of course, I'm somebody in a generation that's not unique because almost everyone at the time of the Third Reich was Nazi.
You see it in the approval rates, you see it in the ballots, you see it in the results, you see it in the approval for Hitler.
It's staggering.
And because of that.
Because of that, a bigger question has always moved me.
How does it come that a country as civilized with great poets, mathematicians, all the great composers, the philosophers, within the span of a very few years lapses into sheer barbarism?
How is that possible?
And because of that, I set out right after I finished high school when I was 17 or 18.
I set out because I wanted to go to Africa.
Congo, the Congo, was in deep crisis at that time after its independence and there was tribal warfare and chaos, collapse of all civil order, of everything.
And I tried to see it, how do institutions collapse?
How does a sense of a civil state disappear completely?
Of course, in the Congo, it was a devastation of the colonialism.
It's completely different, a completely different background.
But I got curious and I set out and never made it across the border into the Congo because in Juba, which is today southern Sudan, not very far from eastern Congolese provinces, I fell very ill, almost died, made it back and was very, very ill.
So that was one of the times where I almost died.
But it was worthwhile.
I was curious.
I wanted to know a bigger question that had to do with Germany and the collapse of civilization.
What did you conclude, Werner?
I mean, when you really thought about it, did you come up with any explanation for how this could have happened to a great country like Germany?
I still do not have it.
I'm still wrestling with it.
I do only have very partial answers, but we wouldn't have the time to discuss it.
We need 48 hours for that.
But I do only have partial answers, and it's very, very hard for me to fathom it.
But of course, something has become very solid inside of me.
Be vigilant.
You have to be vigilant.
And you have to stem the tides very early on.
The tides of destruction.
When you see tides of barbarism, you have to stem it early, early, early on.
When you see that one of the consequences of the Israel-Hamas war has been a surge in anti-Semitism around the world, for many Jewish people, they feel very...
That's the worst of all.
Yeah, that's the worst.
You see, you may see it from various angles.
Pro-Israel, pro-Palestine.
Whatever your opinion is, whatever your perspective is, there's one single thing that must never ever be the result, and that's anti-Semitism.
And that's a lesson from Germany's history.
Anti-Semitism, that's the threshold where you have to stop right there and do something about it.
Yes.
You famously were the last person to interview Mikhail Gorbachev before his death, a remarkable film called Meeting Gorbachev.
You've spoken in the past about the demonization of Russia being a mistake, that there's been too much animosity towards Russia from the West.
Has your opinion changed now, given the Ukraine war, the activities of Vladimir Putin, what happened to Alexei Navalny and other protesters?
Have you changed your mind about Putin and about whether the animosity towards him is in fact justified?
Yeah.
Not about demonization of a whole country.
It's not only Russia.
Now there's a tendency starting to demonize China.
It is not healthy.
It is not good.
It's not an attitude for a world order that should not start with demonization of very large populations and leads to conflicts that are avoidable.
Should we not be demonizing leaders like Vladimir Putin?
I mean, you know, by that context, you could say, well, you shouldn't, you know, we shouldn't have demonized Adolf Hitler or whatever.
Some people, through their actions, don't they just deserve proper demonization because they warrant it with their actions?
No, not demonization.
I would say there are courts of law that is a better instrument.
There should be instruments in there, instruments.
What if they ignore the law?
Well, that is what history is all about.
Sometimes political acts are outside of law, and we know that and we see it.
And if you start to demonize a certain person, well, I'm really not for Putin.
I'm not for war in general.
And I think the war in Ukraine was avoidable.
It was avoidable.
And we have to look what happened, what was wrong.
And when you mentioned Gorbachev, yes, Gorbachev was quite bitter.
So many missed opportunities.
He himself, upon his order, his signature, moved 400,000 Russian troops out of Poland and 5,000 tanks.
And there was no reciprocity from the West.
A missed opportunity.
And I do remember, for example, in the early 2000s, Vladimir Putin invited by the German Bundestag, delivering a speech and speaking about the common European house from the Urals to the Atlantic.
And then a few years later, Russia applying for NATO membership, which would have taken, let's say, the conflicts out.
Russia would have been embedded in a construct of security.
So there were many, many missed opportunities.
And in principle, you can look at my face, in principle I'm against war, against any war.
There's something terrifying about it.
And whatever we can do to avoid a war, we should do.
But wars very often start with a climate of demonization.
Some of it was not necessary.
But sometimes, as we discovered in World War II, leaders become so despotic over time that the only recourse for the rest of the world is to deal with it.
Otherwise, you can end up in a hellish situation.
Yeah.
Yeah, but I'm not really a politician.
I wish I had much more knowledge.
Discipline and Method Acting 00:05:48
follow what is happening, so I'm well informed and I form my own opinion.
And I'm very careful.
I'm particularly careful with the media.
We are on media right now, but I'm very, very cautious.
And I have learned in important, in really important things to look into parallel information.
BBC gives us a certain perspective of things, but in important things, I would immediately try to figure out what does Al Jazeera say about the sector.
I agree with you.
What is the Chinese, what are the Chinese saying?
On the internet, you can find the full speech of, let's say, the Chinese president.
And you better read the full speech and you know where China is standing and not this kind of this kind of propagandizing your perspective.
Yes, I think it's very important to do that.
I completely agree with you.
Werner, I wanted to end.
It's been a fascinating conversation.
I could talk to you for a lot longer.
But I wanted to end.
There are so many great stories about you, but no one's quite sure where fact begins and ends and where fiction begins and ends with stories about you.
So I wanted to go through a little list we compiled just to clarify for the record whether these are true.
So let's start with a classic one.
That you ate your shoe after losing a bet with a friend.
Is that true?
Yes, and it was filmed by Les Blanca documentary filmmaker Werner Herzog eats his shoe.
I did.
But it was to encourage Errol Morris, who was a nobody who's made his first film.
I encouraged him, you finish this first film and I want to see it and when I see it, I eat my shoes.
What did it taste correct?
What did it taste like?
I don't remember because I cooked it in duck fat in a famous restaurant and because I thought duck fat would have much higher temperatures.
Yes, it does before it boils.
But the leather shrinks and it became tougher and tougher.
I had to cut it in little fragments with a pair of poultry shares and swallow it down with a...
I swallowed down all the fragments with a six pack of beer.
So I was completely drunk after it, so I don't recall how it tasted.
But you can eat your belt, you can eat your shoes, ladies can eat their leather handbags.
It's a digest it easily.
That's a fantastic story.
I know this one's true, but I just still find it startling.
You stabbed your own brother in a fight over a pet hamster.
Yes, correct.
It's embarrassing, but it's correct.
And I wanted to mention it in my memoirs because I wanted to give hints about the formation of my own character.
How, because of a catastrophe that I created, I had to learn immediately.
I had to learn what discipline meant.
It also says you have a hobby of hypnotizing.
By the way, can I say one thing?
In my memoirs, yes, of course, because in my films I have sometimes departed from facts, but in order to reach a deeper truth.
But in my memoirs, fact checking took more time than writing the entire book.
And my brothers, my siblings, read it and confirmed or asked me to modify certain things.
It took more time, more time than writing it.
Well, you know, it's very interesting.
Please interrupted you.
Well, they always say if you like, if you take a car accident and you ask 10 witnesses a week later to recount what they saw, they'll all give slightly different versions.
That's just the nature of human memory, I think.
You apparently have a hobby of hypnotizing chickens.
Is that true?
It's not a hobby, but I think anyone can hypnotize a chicken.
I have actually hypnotized actors for one film, Heart of Glass, where a village community lapses into some sort of somnambulistic state, sleepwalking into a disaster that is prophesized and foreseen.
And I wanted to create a state of somnambulism in the film.
I actually ended up hypnotizing the actors.
I could actually hypnotize an audience via a screen.
It's not as effective.
It is possible.
I will not do it.
It is possible and I've tested it.
Amazing.
Hypnotizing a chicken is hypnotizing a chicken.
You take the chicken's beak on the ground and then you draw with a piece of chalk.
You draw a quick line away from its beak.
Wow.
And it will stay hypnotized.
Fascinating.
I've heard of method acting, but never method directing like this.
You once climbed into a live volcano so you could film it close up.
Is that true?
Yes, and you can see the images.
Volunteering for Dangerous Films 00:07:10
And the title page of the cover photo of my memoirs, Every Man for Himself in God Against All, is a moment where I just climbed out in some sort of a suit, protective suit.
It looks like a space suit a little bit.
And I was down at the very crater with a volcanologist, the famous British volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer, who teaches at Cambridge University.
And we approached it and for a fortnight it was fairly regular and quiet.
And all of a sudden something big happened and slabs of molten lava were raining down, so we better fled.
Yes, I was very close, in one case too close, a little too close.
Is it true you don't have or use a mobile phone, a cell phone?
I still do not have one, but I do it not for nostalgic reasons.
I've thought a lot about it.
I want to derive all my knowledge of the world and of reality in a more direct way, not through applications on a cell phone.
And I do not want to be reachable all the time.
So I do not use it until today.
Very, very wise idea.
Apparently you volunteered to Elon Musk that you'd like to be one of the guinea pigs to colonize Mars.
No, wrong.
And that's a distortion in the media.
I have a conversation on camera in my film about the internet, lo and behold, reveries of the connected world.
And I have an interview with Elon Musk and we speak about the colonization of Mars and I think it's a bad idea.
It should not happen.
We should rather look after the habitability of our planet and not create a habitat which is almost impossible on Mars.
The colonization of Mars with a million people is a pipe dream.
It's an illusion.
And don't listen to anyone who postulates it, including Musk.
And he's intelligent enough to know.
He's intelligent enough to know that this is not going to happen.
But we spoke about traveling and he wants to send a probe onto Mars.
I said I'd like to be on it.
I'd volunteer with a camera, but send me back a week later.
I would send a daily report down to us, a poem in the film clip from Mars.
Wonderful.
It's my dream.
And I actually, I seriously applied to the project of a Japanese billionaire who invites eight people from around the world.
You have to apply.
And I applied, but I was not accepted.
What a shame.
You've been so happy.
So I'm very serious about it.
You've come very close to death many times.
You were shot in the abdomen by an air rifle during an interview in Los Angeles.
An Allied bomb hit your home in Munich.
You fell down a crevice on K2, the mountain.
You fell under the hooves of a bull in Mexico and in a giant wave in Peru.
Do you feel lucky to be alive, Werner?
How can I say?
Sure, of course I enjoy to be around and about and to breathe and to write a poem and see the rain.
It's raining in Los Angeles.
It's wonderful.
So it can't get any better.
And brush with death, yes, it has happened because I had a pretty wild life.
I had wild encounters.
I have been in many countries in many dangerous situations.
Yes, but I've never shied away from entering a danger zone if it was necessary for a movie or for insight.
I'm not into trying to be a stuntman and explore my boundaries.
I'm not into that business.
But as a natural concomitant with a kind of very, very intense and wild life, I've had my brushes.
And sometimes, lucky coincidence, I was booked on a plane in Peru that crashed.
And I tried very, very hard to be on that plane.
Wow.
And I made a film about the sole survivor later on, Wings of Hope.
Right.
A young teenage girl who survived it.
And I was basically on the same plane and was taken.
It's a complicated story, but I was not on the plane.
And if your luck was to ever run out, Werner, how would you like to be remembered?
What would you like your legacy to be?
Oh, I don't care because I won't be around anymore.
I don't care about legacy.
But how shall I say, while I'm around, while I'm still around, I'm trying, I'm still trying something I've always tried, be a good soldier of cinema.
Well, you're one of the great soldiers in cinema history.
It's been an absolute joy to talk to you.
Honestly, you're fascinating.
And you're a great filmmaker, even if you won't want me to say that.
And I know you're very modest with it, which is a great quality to have.
I just want to end you on one final question, because it's the big question with the Oscars coming up.
Are you in the Barbie camp or the Oppenheimer camp?
I have not seen Oppenheimer yet, but I will do it.
Barbie, I managed to see the first half hour.
And I was curious.
And I wanted to watch it because I was curious.
And I still don't have an answer, but I have a suspicion.
Could it be that the world of Barbie is sheer hell?
And for a movie ticket as an audience, you can witness sheer hell as close as it gets.
Yes.
So I don't know yet.
Werner, I forced my...
Give me a moment to watch the whole thing.
Trust me.
I have to watch the whole thing first, dear.
Let me spare you the horror.
I watched the whole thing and it is hell.
I completely concur with your initial assessment after half an hour.
And I would definitely recommend you don't put yourself through the rest of it.
Werner Herzov, what a pleasure.
Thank you very much indeed for being on Uncensor.
I enjoyed it.
Very nice to talk to you.
Take care.
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