The new documentary "Werner Herzog – Radical Dreamer" (trailer) presents a comprehensive portrait of an iconic artist. It is about filmmaker Werner Herzog, whose films like "Fitzcarraldo" or "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" are classics and have long been part of collective cinema memory. In 2009, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people of our time. At 80, Herzog continues to make films. Next-generation German filmmaker Thomas von Steinaecker accompanies him on shoots on Lanzarote and in his Bavarian home village of Sachrang, and follows him all the way to Los Angeles, where Herzog has been living for many years. In addition to Herzog himself, his wife Lena and his brothers have their say in the doc, as well as companions such as Wim Wenders and Volker Schlöndorff, and Hollywood stars with whom he has worked, including Nicole Kidman, Christian Bale and Robert Pattinson.
In the article "Welcome to Werner World," which we are bringing you in five parts over the next few weeks, von Steinaecker dives deep into his encounter with Herzog:
"One December night in 2020, I’m sitting at my laptop in my study in Augsburg. In a few minutes, I have an appointment for a Skype conversation with Werner Herzog.
Tellingly, his profile picture doesn’t show a face, but a rugged rocky island in a roaring sea. I keep telling myself: Ultimately, even Werner Herzog, the directorial legend who has a persistent reputation for being unpredictable and borderline insane, is only human, isn’t he? Still, to my own surprise, I now find myself in a state of extreme nervousness.
First of all, of course, there are those films of his. I can’t forget when, as a child in the late eighties, I happened to be watching TV at night and Kinski was fighting his way through the jungle as a Spanish conquistador, at war with himself and the universe. I was as deeply disturbed as I was lastingly fascinated. Aguirre, the Wrath of God, now more than fifty years old, was and is unlike anything ever seen in cinemas. A documentary film from the Middle Ages, fantastic and realistic at the same time. Then there are Herzog’s diaries, Of Walking in Ice and Conquest of the Useless. For me as a young writer, they were an inexhaustible source of inspiration. On the one hand due to the language, which seems to have fallen out of time. You could call it Herzogian, a peculiar mixture of expressiveness reminiscent of Georg Büchner’s Lenz, Thomas Bernhard-like sentence variations, precise poetic observations of nature, and all that spiced with Bavarianisms.
A master of autofiction and autosuggestion
On the other hand, both books, written in the seventies and early eighties, are autofiction avant la lettre; the events in them, however, sound incredible, even invented. In the one, Herzog walks from Munich to Paris in the depths of winter, convinced this is the only way he can save his dying mentor Lotte Eisner who, of course, is miraculously released from the hospital when he arrives. The other describes filming Fitzcarraldo in the Peruvian jungle. The raging Kinski and the steamship weighing tons that has to be dragged over a mountain are just two of many problems. And wasn’t Herzog shot at during an interview on camera some time ago, only to calmly continue the conversation? And isn’t he, the Bavarian from a mountain village, still considered a great unknown at home, while in the U.S., where he’s lived for decades, he’s one of very few German superstars who now appears as himself in The Simpsons and as a villain in The Mandalorian?
All this made him a kind of semifictional figure for me. Someone not of this world; with a biography against all odds. And the project for which I’m now meeting him on Skype is also completely improbable. In a film, I want to explore my heroizing fascination, which seems strange to me, and above all, I want to pursue the question: Who is the person behind all these superhuman stories? The minor problem is that Herzog has always denied all requests for portrayals. In the end, one desperate biographer merely wrote a book about how impossible it was to write a biography about Herzog. But by some coincidence, I’ve now made it this far. This conversation will decide the project."
Werner Herzog – Radical Dreamer by Thomas von Steinaecker (Germany 2022) premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in honour of Herzog’s 80th birthday. It stars Werner Herzog with appearances by Patti Smith, Paul Holdengräber, Chloé Zhao and more. The documentary is a Hot Docs Partners project.
Author, journalist, and film director Thomas von Steinaecker was born in Germany in 1977. His acclaimed novels include Wallner beginnt zu Fliegen and Die Verteidigung des Paradieses, both of which were nominated for the German Book Prize. His films include Richard Strauss and his Heroines and Leonard Bernstein The Torn Genius.
Article "Welcome to Werner-World“ by Thomas von Steinaecker/FAZ.NET, 9 September 2022, translated with permission. © All Rights Reserved. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH, Frankfurt.
image © 3B Produktion
