Werner Herzog in conversation with Paul Cronin (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Werner Herzog in conversation with Paul Cronin (2014)

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Buried in this interview is a great insight about the limits of AI:

"Just viewing all of Treadwell’s material would have taken me at least ten days, but I had four assistants who went through everything, melting it down to about twelve hours of footage. I gave them precise instructions about what I was looking for, but sometimes scrutinised what they had put aside and found extraordinary moments they had dismissed. The shots of the fox paws on the tent had been discarded because they were too shaky, but I thought it was very beautiful imagery."

Benedict Evans often compares LLMs as "infinite interns" and when I started reading this passage my mind immediately went to the idea of "What if Werner used LLMs to filter this footage?" But the following sentences reveal a truth that I've discovered personally and that is apparent here: When creating something original there is something only accessible to the human mind of the creator. The creator needs to have direct experience with the materials that make up the creation to bring out its full vision. The more of the process you replace with interns (or assistants, here), the more the creation is compromised and doesn't fulfill its possibility.

Art is communication. If you can convey the message to an intern on a post-it, what's the point!

My favorite art is the kind that describes to people how they already feel.

Absolutely. One of the major purposes of art is as a way to communicate things that can not be put into words. And if that's the case, how could one ever hope to create it with a prompt?

The problem I see is that LLMs have the tendency to pull everything towards the mean of whatever you ask it to. But the really, really good stuff is often totally out there on the fringes.

You can get some good results with really precise instructions, but this requires someone who has already thought a lot about what they are after.

Coming up with precise instruction about what we are after isn't always possible. In many cases we only know what we are after once we see it. And if you can't express what you are after into tokens you can't outsource that choice to anyone else except your own direct experience of the process.

Yeah I think LLM story lines will probably have the exact same problem as story lines made in commitee. They end up as average and predictable results that might not be bad but almost never become something great.

Subverting expectations by itself can make or break a movie, but it takes real insight to not just be "lol random spork, im edgy" or just baffling, as we have seen in many soon forgotten works.

What I always loved about Werner Herzog documentaries that how he just lets people talk. He just listens. Most people will talk and tell their story if you let them do it and that's exectaly what he does without any fanfares. But he never lets them off the hook either. It's an art on its own to do this, walking on a thin line.

I can highly recommend Into the Abyss, one of his best work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmyN3QJky7I

Spot on. There's something about his approach to documentaries that really resonates with me. I'll admit I'm not super well-versed in documentaries so maybe his style isn't that unique, but I suspect it is. The only other film that's had the same effect on me as a Herzog documentary was Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing. I would also highly recommend Herzog's early film, Land of Silence and Darkness (1971) which shows he had the magic very early in his career.

Grizzly Man was the first Herzog documentary I saw and this scene is exactly what you’re talking about and something I still think about when I am with people willing to share the things they alone carry in life: https://youtu.be/hXyQAtXJ4II

"he just listens" is probably a false assumption. He famously promotes his documentary method of finding the "ecstatic truth", which "does not necessarily have to agree with facts". This style leads him him to script and stage scenes, sometimes with multiple takes. I don't think this counts as just listening.

Additionally, he has called cinema verite "a mistake".

Yes. Frederick Wiseman and Harvard Sensory Ethnographic Lab are better examples of the approach

Andrew Callahan of Channel 5 has mentioned several times that he adopted the technique of "active listening" which largely amounts to letting people talk until they stop. And then when you are tempted to prompt them, just wait and let them continue. And when they do that is when they start to really get real.

“ he just lets people talk. He just listens. Most people will talk and tell their story if you let them do it”

That used to be the appeal of Joe Rogan and to some degree still is for some other podcasts. Just let tell people talk and let the audience make up their minds. Instead of pushing the guest into a predetermined corner like a lot of media likes to do.

I love his views on Los Angeles, I paraphase:

> [...] What I like about Los Angeles is that it allows everyone to live his or her own lifestyle. Drive around the hills and you find a Moorish castle next to a Swiss chalet sitting beside a house shaped like a UFO. There is a lot of creative energy in Los Angeles not channelled into the film business. Florence and Venice have great surface beauty, but as cities they feel like museums, whereas for me Los Angeles is the city in America with the most substance, even if it’s raw, uncouth and sometimes quite bizarre. Wherever you look is an immense depth, a tumult that resonates with me. New York is more concerned with finance than anything else. It doesn’t create culture, only consumes it; most of what you find in New York comes from elsewhere. Things actually get done in Los Angeles. Look beyond the glitz and glamour of Hollywood and a wild excitement of intense dreams opens up; it has more horizons than any other place. [...]

> New York is more concerned with finance than anything else. It doesn’t create culture, only consumes it

Even smart and talented people are capable of saying very stupid things.

> for me Los Angeles is the city in America with the most substance

Well, it could have been worse. He could have disclosed his undying admiration for Las Vegas ..

Likewise, someone said Jacksonville FL is the most boring city, yet you have a vibrant artist communtiy there.

They have galleries and they are there for tax fraud.

What about the street art people?

Do you believe the murals aren't paid for?

This interview is full of gems. Just below that:

>Of course, California is also where some of humanity’s most astonishing stupidities started, like the hippie movement, New Age babble, stretch limos, pyramid energy, plastic surgery, yoga classes for children, vitamins and marijuana smoking. Whenever someone wants to pass on “good vibes” to me, I look for the nearest empty elevator shaft.

Had your cat to a psychic yet? No? You're missing out man.

Where are these quotes pulled from? His autobiography? Something else?

He's also written an autobiography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Man_for_Himself_and_God_...

The part about begging for money to continue making Fitzcarraldo fascinated me, I wonder what artistic vision was actually driving him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeUKZtYug3w

There is also Fitzcarraldo: The Original Story which is his diary from the years making the movie. Quite interesting and like a fever dream, at times.

And from this year: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/werner-herzog-isnt-afraid-f...

I found the whole thing utterly fascinating. Especially the way he talks about Los Angeles.

"Los Angeles is the city with the most substance in the United States."

" First and foremost, cultural substance. But don’t forget that there’s a huge amount of industry there. When you fly into Los Angeles, you see all these industrial areas, flat roofs, gigantic factories. Reusable rockets are being built within the perimeter of the city. You don’t have this factory in the Bronx. You don’t have it near Wall Street. Of course, people immediately think the superficial side, glitz and glamor of Hollywood, that’s what I don’t mean. But serious art — all the artists that made New York important, there were late 1940s, early 1950s. The last straggler in a way was Andy Warhol. It’s a place where you consume culture, New York. It’s generated, in Los Angeles. The painters are living there nowadays — not all, but some very important ones. Writers, mathematicians. Also stupidities, like crazy sects, yoga classes for five-year-olds. I mean, it’s grotesque. Great universities. LACMA is going to open very soon and all of a sudden you will have one of the two, three most important museums in the United States. I mean, it has great museums already, and it’s going to be big. You see, I’m the one who says it at a time where nobody believes it, nobody notices it, and it’s wonderful to articulate it now."

Right, and for example LA is actually full of concealed oil wells pumping oil in the middle of the city (!).

https://www.noemamag.com/its-oil-that-makes-la-boil/

> Fifty-four tightly clustered, slanted oil wells — the last of the Salt Lake Oil Field — sit snuggly between Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s and San Vicente Boulevard. In fact, the Beverly Center’s odd, curved footprint is designed to accommodate the drilling site, which is hidden by a wall along the street. The wells are almost completely invisible, dwarfed by the mammoth mall and the sprawling Cedars-Sinai Medical Center across the street — the hospital where I was born and where I later dropped my friend off to meet his wife for an ultrasound appointment.

I know, my family got a check for one every month. :). They are required to compensate you for any oil under your house.

I always enjoy hearing from him because he’s so unorthodox and I never have any idea the approach he’s going to take when giving an interview or answering a question.

And I always feel the need to point out that Grizzly Man was a truly good movie. I’d heard about it for years and based on the premise expected to have a low brow appeal, something for dumb people to feel superior to someone. But no, it was a respectful and in-depth character study (with some downright poetic narration) and probably Herzog’s best movie.

something for dumb people to feel superior to someone.

Herzog has some common themes that he likes to talk about in interviews. One is that "the poet must not avert his eyes". One meaning he gives to this statement is that he takes tv programs like "here comes honey booboo" or "the Anna Nicole Smith show" seriously, because it is a product of our society, even if it seems exploitative in some way.

What I'm getting at is, if he takes exploitative reality TV in good faith, of course he makes his films in good faith with relation to his subject.

If you want to see the extent of his respectfulness and depth, with his courage for self-analysis added on top, My Best Fiend would be my choice. It's a documentary about his relationship with Klaus Kinski, who was a pretty unhinged actor. It's fascinating to watch Herzog hold his own with Kinski, and to observe the strange mental space Herzog is in, somewhere between crystal-clear vision and complete madness.

Watched it. It reads interesting indeed. Makes me suspect that, at least during the Fitzcarraldo period, Herzog might’ve thought misery was valuable or even necessary to good filmmaking - misery in the form of stunts and geographic setting, and misery in the form of lead actor’s personality.

Best part of My Best Fiend was Herzog’s own thoughts (soliloquy?) on nature and the jungle itself. Those bits were some pure solid gold Herzog.

I love Werner’s rant on how dumb chickens are. Although when I owned chickens, I was surprised to find there seemed to be a lot more to them than he suggested.

Still my favorite rant.

I'm too much of a baseball fan, I see this as Whitey Herzog and think two things: a) He passed away in 2024, and b) Why would he talk to Paul Cronin?

Then, I think it would have been cool if they met each other at one point.

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