Werner and Errol

Even if I wish he would have a bit more of a sense of humor - so does the rest of the world - Werner Herzog should be a model for anybody who wants to work in the arts. He's not yet 70 and has directed nearly 60 films, all of which (that I've seen, which at this point can't be any more than 10 of them) could never have been made by anybody else. There's only one explanation for this: relentless work, relentless discipline, and relentless pursuit of creating whatever he wants to make: damning what anybody else thinks.



But whatever genius he possesses, it's clearly not one that lets him see things with empathy. There's something inhuman about Herzog that you can even see here in this dialogue. Errol Morris (Fog of War, Brief History of Time) goes out of his way to praise Werner Herzog and then Werner responds by berating Errol Morris for his lack of self-discipline, it's kind of painful to watch. This whole hour is like a process of Errol Morris trying to ingratiate himself to his hero, and his hero constantly beating him down. The truth is, most of us are a lot more like Errol Morris. Herzog is someone for whom making a movie is as easy as taking a drink of water. But doing great work doesn't come to most of us so easily, and it takes time to wrestle with ideas and execution. This is, with some exceptions, what separates geniuses from mere talent. It's also what makes the real geniuses so scary to engage with. Many of them are incapable of understanding the rest of us because it's impossible for them to understand what ordinary life is. For most of us, making something good is very hard because it requires making something extraordinary out of the ordinary frustrations that get in everyone's way. But so many, perhaps most, of the world's really extraordinary artisans feel unencumbered by these problems because they are literally hard-wired to bypass ordinary concerns.


(Aguirre, The Wrath of God. A film which during its making Werner Herzog and his star Klaus Kinski threatened to shoot each other - multiple times. One famous critic called it 'a film made on a dare' because it involved Germans going into the Peruvian Amazon with barely any money or provisions to shoot a film about Spanish Conquistadors going into the Peruvian Amazon with barely any money or provisions. Both went up the Amazon seeking what others thought were impossible tasks - Aguirre did it to find El Dorado, a mythical city made of Gold. Herzog went into the river to find a great movie. He succeeded where Aguirre failed, but perhaps not without losing whatever humanity he had in the process.)