[MUSIC PLAYING]
I'm a little uncomfortable with the term interview
because I'm not a journalist.
I do have conversations, and normally I'm
not very well-prepared.
Very often, of course, I know a lot
of the background of a person.
Or in Death Row, I know the entire first reports
of homicide detectives-- a case file, sometimes 1,000 pages--
but nothing that really pertains to what I'm
going to speak now on camera.
I do not have a questionnaire, I do not have a piece of paper
with a catalog of questions.
I have to try to get into a deeper dialogue
very, very quickly early on.
And normally I do not speak to the persons
before, so that things still remain fresh.
I do not have anything like a basic standard question that
brings me to the essence of a person.
I don't have it, because you have to somehow be aware
that every person has his or her own structure and her own value
system and her own vision.
So you better explore what's coming at you,
and you have to react very quickly.
I try to have my people whom I'm covering in the film
not doing a statement for a camera.
And in Grizzly Man, for example, the coroner-- who
speaks very eloquently and really in a very, very
strange, intense way-- I had him on camera, Dr. Fallico
in Alaska, in Anchorage.
And he, in front of the camera, starts
to speak about deaths and his findings as a coroner.
And I stopped him within 30 seconds and I said to him,
you're not here in front of a jury, we're not in a courtroom,
you're not the expert witness.
You know what?
You studied this case, you had the remains
of Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard on your table,
you had them.
And this was something you had to deal with as a person.
So I want to see a human being that speaks to me.
I said, did you understand that?
And he said, yes Werner, I know, I think I know.
And I said, let's roll it one more time.
And he goes on camera and he's wonderful.
In the case of Timothy and Amie, what I had were body parts.
Just the visual input of seeing a detached human
being before my eyes makes my heart race,
makes the hair stand up on the back of my head.
Particularly in combination with the contents of a tape,
an audio tape that is the sound portion of a video tape.
And when I find out from other investigators
that the shoes nearly placed at the entrance to a tent,
and the cap left on a camera so that the visual part could not
be recorded-- yet the tape is running so that we can hear
the sounds of Amie screaming and the sounds of Timothy moaning,
it tells me that this event occurred very, very quickly--
suddenly and unexpectedly.
I clearly can hear her screaming stop
and go away-- maybe run away, there's
a lot of background noise.
Timothy is moaning, and I hear Amie
beating on the top of this bear's head with a frying pan.
And Timothy is saying run away, let go, run away, run away,
Amie.
Run away.
Amie had a great deal of conviction.
She had a great deal of conviction
in this relationship, we know that, although in the past
she was more standoffish.
She didn't get as close to the bear as Timothy did,
she was more cautious.
However, I know that at the moment of death,
when one is being tried to the maximum of one's ability
to be faithful, to stick to a situation,
to be loyal with one can say that to Timothy,
she stayed there and she fought with Timothy.
She did not run away.
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I try to limit the conversations to under one hour,
and that's normally all I see and hear from a person.
Because you do not stay much in contact
with a subject on camera.
Of course, other films like Little Dieter Needs
to Fly, I spent much time with him,
I traveled with him to Thailand, I
traveled with him back to Germany where he grew up.
So you spend something like four or five
weeks with your central figure in the film.
Or other films-- Graham Dorrington,
the aeronautic engineer.
Yes, I traveled with him to Guyana, into the rainforest.
And of course we eat together and we
talk about all sorts of things.
We talk about women, we talk about food,
we talk about whatever his dreams.
And all of this, of course, is not in the film,
but the key things I try to keep untouched until I really film.
And quite often, I see that all of a sudden my sound man
sits in the kitchen and starts talking about his case.
And I said, no, no, separate, separate.
You do not have to feel like you said it before.
Let's just connect when we are on camera.
And sometimes, of course, I would repeat things.
I would ask, can you say it but much, much shorter?
The key to what you said is only that one element.
Please focus on that.
I had cases where the camera was already set up
and the person would walk in.
And I would say, hello, I'm the one who got you into this mess,
my name is Werner Herzog.
Is it all right that you are sitting here
and you have this and that behind you?
Is it OK for you?
And if they say yes, I say let's go right into it.
You are in a situation where you have to talk to me
and I'm next to the camera, don't speak to the lens itself.
That's very strange and not the normal thing.
It's like death staring at you when you look at a camera.
It's kind of scary, also.
And I would have my face very close,
next to the lens of the camera, never visible myself.
And it's an attitude of listening, also.
You see this enormous amount of interest.
You sit there and you look at the person,
and you know it and you want to-- your face has to show
oh yeah, I want to hear it all.
And the sympathy-- wonderful, yeah, and tell me more.
So I don't have to say it, it has to come on the face.
The most ingenious of anyone whom I know in doing this
is Errol Morris.
The way he is next to a camera is just fantastic.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The White Blue Yonder, I had footage from 1989
with astronauts.
18 years later, they have aged meanwhile.
I tried to assemble them all together,
and I got them all together in Houston at Johnson Space
Center.
And I had to ask them, please can you act in my film
as if you had spent 850 years in high velocities,
but on our planet?
You're only 18 years old.
And I had some real quest and some embarrassing requests
for them.
And I was led in, and they were sitting in a semi-circle,
and my heart sank.
I had no idea what to tell them, how do I start?
And I looked around and I said, my name is Werner Herzog.
And I looked at faces and I spotted one,
and I said you know, I grew up in the mountains in Bavaria.
And as a little kid, I earned my first bucks
by looking after cows.
And I learned how to milk cows with my own hands.
And since then, I have an eye, I know
who can milk a cow with his own hands.
And I said, you sir.
It was actually the pilot of the spacecraft, who
had done test flights in 50 different jet planes, who'd
been on a submarine.
And I pointed at him, and he screams and laughs and slaps
his thighs, and makes this movement
and says yes, I know how to milk a cow.
But imagine I had guessed wrong.
What a disaster that would have been,
and what-- I would have sunk into the ground.
So you have to have the courage sometimes
to do the most unexpected, and to show them
that you understand something about them.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Sometimes you have to crack a human being open.
The beginning of Into The Abyss, the chaplain of the death
chamber-- I knew he had to be in Huntsville in Texas,
which has a death chamber.
And he comes in this car-- I had never
met him before in my life.
Like all the other people in the film,
I'd only met in front when they arrived on the set.
He arrives, and he's in a hurry, and he says,
quick, quick, I have to be in the death house in 40 minutes.
I said, in 40 minutes?
Yes, I have to be there.
So I was wrong with my timeline.
And he starts, I barely identified myself
as a director.
And we start a conversation and he speaks like a phony TV
preacher about the beauty of God's creation,
and that there was forgiveness and redemption for everyone,
for every soul.
And I didn't know what to do.
And he speaks about the beauty of the golf course
where he's alone on his golf cart,
and he sees some squirrels.
And they're looking at him, and a horse sometimes,
and he acknowledges the greatness of God's creation.
And I interrupt him, and I ask him a question you cannot learn
in film school or anywhere.
I ask him, tell me about an encounter with a squirrel.
And for a moment, he accepts the question
and he starts to unravel.
Because what happened is that he put the brakes on his golf cart
and stopped in front of two squirrels.
He could have run them over.
OK, OK, fine, that's nothing particular.
But it reminds him of now in a few minutes
he has to be in the death house, and he
will touch the man who is going to be put
to death by lethal injection.
He holds-- he asks for permission-- holds the ankle
and is there for him.
And he says, I cannot stop what is going to happen now.
I cannot stop it, I wish-- and almost starts to cry.
And all of a sudden, he's a human being cracked wide open.
Please describe an encounter with a squirrel.
An encounter with a squirrel?
I was driving a golf cart, and I was on the cart path,
and I saw two squirrels.
They were chasing each other, and as I was getting closer
they were running across the cart path.
And I put on my brakes, and they stopped
in the middle of the cart path and looked at me.
And I said, how about this?
If I wouldn't have stopped, I could've
run over one of these squirrels.
Their life would have ended.
And that reminds me of the many people
that I had been with in their last breath of life.
And due to bad choices and mistakes throughout their life,
their life is taken away in the moment.
So life is precious, whether it's
a squirrel or a human being.
So I will sometimes meditate on that experience,
make a little noise, and the squirrels
will take off and continue their life.
But I cannot do that for someone on the gurney.
I cannot stop the process for them.
But I wish I could.