MasterClass: Werner Herzog Teaches Filmmaking

A very good example about the genesis of the film

would be Fitzcarraldo.

It's a film about an Irish man, Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald.

Nobody can pronounce his name in the Amazon.

And he wants to bring great opera into the jungle.

And he moves a ship over a mountain.

It started out with me looking for rugged coastlines

for a completely different film.

First place I ended up was in Britain

and the Northwestern corner of France.

And arrive at darkness at a place, Carnac.

And Carnac, I didn't know that it existed.

It is famous for its neolithic menhirs, that

means slabs of stone, erected in parallel lines, 4,000 of them,

up the hill, down the hill.

It's just unbelievable.

You cannot believe your eyes.

In the brochure, the writer claimed

that these slabs of rocks could not

have been erected by stone age men, 5,000, 6,000,

7,000 years back.

That they must have been planted by alien astronauts.

And I said to myself, how insipid, how grotesque.

Of course it was Stone Age men and of course there

were no alien astronauts ever visiting us.

So I took a vow.

I said I'm not going to leave until I know how,

as neolithic men, I would move a slab of stone, slab of rock,

over, let's say, two miles or two kilometers of distance.

And how I would put it up right.

And then I thought, how would I move this gigantic slab

of rock, either on very big hardened oak

logs, hardened in fire.

And I would use ropes.

Of course, in neolithic time, you can assume they had ropes.

And I would build turnstiles where

people would walk around in circles and coiled the rope up.

And this is a real strong machine, in a way.

So that was one element.

Later in the film, you see exactly how

I used it to move a 300 something ton

ship over a mountain.

The second element was a friend of mine visited me in Munich

and he said, Werner, you have to come back to Peru

to the jungle.

I had done a there before.

And everybody loves you there.

And come back, come back.

And I said I would come back right away if I had a story.

And he said, I came to you because I have a story.

It's about a robber baron whose name is .

Again, people couldn't pronounce his name.

And he told me a completely boring story about a robber

baron who was very rich and had a private army of 3,500.

And at the end, drowned in a boat accident.

And I said, but that's not a story for me.

It's boring.

It doesn't make sense.

So it was disappointing.

And when he walked out, he stopped in the door

and turned around and he said, Werner, there's

one thing I've forgotten, a detail.

Once this guy disassembled a huge steamboat

into hundreds of pieces and moved it

across an isthmus, a flat isthmus from one river system

to another inaccessible river system.

And I said, that's my movie.

These great, incredible visions sometimes

have to take root inside of you, and the starry

has to come to you.

It is material that is accumulating.