MasterClass: Werner Herzog Teaches Filmmaking

I would say, if you are not going to film school--

and my general advice is to be skeptical about them.

You spend way too much time in the film school.

It costs way too much money.

And you can learn the essentials of filmmaking on your own

within a week, or maybe two weeks.

All the rest, film school cannot teach you anyway.

For me, short films were my film school.

And it could still be the film school

for many aspiring filmmakers.

However, there are subjects that are calling for a short format,

like "Plastic Bag," where I gave my voice for the plastic bag,

in friendship to a colleague filmmaker, Ramin Bahrani.

At the time I started, there was a lot of sense

for doing short forms, because cinemas

would have to pay less taxes if they showed a short film ahead

of the regular program.

What today is commercials, it was a short film

which had some sort of evaluations

and was considered culturally valuable.

And I would have a film like this, and I could sell it,

because the theatres would show it.

That doesn't exist anymore.

The short forms, I don't think there is a space in theaters.

There's not a real space in television.

I think the real fertile ground today

is the internet-- YouTube, for example, or whatever.

There will be formats out there, and you can easily

present a short film there.

And sometimes, the shorter the better.

If you have a crazy cat video, it

shouldn't be longer than 60 seconds.

So my advice is, of course, always read, read, read.

Watch films.

Travel on foot.

Travel on foot, which opens your perspectives, which

opens the world up to you.

Initiative.

I think, in a way, I'm a product of initiative.

And the real genius of initiatives

was Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a colleague of mine

who passed away way too early.

And this was something-- I was blessed

enough to grow up in post-war Germany, where there

were no real predecessors.

Filmmakers, we didn't have any fathers to learn from

or to be proud of, because either they

were exiled, like Fritz Lang and others,

or they sided with the Nazi barbarism.

So we knew we were on our own.

And all of us immediately founded our own production

companies.

We started our own festivals.

You see it fairly often when you are speaking to film

students in the United States.

They would not think about founding their own labor union.

They would hardly ever contemplate to

found their own production companies,

to found their own festivals, their own film subsidy law,

their own system of support.

I do not see it very often.

It has happened to me quite often.

It will happen to all of you who are making films.

And you have to-- to fortify yourself, in a way.

I do remember my first feature film, Signs of Life,

which won the National Film Award, which

won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.

I was just a kid when I made this film.

And it was very hard to find theater audiences.

And then, in the city of Wiesbaden or Frankfurt,

there was a rave review of the film,

a whole page in the local paper, photos and a rave review.

And it was so extraordinary that the theater owner said, oh,

please, come to my opening in my theatre, and sent me a ticket.

And I went there, and I step out,

having a Q&A with the audience, and there

are seven people there.

Seven people saw the film.

So this kind of sinking into a dark hole, irretrievably,

of rejection of audiences is something really extraordinary.

People are yelling at you and booing at you.

The film about Kuwait, Lessons of Darkness,

at the Berlin Film Festival, it was one storm of rejection

and booing and yelling against me

and yelling against the film.

I walked down the aisle.

People spat at me.

And I heard, in this chorus of angry screams,

I heard, you're aestheticizing the horror!

And I grabbed a microphone and I said,

yes, aestheticizing the horror.

It is not a political film.

It does something which others have done before me.

And my witnesses are Dante with his Inferno.

And my witness is Goya with Desastres de la Guerra.

My witness is the painter Hieronymous Bosch,

with his hellish visions.

So it didn't silence anyone.

Didn't silence.

But I had to live with it.

And it's still one of my strongest films.

So-- and it has outlived all this uproar

that it has created.

If I showed the film today, it would be fully accepted.

And a beautiful example of rejection

is Little Dieter Needs to Fly, one

of my most intense, one of my strongest films I have made,

documentaries.

And it was commissioned by a German TV station.

And I edited the film, I shot the film, edited the film,

and I knew I had something extraordinary at my hand.

It was so extraordinary that I later

made a feature film, Rescue Dawn, with Christian Bale.

So there was so much substance there.

And the network executive flies into Los Angeles--

because I was editing in Los Angeles--

and he watches and is completely silent,

and crouches down in this kind of really intimidating sort

of crouch, and watches it.

And at the end, we turn the screening off,

and he turns to me and he says, where's-- where's the men's

room?

Where's the men's room?

And I say, it's out here and to the left, to the right.

And he says, I have to rush to the men's room

because I have to vomit.

This film is so bad that I need to vomit, now.

And he rushes out.

Of course he doesn't vomit.

It was all-- this, after a few minutes, he comes back.

And he says to me, Werner, you know,

I have worked in this profession as a commissioning network

executive for 25 years.

But in 25 years, I've not seen such a piece of garbage

like this film.

And I said, well, I think it's one of my strongest.

My opinion differs from yours.

And the rejection went so far-- he

saw you couldn't repair the film and shoot

wild re-enactments and other things, and stupid things

that he had on mind.

And he said, this was meant for a very successful slot,

a prime-time slot, on German TV.

And he said, I cannot take this film into this slot.

It still-- the thought alone makes me vomit again.

And he buried the film at 11:45 at night,

when most audiences are soundly asleep.

Yeah, the emotional investment-- after rejection, normally I

say, oh, this guy is just-- is just a bozo.

I had to deal with a bozo of this caliber,

of this magnitude.

The film will outlive him.

And it has outlived him.

But what can I tell you?

As filmmakers, yes, these moments will come.

They come very, very often.