Werner Herzog near Mount Sinabung, Northern Sumatra, Indonesia. Image: Netflix
Listen to this episode of Radio Motherboard on Soundcloud, iTunes, and elsewhere, and read a transcript of the interview below.Werner Herzog is something like a force of nature. Even if you haven't seen his films, you probably know them. You know his Teutonic, tectonic voice, and perhaps his reputation--and if you haven't seen them, there are plenty of good places to start. He's made about 50 films over five decades and in the past year alone, he's made two documentaries, Lo and Behold and Into the Inferno, about the internet and volcanoes; and two feature films, Queen of the Desert, starring Nicole Kidman, and Salt and Fire, with Gael Garcia Bernal (which also features a volcano). His dozens of movies range across the strange and sublime and terrible and wonderful terrain of human experience: lyrical documentaries like Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World; absurdist fables like Stroszek, the story of a mentally challenged ex-con, an old man and a prostitute who leave Germany for the promised land of rural Wisconsin; and epics like Fitzcarroldo, for which Herzog famously--infamously--orchestrated the pulling of a ship over a mountain in Peru.
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Werner, how are you.Good, where are you, if I may ask?That's exactly what I was about to ask you.I'm in Los Angeles, where I live.OK. In your home?Yes. And you?I am in New York. I'm in Brooklyn, in Williamsburg. I'm in my house in my bedroom at the moment.OK.Where do you do your business from?During the day I do it's literally where I am. I can write a screenplay or continue writing a screenplay in a busy part of the departure area for me I park on a crowded bus. Doing my tax returns in between answering the phone. So I don't need a very specific place.I love working on buses too and airports. Do you tend to write on a computer or do you use a pen? it?On a laptop, yeah. I used to write on a typewriter but those days are over because I'm not using paper.You mean for environmental reasons?In a way, yes. I don't like the idea that there's too much paper, many trees wasted. And that's the charm of , search the Internet, that you have publications on the Internet. And millions of tons of pulp from trees is not needed to such an extent anymore.Although when I think about the Internet as someone who writes for the Internet and edits articles for the Internet and who lives on the Internet really it feels like a constant barrage like it's this sort of endless book whereas a book itself is so limited and focused. And I also feel like with writing writing by hand is obviously a different process, a different mental process than writing with a computer. But of course most of my writing I do on the computer too, and I do wonder how that affects my writing.
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Read my review of Lo and Behold, and watch an interview with Herzog after he made Into the Abyss, a documentary about a man sentenced to death in Texas.