Herzog

In early 2022, “totally out of the blue”, Wim Wenders received an invitation to visit Tokyo and look at some public toilets. It came from from the Tokyo Toilet art project, which had commissioned several high-profile architects and designers to create 17 aesthetically beautiful public toilets in various locations in the Shibuya district of the city. “They basically contacted me and said: ‘We know you like Japan and we know you like architecture,’” he recalls, smiling. “‘So we would like you to come and see our beautiful…

With pop-culture brand recognition like no other auteur, he walks the walk and talks the talk … in that inimitable voice. Werner Herzog – film-maker, visionary, adventurer and first among equals of the New German cinema – is now the subject of a highly enjoyable new documentary from Thomas von Steinaecker, who has assembled an A-list gallery of interviewees to talk about knowing or working with the great man; these include Wim Wenders, Volker Schlöndorff, Nicole Kidman, Chloé Zhao, Joshua Oppenheimer, Robert Pattinson and…

Photo via Marvel Stuios Marvel Studios will likely be conducting a lengthy postmortem on Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. The movie is currently sitting at a miserable 48 percent on the Tomatometer and is experiencing a huge box office drop-off, leading many to wonder for the first time in years whether all’s well behind the scenes at the studio. Quantumania‘s problems are manyfold, but would it have been better if they’d included a Ninja Turtle-style giant ant voiced by Werner Herzog? Yes, yes it would. This…

Almost 50 years ago, Tom Luddy co-founded the Telluride film festival, a small and enormously influential long weekend that takes place every year over the Labor Day weekend high in the Colorado mountains.Telluride is not like other film festivals. It is intimate and inclusive and democratic. Everyone mixes with everyone else – anathema to the likes of Cannes or Venice.It has high and singular standards. If its curators – Tom and executive director Julie Huntsinger, who joined in 2007 – like a film, they invite it. If…

On the website Infinite Conversation, the German filmmaker Werner Herzog and the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek are having a public chat about anything and everything. Their discussion is compelling, in part, because these intellectuals have distinctive accents when speaking English, not to mention a tendency toward eccentric word choices. But they have something else in common: both voices are deepfakes, and the text they speak in those distinctive accents is being generated by artificial intelligence. I built this…

We’ve all heard about the Japanese soldier who, after the second world war ended, stayed on the Philippine jungle island where he was stationed, armed and lethal, dismissing all signs that Japan had been defeated as enemy propaganda. His name was Hiroo Onoda; he finally stood down in 1974 after almost 30 years of delusional guerrilla warfare and died in 2014. Werner Herzog, the prolific German film-maker who narrates his documentaries in a Wagnerian register (wonderfully parodied in the YouTube video Werner Herzog Reads…

Werner Herzog is about to turn 80 and is refashioning himself as a writer. He wishes it to be appreciated that this is what he always was – he is, after all, a virtuoso screenwriter as well as one of the greatest film-makers alive. He is talking from LA, where he now lives, about his new book, The Twilight World, a poetic hybrid, somewhere between dream and documentary. The book, which became a bestseller in the US within eight days of publication, is the story of Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who faithfully defended…

Whenever a master of one artistic medium chooses to work in another, it raises the question of what the new discipline might offer, and what the previous one denied. The Twilight World isn’t Werner Herzog’s first book (nor his last – a memoir is awaiting translation), but it is his first attempt at what might loosely be called a novel. So: why not another film? What does the novel have to offer a man who, 60 years and 70 films deep into his career, can surely film whatever he wants?Herzog’s preliminary disclaimer offers a…