How Werner Herzog makes documentaries
In an editing suite in Los Angeles, filmmaker Werner Herzog and editor Marco Capaldo played back footage of murky water at the bottom of a desert pool.
“It’s very strange now. Look at this here,” Herzog told correspondent Anderson Cooper, seated just behind him.
A tail swung past the frame, suddenly recognizable as belonging to an elephant, who could now be seen playfully bathing to the soundtrack of Schubert.Ā
“I love it,” said Herzog, beaming as he turned to Cooper.Ā
The sequence is from Herzog’s unreleased documentary film, “The Ghost Elephants.”
It’s about a herd of mythic elephants in southern Africa. But Herzog insists it is not a wildlife film.Ā
“[It’s] a fantasy of elephants. Maybe a search, like for the white whale, for Moby Dick. It’s a dream of an elephant,” he told Anderson Cooper.
Herzog made a name for himself in the world of cinema with epic dramas like “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” and “Fitzcarraldo.”Ā
But over the course of his career, he has also created unconventional documentaries.Ā
He’s made films about volcanologists, primitive cave paintings in France, and a man who lived with grizzly bears in Alaska.
The documentaries are usually narrated by Herzog himself.Ā
In what’s become a signature, he shares his contemporaneous thoughts and philosophical musings of on-screen images in a slow-paced, poetic narration.Ā
He often asks questions that don’t have answers: “Are we floating in a strange and beautiful reality? Do we dance in our minds?”
Herzog “is probably one of the most unusual filmmakers working today,” Cooper told 60 Minutes Overtime.Ā
“And it’s fascinating to watch the way he works becauseā¦ he doesn’t storyboard a documentary film out. He doesn’t even look at transcripts.”
Herzog and editor Marco Capaldo will watch all the footage shot for a film in one sitting, and only one time. Herzog takes notes as he watches, marking the shots he likes with exclamation marks.Ā
“And when something has three exclamation marks, it means, ‘If this is not in this film, I have lived in vain,'” the filmmaker told Cooper.Ā
“[He] falls in love with particular images, and then just starts to put the film together, shot by shot,” Cooper told Overtime.Ā
As the film is edited, Herzog will look for moments to punctuate images with narration.Ā
60 Minutes was with Herzog when he found one of these moments for “The Ghost Elephants.”
“Hold it as long as we haveā¦I need to say something over this here,” Herzog told Capaldo when he saw a shot of the bottom of a lake with nothing in the frame.Ā
He jotted down notes, got up from his seat, and walked back to a makeshift audio booth behind the edit suite.
Capaldo gave him a cue to begin recording.Ā
“Here comes a fundamental question I’m asking myself. Could it be even better just to dream of the elephants than finding them in reality?”
In the edited sequence 60 Minutes saw, Herzog’s question is followed by an elephant’s legs walking along the floor of the pool, a barely-recognizable, dreamlike image.
Herzog also showed 60 Minutes a sequence from “Theatre of Thought,” a documentary about the human brain, playing in theaters now.Ā
“I spoke to someone who created Siriā¦ I noticed that he hadn’t switched off his TV screen in the background with fish, which he had filmed himself.”
In the film, Herzog leaves his interview subject behind, filling the frame with images from the man’s television, and then uses his own narration over the images of fish.Ā
“Do fish have souls? Do fish have dreams?” Herzog asks.
“Do they have thoughts at all? And if so, what are they thinking about? Is the same thought simultaneously in all of them?”
Herzog explained that the narration is key to making a sequence of images memorable for the audience.Ā
“With the commentary that I’m putting in there spontaneouslyā¦ I put something into your soul or into your dreams,” he told Cooper.Ā
“You will not forget it easilyā¦ It’s poetry.”
Cooper noted that broadcast journalism does not allow the opportunity to “live inside these incredible images” the way Herzog’s documentaries do.
“Well, news is something different, and journalism is something different,” Herzog said.Ā
“I transport the audience into something they have never seen, and into something which is outside of realityā¦ beyond information.”
“In 30 years from now, when I’m not around anymore, people will still remember this sequence.”
The video above was produced by Will Croxton. It was edited by Sarah Shafer.
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