Werner Herzog returns with 'Bucking Fastard' and reaffirms his ecstatic vision of human endeavor

When Werner Herzog needed a title for his memoirs, he reached back to one of his own films: "Every Man for Himself and God Against All," the original German title of his 1974 feature known in English as "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser." For Herzog, perhaps the last wild man of European cinema, it's less a title than a worldview.

Over more than 60 years as a provocative, boundary-breaking filmmaker, Herzog has made films on the slopes of active volcanoes, and in the middle of the Sahara. He's filmed in the jungle and north of the Arctic Circle, telling stories of characters who live at the edges of human achievement. Often, in making these films, Herzog has pushed himself, and his collaborators, to the edge as well.

Now 84, Werner Herzog shows no signs of slowing down. He's back with a new feature film, "Bucking Fastard," his first drama in seven years, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival.

'Bucking Fastard:' two sisters, totally in sync

The film is the story of Jean and Joan Holbrooke, two sisters who speak, think and move in unison. They even share the same dreams and love the same undeserving man.

Hollywood stars and real-life siblings Kate and Rooney Mara play the sisters, their performances synced up to an uncanny degree.

The film is loosely inspired by real-life twin sisters Freda and Greta Chaplin, who became a tabloid sensation in England in the 1980s. The film's title is a reference to an inadvertent simultaneous spoonerism the sisters made in court, when describing their former lover.

In Herzog's version, the Holbrooke sisters, after being rejected by their true love (played by Orlando Bloom), decamp to the wilds of Ireland and begin digging a tunnel in a cave, convinced they can dig their way to the Orkney Islands — a mythical place where true love is possible.

Reaching out for the extraordinary

The Holbrooke sisters are two ecstatic dreamers striving to do the impossible. Typical Herzog protagonists.

Herzog himself sees the through-line.

"With 'Fitzcarraldo,' there is a great dream about opera in the jungle, and for that the protagonist moves a big ship over a mountain," he told DW in Venice.

Herzog was referring to his 1982 epic adventure drama in which he had his crew actually haul a 320-ton steamship over a hill in the Peruvian jungle to tell the story of a man who dreams of building an opera house in the middle of the rainforest.

Similarly, added the director, "Bucking Fastard" is "the dream of an ideal country, which doesn't really exist."

In the world of Werner Herzog, art imitates life, and vice versa.

While filming "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" (1972), the story of a mad conquistador in search of El Dorado, Herzog and his crew, including star Klaus Kinski, nearly went mad themselves.

In his 1999 documentary on Kinski, "My Best Fiend," Herzog recounts how the actor threatened to leave the film. If he did, the director told him, he would follow him and shoot him dead.

Real people, real extremes

Herzog is, if anything, even better known as a documentarian and his real-life protagonists are as extreme as his fictional characters.

In "Grizzly Man" (2005), he ponders the life of Timothy Treadwell, an animal rights activist who spent years getting up close and personal with bears in the wild, until one of them ate him.

"Little Dieter Needs to Fly" (1997) follows the German-born American Vietnam War pilot Dieter Dengler, who survived a harrowing escape from a Laotian prison camp.

For "La Soufriere" (1977), Herzog filmed in an abandoned town in Guadeloupe, next to a volcano on the brink of eruption, to talk to the one man who refuses to evacuate.

Films as our 'collective dreams'

Herzog sees little difference between his fiction and non-fiction films. He admits to inventing scenes for his documentaries, and to filming real events for his features.

For "Rescue Dawn" (2006), a feature adaptation of the Dieter Dengler story, Herzog got star Christian Bale to devour live maggots on camera (the director showed him how, gobbling up some himself) and wrestle with a real live snake for a scene.

"Film does not have so much to do with reality as it does with our collective dreams," Herzog said.

He thinks of himself less as a director than "as a poet."

'Just go out and do it'

In his often haunting tales of man's struggle with nature, Herzog aims to achieve an "ecstatic truth" beyond mere reality. His goal, he said, is not to depict the extreme as bizarre or extraordinary. It is to inspire everyone to be extraordinary.

"Every grown-up man should move a ship over a mountain. Every grown-up woman should dig a tunnel through a mountain range," he told DW. "[The message] is very simple: Just go out and do it."

Rooney Mara agreed: "Being willing to show up every day and dig a tunnel through a mountain for love — that's not crazy. Everyone else is crazy for not wanting to do that."

A divided response in Venice

"Bucking Fastard" is an odd, and oddly funny film, especially for a Herzog movie.

"Thank you for seeing that," said Herzog, who argued there is humor in all his films, if you look for it. "Sometimes it's a dark humor. Sometimes it's a very Bavarian humor that even Germans wouldn't understand. For Americans, it's easier. Mexicans, yes, they immediately get it."

The Venice audience gave "Bucking Fastard" a warm welcome, but critics were more divided. A few embraced Herzog's new piece of ecstatic weirdness. Most dismissed it as confusing, clunky and utterly nonsensical. An "uddled-mup fairytale," wrote one, playing on the film's mixed up title.

Why Herzog still matters

Herzog critics are legion, but his fans probably don't care. The 84-year-old director is as popular as he's ever been. He launched an Instagram account last year, even though he still doesn't own a smartphone, and it has become a huge hit with Gen Z.

"My younger son does it, he knows how, and he tells me 85% of those who read it and love it are between 15 and 20 years old," Herzog said. "And because my films are now available on the internet, on streaming platforms, all of a sudden [young people] are discovering it."

Mara said Herzog remains an inspiration, as "a singular human being [who] really doesn't give a sh**." Speaking to the German director, she noted: "You march to the beat of your own drum so thoroughly, and people love that because that's what we all want to do."

Next stop: outer space?

For his part, Herzog is not slowing down. He's already put "Bucking Fastard" behind him and is deep in post-production on his new film and has a Taschen photo book in progress.

And he still hasn't given up on his impossible dream: making a film in space.

"I spoke to NASA, but they didn't take me. And then there is a Japanese billionaire who is planning a spaceship around the moon [but] he refused to take me on board," he said. "[But] Elon Musk promised me that if he goes on a mission to Mars, I would be on board."

Edited by: Elizabeth Grenier