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CBS News
16-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
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. "I love it," said Herzog, beaming as he turned to Cooper. 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. "[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." But over the course of his career, he has also created unconventional documentaries. 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. In what's become a signature, he shares his contemporaneous thoughts and philosophical musings of on-screen images in a slow-paced, poetic narration. 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. "And it's fascinating to watch the way he works because… 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. "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. "[He] falls in love with particular images, and then just starts to put the film together, shot by shot," Cooper told Overtime. As the film is edited, Herzog will look for moments to punctuate images with narration. 60 Minutes was with Herzog when he found one of these moments for "The Ghost Elephants." "Hold it as long as we have…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. 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. "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. "I spoke to someone who created Siri… 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. "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. "With the commentary that I'm putting in there spontaneously… I put something into your soul or into your dreams," he told Cooper. "You will not forget it easily… 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. "I transport the audience into something they have never seen, and into something which is outside of reality… beyond information." "In 30 years from now, when I'm not around anymore, people will still remember this sequence."
Yahoo
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Paddington in Peru' teaches a timely lesson about immigration
Paddington Bear wasn't even supposed to be from Peru. When writing the first book in the popular British series in 1958, author Michael Bond wanted him to be from "darkest Africa" but was saved from his casual racism by a book agent who pointed out that the continent has no bears. Not that it mattered. The point of the stories was that Paddington was from Somewhere Else, a fish out of water whose bumbling but good-hearted attempts to fit into British society were meant to be relatable to kids going through their own trials. Every child is an immigrant in the adult world, after all. Now, in "Paddington in Peru," the third installment of a popular movie series based on the books, which hit theaters over the weekend, the titular bear's home country finally gets its due. And in keeping with the quiet humanism of these movies, it's with a thoughtful exploration of the lingering effects of colonialism and the push-and-pull that immigrants feel toward their homes. The movie has lessons that Americans could stand to benefit from right now as our president targets immigrant communities with renewed threats of mass deportations, increasingly indiscriminate ICE raids and anti-immigrant rhetoric that fuels angry white nationalists trying to claim the country for their own. That all sounds heavy, so let me reassure you: "Paddington in Peru" is a movie that an elementary schooler will enjoy, full of bright colors and singing nuns and adventures in the jungle. But far more than the books ever did, this and the other "Paddington" movies take his experience as an immigrant seriously. The first, in 2014, featured a villain who refused to accept him as anything more than a bear and a crotchety neighbor who belatedly came to acknowledge his worth. The second, in 2017, hinged on police who were quick to arrest the immigrant bear for a crime he didn't commit. In the third, Paddington has officially become a British citizen, as evidenced by his new passport and, more importantly perhaps, his proper London umbrella. But he's drawn back to Peru — and eventually into the Amazon — by a desire to help his elderly Aunt Lucy. He eventually gets caught up in a scheme to find the lost city of El Dorado, because, well, this is a children's movie. As before, the villain is a treat. In this case, it's Antonio Banderas, who plays a grizzled riverboat captain as well as the multiple generations of his ancestors who haunt him with their desire to find the fabled city of gold. The most notable is a conquistador who appears to have stepped out of Werner Herzog's epic "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" and into this movie about a lovable CGI bear. (There are references to "The Sound of Music," Indiana Jones and Buster Keaton, too, for good measure. This is a movie made by people who love movies.) A jokey montage of the captain's ancestors meeting their fates while searching for gold in the Amazon also doubles as a tidy history for kids of the various attempts to exploit South American resources. But while it critiques foreign adventurers treating the jungle as their playground, the movie doesn't do much better. Indigenous Peruvians are reduced to a literal snapshot and Incan culture gets boiled down to quipu knots and stone sculptures. But I'm willing to overlook this fault because the movie already has about three more characters than it really needs for the plot, which is par for the course in the third outing of any series. The crew eventually finds El Dorado, and it turns out to be not what anyone expected. Paddington meets his long-lost family and shares with them his recipe for marmalade — a nod to the ways in which immigration is a two-way street, enriching both countries. And there's a brief but emotional moment when you are supposed to think that Paddington may decide to stay behind in the jungle. It's no spoiler to say that he doesn't. Paddington is British not through some accident of birth, but because he chooses to be. The things that make him British are not blood and soil, but rather the customs that he has adopted: teatime and marmalade sandwiches, duffel coats and Weatherman umbrellas, the hard stare at someone who has forgotten their manners and the unfailing politeness when he's the one at fault and, most of all, a deep love of his new home. "Unmixed feelings," as he says at one point. It is remarkable, really, that this foreign-born bear has come to be seen as so quintessentially British that an illustration of him and Queen Elizabeth II holding hands went viral after her death. An image of the CGI Paddington and the queen from a short made for her Platinum Jubilee even has a brief cameo in the movie. This is even more interesting because the royals have historically represented the opposing idea of Britishness and their current track record isn't great. When he was created, Paddington wasn't supposed to be such an important symbol of the value of immigration or more expansive ideas of nationality. But accidentally at first — and then with more forethought through these carefully constructed movies — he's grown into the role. It's a lesson we could use on this side of the Atlantic as well these days. This article was originally published on
