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Episode: Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is

Author: NPR
Duration: 00:44:47

Episode Shownotes

Herzog reflects on the curiosity that's fueled his career in the memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, now out in paperback. The filmmaker and writer is drawn to extremes: extreme characters, extreme settings, extreme scenarios. But don't mistake him for a mad man like some of his

film subjects: "You have to control what is wild in you. You have to be disciplined. And people think I'm the wild guy out there but I'm a disciplined professional," he tells Terry Gross.Film critic Justin Chang reviews Queer.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Summary

In this episode of Fresh Air, filmmaker Werner Herzog discusses his memoir, "Every Man for Himself and God Against All," and the interplay of curiosity and discipline that has defined his career. He explores his fascination with extremes in filmmaking, asserting that a controlled approach underlies his adventurous themes. Herzog reflects on his formative experiences, particularly the dangers he faced as a filmmaker and his complicated relationship with actor Klaus Kinski. He also emphasizes his strong opposition to war, rooted in his childhood in post-war Germany. Herzog seeks to clarify misconceptions about his persona as a "wild guy," affirming that discipline is vital for creativity and successful storytelling.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Werner Herzog Isn't The 'Wild Guy' You Think He Is) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_04
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00:00:16 Speaker_05
This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Werner Herzog is a writer and director known for his unique approach to storytelling that often delves into the extremes, extreme personalities, predicaments, and places.

00:00:31 Speaker_05
Aguirre, The Wrath of God, follows a mad conquistador in the 16th century as he navigates the treacherous Amazon jungle.

00:00:39 Speaker_05
Then there's Fitzcarraldo, where Herzog tells the story of a European man living in Peru who becomes obsessed with bringing opera to the Amazon.

00:00:48 Speaker_05
To achieve his dream, he faces an incredible challenge, getting a steamship over a mountain to reach a river. It's a wild premise, and it's made even more intense by the performances of Klaus Kinski, who plays a madman in both films.

00:01:04 Speaker_05
Herzog has remarked that Kinski is not just acting, he was an actual madman in real life.

00:01:10 Speaker_05
Kinski also starred in Herzog's haunting version of Nosferatu and appeared in the documentary Grizzly Man, which tells the tragic story of a man who lived among grizzly bears in Alaska, believing he was protecting them, until one day a bear eats him.

00:01:27 Speaker_05
Herzog's own life has been shaped by extremes, too. Born in Munich during World War II, his mother rescued him as a baby from his crib, which was covered in shattered glass and debris after Allied bombs devastated nearby homes.

00:01:41 Speaker_05
His mother fled to a remote part of Bavaria for safety, where she raised him and his brother in poverty. Throughout his life, Herzog has endured numerous injuries, ski jumping, and while making films.

00:01:54 Speaker_05
His cast and crew have faced their share of challenges, too. Those who may not be familiar with Herzog's films often recognize him for his sinister roles in popular shows like Jack Reacher, The Mandalorian, and even The Simpsons.

00:02:08 Speaker_05
Today, Herzog divides his time between Los Angeles and Munich, and Terry Gross spoke to him last year. His memoir is now available in paperback. It's called Every Man for Himself and God Against All.

00:02:21 Speaker_01
Werner Herzog, welcome back to Fresh Air.

00:02:25 Speaker_00
Thank you for having me again.

00:02:27 Speaker_01
Oh, it is always my pleasure. Do you know why you're attracted to extremes in your life and in your films?

00:02:36 Speaker_00
I don't see it that much as extremes. You see, when you move a ship over a mountain, it is doable. And I knew it was doable, although quite hard. But I think it is such a big metaphor.

00:02:50 Speaker_00
In literature you have it, for example, the white whale, Moby Dick, and the hunt for it, or Don Quixote attacking the windmills with his lance.

00:03:02 Speaker_00
So there are big metaphors, a big vision out there, and then it doesn't matter if it's becoming difficult or not. And, of course, I disagree a little bit about what you said about risking things. Yes, I have risked, personally, things.

00:03:20 Speaker_00
the problems and the obstacles and the dangers. But in 80 or so films, not a single actor was ever injured, not one. So it's my proof that I must be circumspect, that I must be careful.

00:03:34 Speaker_00
Of course, sometimes crew members were hurt, but they would volunteer, even push me, for example, let's go through the rapids with a ship. And it's a big one, I mean 320 tons.

00:03:47 Speaker_00
And if it crashes into the rocks, it has a momentum and a kinetic energy that's enormous. And of course, almost everyone who was on board for filming and they pushed me, let's go on board and let's film this.

00:04:05 Speaker_00
Almost everyone was injured, but that does happen and it's a risk that we knew and we accepted it.

00:04:16 Speaker_01
But my question still stands. Why do you think you're attracted to making films that put you in risky situations and that put you in extreme situations?

00:04:27 Speaker_01
It's one thing to have in the film a metaphor, like dragging a ship over a mountain, but it's another thing to actually have to do it in your film. At that point, it's not a metaphor. At that point, it's something your crew has to do.

00:04:43 Speaker_00
I hear you, yes. But I'm not searching for finding my boundaries or something. The extreme mountain climbers do that. That's not my thing. I know my boundaries and I accept them and I take no as an answer, for example.

00:04:59 Speaker_00
And I'm a professional person, I'm a filmmaker, and I want to come back with a film and I want to come back alive. because I want to edit the film and I want to show it to audiences.

00:05:12 Speaker_00
So, for example, at the edge of a volcano, yes, there were certain dangers and there was an eruption and glowing slabs or blobs of lava came down on us, raining down, and some of them very large, I mean, the size of

00:05:32 Speaker_00
the size of a car, the size even of a truck. So you better flee quickly. You get out of it. But I'm not searching the dangers. The nature of my storytelling sometimes requires to go into extreme situations, yes.

00:05:50 Speaker_00
But I think to look deep into our human nature, to look deep into the darkest recesses of our soul or the hidden things deep in our soul, you have to put human beings at some sort of an edge.

00:06:13 Speaker_01
You grew up in extreme circumstances during World War II in Munich and then in remote part of Bavaria in the mountains where you were poor.

00:06:20 Speaker_01
And there was one time where your mother, when you were living in Bavaria during the war, took you and your brother up a slope to get a better view of Rosenheim, a city in Bavaria that had been bombed.

00:06:34 Speaker_01
and was on fire, and you describe it as a vast inferno tracing the terrible pulse of the end of the world on the night sky. I knew that outside of our tight valley there was a whole world that was dangerous and spectral.

00:06:49 Speaker_01
Not that I was afraid of it, I was curious to know it. A lot of people would have been afraid of it. Why were you more curious to know it?

00:06:57 Speaker_00
Well, I was too young. You see, number one, when my mother fled Munich, I was only two weeks old, 14 days old, when there was carpet bombing on Munich. Of course, there's no memory, anything. The childhood was very, very closed and very beautiful.

00:07:14 Speaker_00
But when I was two and a half, and it's my very first memory, my mother wakes us up abruptly in the middle of the night. It must have been April. 1945. And she says, you have to see it, boys, wraps us in blankets, rushes up on a slope.

00:07:33 Speaker_00
And at the end of the valley, the entire sky was red and orange, but not flickering because Rosenheim is 40 miles away. So the entire sky is pulsing slowly, red and orange. And that somehow is embedded in my memory forever.

00:07:56 Speaker_00
And of course I knew all of a sudden there's something out there. There's a world out there. There's war out there. There's a conflagration out there. And I became curious.

00:08:10 Speaker_00
And it's strange because my two brothers who grew up with me did not move out and were that curious. They were very successful in their professions, but not like me.

00:08:23 Speaker_00
I was one who would move to Antarctica or to the jungle or to the Sahara Desert to do my work.

00:08:32 Speaker_01
So when you were young, you got into a fight with your older brother and you stabbed him in the wrist and the thigh, there was blood all over. And you're right that you realized you urgently needed some self-discipline.

00:08:44 Speaker_01
What did you do to acquire that self-discipline?

00:08:49 Speaker_00
It was from one moment to the next. I knew that something like that cannot happen again. And that's how a character is being formed, defeats catastrophes that I created. And of course, that shaped my character.

00:09:08 Speaker_00
And from one moment to the next, I knew you have to control what is wild in you. You have to be disciplined. And until today, 90% of what you see when you meet me is discipline. People think, yeah, I'm the wild guy out there.

00:09:27 Speaker_00
And so, no, I'm a disciplined professional. And at that time, family, of course, was important because we grew up with our mother who raised us. We were three brothers and one mother. We lived in one single room in a sort of pension, we called it.

00:09:50 Speaker_00
It's a boarding house. And of course we had clashes like brothers would have, and until today it's mysterious to foreigners. Not long ago, a few years ago, I visited my older brother in Spain.

00:10:11 Speaker_00
where he had built himself a big house, and he had a wonderful sailing boat. And we were at a fish restaurant, and I studied the menu, and he put his arm around my shoulder.

00:10:24 Speaker_00
And all of a sudden, I feel some stinging thing in my back, and I smell smoke. And I realize he has set my shirt on fire with his cigarette lighter. And we laughed so hard, and everybody around on the table was appalled.

00:10:43 Speaker_00
But sometimes that's how brothers sometimes function, and I love him dearly, and we do mischievous things to each other. It does happen, and it's not that serious.

00:10:55 Speaker_00
You see, somebody gave me his T-shirt, and we cooled my back with a few glasses of Prosecco, and that was that.

00:11:04 Speaker_01
That strikes me as slightly less than hilarious and kind of dangerous.

00:11:09 Speaker_00
No, it was hilarious. I mean, come on, a shirt doesn't really burn. I mean, it glows and glimmers a little bit, but that was his joke.

00:11:20 Speaker_01
You know, you talk about wanting to see the dark recesses of the soul, but you also write, when it comes to your soul, that you'd rather die than go to an analyst because it's your view that something fundamentally wrong happens there.

00:11:34 Speaker_01
And you say it's a mistake to light up your soul, shadows and darkness and all. Why do you not want to light up your own soul, but want to explore the dark recesses of other people's souls?

00:11:48 Speaker_00
Well, that's my profession. That's my profession as a poet, and you look deep into who we are and you describe it. But you shouldn't make the mistake to believe that memoirs are confessional.

00:12:03 Speaker_00
I'm not into that business, and I never liked too deep introspection. There's enough in my memoirs. there's enough introspection, there's no doubt it's in there, but to a certain limit. And I do not want to step beyond a certain threshold.

00:12:24 Speaker_00
It is not healthy if you circle too much around your own navel, and it is not good to recall all the trauma of your childhood. It's good to forget them. It's good to bury them. Not in all cases, but in most cases. So psychoanalysis is doing that.

00:12:49 Speaker_00
I do not deny that it is good and necessary in a very few cases. Yes, I admit it, but it's not my thing and I keep telling men. So, you see, rather dead than going to a psychiatrist, but at the same time, rather dead than ever wearing a toupee.

00:13:14 Speaker_00
You see, my hair is thinning, and I just accept it as it is. So no, think rather dead, yeah.

00:13:22 Speaker_01
It's nice to know you have your values straight.

00:13:25 Speaker_00
And women would immediately agree with me. You cannot live with a man who starts to wear a toupee and thinks he is handsome now and rejuvenated.

00:13:42 Speaker_01
Are you afraid of what you'd see if you shone a light on your soul?

00:13:47 Speaker_00
No, no. I know who I am and I know where I come from. And I know where I'm heading to. No fear and no regrets. Sure, I made massive mistakes and I'm in a way a result of my own defeats. So be it. They formed me. They made me thinking

00:14:15 Speaker_00
beyond what I normally thought before.

00:14:19 Speaker_01
One of the films that made you famous is Aguirre, The Wrath of God. And this is a film about a conquistador leading a Spanish expedition in South America, searching for El Dorado, the city of gold. And he goes mad along the way.

00:14:37 Speaker_01
He calls himself the Wrath of God. What interests you about a mind that makes you want to write about it or, you know,

00:14:48 Speaker_00
Well, they are somehow touching a chord that's in us, something mad or borderline mad, something of power and dementia and madness. And through such figures, all of a sudden, we have it spelled out. We can feel it. We can touch it.

00:15:12 Speaker_00
We can read it and sense it and start to compare it. Where I am standing, how mad am I myself?

00:15:21 Speaker_01
Do you feel like you are mad?

00:15:23 Speaker_00
No, no. I'm the only one in the entire profession who is clinically sane.

00:15:29 Speaker_01
Explain that.

00:15:31 Speaker_00
Oh, come on. I wouldn't have made some 80 films without having my wits together and my sanity and my professionalism. I'm the only one.

00:15:42 Speaker_00
When you look at the craze of Hollywood and all these red carpet events and the statements at the red carpet, which are all performative, it's all performative, borderline insanity in a way. pink sort of vanilla ice cream emotions.

00:16:05 Speaker_00
I'm the only one who is sane. The only one.

00:16:09 Speaker_01
All right. I'm definitely taking your word for it.

00:16:13 Speaker_00
Please make sure. And you can read it. Every single line in my memoirs shows you that I'm absolutely sane in an ocean of craze.

00:16:28 Speaker_01
Aguirre is about a Spanish conquistador who goes mad, and you can argue that Fitzcarraldo is a little mad, too. And the actor who you got to play both of them is Klaus Kinski, who you describe as a madman.

00:16:42 Speaker_01
And you knew him since you were 13 and he was 36. And you were living in the same boarding house, and you knew he'd go into rages. You'd witnessed his rages. Did it seem like a good idea to you to have somebody who seemed mad play madman?

00:17:00 Speaker_01
Or was it just your confidence in him as an actor?

00:17:05 Speaker_00
We have to be careful. I said it, yes, he was mad or in moments of paranoia, but he had splendid moments of friendship and warmth and insight. So he had quite a few facets.

00:17:21 Speaker_00
And of course, since I lived in the same boarding house with him, directly with him, and saw the tornado laying waste to the entire apartment, so I knew what was coming at me when some nine or ten years later I invited him to play the leading part in Aguirre, The Wrath of God.

00:17:42 Speaker_00
I knew it was going to be difficult, but I said to myself, so what? The real task now is, since he's such an incredible actor, since he has such a presence and dynamic and authority on the screen, I have to domesticate the wild beast somehow.

00:18:02 Speaker_00
all his crazy attitudes should not explode outside of the screen during a dinner or after dinner where he opens fire at a hut full of extras. It shouldn't happen. It should be all somehow organized for the screen itself.

00:18:21 Speaker_00
And I think that that was my achievement.

00:18:25 Speaker_01
outside of him actually firing into the tent, you know, into the hut, which happened. So I guess you were partially successful with that?

00:18:35 Speaker_00
No, not partially successful. I was successful because I made five films with him. And they all, when you look at them and forget about Kinski and forget about his private crazed personality and his egomania, forget about all this.

00:18:54 Speaker_00
There are five films out there that have something that you normally do not see in a movie. a presence and an intensity of a leading character that's unprecedented. I have only a few precedents out there, like the young Marlon Brando, for example.

00:19:13 Speaker_00
And no matter how difficult it was to tame him, to domesticate the beast, it doesn't matter. The only thing, the only, only thing that counts, what do you see on the screen?

00:19:29 Speaker_01
You can't argue that his presence isn't remarkable on screen. I mean, you can't take your eyes off of him. But there is that thing that one person had part of his finger shot off when Kinski fired into the bamboo hut. So, I mean, that matters too.

00:19:49 Speaker_01
I mean, I understand that what really matters to you as a filmmaker is what you see on screen, but there was some collateral damage.

00:19:57 Speaker_00
Yes, but that was the most serious thing that ever happened, and of course it is serious, and you have to cope with it. And I threatened Kinski. There are wild rumors about it that I had a gun in my hands, and so that's not true, but I threatened him.

00:20:20 Speaker_00
And he understood this was not a joke anymore, and he had to be disciplined from now on. And through all the other films I made with him, never anything of this magnitude ever happened.

00:20:37 Speaker_05
Filmmaker Werner Herzog talking to Terry Gross last year. His memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, is now out in paperback. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air.

00:20:51 Speaker_04
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00:21:49 Speaker_02
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00:22:15 Speaker_01
You grew up, well, you're very early years. We're during World War II and then you grew up in the aftermath. Your father was a Nazi and he fought in the war, but he was mostly like in the supply room, I think. Yeah.

00:22:28 Speaker_01
And your mother was briefly a National Socialist. Did they talk with you ever about Nazism?

00:22:34 Speaker_00
We didn't talk that much. My mother, it was obvious, she was very early on embarrassed about having been misguided. And she practically, of course, she had to raise all alone three children. There was no money.

00:22:53 Speaker_00
My father never paid anything to support us. And she became a completely different person. And of course, it was always lingering out there. And of course, I was fascinated by what happened to Germany.

00:23:13 Speaker_00
How is it possible that within a few years, such a cultured nation lapses into, transforms into a world of barbarism?

00:23:23 Speaker_01
Well, even your father. Your father was from an academic family. I mean, he was from a very educated family. He was an academic himself. So you must have wondered the same about your father.

00:23:33 Speaker_01
How could somebody who was educated from a very educated family...

00:23:37 Speaker_00
Yes, and it happened to many other educated families. There was no one spared. I mean, Germany was almost 100 percent Nazi. The dissidents, yes, they were out there, but they ended up in concentration camps very quickly.

00:23:56 Speaker_01
You know, your mother took you to Bavaria in the mountains to escape the bombing. But in retrospect, she also escaped the Nazis. She escaped her own country. I mean, her own people.

00:24:09 Speaker_00
In a way, yes, but of course, in this village, there were also Nazis.

00:24:14 Speaker_01
Oh, sure, I hadn't thought of that. Did you know that?

00:24:16 Speaker_00
Yes, there were also Nazis. Well, much later, it took some time. I thought, I didn't even know what Germany was. It was the valley where we grew up, in this remote place, and the waterfall in the gorge behind the house. That was our world.

00:24:32 Speaker_00
And of course, the daily struggle, we had no running water. you had to go to the well with a bucket. We didn't have any running water in the house, so my shower was the ice-cold water of the waterfall deep in the gorge, and hardly any electricity.

00:24:53 Speaker_00
I didn't know of the existence of cinema until I was 11. I think the first time I noticed that there was something like Germany, I must have been seven or eight years old, For me, the world was around me and that was it.

00:25:11 Speaker_00
And of course I started to question and I started to understand how does chaos and barbarism invade a fairly organized country.

00:25:25 Speaker_00
And that's why I wanted to go to the chaos of Eastern Congo after its independence, which I never reached and I probably wouldn't have survived it.

00:25:37 Speaker_01
Your parents had to undergo denazification after the war. Did they ever tell you what that entailed?

00:25:43 Speaker_00
My mother, my father was always outside of my life. I hardly knew him.

00:25:49 Speaker_01
Your father you hardly knew. Did your mother tell you?

00:25:51 Speaker_00
Yes, but not very much. It was fairly laconic and she said, look at me, that's me now. And I did a very, very severe mistake in my life. And my character had to readjust. I'm a different person. I think differently now. And so I accepted it.

00:26:21 Speaker_00
And for example, she was never a racist, never deep into Nazi ideology at all.

00:26:29 Speaker_01
How do you think growing up during the war affected you, even though you were at a remove from it in the mountains? In the war and its aftermath?

00:26:40 Speaker_00
It is more the aftermath and the restrictions. For example, I noticed that we were hungry. That was the only thing that was really hard to take. Otherwise, we lived in very deep poverty. I didn't notice. It was a normal thing.

00:26:58 Speaker_00
And everyone around us was impoverished. And so it was nothing really special. Only much later I understood what poverty meant, but that I had gone through it never affected me.

00:27:16 Speaker_01
Although you say that, I'm wondering if you're thinking at all about the children in Israel and in Gaza. Like children in Israel were kidnapped. There's been missile attacks. Children in Gaza have getting bombed. Many children have been killed.

00:27:34 Speaker_01
I'm wondering if you're thinking about that a lot now.

00:27:36 Speaker_00
Yes, you have somebody talking to you who grew up in a war. We were bombed out. There was a foot of glass shards and bricks and debris on my cradle when I was 14 days old. And then, of course, I grew up in post-war time, starvation.

00:28:03 Speaker_00
And since I had this experience, for me it's obvious that there shouldn't be any war. I'm against any war at all. And of course it is terrible what we are witnessing now. It is terrible. It is terrible. And it shouldn't be. But what can I do?

00:28:27 Speaker_00
I cannot fight as a volunteer in this war.

00:28:33 Speaker_01
Well, would you if you could? It sounds like you're against war and wouldn't want to participate in one.

00:28:38 Speaker_00
You know why I would participate if in Germany all of a sudden neo-Nazis started a rebellion, an armed rebellion, a coup d'etat. You would know who would be first one to rush back and pick up a weapon. It would be me. I would fight.

00:28:56 Speaker_01
Because?

00:28:58 Speaker_00
because something like times of the barbarism of the Nazis must not repeat itself. You see, as long as there is breath in me, I would fight.

00:29:13 Speaker_01
I understand that.

00:29:15 Speaker_00
And of course, having caused, having created the Holocaust, Germany has specific attention to Israel. There's no doubt, but we also now, since it will be terrible what's coming, we also have to look after all the casualties on both sides.

00:29:40 Speaker_01
We need to take another short break here, so let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is writer and filmmaker Werner Herzog. His new memoir is called Every Man for Himself and God Against All. We'll be right back. This is Fresh Air.

00:29:54 Speaker_04
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00:30:46 Speaker_01
The first time you narrated a film was when you made a film for a production company in Germany that specialized in extreme subjects and you did a film for them about ski jumping which you knew a lot about having grown up in the mountains in Bavaria.

00:31:03 Speaker_01
And you used to build, God, what are they called? Platforms to jump off, to ski off of?

00:31:08 Speaker_00
Ramps.

00:31:09 Speaker_01
Ramps, yes. And got terribly injured during one of those. And a friend of yours got terribly injured in one of his jumps. But anyway, so you made a documentary about that. And they told you, you have to narrate it, because that's what everybody does.

00:31:22 Speaker_01
They narrate their own films. And you've become famous for your narrations in films, in your documentaries.

00:31:31 Speaker_01
And you've had some movie roles, including in Jack Reacher, in The Mandalorian, which is like a Star Wars spinoff, and parodying yourself on The Simpsons. And they're all like sinister roles.

00:31:48 Speaker_01
What do you think it is about your voice that gets you cast in sinister roles? Maybe it's the content of what you're saying.

00:31:57 Speaker_00
Yes, the content, of course. And since then, I narrated my own writings, my own commentaries, and I had found my voice. But it's a stylized voice. When I'm talking to you, I'm talking like me in commentaries.

00:32:15 Speaker_00
There's a certain stylization, a certain performance in it, a certain hypnotic voice in it. I can't describe it easily and it has caught on. Audiences love it. So I do it for them as well. I do films for audiences. I write my book for readers.

00:32:39 Speaker_00
So I'm enjoying it and I have been good.

00:32:46 Speaker_00
in parts, in roles where I have to play the bad-ass bad guy, like in Jack Reacher, or where, for example, in a film by Harmony Corrine, which is called Julian Donkey Boy, I play a hostile father who harasses his dysfunctional family, and I'm good at that.

00:33:11 Speaker_00
But it's all performance. Don't believe, don't ever believe. I'm like that as a private person.

00:33:16 Speaker_01
That's good to know. Can you quote any of the lines?

00:33:21 Speaker_00
No, not really, but you know when Jack Reacher was released, it was released in France as well, my wife immediately gets frantic calls from her girlfriend in Paris and she says, Lena, are you really married to that man?

00:33:39 Speaker_00
We can give you shelter if you need to flee. We are only an overnight flight away, and Lena laughed so hard and told me about it. And of course, she will testify that I'm a mild-mannered, fluffy husband.

00:33:55 Speaker_00
She came up with that, and I live with her happily now since 28 years. She will give you the right testimony.

00:34:06 Speaker_01
Good. So we're about at the end of the interview and I have to say you made it through without being shot at because you were shot at at the BBC or at least you were shot and only mildly wounded. What was that about? Do you have any idea what happened?

00:34:24 Speaker_00
No, we do not know because I just heard somebody across the street on a veranda ranting. like road rage.

00:34:33 Speaker_00
And all of a sudden I heard some sort of a mild explosion and something like a glowing piece of metal, like a kilo weight of glowing metal hits me at my belt or near my belt.

00:34:50 Speaker_00
And I thought something at the camera had exploded, but no, and I saw the man with a rifle ducking down and disappearing. And I did not know because I did not want to call police. I said to the crew, BBC people, you are frantically now dialing 911.

00:35:13 Speaker_00
consider it. We'll spend the next six hours filing reports at a police station, and we will have a helicopter over us and a SWAT team arriving in five minutes flat. Do we need that? Do you want that?

00:35:31 Speaker_00
And so we decided we'd just continue shooting, but at a safer place.

00:35:36 Speaker_01
Were you outside when that happened?

00:35:38 Speaker_00
Yes, it was outside and you can still see it on YouTube. It's funny because people think, ah, yeah, it was all staged and made up. No, it was not. It was reality. It was the real world.

00:35:50 Speaker_00
And of course, in a world of fake news and inventions and embellishments and so, people believe that being shot and hit, not seriously, but anyway, that it must have been made up.

00:36:08 Speaker_00
or having moved a ship over a mountain that must have been a digital effect and we are only pretending. No, I moved the ship. So you have to connect yourself to the real world and then all of a sudden my memoirs become the most natural thing.

00:36:29 Speaker_00
a man who lived a very normal life with a few things that were exceptional. And I think it's not exceptional to move a ship over a mountain. Every grown-up man should do something like that.

00:36:44 Speaker_01
Did you go to the emergency room after you were shot?

00:36:48 Speaker_00
No, because we could see I was bleeding, but I could see it was the bullet went through all my leather jacket and the folded-up catalog and all my shirt and t-shirt, but it did not perforate my abdominal. It did not perforate and go into my abdomen.

00:37:09 Speaker_00
If it had been inside of me, lodged in my intestines, in that case I would have gone to the emergency room, but I can distinguish what is serious and what can be taken and tolerated. So I do my best, and I think in this case I did my best as well.

00:37:33 Speaker_01
I should hope you would have gone to the emergency room if it penetrated your intestines.

00:37:36 Speaker_00
Well, I would have gone, sure, yes.

00:37:38 Speaker_01
Okay. So what's next for you?

00:37:42 Speaker_00
Well, I just finished another book, The Future of Truth. which will be released next spring, but in its German original.

00:37:54 Speaker_00
What you have in front of you is a very fine translation of my memoirs, but it always takes until it's being translated, so it will take about a year, and I made also two films that are not fully released yet, and I'm working on some poetry.

00:38:14 Speaker_00
And I'm working on a translation of poetry by a Canadian writer, Ondaatje. And, well, I'm just plowing on wildly.

00:38:30 Speaker_01
Do you ever stop working?

00:38:32 Speaker_00
Yes, I have long hours of sleep. I'm fairly lazy. My days of shooting are brief. My hours of writing are brief. I do my text returns three hours in the morning, then I write three hours memoirs, and I go to the pharmacy or whatever.

00:38:55 Speaker_00
But I write 15 pages, it goes fast, and the next day another 10, 15 pages. Because it's my life. I have lived it and it's in me. You see, it's not foreign, it's in me. And because of that I can describe it for you. And you will not be disappointed.

00:39:18 Speaker_01
Thank you so much for coming back to our show. I really appreciate it and I really enjoyed our conversation.

00:39:24 Speaker_00
Oh, so did I. I enjoyed it.

00:39:26 Speaker_05
Thank you. Werner Herzog speaking with Terry Gross last year. His memoir is called Every Man for Himself and God Against All.

00:39:35 Speaker_05
Coming up, Justin Chang reviews the new film Queer, set in Mexico in the 1950s, starring Daniel Craig as an expat infatuated with a younger man. This is fresh air.

00:39:48 Speaker_04
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00:40:59 Speaker_05
The Italian director, Luca Guadagnino, scored a critical and commercial hit earlier this year with a tennis-themed romantic triangle, Challengers. Now he's back with Queer, an adaptation of William S. Burroughs' autobiographical novel.

00:41:15 Speaker_05
It stars Daniel Craig as an American living in 1950s Mexico City who falls hard for a younger man. Queer is now playing in theaters, and our film critic Justin Chang has this review.

00:41:29 Speaker_03
Nobody does forbidden longing in far-off places quite like Luca Guadagnino.

00:41:34 Speaker_03
He whisked us off to Italy for the passionate affairs of I Am Love and Call Me By Your Name, gave us love and death on a Sicilian island in A Bigger Splash, and took us all across America in the cannibal romance Bones and All.

00:41:49 Speaker_03
Now he's made queer, a moody account of thwarted longing that begins in an expat-heavy corner of Mexico City during the early 1950s. A world that Guadagnino brings to life in all its sweaty, scuzzy glory.

00:42:05 Speaker_03
The story follows an American drifter named William Lee, played by Daniel Craig, with a louche smile and nary a hint of 007 elegance.

00:42:16 Speaker_03
Addicted to booze and heroin, Lee spends his days hopping from bar to bar, hoping to lock eyes and more with the handsome young men he spots there and around town. And few are more handsome than Eugene Allerton, a freshly discharged U.S.

00:42:32 Speaker_03
Navy serviceman played by a terrific Drew Starkey. Allerton is trim, slender, and aloof to the point of disdainful, which makes Lee lust for him all the more.

00:42:44 Speaker_03
In time, after a few meals and many drinks, the two fall into bed, in a scene that Guadagnino films with both roughness and tenderness.

00:42:54 Speaker_03
But once isn't enough for Lee, and he spends every minute trying to keep this enigmatic young beauty from slipping away. At one point, a drunken Lee approaches Allerton at a party and causes a bit of a scene, prompting a friend, Tom, to intervene.

00:43:12 Speaker_00
I want to talk to you. Without speaking. I want to touch you. Like, like, like, like the Russian beer. Like the Mayans. All right, Bill. Let's take it easy, huh? Hey, Tom. You gotta drink, Tom. Yeah. A cup of water, maybe.

00:43:48 Speaker_03
Lee is a fictionalized stand-in for the beat writer William S. Burroughs, whose years spent living in Mexico were eventful, to say the least.

00:43:57 Speaker_03
He began writing queer in 1952, while awaiting trial for the killing of his wife, Joan Vollmer, during a drunken game of William Tell. Burroughs never finished the book, which was finally published in its incomplete form in 1985.

00:44:13 Speaker_03
By that point, he had become a countercultural icon, known for his boldly experimental works like Naked Lunch, his struggles with addiction, and his many sexual relationships with men and women.

00:44:27 Speaker_03
Guadagnino has said in interviews that he read Queer at a young age and has wanted to film it for years.

00:44:33 Speaker_03
That may surprise some of the director's fans, since his swoony romanticism, on display in the recent Challengers, isn't an obvious fit with the biting rawness of Burroughs' prose.

00:44:46 Speaker_03
At the same time, Guadagnino clearly likes to push against expectations, and his horror movies, like Suspiria, have shown a flair for the surreal and grotesque.

00:44:57 Speaker_03
Even when queer's narrative loses momentum, it's fascinating to see a filmmaker known for his lush, beautiful surfaces try to connect with a writer's famously uncompromising ugliness.

00:45:10 Speaker_03
For the first hour or so, the screenplay by Justin Kuritska is largely faithful to its source.

00:45:17 Speaker_03
But things take a weird turn once Lee talks Allerton into a trip to South America, so they can find a psychedelic called Yahe, or Ayahuasca, which can apparently confer telepathic powers.

00:45:30 Speaker_03
Deep in the jungles of Ecuador, Guadagnino essentially tries to imagine the mind-blowing ending that Burroughs never wrote.

00:45:38 Speaker_03
The director is clearly having fun, filling the screen with hallucinatory imagery, and introducing a gun-toting healer, played by an unrecognizable Leslie Manville.

00:45:49 Speaker_03
In one maddening and mesmerizing sequence, a drugged-out Lee and Allerton dance silently in the nude. their bodies twisting and melting together as though under a kaleidoscope. Guadagnino is working overtime to honor Burroughs.

00:46:06 Speaker_03
In the thoroughly bonkers epilogue, Set Back in Mexico, he goes well beyond the parameters of the novel to weave in moments from the writer's tumultuous life.

00:46:16 Speaker_03
But the reason queer works as well as it does has everything to do with Craig's performance.

00:46:23 Speaker_03
It's worth remembering that long before he became James Bond, or a gay detective in the Knives Out movies, Craig played the tempestuous younger lover of the painter Francis Bacon in the 1998 drama Love is the Devil.

00:46:37 Speaker_03
He flips that equation brilliantly in Queer. With robust physicality and delicate emotion, he shows us a man in wretched yet defiant thrall to his wants, for sex, for love, for a moment of out-of-body transcendence.

00:46:55 Speaker_03
It's a singular performance, but also, in its expression of pure desire, a deeply human one.

00:47:03 Speaker_05
Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed the new movie Queer, starring Daniel Craig.

00:47:10 Speaker_05
On Monday's show, Jon Fattiste, former bandleader of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, joins us at the piano to play his reimaginings of Beethoven's music. His new album is Beethoven Blues.

00:47:23 Speaker_05
He'll also talk about the extremes in his life in 2022 when he won multiple Grammys and his wife had a reoccurrence of leukemia and a bone marrow transplant. I hope you can join us.

00:47:45 Speaker_05
To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock.

00:47:57 Speaker_05
Audrey Bentham is our technical director and engineer, with additional engineering support from Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld, and Diana Martinez.

00:48:06 Speaker_05
Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, and Anna Baumann. Our digital media producers are Molly C.V.

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Nesper and Sabrina Seawert. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.

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