Werner Herzog on the Books Every Filmmaker Should Read

In part two of their conversation, Werner Herzog and Paul Holdengraber discuss the most important things a filmmaker must learn, the (first) time a b-movie cowboy lived in the White House, and the art of forgery. Listen to part one here.

Werner Herzog on the two things he teaches in his Rogue Film School…
I do not really teach anything in the Rogue Film School with the exception of two minor things: how to pick safety locks (and I’m done with that in 20 minutes), and how to forge documents, how to falsify, for example, a shooting permit. Very good to know how to do it if you’re in a country which has a military dictatorship and does not allow you to film. Like Fitzcarraldo was done with an elaborate and wonderful forgery. Those are the only things I’m teaching. The rest is somehow more about a way of life.

Werner Herzog on books every aspiring filmmaker should read…
Sometimes I talk about these books that have nothing to do with filmmaking. One of them is [J. A. Baker’s book] The Peregrine. We spoke once in public about it. About watching peregrines, but it’s a book that everyone who makes films should read. The kind of immersion into your subject and the passion and the caliber of prose—I mean we haven’t seen anything like this since the short stories of Conrad. It [also] includes, for example, Virgil’s the Georgics, not the Aeneid, but the Georgics. Or a short story by Hemingway, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” And it includes Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s memoir about the conquest of New Spain. He was a footman in the smaller army of Hernán Cortés. And the Warren Commission Report, for example. Just a wonderful piece of reading; the best crime story you can ever read and the phenomenal conclusiveness in its logic. So those are the things I care for aspiring filmmakers to read.

Werner Herzog on American politics…
We should not feel safe and believe that political discourse has hit rock bottom. It has not yet… It certainly has not. I do remember when Reagan was elected president everybody was just tearing out their hair that the actor from Hollywood is trying to act as president. And I said, no, just listen to his speeches. Just listen. Or, for example, Richard Nixon. How appalled my friends were about Richard Nixon, and I kept preaching to deaf ears: look at him, look at him. Tricky Dick. Tricky Dick is an important president. He’s the one who finished the Vietnam War. There was a maelstrom, there was a vortex that dragged everyone into the Vietnam War and he finished it. He ended it. There were other things that all of a sudden appear in our knowledge, in our reminiscences that a couple important things happened in his presidency.

Werner Herzog on films to revisit (and films never to watch again)…
I’m now revisiting two of [Abbas Kiarostami’s] finest films. One is Where Is the House of My Friend? and [the other is] Close-Up. That’s two films I’d like to spread and recommend like I do with The Peregrine. That’s filmmaking at its very very best and it’s like a man who carries 5,000 years of Persian high culture and poetry with him, and all of a sudden it appears in his films. I never liked [Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver]. I’ve never liked it. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. But I revisited the film… Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket. This is phenomenal; it just make me ache. So intense and so beautiful… It makes you ache, it’s so beautiful. And we also watched his Au hasard Balthazar about the donkey Balthazar. It’s an incredible film.