Werner Herzog in conversation with Paul Cronin (2014)

> [...] What I like about Los Angeles is that it allows everyone to live his or her own lifestyle. Drive around the hills and you find a Moorish castle next to a Swiss chalet sitting beside a house shaped like a UFO. There is a lot of creative energy in Los Angeles not channelled into the film business. Florence and Venice have great surface beauty, but as cities they feel like museums, whereas for me Los Angeles is the city in America with the most substance, even if it’s raw, uncouth and sometimes quite bizarre. Wherever you look is an immense depth, a tumult that resonates with me. New York is more concerned with finance than anything else. It doesn’t create culture, only consumes it; most of what you find in New York comes from elsewhere. Things actually get done in Los Angeles. Look beyond the glitz and glamour of Hollywood and a wild excitement of intense dreams opens up; it has more horizons than any other place. [...]

"Just viewing all of Treadwell’s material would have taken me at least ten days, but I had four assistants who went through everything, melting it down to about twelve hours of footage. I gave them precise instructions about what I was looking for, but sometimes scrutinised what they had put aside and found extraordinary moments they had dismissed. The shots of the fox paws on the tent had been discarded because they were too shaky, but I thought it was very beautiful imagery."

Benedict Evans often compares LLMs as "infinite interns" and when I started reading this passage my mind immediately went to the idea of "What if Werner used LLMs to filter this footage?" But the following sentences reveal a truth that I've discovered personally and that is apparent here: When creating something original there is something only accessible to the human mind of the creator. The creator needs to have direct experience with the materials that make up the creation to bring out its full vision. The more of the process you replace with interns (or assistants, here), the more the creation is compromised and doesn't fulfill its possibility.

I can highly recommend Into the Abyss, one of his best work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmyN3QJky7I

The part about begging for money to continue making Fitzcarraldo fascinated me, I wonder what artistic vision was actually driving him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeUKZtYug3w

Then, I think it would have been cool if they met each other at one point.

I found the whole thing utterly fascinating. Especially the way he talks about Los Angeles.

"Los Angeles is the city with the most substance in the United States."

" First and foremost, cultural substance. But don’t forget that there’s a huge amount of industry there. When you fly into Los Angeles, you see all these industrial areas, flat roofs, gigantic factories. Reusable rockets are being built within the perimeter of the city. You don’t have this factory in the Bronx. You don’t have it near Wall Street. Of course, people immediately think the superficial side, glitz and glamor of Hollywood, that’s what I don’t mean. But serious art — all the artists that made New York important, there were late 1940s, early 1950s. The last straggler in a way was Andy Warhol. It’s a place where you consume culture, New York. It’s generated, in Los Angeles. The painters are living there nowadays — not all, but some very important ones. Writers, mathematicians. Also stupidities, like crazy sects, yoga classes for five-year-olds. I mean, it’s grotesque. Great universities. LACMA is going to open very soon and all of a sudden you will have one of the two, three most important museums in the United States. I mean, it has great museums already, and it’s going to be big. You see, I’m the one who says it at a time where nobody believes it, nobody notices it, and it’s wonderful to articulate it now."