Werner Herzog: Don’t Hand Your Dreams to Algorithms

Werner Herzog in San Sebastián: AI threatens thought and dreams, while Hollywood is overflowing with effects but still starving for stories.

Hollywood is looking for good stories, says Werner Herzog, while at the same time it has increasingly powerful tools at its disposal: test screenings, audience data, franchises, recommendation algorithms and models capable of recognizing what has already worked.

Honored at San Sebastián, Herzog speaks from a position that has become rare in the industry: that of someone who considers unpredictability not a defect to be corrected, but a condition of storytelling itself. Meanwhile, he recognizes a shortage of good subjects in Hollywood: if a story is supposed to surprise us, how much can we demand to know in advance about how it will work?

“Make sure you do not hand over your thinking, your dreams, to some algorithm.” — Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog and AI: who decides which stories to tell?

The point Herzog raises concerns the moment when someone still has to imagine a possibility, before there are images to produce or scenes to perfect. Algorithms can offer suggestions, recognize patterns, multiply alternatives. But when those patterns become a criterion for judging what is worth attempting, what worked yesterday is taken and transformed into the criterion for deciding what may work tomorrow.

Herzog’s new film offers a concrete example. In Bucking Fastard, Kate and Rooney Mara play two sisters so bound together that they call into question the very idea of an individual identity; together they dig a tunnel through a mountain. The most obvious question is what is wrong with them. Herzog asks another: from what point of view did we decide that they are the abnormal ones?

It is the same reversal through which he reads Kaspar Hauser. The man who does not know social conventions is not necessarily, in his eyes, the outsider who must be explained: he can be the point from which everyone else’s conventions appear strange.

For this reason Herzog considers abstract ideas enemies of cinema when they claim to govern the story from the beginning. The two sisters do not exist to illustrate a thesis about abnormality; it is their story that forces us to reconsider what we thought was normal.

“The logic of the story resembles more the logic of poems or dreams. And yet a clear view of the world emerges from it.” — Werner Herzog

Bucking Fastard and the audience that cannot be predicted

Bucking Fastard comes from material that would hardly have emerged from a development meeting: the true story of British twins Freda and Greta Chaplin, who became famous in the 1980s for their obsessive relationship with the same man. Even the title derives, according to the story associated with the case, from a slip of the tongue the two supposedly made simultaneously in court: instead of “fucking bastard,” they both said “bucking fastard.”

But for Herzog, a good story stops belonging completely to the author the moment it meets an audience. In September Bucking Fastard passed through the Venice Film Festival and then San Sebastián, receiving different reactions; during Venice it was also shown in a prison, where, Herzog says, the film produced yet another reading.

For Herzog, then, there is no definitive version even of the audience. An international festival, a prison and perhaps a viewer in 2066 can watch the same film without seeing the same object, because a story also changes in relation to who encounters it. This is the margin no author can write into a screenplay and no market research can close in advance: a film continues to produce meanings precisely when it leaves the control of those who made it.

“In thirty or forty years the audience will have changed and visual habits will have changed. You will probably see a very particular interpretation then.” — Werner Herzog