Cineaste: Now you live in San Francisco?
Herzog: Yes, but that shouldn't worry you. I never left my Bavarian culture. Nor has Aguirre left its culture, it's a Bavarian film. And Fizcarraldo is a Bavarian film. Strangely enough I function very easily in the jungle, in the Amazons, or in the Sahara Desert.
Cineaste: Would you talk a little about your Lessons of Darkness, which is the title of one of your films and your manifesto.
Herzog: Lessons of Darkness fits n very well with my manifesto, in what I define as ecstatic truth. We have seen fifteen second film clips of fires in Kuwait hundreds of times on CNN and that is the accountants' truth. But in this film, more visibly than in others, I was searching for something different, for something beyond that, for an epic, ecstatic truth. Lessons of Darkness is sa fine example for me to use in order to clairfy what I mean by the terms in my manifesto - of what distinguishes the accountant's truth, what constitutes fact, and what constitutes the inherent truth of images in cinema and, of course, in poetry.
Cineaste: Why issue a formulation against cinema verite now?
Herzog: It's not something sudden. Since my earliest filmmaking days I have preached that I would like to be one of the grave-diggers of cinema verite. But it was not so clearly articulated. Only after some intensive years of 'documentary' filmmaking could I better articulate what I meant. I did so finally in the manifesto that I wrote in anger - after a sleeples night, because I was too jet-lagged to sleep. I had a feeling it should be written down.
It was very strange because it was a night when I had just traveled for thirty hours from Guatemala to Catania, in Sicily. I went straight from shooting a film in Guatemala to a rehearsal of The Magic Flute. I couldn't sleep and then, when it was finally time, after forty-five hours, to got to bed, I couldn't sleep. I turned on the TV and again found the same thing on Italian TV as on Austrian, Dutch, Canadian, and U.S. TV. Documentaries are always the same sort of borin, unispiired stuff. So I tried to force myself to sleep but I couldn't and I turned the TV on again. There was a porno film on and I had the feeling, yes, even thought it's just a physical performance, it comes closer to what I call truth. It was more truthful than those documentaries. I couldn't fall asleep, so I got up at three o'clock in the morning and, in this anger of not being able to sleep and seeing all these things on TV, I wrote down the manifesto, in fifteen minutes. Not to exaggerate, but the fact is it contains, in a very condensed form everything that has angered and moved me over many years.