Werner Herzog: "I'm not an expert. Do not push me in this corner! Movie

The director-documentarist-divinity, Werner Herzog, looked death in the face, traced a path in madness and traced the most extreme limits of the human experience. For a man of such stature, sitting with one of the most important public figures of the twentieth century did not matter.

"We had an instant report," Herzog said of his recent meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, in an interview with The Guardian at the Tribeca Film Festival. His new feature, Meeting Gorbachev, tells three head-to-head meetings over six months between the filmmaker and the final secretary-general of the USSR. Two personalities known for their intense presence immediately boasted of marveling. .

Herzog explains: "We have similar backgrounds, growing up after the war and knowing what it means to be hungry, having traveled a lot, living in a very remote area without even running water, a devastated landscape. We knew each other. Apparently, Gorbachev had seen some of my films and done a lot of homework on me. He had a lot of comments about my work … We brought him sugar free chocolates from a London chocolatier.

During the most prolific period of a long, varied and busy career – he currently has three new feature films in festivals around the world and what he calls an "avalanche" of obligations for go with them – Herzog had the chance to make a dream come true. Quirical types undertaking Herculean efforts have long captivated the director, from Fitzcarraldo's tough boat transport in defiance of the law of nature in Grizzly Man. He had always respected Mikhail Gorbachev from afar and, when the opportunity for a private meeting came up, he could not resist the opportunity to get to know a key player in modernity. Far from the Russy pop culture of the 80s in the west, Gorbachev called his guests a "charming disarming presence," according to André Singer, a longtime collaborator and co-director of Herzog for the project.

Biographical documentaries, especially those dealing with polemics with magnets, tend to keep their subject at a distance in order to maintain a certain clinical detachment. This is not a problem for Herzog, who sweeps under the pretense of non-partisanship an intimate hagiography. He and the Russian reformer openly look at each other with warmth and admiration; The real subject of the film is not Gorbachev in a void of posterity, but his individual understanding by Herzog. Journalistic ethics does not apply when you search for ecstatic truth, and by the director's own statement he is in a clbad of his own.

"I have never interviewed anyone," he says. "I've had conversations, but an interview would involve a journalistic stance with a catalog of questions. That's the first thing I said [Gorbachev]: "I'm not a journalist, I do not have paper in my hands. You speak to a poet.

He plays a game of his own creation, in which he can dispense with the demands imposed on career journalists while doing what the journalists do, namely the organization of real facts in a compelling story. Through a voice-over narration, he directly portrays the purging of Stalinism as a hero still under fire from critics in his country for his progressive tendencies. Herzog overturns the revolutionary's maxim that "the staff is political," saying that politics can be personalized just as easily.

"The film shows a historical background," concedes Herzog, "but it also shows the soul of a man, and for a fleeting moment, it seems like you're looking into the soul of his country, the soul of Russia. "

Herzog's in camera conversations may have been warm, but he is a much slippery fish when he is not the one asking the questions. Learn about the resonance this film might have in a paranoid America in an eastbound direction, and it does not recognize itself as a pundit. Do not push me in this corner. Same answer when you write down his opinion of Edward Snowden and other specific details. He prefers to deal with high philosophical ideas, not general political positions. By making Gorbachev a personification accompanied by hope and change, he hopes to turn the Western perception of Russia as a big bad bugaboo into something a little more sober.

"This is part of what the film is doing," Herzog said, as the demonization of Russia in the west was a big mistake. The media has set the tone. I hope this is a small step towards a global vision of Russia and its policy. "

For an American writer still submerged with titles on techno-terrorists using lines of Cyrillic code to destabilize democracy, the objection to Herzog's line of thought is clear. What about hackers, which turned out to be real beyond any product of the public imagination?

"And China?", He retorted. "Have you ever heard of Titan Rain, about which Lo and Behold: The Reveries of the Connected World? The biggest hack of all. China has hacked the White House, the Pentagon, Wall Street, NASA, everywhere. They siphon billions of dollars in intellectual property and do it systematically. Have you ever heard that the United States had hacked the private phones of Angela Merkel? The Brazilian president? The French president? The Italian president? "

If this sounds like the sort of deviation referred to by any kind of bystanderism, know that these words come from someone who is genuinely suspicious of the modern world. Herzog lives off – grid, not using cell phones or computers only when necessary. ("You can not hack me in. When I have to use an email, I take the necessary precautions.I do not disclose my darkest secrets and my criminal actions.") He believes the infringements to our Privacy come from all over the place, so we could see how he might think that it is strange that Russia has retained the attention.

Herzog has come and gone in the country since the 1970s, through perestroika and glasnost, as well as the "catastrophe" of the Yeltsin years. He saw the wind slowly turn, while once-resentful citizens gradually embraced Gorbachev's progressive legacy as they continue to live under Vladimir Putin's reactionary yoke. With a deep knowledge of Russian history, he sees their modernity agitated through a sociologist's eye. For example, a mention of dashboard cameras in Russian culture and it's like a shot:

"The dashboard cameras are a reflex of the Yeltsin years. Under Yeltsin, no pension was paid, no university lecturer was paid, the police were underpaid and the country thus went to organized crime. Let's face it, they're called oligarchs today, but it's nothing more than organized crime. Russia has fallen into utter destitution and the loss of all dignity. At that moment, the Russian policemen being barely paid, they stopped you at a traffic light and told you that you were going to traffic light and that it would cost you ten dollars, or rubles. The cameras on the dashboard could prove what happened or not. The beauty of this, for example, is that a meteor that fell near the Siberian city of Chelyabinsk was recorded by thirty or forty cameras. "

Once again, any fear of a state under surveillance takes a back seat to a fascination somewhere between academic and artistic. When I express my own concern about the prospect of being constantly monitored, there is a long pause until Herzog responds with total and icy indifference: "OK. I recognize that."

Herzog lives in his own world, less in the way of Hollywood solipsism and more in the extraterrestrial way. It is not that the concerns of the populace are not important, it is that the concerns of humanity does not count for him. In one scene, Herzog asks Gorbachev (whose health quickly declined during the production of the film, leaving him too ill to attend his first well received in Russia at the recent Moscow International Film Festival) tombstone. The former general secretary answers "we tried", a response of wise simplicity and humble compbadion. I ask Herzog the same question and, after a moment's reflection, all he can say is: "Mine? I'm mad.