Podcast #67: Werner Herzog on Greece and Wrestlemania
At this point, it's safe to call Werner Herzog a cinema legend. Born in Munich, the director, screenwriter, and producer has directed sixty-seven films. He has won four awards at the Cannes Film Festival and been nominated for one Academy Award. This week on the New York Public Library Podcast, we're proud to present Werner Herzog discussing ancient Greece, his grandfather, and Wrestlemania, a conversation co-presented by The Onassis Cultural Center, New York.
His early film Signs of Life holds one key to Herzog's past. The filmmaker connects it with his grandfather, an archaeologist:
"Most of it was done on the island of Kos, which had a great significance for me because my grandfather, with whom I had a very deep connection, worked there as an archaeologist in the early twentieth century for eight years. I always felt much closer related to my grandfather than my own father... I've always felt very close, in a way, to my grandfather and his impeccable sense of location. He had an incredible sense of finding places for centuries on the island of Kos. There were searches for the Asclepieia and he found it. Almost all the other monuments of ancient Greece like, let's say, Mycenae or Knossos on the island of Crete, you knew were it was because the columns were sticking out of the ground."
Years later, the ancients still fascinate Herzog, though he was not particularly interested in studying the classics as a student. Instead, he preferred the education of an autodidact:
"I didn't like school. I was very much self-taught. I never trusted school. I never trusted instructors. I never trusted teachers, but something remained there, and only after school when I was long done with it, I started to like it, and I started to read. Of course, my reading in ancient Greek or in Latin is limited. My knowledge of ancient Greek drama is very, very limited. My knowledge of Greek philosophy: quite limited. Of course we had to read Plato in its original in school, but somehow it never touched my soul. It was other things. It was other things that moved me and that keep my mind engaged until this very day."
While some might be apt to dismiss studying these ancient civilizations, Herzog sees reverberations of ancient Greek culture in contemporary popular entertainment. He noted an unexpected correlation:
"I think like Herb Golder, who is here with us, who has worked with me, who believes that in Wrestlemania there are crude forms of mythology and drama going on, and they're not in the fights. The fights are interrupted by commercials, but when the owner of this whole enterprise shows up in the ring and his wife — allegedly, his wife in black sunglasses and in a wheelchair — is wheeled in and she has become blinded because of grief, because he, her husband, has four blond babes with breast installations like this on his arm and scolds her and says, 'You're stupid. You don't have any boobs like this.' And the son steps up and confronts his father but not in defense of the mother. The son steps up because he wants more of the money, of the pie of the money. And I'm convinced and Herb Golder is convinced that ancient Greek drama had some crude proto-forms a little bit like that."