Legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog on the ‘phenomenal stupidities’ of his beloved LA, the dangers …

Explore the latest developments concerning Legendary filmmaker Werner.

Legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog on the 'phenomenal stupidities' of his beloved LA, the dangers awaiting Gen Z and 'The Future of Truth'

Nick Lichtenberg is business editor and was formerly Fortune's executive editor of global news.

What is “The Future of Truth” and why has Werner Herzog written a book on it? You ask the legendary director and you get back a soliloquy. It would be familiar to any fan of the filmmaker, who burst onto the arthouse cinema scene in the 1970s as a leading light of the New German Cinema, before much wider exposure in the 2000s as the director of Grizzly Man and a supporting actor in a Star Wars show and even a Jack Reacher movie.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Fortune, the Bavaria-born director refers back often to his history of probing documentaries and feature films on humankind’s unending quest for meaning. “Wrestling with this question” has “engaged my fascination” since very early on, he says: “I think it is something inherent in art or in poetry, or in cinema. What exactly it is, nobody knows.” Herzog is evasive on whether he’s come down anywhere definitive on the question, now that he’s in his 80s. He cites the example of Ghost Elephants, his recent documentary on whether a mysterious giant species of elephant is hiding, somewhere in Africa. “Sometimes to maintain a dream is better than seeing it fulfilled,” he explains.

Werner Herzog Is Ready for the Post-Truth World

Growing up in a suburban utopia outside of Houston, I wanted for little. Ours was a community of deeply religious, hardworking
oil-and-gas men and women, beautiful families with manicured lawns,
gas-guzzling SUVs, Little League, country clubs, marching band, and Outback
Steakhouse. But things seemed a bit too perfect. What deeper truths were
lurking? I wondered. Absent real answers, I turned to the otherworldly and the
supernatural, obsessing over inexplicable phenomena, conspiracy theories, calamitous
predictions of doom via civilization-ending comet or pandemic. The Betty and
Barney Hill abduction, D.B. Cooper’s lost briefcase, the JFK assassination, the
Mothman, the Antichrist’s imminent arrival. By the third grade, I had become a
chubby, big-haired, walking encyclopedia of the catastrophic and the
unknown. 

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