Speaker 1: If this is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
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Speaker 1: to start this show out by saying this me Eater's
Speaker 1: American history, The Long Hunters seventeen sixty one to seventeen
Speaker 1: seventy five is out.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: When you get to the end of this episode, you're
Speaker 1: gonna hear a long I don't wanna call it long.
Speaker 1: You're gonna hear a very good explanation of what this
Speaker 1: project is and why you want to buy it. Just
Speaker 1: be prepared for that, Like when you get to the
Speaker 1: end of the episode, get your credit card out and
Speaker 1: go to wherever you buy your audiobooks, because you're gonna
Speaker 1: be like, damn, I'm buying that. So get to the
Speaker 1: end and I'm gonna tell you a lot about it.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna just convince you just how good it is.
Speaker 1: It's really good. We've been talking about it a long time.
Speaker 1: This is narrated by me Steven Arnello and Clay Nukem
Speaker 1: from the Bear Grease podcast, and it is a audio original.
Speaker 1: It's like an audiobook that you listen to, okay, and
Speaker 1: it's called Meat Eater's American History The Long Hunters seventeen
Speaker 1: sixty one to seventeen seventy five. It tells one of
Speaker 1: the most bloody, hair raising stories of hunting in American history.
Speaker 1: It's out now, but listen to the show. Enjoy the show,
Speaker 1: but know that at the end of the show that
Speaker 1: you're about to listen to, I'm gonna give you the
Speaker 1: sales pitch to end all sales pitches, so you can
Speaker 1: if you're not convinced, you can listen and be convinced,
Speaker 1: or you can just know that you'll be convinced and
Speaker 1: buy it now. I don't really care. I just want
Speaker 1: you to get it and start listening because this is
Speaker 1: one of the things that I've made that I'm most
Speaker 1: proud of. Meet Eater's American History The Long Hunters, available
Speaker 1: now and explained in greater detail at the end of
Speaker 1: the show. Is to stay tuned, everybody. I'm very, very
Speaker 1: excited to announce that I am seated here with the
Speaker 1: writer and film director Werner Herzog, who's made over sixty
Speaker 1: films and documentaries, including many I'm sure you heard of,
Speaker 1: and a bunch of them that you better have seen.
Speaker 1: Little Deader Needs to Fly Rescue Dawn, the famous in
Speaker 1: my circle of people, Grizzly Man, Happy People, cav of
Speaker 1: Forgotten Dreams, which I believe is your only film that
Speaker 1: I managed to catch when it released in a theater
Speaker 1: in New York Cava Forgotten Dreams. His films deal with extremes,
Speaker 1: with struggle, with absurdity, with madness, with happiness, and many
Speaker 1: are fused, in my opinion, with a very unique perspective
Speaker 1: on nature in the natural world. If you read about Herzog,
Speaker 1: you'll often find writers describing it his work as man
Speaker 1: against man, against nature, man versus nature. We'll find out
Speaker 1: if he describes it that way. I'm guessing he doesn't,
Speaker 1: as I believe that description would imply that nature is
Speaker 1: aware of man as an adversary. Mister Herzige, a couple
Speaker 1: of your own quotes, the universe is monstrously indifferent to
Speaker 1: the presence of man. You also once said, I believe
Speaker 1: the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility,
Speaker 1: and murder. Now, many documentarians who deal with the natural
Speaker 1: world I find personally seem to reflect the relationship with
Speaker 1: nature sometimes feels to me as though it's as though
Speaker 1: it's taught, as though it's something they picked up or
Speaker 1: learned from their peers. It's oftentimes political. But our guest
Speaker 1: here today, I feel that the things he has to
Speaker 1: say about the natural world and the way that the
Speaker 1: natural world plays into his movies is wholly original influence
Speaker 1: me immensely, not just as a writer or TV person,
Speaker 1: but as a human. I'd say, for me on par
Speaker 1: with Cormick McCarthy, because both have these immense bodies of
Speaker 1: work that interplay together as something that is not schizophrenic,
Speaker 1: meaning they carry this sort of intellectual trademark. And the
Speaker 1: last little bit of introduction I'll saying this is a
Speaker 1: very inside joke. When I'm arguing with production people, which
Speaker 1: I do in my line of work, I've a lot
Speaker 1: of times dealt with camera guys producers that want to
Speaker 1: catch the entirety of a process, and if they can't
Speaker 1: catch the entirety of a process, they don't want to
Speaker 1: use it. And I will say to them in shorthand.
Speaker 1: I will take a line from Happy People and I
Speaker 1: will say the nets were set the night before, because
Speaker 1: there's a scene in Happy People which chronicles the lives
Speaker 1: of Siberian fur travers and subsistence hunters, and there's a
Speaker 1: scene that opens where they're just checking a net, and
Speaker 1: my camera guys would have been like, well, we can't
Speaker 1: use that. We never saw you set the net, to
Speaker 1: which I will refer them to Happy People, and I
Speaker 1: will say to them, the nets were set the night before.
Speaker 1: And that's it. Go on with your movie. Go on
Speaker 1: with your movie. I want to start our conversation talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about your your childhood, which I was like, like,
Speaker 1: I said, my avenue to you and your work. It's
Speaker 1: just been your movies. I've been a fan of your
Speaker 1: movies for such a long time, and it wasn't I
Speaker 1: read your new book, which I haven't finished yet. It
Speaker 1: started a new book. It's every Man for Himself and
Speaker 1: God against all your life. Yeah, I didn't realize the
Speaker 1: extent of the poverty that you grew up in.
Speaker 2: Well, it's easy to imagine when you grew up at
Speaker 2: the end of the Second World War and then mostly
Speaker 2: post war time and you have to imagine a scenario
Speaker 2: where everybody here in the country, in the United States
Speaker 2: is very well aware how Ground zero looked at ninety eleven.
Speaker 2: After nine eleven, complete devastation, but very limited, a very
Speaker 2: limited area on the island of Manhattan. But you have
Speaker 2: to imagine a whole country Germany, where seven hundred twenty
Speaker 2: or so cities were wiped out, the entire cities, some
Speaker 2: of them not as completely. For example, Munich, where I
Speaker 2: was born, was only eighty eighty five percent flattened and destroyed.
Speaker 2: And it was one of these Allied bombing raids, carpet
Speaker 2: bombings that hit our neighborhood and everything around destroyed. And
Speaker 2: I was only two weeks old, fourteen days old, and
Speaker 2: where we lived was partially destroyed, and my mother picks
Speaker 2: me up from my cradle, which was covered with about
Speaker 2: a foot high shards of glass and bricks and debris.
Speaker 2: But I was unhurt, And of course you get when
Speaker 2: your mother, you're naturally are scared. And she fled with
Speaker 2: my older brother and me into the remotest mountain valley
Speaker 2: in the Alps in Bavaria.
Speaker 1: And your dad had split out on you guys, Your
Speaker 1: dad wasn't in the picture at this time.
Speaker 2: He wasn't in the picture. Well, he was in the
Speaker 2: war when I was born. I was born nineteen forty two.
Speaker 2: The war was over nineteen forty five, and when he
Speaker 2: came back very soon divorced, and my mother was a
Speaker 2: singing a singing mother and had to raise Then she
Speaker 2: had another boy, my younger brother, so she had to
Speaker 2: raise three children, and there was never enough to eat.
Speaker 2: What I remember very well is starving.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you tell a story of a lesson you learned
Speaker 1: about nagging your mother, You and your brother nagging your
Speaker 1: mother about how hungry you were, and her saying, if
Speaker 1: I could take it from my ribs, I would take
Speaker 1: it from my ribs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I can't. But I can't, And you shut
Speaker 2: up boys in me. Of course that that was a
Speaker 2: serious moment, and it's engraved in my memories. So and
Speaker 2: and of course it was not only food. We had
Speaker 2: literally nothing. For example, we don't have didn't have mattresses.
Speaker 2: My mother stuffed burlap sacks with hay that she made
Speaker 2: from fern. But when you cut the stem of a fern,
Speaker 2: it hardens when it dries, it hardens like the tip
Speaker 2: of a shark. Yes, she cut it with a side
Speaker 2: and it you would feel it at night when you
Speaker 2: shifted around, all of a sudden you were on two
Speaker 2: pencils that were stings stinging you. And and fern also hardens.
Speaker 2: It's not like hay more fluffy. It becomes almost like cementing.
Speaker 2: You have this little dents and I had to navigate
Speaker 2: the dents in my mattress. So my entire childhood, I
Speaker 2: never had a flat surface on which I slept. And
Speaker 2: we had no running water. You had to go to
Speaker 2: the well with a bucket and bring in the water
Speaker 2: in no sewage system, no heating, no toy, no real
Speaker 2: I mean a toilet, but an outhouse which was adjacent
Speaker 2: to this little to this little house where we grew up.
Speaker 1: And you talk about eating a someone killing a crow
Speaker 1: or a raven. Yes, yes, and you're being surprised by
Speaker 1: the the seeing fat, yeah, fat on a soup broth
Speaker 1: and being surprised but fat.
Speaker 2: I never had seen anything like this until today. This
Speaker 2: means wealth. For example, the first time I ate a
Speaker 2: fried egg, what an ache in my life. I must
Speaker 2: have been about ten or eleven, and it was like
Speaker 2: an incredible feast. Never ate a chicken for me. Even
Speaker 2: I see, and even you see, even when you drive
Speaker 2: by the fast food Kentucky right chicken finger licking good,
Speaker 2: and it makes an impression on me because chicken means
Speaker 2: the definitive feast.
Speaker 1: You mentioned another detail of your mother getting a loaf
Speaker 1: of bread with food coupons or I describe them, but
Speaker 1: then scoring the bread right in seven segments for each
Speaker 1: day so that she would part she would partition the
Speaker 1: breadh as the week's ration of bread. And in that
Speaker 1: passage you mentioned you don't elaborate on it, and I
Speaker 1: was looking for you to elaborate on it that you
Speaker 1: said that you have no tolerance for the culture of complaint.
Speaker 3: Sure, yeah, yeah, I get it, But explain that to me. Well,
Speaker 3: I cannot make it the norm. How I grew up,
Speaker 3: it was an unusual, unusual childhood because it was in
Speaker 3: the aftermath of a catastrophic war that Germany actually had started,
Speaker 3: and the catastrophe came from our own people, from our society,
Speaker 3: from our.
Speaker 2: Leader adult Fitland. It was it was really so bad
Speaker 2: that we knew now what we got. We got, and
Speaker 2: each one of us had a thin slice of bread
Speaker 2: per day, and the kind of grooves that my mother
Speaker 2: carved into the loaf of bread. We knew this was
Speaker 2: the only thing we have, and of course she would
Speaker 2: also make some food from dandelion leaves and from syrup
Speaker 2: from some trees and replacing sugar which we didn't have.
Speaker 2: So when I see in our kind of society's western
Speaker 2: highly technical societies where a lot of food is being
Speaker 2: thrown away in the United States, I think more than
Speaker 2: forty percent of food, and I find it outrageous. And
Speaker 2: I never say anything because it was my experience and
Speaker 2: I know the value of food. I now there's something
Speaker 2: which has to be honored, and it in a way,
Speaker 2: it pains me when I see so much food being
Speaker 2: thrown away. Because of my experience, it was unusual, but
Speaker 2: I never I never speak out loud.
Speaker 1: But you.
Speaker 2: Know, for God's sake, I would be the last one.
Speaker 2: That's not in my nature. Because you have to determine
Speaker 2: how you live and whether you live a life of
Speaker 2: consumerism or whether you are more cautious with wasting resources
Speaker 2: that we have. And I think when you are in
Speaker 2: other societies hunters and gatherers, they are more careful and cautious.
Speaker 2: There's no doubt in my heart, because that's how we've
Speaker 2: organized as biological creatures. And so how can I say.
Speaker 2: I see people in the restaurant complaining to the waiter
Speaker 2: that this wasn't any good and give it back to
Speaker 2: the kitchen, and so I don't like this complaint. And
Speaker 2: it's not only about food, it's about whatever. Our lives
Speaker 2: are so difficult, and gasoline has become so expensive, into
Speaker 2: all these things. Yes, deal with it, deal with it
Speaker 2: in the right way, but don't complain too much.
Speaker 1: There was a I got two questions stacked up in
Speaker 1: my head and when I was going to ask you,
Speaker 1: and when I thought about asking you and decided not to.
Speaker 1: But now I'm going to ask you because you alluded
Speaker 1: to it.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: My father fought in World War Two serving the European
Speaker 1: Theater and maintained, I don't want to say we we
Speaker 1: joke about it now, but maintained a deep suspicion of
Speaker 1: Germany through to the end. Rightly, So zero for Japan,
Speaker 1: didn't zero for Japan. Father? Well, no, no, no, I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna that. But what was the It's kind of like,
Speaker 1: outside of a subject matter, I'm like anything, but or
Speaker 1: that I'm an expert on but what was the How
Speaker 1: did you perceive when you're thrust in at a young age,
Speaker 1: when you're thrust into such like this, this devastating situation,
Speaker 1: and so many of your countrymen are being killed, your
Speaker 1: cities are being destroyed, You're starving. What is your perception
Speaker 1: of Germany? Is it gone?
Speaker 2: No? No, of course not. I'm still a German citizen.
Speaker 1: No, no, I'm saying at that time, how are people
Speaker 1: feeling about?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 1: I mean, is this all happening to them? Is it
Speaker 1: a thing they created? That was your mom's perception?
Speaker 2: It's a different response some of them. You still until
Speaker 2: today you have denious You even have Holocaust denials, which
Speaker 2: is the most absurd of all, because it's one hundred
Speaker 2: thousands of times documented survivors are there, the bodies were found,
Speaker 2: I mean, and and a crime of proportions that the
Speaker 2: world has never seen in any country throughout the entire
Speaker 2: history of the human race. Nothing like that has ever happened.
Speaker 2: So you, of course, you have to ask yourself what
Speaker 2: went wrong? What made Germany lapse into a culture from
Speaker 2: a very solid culture of philosophy, mathematics, writers compose us,
Speaker 2: you just name it. How does it lapse into a
Speaker 2: culture of barbarism within very few years. So of course
Speaker 2: that gave me to think, and of course it has
Speaker 2: importance always rest something is resonating from from that in
Speaker 2: my entire existence.
Speaker 1: But where the pot? What was your sense of or
Speaker 1: perhaps this would be a question that you'd have to
Speaker 1: answer on your mother's behalf. Where what was the sense
Speaker 1: of blame? There was the blame the wise was the
Speaker 1: blame on England the US for doing this?
Speaker 2: No, I think the overwhelming, the overwhelming part of the
Speaker 2: population knew it was self inflicted. And you have to
Speaker 2: also see one strange thing when you speak about Germany.
Speaker 2: As a child, and even when I was six and
Speaker 2: eight years old, I didn't know that Germany existed, that
Speaker 2: there was such a thing like Germany. For me, this
Speaker 2: valley in the mountains that was the world. And beyond that, yes,
Speaker 2: there was Austria because a border was close, and some
Speaker 2: young men, that bold young men would secretly smug goods
Speaker 2: from Austria into Germany, and some of them were my
Speaker 2: childhood heroes. But I did not notice. I had no
Speaker 2: concent except that there were countries, I mean Austria, tiar role. Yes,
Speaker 2: our valley and something beyond it. And my very first
Speaker 2: memory that I have about I was must have been
Speaker 2: two and a half years Allied bombers hit the city
Speaker 2: of Rosenheim, and my mother took us out of bed,
Speaker 2: and it was in middle of the night ice colt
Speaker 2: must have been March or April. Still snow out there
Speaker 2: and very fine. The distance at the end of the
Speaker 2: valley you could see the entire sky, not burning, not flickering,
Speaker 2: so a very slow pulsing of red and orange. And
Speaker 2: she said, boys, the city of Rosenheim is burning. But
Speaker 2: the city of Rosenheim is forty miles away that far,
Speaker 2: an entire city burning, And for me it was a
Speaker 2: very essential moment because I apparently started to understand there's
Speaker 2: a world. There's a world out there, not our valley
Speaker 2: alone and not the waterfall in the ravine behind the home,
Speaker 2: that there was something out there that was different and
Speaker 2: dangerous and burning, and there was such a thing like
Speaker 2: a war. Of course, we saw American soldiers coming in,
Speaker 2: but they were very genial with kids and befriended the kids.
Speaker 2: And for the first time I saw an African American
Speaker 2: and I was completely enthralled. A huge, big, big guy
Speaker 2: with a big, resonant voice. A little bit. I could
Speaker 2: always compare him to Shaquille O'Neill, a very very big
Speaker 2: man with a very big heart and a wonderful voice,
Speaker 2: a soft, wonderful voice. That was that was for us.
Speaker 2: We only knew it from fairy tales. The moors, oh
Speaker 2: the more and there was a more and that was
Speaker 2: completely completely fascinated and I knew, yes, it's true that
Speaker 2: some foreign countries like Africa and you have the moors,
Speaker 2: and there are moors in America. How about that.
Speaker 1: That particular city that burned that the story you're telling
Speaker 1: your book demonstrates a little bit of the of a
Speaker 1: different perspective on collateral damage then you see in warfare today,
Speaker 1: where in warfare today there's so much public emphasis on
Speaker 1: not you know, targetings of billions where you're hitting, and
Speaker 1: you're telling that story that Allied bombers are actually trying
Speaker 1: to get to a different place entirely, yes, and they
Speaker 1: can't get over the mountains because of the weather, and they
Speaker 1: just find a town.
Speaker 2: Ye sure, and they they want to return to the
Speaker 2: base empty. And it was probably the reason why the
Speaker 2: city of Rosenheim was destroyed in a gigantic contralt contra flagration.
Speaker 2: So but only later let me add up one thing
Speaker 2: with a sky in the distance pulsing in flames. It
Speaker 2: made me curious, and I knew there was something out
Speaker 2: I wanted to to understand. I wanted to learn so
Speaker 2: and that's why I moved out, and that's why I
Speaker 2: have been so much around. And it's very strange because
Speaker 2: people ask me, why can you say that you are
Speaker 2: a writer. And I have always maintained that my writing
Speaker 2: will live longer, my prose, my poetry will probably live
Speaker 2: longer than my films. How do you somehow compare that
Speaker 2: why it is a conflict between filmmaking. No, it is not.
Speaker 2: And I have a simple almost like a formula, films
Speaker 2: on my voyage and writing is home.
Speaker 1: Oh that's your Your films are your forays out into
Speaker 1: the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, writing is home.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. That brings
Speaker 1: it to a question that I was hoping to share
Speaker 1: with you, to ask about, Like I said, I had,
Speaker 1: I was unfamiliar with the level of poverty that you
Speaker 1: that you grew up in.
Speaker 2: Oh it doesn't it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, this is no no, no, no.
Speaker 2: I don't want to be commiserated for children. It was
Speaker 2: a wonderfully incredible time and we had to take responsibility.
Speaker 2: We had to go out foraging. We were the ones
Speaker 2: who would catch trout in the creek, but since we
Speaker 2: had no fishing gear, we caught them by hand. You
Speaker 2: can catch trout slow movement, and they flee under under stones,
Speaker 2: They take refuge under under tufts of grass overhanging into
Speaker 2: into the creek, into the water, and you know where
Speaker 2: they're hiding, and you have to be very very patient
Speaker 2: and cautious, and you actually can catch them with their
Speaker 2: own hands. People think I'm making it. You have probably
Speaker 2: done it yourself.
Speaker 1: When so considering that that that childhood, it made me
Speaker 1: rethink you're film Happy People. Yes, And within the last
Speaker 1: day or two, maybe it was even our producer Krinn
Speaker 1: or Phil the engineer here, I mentioned happy People and
Speaker 1: he said, you mean that I remember who he said.
Speaker 1: They said, you mean the people that seem miserable but
Speaker 1: they're happy. And I wondered about that or some joke
Speaker 1: like that, meaning I just remember watching Happy People, which
Speaker 1: is about Siberian hunter gatherers and fur trappers, and just
Speaker 1: seeing someone carpeted into mosquitos. I mean it was like
Speaker 1: they had apparel, like they're apparel was made of mosquitos,
Speaker 1: you know, but just working away and uh, without complaint, Yeah,
Speaker 1: without complaint. And that's what I thought about, because because
Speaker 1: in Happy People, there's no no person meditates on the
Speaker 1: meaning of happiness. No person says, well, you know, in
Speaker 1: spite of appearances, I'm quite happy. There's no matter. It's
Speaker 1: just the title, it's Happy People. But then it's this
Speaker 1: portrait of people. And and no, a viewer would not
Speaker 1: watch Happy People and someone said, what did you watch
Speaker 1: a movie about, they wouldn't say, I watched the movie
Speaker 1: about these very happy people.
Speaker 2: Yes, and not only happy, they are dignified. They lead
Speaker 2: a life full of dignity, of awe, of wonder, of nature,
Speaker 2: of being out there, a life that takes a lot
Speaker 2: of deep meaning. I envy them. And when I see
Speaker 2: them in on a on a screen, there's only one wish,
Speaker 2: old man, I would like to join them.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I can see that.
Speaker 2: And the fact that they do not have let's say,
Speaker 2: electricity and air condition and mosquito repelling and you just
Speaker 2: name it. Just their dogs, insane intelligence and rifleent and
Speaker 2: fishing gear. And they live an incredible life, so fulfilled,
Speaker 2: so wonderful. And whoever whoever sees this, and I believe
Speaker 2: those who who actually have ever hunted, they will immediately
Speaker 2: understand instantly. Yeah I envy them.
Speaker 1: Yeah you when you made Grill, I had watched your films,
Speaker 1: but became interested in your thinking about nature. And you're
Speaker 1: thinking about animals like I had seen a Geary Wrath
Speaker 1: of God. I'd seen fitz Crawl though, which are great stories,
Speaker 1: really enjoyable films, and and and and it sparked a
Speaker 1: curiosity in me about how you view things. But then
Speaker 1: it then the Timothy Treadwell incident happened. So just to
Speaker 1: give listeners a quick run through Timothy Treadwell, I think
Speaker 1: he's born in the late fifties, if I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 1: He had been a he was wanted to be an actor.
Speaker 1: He had actually was in competition with Woody Harrelson.
Speaker 2: Well, that's what he claims.
Speaker 1: We do not know excectly.
Speaker 2: We can look at him and say he was a failed.
Speaker 1: Actor, failed actor.
Speaker 2: And then and then deeply, deeply into alcohol and drugs.
Speaker 2: So he was struggling, struggling to get out of addiction,
Speaker 2: and in a way that brought him to Alaska because
Speaker 2: out there in nature and with a task too that
Speaker 2: he put on his own shoulders to protect the bears
Speaker 2: against the bad guys, the poachers. Poaches hardly existed all
Speaker 2: but that was his his fiction under which he lived,
Speaker 2: and he got himself straightened out in a way. And
Speaker 2: when you look at Team, of course he has moments
Speaker 2: where he unravels and where he's completely falling apart, but
Speaker 2: moments of deep insight, moments of poetry, moments of beauty,
Speaker 2: what he's doing, what he's seeing, how he describes it,
Speaker 2: how he depicts things, a wonderful, wonderful kind of life
Speaker 2: out there in the wilderness.
Speaker 1: In my world at that time, there was this what
Speaker 1: was getting at about when I became interested in your
Speaker 1: in how you view these because in my world at
Speaker 1: that timing, you know, fairly serious outdoorsman, strong Alaska connections.
Speaker 1: There was just people reveled in his death and it
Speaker 1: was just how stupid he should have known. What a nutjob.
Speaker 1: And I would find myself before you did your film,
Speaker 1: I would find myself joking like that man would out
Speaker 1: camp any person I know, and I would say, I
Speaker 1: would love to see you go spend yeah, thirteen summers, Yes,
Speaker 1: in an alder thicket on the Alaska Peninsula.
Speaker 2: Population.
Speaker 1: Ye, go do that and then come tell me how
Speaker 1: stupid the guy was. You might not agree with what
Speaker 1: he stood for, you might not agree with his practice,
Speaker 1: but like there was a tenacity and a sort of
Speaker 1: outdoor expertise. And then your film came out and it's
Speaker 1: like I had joked about it and commented on it,
Speaker 1: but your film came out and was so it was
Speaker 1: so like open hearted and fair. Yeah, but the proper condemnation,
Speaker 1: the proper respect, which just painted a wholly different picture
Speaker 1: than what you got from the media, which was just
Speaker 1: nothing but a nut job.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well that was a small part of the media.
Speaker 2: But of course it's also unusual that the filmmaker has
Speaker 2: an ongoing argument with his protagonist who was already killed
Speaker 2: by a bear ten months before.
Speaker 1: Ten months when you're working on that, you got to
Speaker 1: it right away.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well I never met him. Of course, he was
Speaker 2: dead when I heard about and his girlfriend was also
Speaker 2: killed and eaten by the same bear. So it doesn't
Speaker 2: matter that I'm that I differ from him, and I
Speaker 2: differ from him in some basic I said, with caught
Speaker 2: caution in quotes basic philosophy. He was more a little
Speaker 2: bit towards New Age, which I can't stand, this pseudo
Speaker 2: philosophical babble. But behind this new agey aspect of wild
Speaker 2: nature there's something which I call the disneyization of wild nature.
Speaker 2: For Treadwill, the bears were wonderful, big hearted, fluffy creatures,
Speaker 2: and you had to approach them and if possibly even
Speaker 2: hug them and sing a song to them, and tell
Speaker 2: them how much you love them. And one of the
Speaker 2: native Alutic people on Kodiak Island, he says on camera,
Speaker 2: there was something wrong. You do not love the bear.
Speaker 2: You should You should rather respect the bear and respect
Speaker 2: the territory, keep your distance, allow the bear, it's territory,
Speaker 2: but you do not need to love it. You do
Speaker 2: not love the bear, respect it. And that this kind
Speaker 2: of philosophy that went awry into Walt Disney fluffiness somehow, unfortunately,
Speaker 2: unfortunately cost him his life and the life of his girlfriend,
Speaker 2: and a life of two grizzly bears who were shot
Speaker 2: by park rangers who found them still feasting on the bodies.
Speaker 1: How when you heard how did you first hear that
Speaker 1: story and jump into that project.
Speaker 2: Well, it was unusual, because I do things that come
Speaker 2: with vehemence at me, and it was one of those
Speaker 2: cases where something stumbles in me into me. I was
Speaker 2: at a producer's place down in the valley, a few
Speaker 2: miles away from here only where I'm sitting, and he
Speaker 2: had helped me very generously with finding partners for a film,
Speaker 2: and I paid him a visit just to thank him.
Speaker 2: And at the end we were sitting at a glass
Speaker 2: table full of messy papers and fedexis and half eaten
Speaker 2: lunch salad. And so when I got up, I got
Speaker 2: up and I had miss I couldn't find my car keys.
Speaker 2: I swear to God, I was searching for my car keys,
Speaker 2: not for a movie, and I had placed it on
Speaker 2: the table and I look at the car key, and
Speaker 2: he sees it and thinks I spotted some paper and
Speaker 2: shoves an article to me. It was one of the
Speaker 2: first magazine articles about Timothy Treadwill, and he says, read this,
Speaker 2: we are doing a very interesting project. So I took
Speaker 2: it and my keys went home. And I was sitting
Speaker 2: literally here, just at this table next behind you. I
Speaker 2: was sitting there, and normally I don't read these things.
Speaker 2: I read it, and you know what, I was instantly
Speaker 2: back in my car and I rushed down and I said,
Speaker 2: this is this is big, This is so big I
Speaker 2: cannot believe it. And I said, how far are you
Speaker 2: in preparations? We have to start in eight days at
Speaker 2: the latest. There's hardly any time left. We have to travel.
Speaker 2: And then I asked who is directing the film and
Speaker 2: he said, listen, very very carefully, he said, I'm kind
Speaker 2: of directing the film, kind of directing these film. So
Speaker 2: I sensed he didn't know exactly what I was, what
Speaker 2: he was doing, or how to tack it is. And
Speaker 2: I looked at him and I said, no, I will
Speaker 2: direct this movie now. And was kind of surprised and
Speaker 2: shook my hand and said it would be an honor.
Speaker 2: And I made the film in that movie, but it
Speaker 2: was you see, what was clear, this is big. And
Speaker 2: there's a storyteller as somebody who makes movies and also
Speaker 2: a writer. I know this is big.
Speaker 1: In that there's the famous scene where you I believe
Speaker 1: you're at a kitchen table and you put on the
Speaker 1: headphones and you're able to hear the recording. There was
Speaker 1: a camera rolling for six months during the attack, and
Speaker 1: you hear the recording, and your comment does your comment
Speaker 1: does more to convey the horror of what you're hearing
Speaker 1: than perhaps hearing it.
Speaker 2: Because I say comment, I barely comment.
Speaker 1: But you say no one, You say no one should
Speaker 1: listen to this, Yes, and never let anyone listen to this.
Speaker 2: And my comment is even stronger because her camera is
Speaker 2: over my shoulder. You see only the back on the
Speaker 2: side of my head, and the camera is on the
Speaker 2: woman who owns the tape, who has worked with treadwell
Speaker 2: for long, long years, and she tries to read from
Speaker 2: my face, but I'm hearing how horribleiss it is, and
Speaker 2: she starts to cry. She can tell from my face
Speaker 2: that there's something terrible that I'm hearing. No, And I
Speaker 2: said to her, please don't ever listen to it. And
Speaker 2: I said to her something very stupid. Please you should
Speaker 2: rather destroy it, which she didn't do. She was smart
Speaker 2: enough not to do it. But she separated her from
Speaker 2: the tape and put it in a bank vault, so
Speaker 2: it's locked away from her. And you see, as a filmmaker,
Speaker 2: you do not have to to put everything out, even
Speaker 2: though it was say and it would have sensationalized the film.
Speaker 2: Everybody wanted me to include it into the film. The distributor,
Speaker 2: the TV network, the production company, everyone said, And I said,
Speaker 2: I will address the tape because it is known. It's
Speaker 2: out there, but I will make the decision. And after
Speaker 2: I had heard it, I said, it's not going to
Speaker 2: be in my film. You have to take me out,
Speaker 2: but I will resist to be taken out. I'm a
Speaker 2: formidable opponent. Be careful, i will fight. And this is
Speaker 2: not going to be in my film because there's such
Speaker 2: a thing as a dignity and the privacy of an
Speaker 2: individual's death, and you do not you do not publicize
Speaker 2: it and sensationalize it. Period. So and I understood. And
Speaker 2: another example, because I saw the film two days ago
Speaker 2: for the first time in many years, The White Diamond.
Speaker 2: It's about a jungle airship some sort of that maneuvers
Speaker 2: in the canopies of trees and nearby in in Guyana. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and there's a waterfall that kaye to a waterfall three
Speaker 2: times the height of Niagara Fall, not as much volume
Speaker 2: of water, but a formidable waterfall.
Speaker 1: I've been waterfall, you have been.
Speaker 2: Wow, h and you have seen the swifts. There are
Speaker 2: swifts that come down. They come down from from the sky.
Speaker 2: They form VORTI sees a vortex and then they shoot
Speaker 2: down and with his speed that is higher than free fall,
Speaker 2: they swish behind the waterfall, behind this massive curtain. There's
Speaker 2: a gap, and they have a million and a half
Speaker 2: a million nests behind there. And I was curious, and
Speaker 2: we lowered a strong guy in the team, actually also
Speaker 2: a mountain climber, lowered him on a rope with a
Speaker 2: camera and he filmed it. And a few days later,
Speaker 2: a local tribal leader tells us, Ah, you filmed that here.
Speaker 2: But you know, for us, in our culture, there's a secret,
Speaker 2: because they are gigantic snakes and that keep the secrets
Speaker 2: of our people, that keep the treasures of our hearts,
Speaker 2: and nobody of us would ever look behind the waterfalls.
Speaker 2: And very politely he says, could it maybe? Could it
Speaker 2: be that you just saw it, but you don't publish it.
Speaker 2: And that very moment I said, it's not going to
Speaker 2: be published.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that little bit of h Yeah, but I guess
Speaker 1: there's something. There's something bigger, that bigger than filmmaker. There's
Speaker 1: something bigger that you have to live with than the
Speaker 1: films put out for people to enjoy.
Speaker 2: They're bigger things. And filmmaking, let's face it.
Speaker 1: You've done a number, You've done two, You've done three
Speaker 1: films about people. You've done three films about people who
Speaker 1: were shot down or survived air crashes. Yeah, and land
Speaker 1: in the jungle. So you did one about a woman
Speaker 1: the soul survivor from an air crash.
Speaker 2: Yes, and Peru was this the jungle of.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a plane was struck by lightning. She was buckled
Speaker 1: into a row of seats, yes, which maybe acted as
Speaker 1: a parachute. It's just inexplicable. But she and a number
Speaker 1: of other people's, a number of other passengers fell ten
Speaker 1: thousand feet hit the forest.
Speaker 2: Cannopy ten thousand. I think it came down, but we
Speaker 2: can only estimate from five thousand meters altitude fifteen sixteen
Speaker 2: thousand feet. And she survived it. And probably it's mysterious.
Speaker 2: I mean, there was a violent thunderstorm at the eastern
Speaker 2: slopes of the Andes and this updraft may even take
Speaker 2: you high up into the sky. It could happen. And
Speaker 2: she was on a window seat on the three seats
Speaker 2: her mother in the middle seat, an obese Peruvian man
Speaker 2: immediately falling asleep snoring on the aisle seat, and she
Speaker 2: has fragments of memory that she sailed on strapped to
Speaker 2: the row of seats, and she complained, she said, people
Speaker 2: say I left the plane. Now the plane left me,
Speaker 2: she says. And you know, I was always fascinated by
Speaker 2: her story because I was booked on that very flight
Speaker 2: and a huge chain of coincidences took me out of this.
Speaker 2: And also something as he was had the seat, the
Speaker 2: empty seats next to her. It's what we call the
Speaker 2: maple seat effect. If you have the seed of a maple,
Speaker 2: you have the seat, and then something like a wing
Speaker 2: and it's virals. It keeps spiraling down to the ground.
Speaker 2: So that may have saved There were actually other, probably
Speaker 2: other survivors, because some people were found sitting and leaning
Speaker 2: against a tree, so they must have crawled there. And
Speaker 2: it was a very eerie scene. When the first rescue
Speaker 2: people arrived, they had actually given up the search after
Speaker 2: ten days or eleven days. It was hopeless because the
Speaker 2: plane had disintegrated in thousands of fragments and rained down,
Speaker 2: so there was no impact site that it could spot
Speaker 2: from the air and suitcases had opened in mid air
Speaker 2: because it was Christmas eve Day and there were presents
Speaker 2: dangling in the jungle trees and also human intestines is decoration.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's an eerie must have been a very
Speaker 2: very surreal sight.
Speaker 1: But she survives.
Speaker 2: She survived because she knew about the junkie. She had
Speaker 2: grown up with her she had grown up with her
Speaker 2: parents at an ecological station, biological station in the jungie.
Speaker 2: And then you understood what was going on around.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then you did two films about You did
Speaker 1: a fictional film and a documentary about an individual a
Speaker 1: US airman I think a Navy pilot and he was
Speaker 1: shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War. Survives all
Speaker 1: these just horrific conditions. When he finally gets rescued, they
Speaker 1: can't the guys at the helicopter pilots that rescue him
Speaker 1: came tell what he is. They don't know who he is.
Speaker 1: They find a half eaten snake and his backpack and
Speaker 1: it's this airman that had been missing for I don't
Speaker 1: know how many half.
Speaker 2: Half yeah, yes, uh.
Speaker 1: And thinking about those and then thinking about when you
Speaker 1: were doing the may when there's there's a documentary made
Speaker 1: about you, making Fitzgrawal though I remember you saying some
Speaker 1: of the birds in the jungle and you said the
Speaker 1: birds here I'm paraphrasing you said, the birds here don't sing,
Speaker 1: They scream in agony. What what? But you've spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time in the jungle, yes, I mean, do
Speaker 1: you what is your how do you feel about the jungle?
Speaker 1: Where jungle?
Speaker 2: I say it also in in some written texts in
Speaker 2: my book Conquest of the Useless, and at some point
Speaker 2: I'm saying I love the Chungie yet against my better knowledge.
Speaker 2: But you see, you cannot take it completely out of context.
Speaker 2: When Les Blank was filming me, it was right after
Speaker 2: we had two plane crashes, two small aircraft that brought
Speaker 2: provisions and extras to us. We have just had our
Speaker 2: camp for eight hundred people in the jungle burned down.
Speaker 2: We ran into a border war between Peru and Ecuador,
Speaker 2: and my leading character was became so ill that we
Speaker 2: had to fly him back out to the United States,
Speaker 2: and his doctors wouldn't allow him to return. Then there
Speaker 2: was an attack of the tribal group far far up
Speaker 2: in the mountains that had suffered from the drought. There
Speaker 2: was a dry stry season in recorded history in memory.
Speaker 2: And they had wandered down with a drying river in
Speaker 2: search apparently of turtle eggs. And they clashed through two
Speaker 2: three people, local people, much againer, native tribal people who
Speaker 2: had been fishing for us and looking for turtle eggs.
Speaker 2: And they shot them in the dark of the night.
Speaker 2: And the man was shot through his throat and had
Speaker 2: an also deflected arrow at his shin, and a woman
Speaker 2: shot by three arrows into her body very close, a
Speaker 2: cluster of three arrows, and so, and we had to
Speaker 2: operate them on the kitchen table. They would have died
Speaker 2: if he had tried to transport them. And I was
Speaker 2: with mosquito repellent spraying away the cloud of mosquitoes, and
Speaker 2: with the other hand a torchlight illuminating the operation. And
Speaker 2: all this happens on a daily basis. And then Les
Speaker 2: Blank says, let's speak about the jungle.
Speaker 1: So in a way that was the frame of mind,
Speaker 1: was usual in.
Speaker 2: The frame of mind, should be mentioned at least, otherwise
Speaker 2: it sounds like a crazy statement. It was a very
Speaker 2: natural statement.
Speaker 1: When I describe that movie to people, I describe it
Speaker 1: probly the way many people do. Where it's the story
Speaker 1: of a of a rubber baron trying to move a
Speaker 1: boat from one drainage to the next, and it's just
Speaker 1: as impossible.
Speaker 2: That's a huge steam boat over a mountain.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so what you do in the movie, which
Speaker 1: sounds funny in this age of special effects and cgi
Speaker 1: what the movie does the exact and the making of
Speaker 1: the movie does the exact insane thing that is portrayed
Speaker 1: as an insane thing in the movie.
Speaker 2: No, I do not agree insane. Okay, it is number one.
Speaker 2: I knew it was doable, and I did it. And
Speaker 2: it is not insane because it's a big metaphor somehow
Speaker 2: dormant in us, so big, like let's say don Quixote
Speaker 2: tackling with his lands the windmills. It's something described, of
Speaker 2: course by Sevantes and we know, a yeah, that's somehow
Speaker 2: in us. It's a metaphor or Mobby Dick the Hunt
Speaker 2: for the White Whale, things like that. And I knew
Speaker 2: a ship pulled over a mountain by force of human
Speaker 2: strength and turnstiles and coiling up ropes, and I would
Speaker 2: move it over a mountain. It's a big metaphor, not insanity,
Speaker 2: because it's deep inside of us and it has something
Speaker 2: that I could articulate and others couldn't. But since I articulated,
Speaker 2: we have a metaphor, one more of the metaphors that
Speaker 2: are probably dormant in many of us. Absolutely not insanity,
Speaker 2: clinically sane, so to speak.
Speaker 1: But I did stay in corrected.
Speaker 2: And at the time, of course, there was no digital effect.
Speaker 2: It was done in nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 1: You had to do it when you had no not.
Speaker 2: Not necessarily because twentieth Century Fox at the time wanted
Speaker 2: to produce the film, however, only with a miniature plastic
Speaker 2: replica and what they called in a good Jungle, and
Speaker 2: they meant the botanic garden in San Diego. And I
Speaker 2: asked them, gentlemen, what's the bad jungle then? And that
Speaker 2: it became frosty and I knew I was alone and
Speaker 2: I had to do it alone. I was also the
Speaker 2: producer of the film, and so I don't want to
Speaker 2: miss this work.
Speaker 1: What a how do you look at with all the
Speaker 1: movies you made, sixty over sixty movies and how many
Speaker 1: books you don know.
Speaker 2: It's probably eighty movies by now.
Speaker 1: And a dozen books or so.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in poetry, and I just finished yet another book.
Speaker 2: You have to take it seriously that that I am
Speaker 2: deeply inside convinced that the written stuff, the pros, the poetry,
Speaker 2: has somewhat direct impact something. And it's not the events
Speaker 2: you see if you're in my memoirs, if you look
Speaker 2: after event, event event, Yes, of course a wild events.
Speaker 2: But it's a style, it's a prose. That's what makes
Speaker 2: the book on.
Speaker 1: I mean, you're a I mean like from me to
Speaker 1: feel the need to tell you this, but I mean,
Speaker 1: you're a phenomenal writer. And reading your book, I had
Speaker 1: said Karen, our producer, I had said, I had kind
Speaker 1: of given up on literary memoirs in exchange for memoirs
Speaker 1: autobiographies of people who have a you know, a story
Speaker 1: to tell, right, and this book but this book is.
Speaker 1: But this book is a combination of those two things.
Speaker 1: I mean, this book is. This book is of a
Speaker 1: high literary merit, like like you know, as a writer,
Speaker 1: as a person who loves the language, it's of high
Speaker 1: literary merit, but also does that heavy lifting of telling
Speaker 1: a story that really ought to be told, which is
Speaker 1: how you came to view the world the way you
Speaker 1: do and produce the work that you did. But I
Speaker 1: have two last questions. With all that work, how do
Speaker 1: you gauge which How do you gauge which are the
Speaker 1: your favorites? Like which are the ones you shouldn't have done?
Speaker 1: What are you going to do?
Speaker 2: You can stop right away. I love them all, I
Speaker 2: truly love them all, and they're all good. They're all good.
Speaker 1: There's no one you wish you could put ba in
Speaker 1: the box.
Speaker 2: No, for God's sake, never only over made that body.
Speaker 2: I would allow you to put it away and put
Speaker 2: it back, but you have to be aware that. Of course,
Speaker 2: I'm critical as well, and I see mistakes. Yes, I
Speaker 2: do see mistakes, and I see how I evolved as
Speaker 2: a kid who made films because I made my first
Speaker 2: film at the age of nineteen.
Speaker 1: I know you made your first phone call at seventeen.
Speaker 2: That's true. Yes, nobody, Yes, nobody nowadays believes it. Everybody
Speaker 2: with a cell phones and applications. So I literally made
Speaker 2: my first phone call it age seventeen. Yes, all these films,
Speaker 2: I see mistakes, mistake here, mistake there, but I accept them.
Speaker 2: I can live with it. And it's the same way
Speaker 2: like with a mother. You do not ask the mother
Speaker 2: your five children here, which is your favorite? And you
Speaker 2: know who the favorites are. My favorites are all the
Speaker 2: children that have the worst defects, the child that has
Speaker 2: squint eyes, the child that has a stutter, the child
Speaker 2: that has a limp. And I would be as a
Speaker 2: mother the lioness to help them, defend them, make them proud,
Speaker 2: shine as great and wonderful as they can shine.
Speaker 1: You mentioned a minute ago you said, over my dead body, Uh,
Speaker 1: let's move on to your dead body for me? What
Speaker 1: I have no idea? What you'd say to this? What?
Speaker 1: What do you what do you hope and fear about?
Speaker 1: What's going to happen to you when you die? Like?
Speaker 1: What do you are? Do you entertain an idea?
Speaker 2: No, I won't be around anymore. I always said, posterity
Speaker 2: doesn't interest me because I won't be around there anyway.
Speaker 1: However, But like what what I mean? Do you do
Speaker 1: you picture? What is your idea? I don't know, get
Speaker 1: like I don't want to get like terribly personal in
Speaker 1: a way, it's on card. But what is your idea
Speaker 1: of an afterlife?
Speaker 2: I think it's highly likely that there's no afterlife.
Speaker 1: So your posterity like you don't care about that, and
Speaker 1: then it's.
Speaker 2: I won't be around here. However, I did something which
Speaker 2: was not in my catalog of behavior and thinking, and
Speaker 2: my brothers and my wife Lynna convinced me there are
Speaker 2: ad films, negatives, mixes, tens of thousands of photos, manuscripts,
Speaker 2: you just name it, documents. It should be somehow preserved.
Speaker 2: And I started a non profit foundation which is has
Speaker 2: the oversight of the state of Bavaria, where all the
Speaker 2: rights of all my films, of everything I've created went
Speaker 2: in Bavaria. Well, because because my culture is Bavarian.
Speaker 1: I feel like you owe that. I feel like you
Speaker 1: owe that to the America.
Speaker 2: No, because you you do not see where I come from.
Speaker 2: English was only my fourth or fifth language. I mean,
Speaker 2: but that's the language. It doesn't matter. It's I would
Speaker 2: not write a novel like The Twilight World in English.
Speaker 2: I write it in German and it's translated.
Speaker 1: And your your new book was translated.
Speaker 2: Sure, yes, very well. The best translator arguably from Germany
Speaker 2: into English has done it. Michael Hoffmann. It's in German prose.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you but you have zero problem communicating in English?
Speaker 2: Yes, but I do not write poetry in English. You
Speaker 2: can only do it in your in your mother tongue.
Speaker 2: But let me go back to the to the after life. Yes,
Speaker 2: my my work will have after life because it's owned
Speaker 2: now by a foundation, a nonprofit foundation. In other words,
Speaker 2: if I become impoverished tomorrow, I cannot sell the catalog
Speaker 2: of my films to Time Turner Classics or you just
Speaker 2: name it, because I do not own them anymore.
Speaker 1: You're protecting yourself and yourself.
Speaker 2: No, I don't need protection against myself. I understand that.
Speaker 2: And I was clearly told, sat down at a table
Speaker 2: by my wife in She said to me, you think
Speaker 2: your films are your property? Yes, many of them that
Speaker 2: I produced and wrote and directed technically legally, they are
Speaker 2: my property. But you know what, you really do not
Speaker 2: own them. The people own it. The people, the audiences
Speaker 2: out there, they own it. They owned the books, they
Speaker 2: own your pros, they own your poetry, they own your memoirs.
Speaker 2: So and I'm completely at ease with that and let
Speaker 2: let life go on. I won't be around And that's
Speaker 2: totally absolutely fine, because we are made into all biological
Speaker 2: life is made like that. I'm totally at ease, I likes.
Speaker 1: I got one last question for you, Okay, I haven't
Speaker 1: gotten to the end of of every Man for Himself
Speaker 1: and God Against All your new memoir. Do you this
Speaker 1: one's for from my kids? Do you in the end
Speaker 1: of that book get into acting in the Mandalorian or
Speaker 1: is not address in the memoir?
Speaker 2: I believe I am addressing it, but briefly. But the
Speaker 2: end it has a very very strange end that he
Speaker 2: will never see anywhere in world literature. And it has
Speaker 2: to do with something the Japanese soldier hero Onoda, who
Speaker 2: fought the Second World War twenty nine years still after
Speaker 2: the end of the war in the Jungling in the Philippines,
Speaker 2: and he had survived one hundred and eleven ambushes and
Speaker 2: being fired at. And he says to me, because we
Speaker 2: were discussing time, does present time existent? Is there only
Speaker 2: past in future? And present time is a fiction? Which
Speaker 2: actually is And he says, but sometimes you can see
Speaker 2: the future, because one day a bullet was fired at him,
Speaker 2: and the sun very low, and he sees a bullet
Speaker 2: coming right at him, and with the sun it has
Speaker 2: this orange copper kind of glow, and he knows it
Speaker 2: will kill him, and he only had time to rotate
Speaker 2: his body to the side and whist it whizzed by
Speaker 2: his body. And I was writing on my last chapter.
Speaker 2: I knew it was going to be the last chapter,
Speaker 2: the absence of images, the absence of the human race
Speaker 2: on this planet, maybe two hundred thousand years in the future.
Speaker 2: And I was typing at a window was out there,
Speaker 2: and all of a sudden, I have this sensation a
Speaker 2: bullet is coming at me, because I saw in somehow
Speaker 2: I sense something golden and greenish iridescent came shooting towards me.
Speaker 2: And I look up, but it was not a bullet.
Speaker 2: It was a hummingbird. Sometimes they shoot straight like that.
Speaker 2: And I looked at my text. In the moment I
Speaker 2: had reached I thought, I don't I shouldn't write any
Speaker 2: more word. And the text stops in mid sentence. The book,
Speaker 2: the entire book stops in mid sentence.
Speaker 1: And that's it.
Speaker 2: That's it.
Speaker 1: Did you get a lot of pushback from an editor?
Speaker 2: Now they loved it in audiences those who read it.
Speaker 2: You will see when you finish reading the memoirs, you
Speaker 2: will like it, I guess.
Speaker 1: So thank you very much for joining us. Check out patience. Well,
Speaker 1: check out all of his movies, and especially check out
Speaker 1: every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog,
Speaker 1: and then do yourself a favor and watch Happy People.
Speaker 2: Yes, they're highly advisibly.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much. Picture. We've talked about it a lot.
Speaker 1: We've talked about it, we've promoted it, we've pimped it.
Speaker 1: It's here, it's finally ready. You can go right now
Speaker 1: and get it. You can go right now, go to
Speaker 1: where you buy your audio books, go to where you
Speaker 1: buy your audio originals, right now, and you can get it.
Speaker 1: It's done. You can get it right now, beating the
Speaker 1: table because you can get it. What can you get?
Speaker 1: You can get me Eater's American History The Long Hunters
Speaker 1: seventeen sixty one to seventeen seventy five. This is the
Speaker 1: beginning of a big project, and this is just the
Speaker 1: first one. We're doing the first installment of meat Eaters
Speaker 1: of American History, where we explain in great fun, lively, bloody detail,
Speaker 1: chunks of American history. The one we're starting with is
Speaker 1: the Long Hunters. If you wonder what a long hunter is,
Speaker 1: Daniel Boone was a long hunter. Everybody knows Daniel Boone, like, oh,
Speaker 1: he's some kind of pioneer or explorer. Well he was,
Speaker 1: but he was a long hunter. He was a white
Speaker 1: tail deer skin hunter. That was his business, that was
Speaker 1: his craft, that was his trade. The peak of the
Speaker 1: long hunter era, mean the peak of the white tail
Speaker 1: deer hide business, as we're going to explain in this thing,
Speaker 1: runs from about seventeen sixty one to seventeen seventy five.
Speaker 1: If seventeen seventy five sticks in your head as some
Speaker 1: a year something happened, that's because it's right before seventeen
Speaker 1: seventy six. And if you're any kind of American, you
Speaker 1: know seventeen seventy six Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War. Okay,
Speaker 1: there's a reason that this era ends then, and this
Speaker 1: you will learn this reason and be fascinated by this,
Speaker 1: Like why would the long hunters who are hunting white
Speaker 1: tailed deer skins, having all kinds of adventures and getting
Speaker 1: killed like flies, why would that all of a sudden
Speaker 1: end with the American Revolution? You will learn when you
Speaker 1: get meters American History, Long Hunters seventeen sixty one to
Speaker 1: seventeen seventy five. It's an audio original. You can't read this,
Speaker 1: you can only listen to it. It's narrated by me,
Speaker 1: Steven Ronella, my friend Klay Nukeom and exhaustively researched by
Speaker 1: me Eater Trivia thirty time champion, whatever the hell he is,
Speaker 1: Doctor Randall Williams. It's out now now. This is the
Speaker 1: definitive telling of the story of the long hunters. It's
Speaker 1: perfect for you if you are a person who understands
Speaker 1: or wants to understand how backwoods hunting actually happened in
Speaker 1: the years before the American Revolution, and how market hunters,
Speaker 1: these are people who hunt for a living, how they
Speaker 1: actually went ab out their business of killing, skinning, selling
Speaker 1: scores or hundreds of deer per season, which if they
Speaker 1: were successful, could be more lucrative than farming. Really being
Speaker 1: a long hunter, if you got lucky and lived, and
Speaker 1: you got lucky and had a good hunt, you got
Speaker 1: lucky and all your stuff didn't get stolen by Native Americans,
Speaker 1: or they wouldn't view it as stolen. They would view
Speaker 1: it as taking their stuff back from you, which you
Speaker 1: stole from them. Was more lucrative than farming, is more
Speaker 1: lucrative than being a builder, more lucrative than all that.
Speaker 1: In this we start out that there's a phenomenal opening
Speaker 1: to the book which is going to hook you like
Speaker 1: a circle hook. But we quickly get into this question
Speaker 1: what is a long hunter? Now? Like I said, you know,
Speaker 1: the most famous one of all Daniel Boone, But he
Speaker 1: was only one of a generation of backwoodsmen who were
Speaker 1: hunting white tailed deer for the commercial high market. I
Speaker 1: was tempted to say one of a generation of Americans.
Speaker 1: But as we'll get into, the idea of America hadn't
Speaker 1: taken shape, and the long hunters did not identify as Americans.
Speaker 1: We talk about that about some of these long hunters
Speaker 1: like Daniel Boone becoming these sort of honorary founding fathers,
Speaker 1: but they were anything but founding fathers of America. These
Speaker 1: guys participated in hunting expeditions beyond the line of British
Speaker 1: colonial settlement to supply a booming as will explain, global
Speaker 1: marketplace for white tailed deer skins you might expect from
Speaker 1: the name. They were gone a long time, months or
Speaker 1: even years at a time on hunting trips, killing hundreds
Speaker 1: of deer, killing thousands of deer. These adventures include some
Speaker 1: of the most hair raising and jaw dropping stories of
Speaker 1: wilderness living and deer hunting known to man. In this
Speaker 1: audio original, you're going to hear about buffalo stampedes, bear attacks,
Speaker 1: people get lost, bodies getting found, long journeys, close calls,
Speaker 1: in the rise and fall of a forgotten trade, and
Speaker 1: the skin of a creature that remains America's favorite big
Speaker 1: game animal. We've always had market hunters. We continue to
Speaker 1: have market hunters. Okay, keep this in mind as you
Speaker 1: as you go about getting into this story. We explain
Speaker 1: all this. You've got market hunters who hunt for whale oil. Okay,
Speaker 1: if you've read Moby Dick, you've read about whale oil
Speaker 1: market hunters. You've got market hunters who hunted for beaver pelts.
Speaker 1: So if you're familiar with the exploits of say Jim Bridger,
Speaker 1: he was a market hunter. After beaver pelts, you have
Speaker 1: market hunters who hunted for buffalo hides and buffalo meat.
Speaker 1: Buffalo Bill Cody you probably heard of, he was a
Speaker 1: buffalo meat market hunter. Davy Crockett market hunter, generally black
Speaker 1: bear meat market hunter. But these guys were from the
Speaker 1: era when the thing that the market hunters were after,
Speaker 1: the money to be made was in deer skins, But
Speaker 1: our story is not. It's the story of the rise
Speaker 1: and fall of trade in this particular animal. These guys
Speaker 1: were engaged in a risky business, and this chapter of history,
Speaker 1: this broad story that we telling, this includes no shortage
Speaker 1: of life or death adventures. As you'll see, Daniel Boone
Speaker 1: is one example. He in this area that we describe
Speaker 1: and we described as the first Far West. We'll explain
Speaker 1: why we call it the first far West, And as
Speaker 1: you'll learn, the second Far West is the one you
Speaker 1: think of when you think of far West. When you
Speaker 1: hear far West, you probably think the American Great Plains,
Speaker 1: the Rocky Mountains. As we'll explain, that's the second Far West.
Speaker 1: This is the first Far West, and it was just
Speaker 1: as harrowing Boone, Daniel Boone, you heard the name. He
Speaker 1: probably don't know. He lost two sons, He lost his brother,
Speaker 1: he lost his brother in law, all in the first
Speaker 1: Far West. And those are some heart wrenching stories. But
Speaker 1: even these father son tragedies were not limited to the Boons.
Speaker 1: Here's a snippet of a story we tell about long
Speaker 1: hunter named Henry Skaggs, who witnessed his own son's death
Speaker 1: as well. This happened in the late seventeen seventies when
Speaker 1: Skaggs was hunting with about twenty long hunters and what
Speaker 1: is now Kentucky along the Green River. They're out, they
Speaker 1: get attacked by Indians. They lose a bunch of their horses.
Speaker 1: Most of the guys that are with Skags turntail and run.
Speaker 1: They want to head back to the settlements, but three
Speaker 1: of them stick it out. It's Henry Skaggs, his son
Speaker 1: John In a hunter named Alexander Sinclair. They go over
Speaker 1: the Cumberland Gap, and if you've heard of the Cumberland Gap,
Speaker 1: you're gonna at the end of this, when you buy this, listen,
Speaker 1: you're gonna know more about the Cumberland Gap than anybody
Speaker 1: you've ever met. They go over to Cumberland Gap and
Speaker 1: begin their hunt, but it's one of the worst winners
Speaker 1: on record. Hunters that winter were reporting large numbers of
Speaker 1: deer simply frozen to death near Salt Licks. And if
Speaker 1: you're thinking, what the hell's is salt Lick, you will
Speaker 1: know more about Salt Licks than anybody you've ever met.
Speaker 1: When you finish listen to this. So Skaggs keeps hunting
Speaker 1: out right, all his friends take off and sk Eggs
Speaker 1: hunts it out and we tell this whole story. His
Speaker 1: son gets sick soon after that guy Sinclair, who's with him,
Speaker 1: heads off to run his trap line, never to be
Speaker 1: seen him again. Henry Skaggs leaves his sick child and
Speaker 1: goes to try to find the guy. All he can
Speaker 1: finds a hole in the ice, and he deduces that
Speaker 1: the guy must have just fallen through the frozen surface
Speaker 1: of the Green River drowned. Apparently, the river freezes back
Speaker 1: up shortly after that, Skags his boy dies, but the
Speaker 1: ground's so frozen he can't dig a grave, so he
Speaker 1: stuffs his boy's body into a hollow log and stoppers
Speaker 1: up the ends. He then returns to a station camp.
Speaker 1: If you're like, what in the hell's a station camp,
Speaker 1: you will learn very well what a station camp is.
Speaker 1: And then Skags alone now, after losing his partner and
Speaker 1: his son, spends his whole winter under an overhanging rock
Speaker 1: near a salt lick and kills whatever animals he can
Speaker 1: find that approach the lick, and then in the spring
Speaker 1: makes his way back to the settlements. This is like
Speaker 1: nothing compared to other hardships you'll encounter in this story.
Speaker 1: Some of these stories blow away anything you'll hear of
Speaker 1: the Rocky Mountains and the mountain men. Here's another one
Speaker 1: in May seventeen seventy one. This is a story we
Speaker 1: tell in great detail. Daniel and his brother Squire Boone,
Speaker 1: are headed back to the settlements after a long hunt,
Speaker 1: and they need to stop to shoot some game for
Speaker 1: meat that they're gonna bring home with them. They set
Speaker 1: up camp and Squire is just heading out to hunt
Speaker 1: when he sees a lone figure coming in the distance.
Speaker 1: He's cautious about it. He doesn't know who it is,
Speaker 1: but it winds up being a guy named Alexander Neely,
Speaker 1: who they'd been hunting with and had vanished on a
Speaker 1: previous long hunt. The guy's all messed up, his clothing's torn,
Speaker 1: he's starving to death. His arms and legs are all
Speaker 1: cut up. Neely explains that he had got separated from
Speaker 1: a group of hunters and tried to shoot his gun
Speaker 1: fire off his gun so they could hear him, but
Speaker 1: he burned up all of his gunpowder, so he had
Speaker 1: no way of shooting his gun anymore, and never found
Speaker 1: his hunting partners. Tried to make his way back to
Speaker 1: the settlement with no gun, so he's got no way
Speaker 1: of obtaining meat, gets hopelessly lost, and then one day
Speaker 1: he's resting against a downtree and a dog shows up.
Speaker 1: This dog probably belonged to an Indian hunter, and it
Speaker 1: runs up to greet him, but Neely strangles the dog
Speaker 1: and roasts it and makes jerky out of it and
Speaker 1: stores that jerky in a sack made out of the
Speaker 1: dog's skin. When Squire Boone finds him, he still got
Speaker 1: some of this dog jerky in the dog skin bag,
Speaker 1: and Squire Boone comments how it was quite alive with maggots.
Speaker 1: This is all stuff you're going to hear about. It's
Speaker 1: just it's stuff that blows your mind. And I had
Speaker 1: been my whole life, I've read about the long hunters,
Speaker 1: and these are all like so many of these stories
Speaker 1: like that one, for instance, are stories that I had
Speaker 1: never known until he got into this project. Like this
Speaker 1: is the level of detail stuff that we drug out
Speaker 1: through research to bring out in this project. And there's
Speaker 1: other stuff that's going to really blow your mind. Because
Speaker 1: you might have heard a lot about Daniel Boone or
Speaker 1: heard the term long hunters even but there's stuff you
Speaker 1: might not know, like even just the intricacy of game
Speaker 1: laws back then in the first Far West, meaning there
Speaker 1: was restrictions on the kind of hunting that these backwoods
Speaker 1: frontiersmen were supposed to do, whether or not people listened
Speaker 1: to him or not. There were restrictions passed by lawmakers
Speaker 1: to try to discourage these colonial backwoodsmen from engaging in
Speaker 1: the deer skin trade. So this is an era when
Speaker 1: Daniel Boone these other Euro American hunters are literally having
Speaker 1: like running gun battles with Native Americans over access to
Speaker 1: deer herds. Meanwhile there's people trying to impose game laws
Speaker 1: on them. There was a law meant to prevent these
Speaker 1: so called quote disorderly persons from hunting deer quote merely
Speaker 1: for the sake of skins, which lawmakers pointed out were
Speaker 1: clandestinely carried out of the colony in order that the
Speaker 1: hunters could avoid paying taxes, or that legislators in some
Speaker 1: areas had explicitly banned the practice of shooting or killing
Speaker 1: any deer just for the skin. You could not kill
Speaker 1: a deer for the skin while leaving the flesh in
Speaker 1: the woods to rot. If you did, you were subject
Speaker 1: to a fine. And in this project, as you're listening
Speaker 1: to this, you'll learn like how that could be reconciled
Speaker 1: with this history of people who are killing hundreds or
Speaker 1: thousands of deer for the skins. Likewise, to try to
Speaker 1: discourage over harvest by market hunters. In North Carolina, check
Speaker 1: this out, they had a law that prohibited you from
Speaker 1: hunting deer if you didn't have a settled habitation in
Speaker 1: the colony. So nowadays, when you hear people complaining about
Speaker 1: out of state hunters, there were rules like that in
Speaker 1: place them and we lay these out. I think the
Speaker 1: reason most stories miss this stuff is because they have
Speaker 1: an audience that isn't going to understand or they fear
Speaker 1: they won't understand it anyways. But our audience understands this,
Speaker 1: and you're gonna be like delighted in these kind of intricacies.
Speaker 1: You needed to have in certain places. Check this one.
Speaker 1: You needed to have five thousand corn hills within the
Speaker 1: colony in order to be illegal deer hunter, meaning they
Speaker 1: would at that time they would say like no, no,
Speaker 1: you gotta have you gotta have you can't be from
Speaker 1: out of town, you gotta have land. Not only you
Speaker 1: gotta have land, you have to have five thousand corn hills.
Speaker 1: And you'll learn what a corn hill was and why
Speaker 1: that mattered if you wanted to hunt deer. South Carolina
Speaker 1: at the time Boone was out being Boone, South Carolina
Speaker 1: passed the law that made it illegal to hunt more
Speaker 1: than seven miles from one's own home in an effort
Speaker 1: to try to restrict these commercial deer hunters who would
Speaker 1: come through an area and wipe out the deer to
Speaker 1: get the hides. There were exceptions of these rules, meaning
Speaker 1: they still even back then. You've heard of depredation permits now,
Speaker 1: even back then, pre America, okay, pre Declaration of Independence,
Speaker 1: there was exemptions for landowners who needed to kill deer
Speaker 1: to protect their crops, and there were exceptions for people
Speaker 1: who needed to kill deer for food what they called
Speaker 1: the necessary subsistence of himself or his family. But even then,
Speaker 1: they had provisions. Back then, if you killed a deer
Speaker 1: for food, you were not allowed to sell or dispose
Speaker 1: of the skin, because they were trying to deter these
Speaker 1: frontier settlers, these crazy backwoods wild men from hunting deer
Speaker 1: for skins. These restrictions combined with declining deer numbers are
Speaker 1: part of what pushed the long hunters to go further
Speaker 1: and further west into the farther reaches of this first
Speaker 1: far West. Now, what we wanted to do with this book,
Speaker 1: I'm just giving you a handful of examples of stuff
Speaker 1: you're going to learn. We're talking. This is hours of
Speaker 1: material that's like expert researched and very succinctly presented. This
Speaker 1: is just me talking about this thing. But this thing
Speaker 1: is different because it's it's perfect. Okay. What we wanted
Speaker 1: to do in the book is we wanted to dig
Speaker 1: into the historical sources so we could tell you who
Speaker 1: these guys were, like really, who they were, where they
Speaker 1: came from, what their backgrounds were, what their circumstances were,
Speaker 1: what pushed them into this this very deadly bloody trade,
Speaker 1: Why they engaged in the deerskin trade, which means we
Speaker 1: have to explain what America was then, who Americans were then,
Speaker 1: what the globe looked like then, what cattle ranching was, like,
Speaker 1: why there was a shortage of leather, And telling this
Speaker 1: we explained all this other stuff like why did they
Speaker 1: use the rifles they use When you hear of a
Speaker 1: Kentucky long rifle. What did that mean back then? Now
Speaker 1: you shoot it because it seems old and antique. They
Speaker 1: shot them because it was the most sophisticated weapon you
Speaker 1: could get your hands on. They were shooting state of
Speaker 1: the art equipment, cutting edge equipment. Why was that the
Speaker 1: way it was? How did they camp? Because I mean, remember, no,
Speaker 1: they didn't have flashlights, they didn't have lighters, they didn't
Speaker 1: have tents. But they're gone for two years killing deer
Speaker 1: in the woods. How did they camp? What did they eat?
Speaker 1: What were their interactions with native people? What were the
Speaker 1: long hunter's interactions with tribes the Shawnee, the Cherokee, who
Speaker 1: had a rightful, thousands of years old claim to these
Speaker 1: hunting grounds. And this becomes a really complicated thing that
Speaker 1: will explain. The long Hunters had this idea of this area,
Speaker 1: against all historical evidence outside of these things that they
Speaker 1: saw when they were there, they had this idea that
Speaker 1: it was unclaimed. And we're gonna talk we talk a
Speaker 1: lot about that. Why did the long hunters think there
Speaker 1: was on this landscape the first far West? Why did
Speaker 1: they think it was unclaimed? And why did the Shawnee
Speaker 1: and Cherokee and other tribes know that in fact, that
Speaker 1: was not true. It was quite claimed. They had been
Speaker 1: hunting it a long time and they were not going
Speaker 1: to stand by and watch these euro Americans come in
Speaker 1: and rape and pillage the landscape and deplete it of deer.
Speaker 1: So we explore this, just like very different perceptions of
Speaker 1: the American wilderness. To the long hunters, it was wilderness,
Speaker 1: it was the unknown, it was the dark and dangerous.
Speaker 1: Right to the Shawnee and Cherokee, it was home. It
Speaker 1: was their hunting spot. And this disagreement takes many shapes
Speaker 1: and forms, and we dig a lot into this so
Speaker 1: you can understand this interplay of America and Native America
Speaker 1: on the landscape. How did the long hunters like actually
Speaker 1: hunt deer? This is something like there are audience is
Speaker 1: going to want to know because you might just read
Speaker 1: a normal history book they hunted deer. But you know
Speaker 1: about hunting deer, right, You know about bait, you know
Speaker 1: about blinds, you know what still hunting is, you know
Speaker 1: what deer drives are, you know what ambush hunting is.
Speaker 1: We tell you how they were so effective, like how
Speaker 1: they hunted deer, and a normal history book might be
Speaker 1: like they sold the skins, they processed the skins, but
Speaker 1: you want to know more, we tell you, like like
Speaker 1: how they skinned them, what they did with those skins,
Speaker 1: step by step, and we're honest with you when there's
Speaker 1: parts of that explanation that we don't know, and we
Speaker 1: tell you why we don't know what we know. We
Speaker 1: tell you why, how we know what we know, and
Speaker 1: we were straight with you when we tell you what's
Speaker 1: not known. How the skins get the market, and then
Speaker 1: how did those skins travel across the Atlantic to craftsmen
Speaker 1: and consumers in Europe and get this? How did piracy pirates?
Speaker 1: How did piracy play into this whole thing. It includes
Speaker 1: a deep dive on the global financial circumstances, the global
Speaker 1: economic circumstances that drove the deerskin trade at that time,
Speaker 1: and all of this plays into explaining what would cause
Speaker 1: a person who could become some humdrum farmer to instead
Speaker 1: risk fairly certain death, pretty certain death, damn certain trouble
Speaker 1: and risk to go out and become this thing called
Speaker 1: a long hunter. Me Eater's American History The Long Hunters
Speaker 1: seventeen sixty one to seventeen seventy five, narrated by me
Speaker 1: Steven Ranella and Clay Newcomb available now wherever you get
Speaker 1: your books.