Speaker 1: My Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production
Speaker 1: of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1: And wow, do we have a treasure to share with
Speaker 1: you today. Today we are bringing you an interview that
Speaker 1: we just conducted just just minutes before recording this with
Speaker 1: with film director Werner Hertzog and his collaborator, the volcanologist
Speaker 1: Clive Oppenheimer. And this was so powerful. That's right. They
Speaker 1: have a new documentary, Fireball Visitors from Darker Worlds and
Speaker 1: a debuts November only on Apple TV. Plus it's an
Speaker 1: Apple original film. You know. In the past few days,
Speaker 1: I've just been mainlining Hertzog documentaries, all three actually involving
Speaker 1: Clive Oppenheimer. So the first one was his I think
Speaker 1: it was two thousand seven film, Encounters at the End
Speaker 1: of the World. That's all about people in Antarctica and
Speaker 1: how they ended up there, what they're doing there, and
Speaker 1: one of them is this volcano researcher named Clive Oppenheimer
Speaker 1: who's studying Mount Erebus. And this started a partnership between
Speaker 1: Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer. So They've worked together on
Speaker 1: a couple of films since then. One was a fantastic
Speaker 1: documentary about volcanoes called Into the Inferno, and now this
Speaker 1: new one called Fireball, which is all about space impacts
Speaker 1: and meteorites. That's right, Yeah, this one is directed by
Speaker 1: Herzog and Oppenheimer, and it's written and narrated by Herzog.
Speaker 1: These are both tremendous documentaries that I feel like they're
Speaker 1: very much the sort of documentaries that stuff to blow
Speaker 1: your mind listeners would enjoy because they are obsessed with
Speaker 1: with not only science but human culture. And where where
Speaker 1: the two meet? How how are understanding or interpretations of
Speaker 1: of of cosmic or geologic events impact the formation and
Speaker 1: the continuation of culture. I feel like we shouldn't delay
Speaker 1: any longer. Should we go right to the interview. Let's
Speaker 1: do it. Let's jump right in. Werner Herzag and Clive Oppenheimer,
Speaker 1: welcome to the program. Thank you. We both watched this
Speaker 1: documentary along with your previous collaboration Into the Inferno, and
Speaker 1: we love them both both fabulous explorations of science and culture.
Speaker 1: Where did the idea for Fireball come from? And when
Speaker 1: did you film it? Well, it came from Clive, but
Speaker 1: he has to explain yes. So about a year after
Speaker 1: the release of Into the Inferno, I had been working
Speaker 1: through one or two concepts for another film, but it
Speaker 1: was actually by chance on a trip to South Korea,
Speaker 1: I visited the Korean Polar Research Institute and they gave
Speaker 1: me a tour of the facility and I saw their
Speaker 1: their meteorite collection. They go every every year downtime Tarctica
Speaker 1: and hunt for meteorites. They've got a thousand already, but
Speaker 1: they're hoping I'll find something new. And it was while
Speaker 1: speaking with the meteorite expert there and and just looking
Speaker 1: at these wonderful stones that have fallen from from space,
Speaker 1: that it just seemed that this was another very obvious,
Speaker 1: ostensibly a gear science topic, but one that immediately touches
Speaker 1: on human culture, on on our origins, origins of life, um,
Speaker 1: human origins. Thinking about the large, the massive impact sixty
Speaker 1: five million years ago that reset the biological clock on Earth,
Speaker 1: three quarters of species went to the wall. Um. It
Speaker 1: speaks to our destiny. And there was something also that
Speaker 1: the scientific veneration of these stones. Each each was in
Speaker 1: a cubicle like a microwave oven with a window but
Speaker 1: in a in a nitrogen atmosphere to preserve them, and
Speaker 1: they were all in and utmost have been feeling like
Speaker 1: in a Catholic church relax of saints, yees behind class
Speaker 1: and preserved somehow and untouchable. That's right, you know. They
Speaker 1: were real veneration. And it was an echo for me
Speaker 1: of the veneration of one of the holiest relics of Islam,
Speaker 1: that the black Stone, which is also thought probably to
Speaker 1: be meteoritic. So that that really inspired me and I
Speaker 1: back home, I put together some ideas of how how
Speaker 1: these themes might fit together, and I gave vernerical perhaps
Speaker 1: that was the start of it. Production we we were
Speaker 1: filming last year. We started filming in Um first of August,
Speaker 1: I think last year, and through to Christmas Eve, and
Speaker 1: we were editing. We finished editing in January. So we
Speaker 1: were very very fortunate too to do the real um
Speaker 1: work that involved a lot of travel before all the
Speaker 1: lockdowns were in place, and so the post production was
Speaker 1: done in Europe and l A. But this was possible
Speaker 1: despite the lockdowns. It's funny that you mentioned the idea
Speaker 1: of comparing the meteorites in their cases to the saints
Speaker 1: and the relics because of course the nitrogen that they
Speaker 1: keep them in there, it's basically to make them incorruptible, right,
Speaker 1: that's right. And you know, particularly the meteorites, the so
Speaker 1: called carbonaceous meteorites, carbonaceous chondrites, that have an extraordinary complement
Speaker 1: of organic molecules, things like ribos of sugar, amino assets,
Speaker 1: the building blocks of life. These are completely a biotic
Speaker 1: and yet um I mean to me this, you know,
Speaker 1: even as a as a geoscientist, I hadn't really taken
Speaker 1: on board just the complexity and abundance of organic molecules
Speaker 1: in certain meteorites, and so I find it very credible
Speaker 1: the idea that these have delivered the building blocks, the
Speaker 1: ingredients of life, not only in our Solar system, but elsewhere.
Speaker 1: And you know, maybe all it takes is for one
Speaker 1: of them to find the right environment with with the
Speaker 1: right kind of temperatures or heating and cooling cycles, wetting
Speaker 1: and drying cycles, in order to start to build very
Speaker 1: simple living organisms. One of my favorite scenes in the
Speaker 1: movie is actually when you're sniffing one of these meteorites,
Speaker 1: and so I was wondering what that smells like. I've
Speaker 1: actually read in other places that some meteorites smell like
Speaker 1: cruciferous vegetables, like rotting cabbage, or like Brussels sprouts. I
Speaker 1: think in the film you might have compared it to
Speaker 1: moth balls, Is that right? Yeah, moth balls. It had
Speaker 1: a very pungent smell. I mean, remember, these are molecules
Speaker 1: that are four and a half billion years old, and
Speaker 1: this was something again I had. I had no idea
Speaker 1: of you know, that you could sniff a meteorite and
Speaker 1: get such a strong smell of it. Um contents of
Speaker 1: a vacuum cleaner bag is another another way maybe capturing
Speaker 1: what it's like. It's it's quite hard to describe, but
Speaker 1: unmistakable that that there is an odor to these stones.
Speaker 1: And they've even used dogs sometimes to help find them
Speaker 1: because they can sniff them out. If it's funny, because
Speaker 1: I really wanted to take a sniff of it as
Speaker 1: well with but I restrained myself because I hate the feeling.
Speaker 1: I would breathe on it and and there would be
Speaker 1: vapor on it, maybe men nose would be dripping on it,
Speaker 1: and what it could testrophy that would mean to wipe
Speaker 1: out the center of four thousand, five hundred million years
Speaker 1: back in time, so I didn't do it. I have
Speaker 1: to rely on you to record what it was. It
Speaker 1: would have been an interesting scientific paper and a fairly
Speaker 1: humiliating retraction later when they realized that it was it's
Speaker 1: not that it dribbled out of your nostrils. Well, that
Speaker 1: reminds me of one of my favorite details leading up
Speaker 1: to that scene, Verner. I thought it was interesting how
Speaker 1: when you're going into the lab where some of these
Speaker 1: meteorites are stored under these tight containment procedures to keep
Speaker 1: them safe from contamination and degradation, there's a moment where
Speaker 1: you focus on the sticky matt that everyone has to
Speaker 1: walk through, uh to go into the room. And that
Speaker 1: seemed like a detail that was very characteristic of your
Speaker 1: eye for documentaries. To me, you noticing these uh, interesting
Speaker 1: peripheral or process details that often wouldn't become the subject
Speaker 1: matter of another documentary. Why do you think you noticed
Speaker 1: things like that so often? Well, you would never see
Speaker 1: it on in a film by Nest, the Geographic, PBS
Speaker 1: or HBO. You don't see that. And I loved it,
Speaker 1: And not only that it was sticky and this this
Speaker 1: crazy I think greenish color when you rip it off,
Speaker 1: the kind of ripping sound it makes, and I love
Speaker 1: the sound, and I had repeated it a few times
Speaker 1: because I wanted to have the sound recorded very well.
Speaker 1: So those are things, of course that point out you're
Speaker 1: entering a very specific, very special sphere. There's something special.
Speaker 1: You do not walk in with your with your shoes
Speaker 1: that you were out in the street. They have to
Speaker 1: be cleansed and you enter with a certain preparation. The
Speaker 1: camera enters prepared and the audience enters prepared, so you
Speaker 1: always have to anticipate an audience behind you. And of
Speaker 1: course it means you're never gonna be boring, you never
Speaker 1: will be didactic. There has to be human that it
Speaker 1: has to be awesome. Uh. And of course there's a
Speaker 1: separate second story within the audience that you have to prepare,
Speaker 1: the curiosity of the audience, the engagement of the audience,
Speaker 1: And those are the moments where you where you really
Speaker 1: capture them, where you really walk with them into into
Speaker 1: this connection that sort of leads into the next thing
Speaker 1: I wanted to ask, which is I was wondering about
Speaker 1: when you're looking at something all inspiring, So you're standing
Speaker 1: in a colossal impact crater, or you're looking at the
Speaker 1: exposed magma and the culdera of a volcano. How do
Speaker 1: you think your experience is colored by the fact that
Speaker 1: you are there to document it, whether that's for science
Speaker 1: Clive or for film Warner, as opposed to just being
Speaker 1: there and witnessing it with no real documentary mission. Well,
Speaker 1: for me, there's no distinction. Do my job and I
Speaker 1: enjoy the moment and somehow. Of course, in some cases
Speaker 1: there's some danger when you're getting too close to create
Speaker 1: a an active creator that is spitting out. Particis in
Speaker 1: Mark mind slabs large as a truck when they come down,
Speaker 1: so you better watch out. You do. We so, But
Speaker 1: it's it's where life and filmmaking there's no distinction. I
Speaker 1: think for me that I do send some distinction. I mean,
Speaker 1: particularly in my scientific work on volcanoes, and I think
Speaker 1: it's actually true as well of the filmmaking. The when
Speaker 1: you're making a film or when I'm trying to measure
Speaker 1: the gas coming out of a volcano, you have to
Speaker 1: think about an awful lot of things all at the
Speaker 1: same time. You have to be flexible. If you're trying
Speaker 1: to make gas measurements on a volcano, you need to
Speaker 1: worry all the time, which way is the wind blowing,
Speaker 1: what's the volcano doing, Is it's safe to be here?
Speaker 1: Why isn't the equipment working? And you know, in some
Speaker 1: ways this this is so absorbing that actually you know
Speaker 1: you're not having a transcendental moment about where you are.
Speaker 1: And it's maybe when when everything is working just great
Speaker 1: and the data is being collected and you can just
Speaker 1: set aside and then and then stop and think, well,
Speaker 1: my goodness, look where I am. I'm on the side
Speaker 1: of a an active volcano crater in in Antarctica and
Speaker 1: it's minus forty degrees celsius. Uh, And then you know,
Speaker 1: then you're really aware where you are and what it
Speaker 1: feels like to be there. Is also certain for me
Speaker 1: is a filmmaking you'll become more fearless because you're doing
Speaker 1: your job, and that has cost For example, work correspondence
Speaker 1: steering the Vietnam War. The amount of casualties and fatalities
Speaker 1: who had among the war photographers was staggeringly high because
Speaker 1: they step into the crossfire and they take photos of
Speaker 1: one side and photos of the other side firing at
Speaker 1: each other and right in the middle of it, and
Speaker 1: then they perish, and a camera gives you this kind
Speaker 1: of quasi feeling of invulnerability. And having Clive around. For example,
Speaker 1: in Indonesia, where we were filming a volcano that had
Speaker 1: come back to life, Clive insisted we have to turn
Speaker 1: the car round so that we can flee. And you
Speaker 1: can't turn the car around on a no on a
Speaker 1: ditch country, ditch road or so, which is not much
Speaker 1: wider than the car. So we had to go one
Speaker 1: mile further down and turn it around and then come back.
Speaker 1: And Clive made sure the car is to face an exit. Uh.
Speaker 1: And and all of a sudden we are seeing something
Speaker 1: in the camera films and an eruption and classes to us, Uh,
Speaker 1: stop the camera loaded now and we flye and and
Speaker 1: we actually fled. And seven days later I think eleven
Speaker 1: peasants who are doing farm work exactly at the same
Speaker 1: spot perished in a similar eruption. Now this is interesting,
Speaker 1: you know, in thinking about not only the craft of
Speaker 1: creating the documentary, but the experience of creating the documentary,
Speaker 1: I was curious. You know. Obviously you're going into it
Speaker 1: with with certain ideas in mind, and then there's the
Speaker 1: shoot itself, and then I imagine some reflection afterwards. Um,
Speaker 1: what is the what is the experience? It's just a
Speaker 1: curious individual like of of going on this journey. Um,
Speaker 1: do find yourself coming out at the other end with
Speaker 1: like a different idea or a different consideration of saying
Speaker 1: near Earth objects or meteorites. No, we are always ready
Speaker 1: for surprises. And Clive is wonderful in doing conversations spontaneous conversations.
Speaker 1: Of course, is extremely well prepared. When we filmed with
Speaker 1: the lay brother in the Vatican, the Jesuit he Clive
Speaker 1: had read the doctoral dissertation of that man, which was
Speaker 1: written in seventy nine, and he quotes from this, So cool,
Speaker 1: for Heaven's sake, is prepared like like him. That's one side.
Speaker 1: But the conversation can go anywhere. And of course, all
Speaker 1: of a suddenly asks him if green men would come
Speaker 1: out from a spacecraft, would you baptize said, and the
Speaker 1: Jesuits said, yes, but go only if they asked for it.
Speaker 1: So the conversation has to go its own course. And
Speaker 1: but but you do not walk away having done that film,
Speaker 1: and you are changed man. You see, that's that's a
Speaker 1: postulate of the silly Hollywood screenplays. A person by Paige
Speaker 1: Sturdy has to know his his task, and by page
Speaker 1: six sixty he or she has to undergo the crisis,
Speaker 1: and by the end of the film, he or she
Speaker 1: has to exit the film as a changed person. Not
Speaker 1: so for us we we we are we. I always
Speaker 1: quote the Bavarian proverbial saying we are we and we
Speaker 1: spell us us and And by the way, I would
Speaker 1: never allow Clive to have a piece of paper in
Speaker 1: his hand. I said, we are not journalists. We do
Speaker 1: not have a catalog of Christians. Let let the thing roll,
Speaker 1: let's tumble through it. So there's a moment in Fireball
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk about where, uh, Clive, where you
Speaker 1: are looking at micro meteorites under an extremely powerful microscope
Speaker 1: under magnification, and you notice that the surfaces of the
Speaker 1: dust grains that come down from space look in some
Speaker 1: ways like the surfaces of moons or rocky planets. And
Speaker 1: this is something I've read about in the geological world
Speaker 1: as well as in the biological science. Is geometrical patterns
Speaker 1: and textures that can be found repeating at vastly different
Speaker 1: levels of resolution. Um, do you have thoughts about this, Clive,
Speaker 1: Like why does the microscopic so often mirror the astronomical.
Speaker 1: It's a good question. I hadn't thought of that, but
Speaker 1: I mean, so these are cosmic dust micro meteorites that
Speaker 1: were found by one of Norway's most famous jazz musicians,
Speaker 1: Get Wonderful guitarist John Larsson, and he spent the last
Speaker 1: ten years up on the roofs of sports arenas and
Speaker 1: and in car parks, trawling collecting all the sludge of
Speaker 1: of the urban but finding in it. And he's found
Speaker 1: several thousand meteoritic grains now and these under high magnifica magnification,
Speaker 1: they look absolutely wonderful, and you know, you would love
Speaker 1: to have one at a large size sitting in your
Speaker 1: living room. That's so beautiful to behold. But to answer
Speaker 1: your question, I mean, I wonder if one of the
Speaker 1: reasons why it struck me that this one of these
Speaker 1: particular grains it it seemed to have fractures and it
Speaker 1: that looked like almost like icebergs that were very kind
Speaker 1: of liganal cracks and fishes between them. And then then
Speaker 1: there was something that looked like it could be a
Speaker 1: coastline that they've broken off from um. And it may
Speaker 1: be that some of the processes are the same, just
Speaker 1: a very different scales. And I'm thinking of things like
Speaker 1: fluid dynamics. Fluid dynamics, there there are guiding principles, the
Speaker 1: force of gravity, the fluidity of something, how viscous, how
Speaker 1: sticky it is when when it's trying to flow, uh,
Speaker 1: and and these processes. This has operated a vastly different
Speaker 1: spatial scales. And so maybe that's why there is some
Speaker 1: inherent similarity that we sometimes see. If I think you
Speaker 1: have it in in the very abstract as well, and
Speaker 1: it's a very deep question about the nature of the universe.
Speaker 1: You have it in mathematics, uh, in fractals, in things
Speaker 1: where all of a sudden, certain patterns reappear on a
Speaker 1: very large scale, and the more miniscule you get keep
Speaker 1: repeating itself. So there seems to be something inherent in
Speaker 1: nature that we do not understand fully yet. And it's
Speaker 1: very beautiful thought to pursue this kind of pattern that
Speaker 1: manifests itself all of a sudden. And why is it
Speaker 1: that on a very large scale you have patterns that
Speaker 1: you find in a microscopic scale in the almost same
Speaker 1: optical impression you have And then we have the the exception,
Speaker 1: the pattern that never repeats itself, the quasi crystal with
Speaker 1: the forbidden fivefold symmetry, and yet which which can be
Speaker 1: you know, was was discovered by artisans in in iran
Speaker 1: Um tiling tiling the shrine of a millennium ago. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: not method maticians like Penrose who describes it mathematically. That
Speaker 1: that has been one of the most fascinating elements in
Speaker 1: the film for me at all, because I did not
Speaker 1: know about quasi crystals at all. And I have to
Speaker 1: point out what the earliest supporter of the film was
Speaker 1: the Simon's Foundation, where they have a sentbox film department
Speaker 1: which supports films that have scientific background. And they are
Speaker 1: on a new trajectory now to attract new audiences to
Speaker 1: non didactic sort of cinema about science. And the man
Speaker 1: who runs this, Greg Boasted, who is a scientist himself.
Speaker 1: He sent me a book written by Paul Steinhardt, a
Speaker 1: cosmologist who actually was in search of quasi crystals for
Speaker 1: more than thirty years. And he's in the film and
Speaker 1: and it's a it's a wonderful character, shy and never
Speaker 1: been out in wild nature. I say in my commentary,
Speaker 1: the deepest contact with the wild nature was the lawns
Speaker 1: at Princeton University, and all of a sudden he goes
Speaker 1: on a expedition into easternmost Siberia, close to the Bearing Strait,
Speaker 1: into the underbrush and wild beast arounded clouds of mosquitoes,
Speaker 1: and he finds remnants of small fragments of a meteorite
Speaker 1: that carried quasi crystals. And it was proven, yes, they
Speaker 1: existing nature out there in the universe, and it had
Speaker 1: been improvement. It's a wonderful, wonderful story and for me
Speaker 1: totally fascinating because I'm fascinated by mathematical things like that.
Speaker 1: How is it possible that a structure in crystal said
Speaker 1: is unthinkable, should be even forbidden, and it was forbidden
Speaker 1: almost to think about it can be proven after understanding
Speaker 1: a certain pattern. Just wonderful these kind of manifestations. And
Speaker 1: I'm I would be if I didn't make films. I
Speaker 1: would like to go into mathematics, but you have to
Speaker 1: start as a child to really into it. Yes, because
Speaker 1: I would like to be on the forefront of finding
Speaker 1: out about three Month's theory, vere Month's hypothesis about prime numbers,
Speaker 1: distribution of prime numbers, those things really really fascinate me. Well,
Speaker 1: I had wondered if maybe I was reading faces in
Speaker 1: clouds when I saw this connection in your work. But
Speaker 1: I was thinking even in the earlier movie, in Into
Speaker 1: the Inferno, I thought I saw verner in your eye
Speaker 1: for the film, this idea of repeating patterns, because I
Speaker 1: noticed there's the scene where you're searching for shattered fragments
Speaker 1: of ancient human bone in the East African Ift in Ethiopia,
Speaker 1: and then immediately you cut to the exposed magma surface
Speaker 1: in the caldera of the nearby volcano, and the cooling
Speaker 1: surface has cracks and it will look almost exactly like
Speaker 1: the edges of the bone fragments that that Clive you
Speaker 1: were just picking out with with I believe it was
Speaker 1: Tim White of of Berkeley, the paleo anthropologist. Was that
Speaker 1: on purpose or I was making crazy connections there? No,
Speaker 1: I've never been aware of that. You are the first
Speaker 1: one who points it out to look at it again.
Speaker 1: Of course it was not fast. It was not on
Speaker 1: purpose to make this connection. But you have the privilege
Speaker 1: as an audience to make these connections. It didn't occur
Speaker 1: to me, and not did I think occurred to Clive No, no,
Speaker 1: but it's it's a wonderful residence. And I can still
Speaker 1: watch into the inferno, which I have seen a good
Speaker 1: few times now, and I will make a connection. We'll
Speaker 1: see a motif reappearing somewhere that I hadn't I hadn't
Speaker 1: spotted before, And I think that's for me, the joy
Speaker 1: of making these kinds of films. For me, they're all
Speaker 1: like a piece of music that you you would you
Speaker 1: love and would listen to again and again. I feel
Speaker 1: with with these films and with Werner's films that uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I could watch a gear gear a many
Speaker 1: many times and never be bored of it. Um. So
Speaker 1: that's that's part of the joy of this, this kind
Speaker 1: of cinema, I would say, just you know, on the accidental,
Speaker 1: accidental things coming good. One of my favorite bits of
Speaker 1: film in Fireball UM is when we're up on the
Speaker 1: Polar Plateau filming the meteorites search with the Koreans and
Speaker 1: the camera was on for about half an hour without
Speaker 1: us realizing it. So it's just been carried around and
Speaker 1: it's pointing all over the place. But we looked at
Speaker 1: this footage and then there's there was just one ten
Speaker 1: five eight seconds worth of just it was just beautiful,
Speaker 1: um just the shadows um our team cost on on
Speaker 1: the blue ice, and because there were shadows, it gave
Speaker 1: a depth into the ice, into this extraordinary glacial ice.
Speaker 1: Just beautiful and completely accidental. So, Werner, you've emphasized the
Speaker 1: ways that high energy natural phenomena like volcanic eruptions and
Speaker 1: impacts from space can reveal us to be very tiny
Speaker 1: and insignificant and powerless. But in this documentary and in
Speaker 1: Into the Inferno, you show a lot of the ways
Speaker 1: that people are drawn to exactly the sites of these
Speaker 1: phenomena when they're trying to build a mythology that gives
Speaker 1: their life meaning. Is there a counterintuitive logic at work here?
Speaker 1: Does evidence of our insignificance and helplessness somehow kind of
Speaker 1: give courage to the part of us that finds a
Speaker 1: way to view our lives as part of a sacred
Speaker 1: story or having a point? Well, that's a very profound question,
Speaker 1: and I have never thought about it for a long time.
Speaker 1: But of course, just looking at the universe, when you
Speaker 1: look at the stars, when you're outside, outside of a
Speaker 1: city where you really see the universe, and it of
Speaker 1: course gives you an understanding of size, and when you're
Speaker 1: in Antarctica, you get an understanding of you can walk
Speaker 1: straight for the next five kilometers like walking across the
Speaker 1: entire continentally United States, and you will not find a
Speaker 1: human soul. And at the same time, the fact that
Speaker 1: the day will last for five months until the sun
Speaker 1: settles because it's circling in Antarctica during the Austrian summer.
Speaker 1: So it gives a scale of of size and importance.
Speaker 1: And of course visa v. The universe, which is monumentle
Speaker 1: indifferent to us, we have to understand the size. And
Speaker 1: yet at such moments we can also understand that here
Speaker 1: and now, in what we are here's a certain importance
Speaker 1: and we do the best out of the moment. We
Speaker 1: create our our own consciousness to some degree, and we
Speaker 1: are responsible for what we are doing, and we are
Speaker 1: big in what we are doing here. So it's um
Speaker 1: it's a strange balance and it sounds like a contradiction,
Speaker 1: but it is not. I would add, I believe you
Speaker 1: know that we are very much disconnected now. I mean,
Speaker 1: more than half of us live in in cities, in
Speaker 1: urban environments, and artificial light has colonized our night. Ah,
Speaker 1: and how many of us can remember the last time
Speaker 1: we saw the Milky Way, And I think that does
Speaker 1: disconnect us from that sense of awe, of of the
Speaker 1: the natural world of if you heard some story about
Speaker 1: the earthquake in the valley, Yes, the the north Ridge
Speaker 1: earthquake in in l A. This struck in February, I think,
Speaker 1: in the middle of the night, and so people ran
Speaker 1: outside their homes and pretty soon a number of calling
Speaker 1: the emergency services because one calls they could see a
Speaker 1: strange silvery cloud in the sky and they thought maybe
Speaker 1: this was some noxious fumes given off from the San
Speaker 1: Andreas fault. But what had happened the earthquake and knocked
Speaker 1: out the para grid and so for the first time
Speaker 1: they were seeing the Milky Way. Idea what it was?
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's people called emergency. You can completely
Speaker 1: understand it. I mean, I live in a village outside
Speaker 1: Cambridge in England. Um, but there's way too much light
Speaker 1: pollution here to see more than a dozen stars at night,
Speaker 1: And um, I think that's I think that's meaningful. Actually,
Speaker 1: it has. It has an impact on on human society
Speaker 1: that we no longer have that sense of wonder, of
Speaker 1: of the infinite and of the nocturnal, because we've lost it,
Speaker 1: but so many of us thank every now and then
Speaker 1: you hear um of of various actors being described as
Speaker 1: a force of nature, or their performance being a force
Speaker 1: of nature that must be crafted or honed by and
Speaker 1: by a director. Werner, what do you make of such comparisons,
Speaker 1: especially having worked with actual volcanos and and alongside other
Speaker 1: legitimate forces of nature in your films. You're not thinking
Speaker 1: about klaus Kinsky, are you? Um we well, certainly he's
Speaker 1: he's an actor that that comes to mind. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: hear occasionally such performers compared to a force of nature.
Speaker 1: But yeah that in in cheap Hollywood of that reviews,
Speaker 1: this uh riveeting and maybe you know you know what
Speaker 1: I mean, So you you should be careful in using
Speaker 1: this kind of lingo that you're here in advertisements for
Speaker 1: for mainstream Hollywood movies being praised by paid of mainstream reviewers. Anyway,
Speaker 1: But if you mean somebody like Nicholas Cage in Bad
Speaker 1: Lieutenant klaus Kinsky in Voitzek, sure, yes, there's something extraordinary
Speaker 1: about performances and in Nasty in the presence on screen
Speaker 1: which is completely unique and remarkable, and you do not
Speaker 1: find it very often, but you do find it, and
Speaker 1: you do find it like Timothy treadwilled grizzly Man. And
Speaker 1: in a way Clive has a presence on camera which
Speaker 1: is unique for a film like that. We only have
Speaker 1: David Attenborough. But it's prepared texts, well written texts, and
Speaker 1: but he puts a kind of excitement into it, and
Speaker 1: and he he deserves being so famous and being so
Speaker 1: loved by audience. Is a wonderful character. But Claive has
Speaker 1: something which I really like is a is a strong
Speaker 1: presence on screen, the sense of awe, the sense of respect,
Speaker 1: the sense of discovery. And if we have a person
Speaker 1: like him in a film, and we have not, we
Speaker 1: don't pursue this kind of lifeless scientific documentaries. And we
Speaker 1: find a man like him in front of a camera wonderful.
Speaker 1: So I've been very lucky that I ran into Clive
Speaker 1: on top of active volcano in Antarctica, a twelve thousand,
Speaker 1: five hundred feet altitude, so the degrees below zero or something,
Speaker 1: and he wore a treat jacket or something. He denies
Speaker 1: it was a treat jacket. Wasn't a tweet jacket, but
Speaker 1: the Harris tweet clan will be will be tracking you down.
Speaker 1: But I mean it was. It looked like a tweet
Speaker 1: check it or like the early Himalaya claimber, some early
Speaker 1: Mount Everest claimbers would would tackle the mountain in tweet jackets. Well,
Speaker 1: this was a Himalayan jacket. It was. It was from
Speaker 1: Kuluminali in India. So I've I've never been a huge
Speaker 1: fan for synthetic fibers. I like, I like to wear
Speaker 1: wool and cotton and all sorts of things you're not
Speaker 1: supposed to wear anymore. In Antarctica, I don't wear I
Speaker 1: don't use Finnisco and you know what the real old
Speaker 1: timers did. But I guess my tweet jacket is pretty
Speaker 1: close to what Mallory wore. You know, we use it
Speaker 1: as a metaphor now, but we struck your appearance was
Speaker 1: striking in the way you're talking to What you had
Speaker 1: to say was just wonderful. So that's where where we
Speaker 1: started to uh notice each other. And Clive actually I
Speaker 1: think on the same one the following day said I
Speaker 1: have a camera myself, can I speak to you? But
Speaker 1: I would like to record it on make camera so
Speaker 1: claim force into filmmaking already. Well, it was really the
Speaker 1: first filmmaking I've done. I was working collaborating with an
Speaker 1: Italian photographer and an artist on on a video installation,
Speaker 1: so I had in Venice, was it correct? Ah, well
Speaker 1: that's yeah, that's an interesting way. So when we were
Speaker 1: putting this thing together, so our artom in Linker is
Speaker 1: the name of the artist, and he thought we might
Speaker 1: have a showing at the Biennale where you can imagine
Speaker 1: coming out of the Ivory Tower in Cambridge. How excited
Speaker 1: that I was at that prospect. It didn't go to Venice.
Speaker 1: It went to the Vestivali Internazionale read Alba in La
Speaker 1: which which I'm sure you know is is the it's
Speaker 1: the big global event in toilet furnishings. If you're into
Speaker 1: toilet furnishers, you're in bolog your foot for the church
Speaker 1: I um uh convention um. The installation I mean commissioned
Speaker 1: by what a very large ceramics company they were. They've
Speaker 1: made a new product called volcanic stone. Uh. And so anyway,
Speaker 1: this is why I had a cowpoint Verner. But the
Speaker 1: that trip to admission to Antarctica, it was I'd say
Speaker 1: very much a turning point for me because I had
Speaker 1: this camera and I was feeling creative to be behind
Speaker 1: the camera and not only thinking about measuring volcanic gases.
Speaker 1: But of course it was also my encounter with Werner,
Speaker 1: and I've been interested in in the idea of making
Speaker 1: a volcano documentary for a number of years. My motivated
Speaker 1: that was distaste for most volcano documentaries. I mean, coming
Speaker 1: from knowing something about the topic. I knew watching a
Speaker 1: lot of these documentaries. They were all identical. They all
Speaker 1: had the line of it's it's not not not a
Speaker 1: matter of if she blows, it's when, and then cuttingto
Speaker 1: the commercial breaks. So I I already had a longing
Speaker 1: to to do more than that because so much of
Speaker 1: the documentary there are some good ones, but most they
Speaker 1: go for the low hanging fruit. It's doom and gloom,
Speaker 1: and it's not not the interesting stories, it's not the nuance,
Speaker 1: it's not the entanglements of of nature and culture. So
Speaker 1: I think, my lucky stars that I ran into Verna
Speaker 1: up in this twelve half twelve and a half thousand
Speaker 1: foot high volcano in Antarctica, in both the fireball and
Speaker 1: into the inferno, you speak with people about their beliefs
Speaker 1: and their traditions and the things that have that have
Speaker 1: impacted those cultures and traditions to steer the direction of
Speaker 1: their their worldviews. Uh. And an inferno you speak with
Speaker 1: individuals whose faith is and is sometimes classified as as
Speaker 1: a cargo cult belief system born out of contact between
Speaker 1: Melanesian cultures in the Western military machine of the Second
Speaker 1: World War. Um. What what was that experience like to
Speaker 1: to actually, you know, to be there and speak with
Speaker 1: them and and and and see them in person. Well,
Speaker 1: I'd say I think there are a couple of elders
Speaker 1: that we spoke within Vanuatu into the inferno. One, as
Speaker 1: you say, that was the car occulted John from cult. Uh.
Speaker 1: And I mean this this was it was very interesting conversation. Um.
Speaker 1: In that particular case. I think this this cargo cult actually,
Speaker 1: if you look at its roots, it starts very much
Speaker 1: as a protest against the colonial authorities. Um. And this
Speaker 1: is sort of back in the I guess it's starting
Speaker 1: around around the time of the Second World War. And
Speaker 1: people on the island of tanna Ah, they they've been
Speaker 1: in in mission schools. They were just taught what the
Speaker 1: British wanted them to know. And they said, well, you know,
Speaker 1: we we want to go back to our traditions, we
Speaker 1: want to drink again, we want to have our ceremonies.
Speaker 1: And so one of the first things they did was
Speaker 1: to stop buying goods from the from the England shops
Speaker 1: and that really upset the colonial authorities, so they they
Speaker 1: threw these guys in prison for fifteen years. And so
Speaker 1: that that's sort of what the cargo cults born born
Speaker 1: from the other chap we spoke with. For me, one
Speaker 1: of the most compelling conversations we've ever had on cameras
Speaker 1: with Um the chief of Endu Village on Ambrim Island
Speaker 1: in the north of the Bato Archipelago. And he he
Speaker 1: lives just a few miles from a very active volcano.
Speaker 1: At night he'll see the glow from the crater and
Speaker 1: so it's it's literally a looming presence and an ever
Speaker 1: present on on the landscape, and every now and then
Speaker 1: ash will all out across their plots of land. Uh.
Speaker 1: And he described his his feelings on one visit he
Speaker 1: made to the crater and and he said, I I
Speaker 1: looked in and I saw this. I saw this stuff
Speaker 1: moving like the sea, you know, so I thought it
Speaker 1: was water, but it was red, so it can't be water.
Speaker 1: What what is it? And the way he describes this
Speaker 1: makes complete sense. Ah, okay, I've I've trained in the geoscience,
Speaker 1: so I have a different perspective on it. But I
Speaker 1: find it very, very compelling how people formulate cosmologies when
Speaker 1: they're faced by these awesome phenomena. And I mean that
Speaker 1: in the sense of inspiring reverential fear as well as
Speaker 1: inspiring or of of just the wonder of scene seeing
Speaker 1: magma at night. I would like to eat two themes,
Speaker 1: because for me it sounds too theoretical when you explain
Speaker 1: the colonial origins of current cults. Yes, sure we can
Speaker 1: drag it back to that, but still it remains very
Speaker 1: compelling and mysterious that we speak with people, or you
Speaker 1: speak with people who believe that an American g. I.
Speaker 1: John from lives in volcano and he, uh, the man
Speaker 1: who with whom you speak has spent a whole night
Speaker 1: inside of the cauldron of the volcano. What were you
Speaker 1: talking about? So the presence and defication the creation of
Speaker 1: a god out of a g I an average G. I.
Speaker 1: John from is fantastic for me, and it had to
Speaker 1: be in the film. The second, which I remember was
Speaker 1: very important. We discussed how do you talk to them
Speaker 1: the attitude, and you said, I know how to do it,
Speaker 1: and I trusted because it shouldn't be condescending, it shouldn't
Speaker 1: be patronizing, it shouldn't be funny, it shouldn't be you
Speaker 1: see in in your quiet curiosity and respect is something
Speaker 1: which which makes the scene unforgetful. So you have to
Speaker 1: have when you do something like this, you have to
Speaker 1: have somebody of your caliber to do it right. And
Speaker 1: and this was on our mind throughout all the conversations
Speaker 1: we had, and it was on our mind when we
Speaker 1: did conversations with let's say female artists in Western Australia,
Speaker 1: an Aboriginal woman h and the way you talk to
Speaker 1: her and you the way you are interested to understand
Speaker 1: her painting and how she explains. It's a wonderful tone
Speaker 1: to it. And you do not see that in movies.
Speaker 1: You don't see it, but we were able to create it.
Speaker 1: And there's a lot of thinking behind it, and in
Speaker 1: a lot of natural decency that's in you is behind it. Vernon,
Speaker 1: I would say in a lot of your movies. It
Speaker 1: seems one thing you enjoy capturing is a palpable sense
Speaker 1: of unpredictability about what's on camera, and that comes through
Speaker 1: even in the conversations. I would say a lot of
Speaker 1: the conversations that you capture in these films feel less
Speaker 1: scripted and less predictable and less worked out in advance
Speaker 1: than most conversations and documentaries do. Yes, of course, because
Speaker 1: we trust in our ability to follow the moment, and
Speaker 1: we trust in our ability to go to the essence
Speaker 1: very quickly. So you see, we we do not shoot
Speaker 1: endless hours and hours and hours. We go to Castel
Speaker 1: Gandorf when we speak to the Jesuit uh lay brother.
Speaker 1: Neither Clive has met him in personally on the phone,
Speaker 1: nor have I ever met him. We go in and
Speaker 1: into in an hour flat to us. So we have
Speaker 1: done filming, and it's wonderful and and we know we
Speaker 1: we captured, we captured the essence of what we wanted
Speaker 1: to do. So we bring skills, We bring certain skills
Speaker 1: to the set that come to fruition in a very condensed,
Speaker 1: in a very condensed way. And thanks God we have
Speaker 1: these capabilities, because otherwise we would have made a boring
Speaker 1: didactic film and we must acknowledge to that that we're
Speaker 1: part of a team with with you know, wonderful cinematographer
Speaker 1: Peter Zeidlinger who was the OP for both of these films,
Speaker 1: and a sound engineer recordist Paul Paragon, both you know,
Speaker 1: extraordinary professionals. The way Peter works with the camera it's
Speaker 1: it's very he's extraordinary. I mean again as well as
Speaker 1: says we're we turn up, we meet people for the
Speaker 1: first time, and we've maybe had a few conversations on
Speaker 1: the phone, um, and we have a very clear sense
Speaker 1: of purpose of oh, what what we're after and what
Speaker 1: what themes we want to dig into? Um. But then
Speaker 1: the way Peter works with the cameras is is a
Speaker 1: marvel to behold. Paul our sound record is you know,
Speaker 1: he'll be up at five o'clock in the morning before
Speaker 1: the birds are up to it to record a wonderful
Speaker 1: ambience that that might then be woven into our soundtrack.
Speaker 1: So it's it's a collective effort with you know, all
Speaker 1: of us knowing knowing what we're doing and how how
Speaker 1: this is going to work work out and fit together.
Speaker 1: I would say one of my favorite examples in in
Speaker 1: your recent films that that I've heard of that sound
Speaker 1: gathering is in Encounters at the End of the World.
Speaker 1: You have a wonderful selection and of sort of the
Speaker 1: commerce of the ice, all the inhuman sounds, of the
Speaker 1: chucking made by the seals, and the cracking of the
Speaker 1: ice behind you. It does give you a sense that
Speaker 1: there is a world taking place there that's utterly inhuman,
Speaker 1: and yet it's very active. I think this fakes back
Speaker 1: very to my very very first films. We were a
Speaker 1: group of young people and we teenagers actually eighteen eteineers old,
Speaker 1: and we all helped each other, eight of us or
Speaker 1: nine of us. Only two finished their films. One was
Speaker 1: a friend of mine and the other one was me,
Speaker 1: and the others failed because of sound problems. And it
Speaker 1: gave me and all of a sudden I became alert
Speaker 1: how important sound was, and it was of essence and
Speaker 1: it can make a film fail. And out of nine films,
Speaker 1: seven failed because of sound problems. But it was it
Speaker 1: was young filmmakers, eighteen nine twenty years old, with without
Speaker 1: any formal training. One of us didn't go to film school.
Speaker 1: Now you've you've both mentioned already. Um, what other documentaries
Speaker 1: do differently or have have have gotten wrong? Perhaps? Can
Speaker 1: you both think to two examples of documentaries you're exposed
Speaker 1: to early on that inspired you that where you watched
Speaker 1: them and said this, this is this is what I
Speaker 1: want to do. This is the sort of documentary I
Speaker 1: could see myself making question fundamentally aims beyond me, doesn't
Speaker 1: hit me? I always said the feeling. I am the
Speaker 1: inventor of cinema, and I see documentaries where everything is
Speaker 1: done wrong, didactic, stupid, sensationalistic understanding documentaries as part of journalist,
Speaker 1: and I said, get away from that. I only have
Speaker 1: negative definitions, only the sins I can name, not the virtues.
Speaker 1: So in in viewing these documentaries that I couldn't help
Speaker 1: but think of the divine comedy. You know, we began
Speaker 1: obviously in the Inferno and in Fireballs in some ways
Speaker 1: about a bridge between Earth and sky. You know, the
Speaker 1: amount of purgatory. Uh So, I mean that just leads
Speaker 1: me to the obvious question, what's next? If you were
Speaker 1: to do another documentary project together, what do you think
Speaker 1: you might consider? I think I will come up with
Speaker 1: something fiendish back to hell. Yeah, I will and we
Speaker 1: we have at least a trilogy in as I I
Speaker 1: feel that and I've always got a few ideas that
Speaker 1: are half baked, and and when I get to get time,
Speaker 1: I'll sit down and really have a thing. Um. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: I would like to move m beyond scientific topics in
Speaker 1: in my filmmaking. I'm very interested in in other aspects
Speaker 1: of human culture. But I think for me it's it's
Speaker 1: always about the complexities and and I think one of
Speaker 1: the things, of course, that I've learned so much about
Speaker 1: through working with Werner is is storytelling is narrative, and
Speaker 1: I find it's even informing now my scientific writing. Oddly enough,
Speaker 1: I think more in terms of how do I tell
Speaker 1: this this story of this finding that I've I've got
Speaker 1: to from some of my own research. But whatever it is,
Speaker 1: you shall not be speeding towards the imperiod at incalculable speed.
Speaker 1: I think, you're I mean, you're, you're, You're right to
Speaker 1: you recognize these these resonances between Fireball and into the inferno.
Speaker 1: I mean these these are geophysical, geological celestial phenomena, volcanoes,
Speaker 1: asteroid collisions, meteorites, ah, but they have so much more
Speaker 1: significance for humans in terms of um, what we think
Speaker 1: of our origins, what we think of the afterlife, are
Speaker 1: our ideas of of of heaven, of the nether world,
Speaker 1: of the underworld. These are very intimately bound with these
Speaker 1: these terrestrial, earthly, subterranean, and celestial imperium phenomena. All right, well,
Speaker 1: there you have it. We hope you enjoyed this chat.
Speaker 1: We certainly enjoyed this particular interview. I feel like it
Speaker 1: was unlike any interview we've done before. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: like having an audience with a couple of wise and
Speaker 1: stern kings of the cosmos. Yes, so yeah, hopefully we
Speaker 1: didn't come off to starstruck in this one once again.
Speaker 1: If you want to check out the film, it is
Speaker 1: Fireball Visitors from Darker Worlds, a film by Werner Herzag
Speaker 1: and Clive Oppenheimer. It is an Apple original film. It
Speaker 1: debuts November only on Apple TV Plus. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: if you would like to check out other episodes of
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your Mind, you can find us wherever
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Speaker 1: monster or two huge things. As always to our excellent
Speaker 1: audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to
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