Werner Herzog: Movies Won’t Change the World

Werner Herzog doesn’t work under any illusions. In this Studio Q interview, the filmmaker tells Jian Ghomeshi that “movies don’t change things.” “Even influential documentaries like Inside Job “do not really change the course of our lives.” And that applies to his latest film, Into the Abyss, which takes a Dostoyevskian look at a triple murder committed in Texas. (See trailer below.) Into the Abyss probably won’t change the U.S. penal system, or how the death penalty gets meted out. But that was never the point of the film, and it’s not why Herzog threw himself, body and soul, into what he calls the most intense filmmaking experience of his life, a project that left him feeling each day like he had been “hit by a truck.” The conversation runs 25 minutes. h/t @webacion

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