"My name is Laurens Straub" "I'm the long-time distributor of films by Werner Herzog who is sitting next to me" "We are watching "Where the Green Ants Dream", a film made in 1984" "The last feature film prior to that was "Fitzcarraldo"" "Werner, why did you pursue this topic?" "Maybe I should first mention that the film is dedicated to my mother who died during that time." "She was the person I was most close to" "I grew up with only my mother and my brothers" "This is the prevailing mood that... shaped this film" "These tornados, for example, were filmed in and around Oklahoma" "The cinematographer, Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, spent weeks travelling with people from the research centre for severe storms and chasing tornados." "This was later taken up by Hollywood" "At the time there was a certain mood and I knew I wanted to include pictures that weren't directly connected to the plot" "Similar tornados exist in Australia, of course, in the north, in Darwin, in Derby and in other places" "Shortly before we started shooting here in '84, these places were completely destroyed" "This place, Coober Pedy, is south of the geographical centre of Australia" "What we see here are huge fields where people used to dig for opals." "They are ten to 15 metres deep" "This is one of the main stars, Wandjuk Marika" "This is an original sound and he is playing it himself, the didgeridoo." "He was really good at it" "You can see that nature has always played a big role here" ""Fata Morgana" probably had some influence on how landscape, desolate landscape is viewed" "Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein was the cinematographer again" "But I've ignored the question of how I came to make this film" "I visited Australia a few years before making this film" "I think I was at a festival, and I had read lots of excited newspaper articles in Australia at that time" "A trial had taken place that became quite famous" "It was the first time that Australian Aborigines had sued a mine company" "It was Nabalco, an Australian-Swiss company, a consortium that I think was digging for bauxite, the basic material of aluminium" "They had destroyed sacred aboriginal places in the desert" "The Aborigines lost the case and the judge expressed regret at the end of the trial that the existing law at the time forced him to make a judgement in favour of the Nabalco consortium" "That caused a lot of commotion in Australia" "Educated people started to realise that this was a question regarding their own identity, of how they were dealing with the Aborigines, and of how they were dealing with their history" "After this case several other cases came to court that were won, in large part, by Aborigines" "I happened to be in Australia during this time and got interested in this issue" "I read all the court records of the Nabalco case" "It's a strange situation because the film starts with such a strange calmness" "Usually in Hollywood you'd start with a big action scene, which develops into a story" "It's not very contemporary in the way it was directed and in how the story is told" "I also think it's interesting that it's structured like a documentary" "Would it have been possible to use this topic for a documentary?" "I don't think so." "I have to be careful." ""Structured like a documentary"" "What we have seen so far are highly stylised images" "In the beginning nothing happens" "This is the main actor, Bruce Spence, a very tall, very pleasant man, who I really enjoyed working with" "He was a big star in Australia at the time" "And with him is Colleen Clifford, an actress" "Almost all actors in that film, all the leading actors, are Australian actors" "And as always, I cast some of my friends that happened to show up" "To me it sounds funny to hear the film dubbed in German" " The original language was English?" " Yes" "They only spoke English and that's why the film seems to have a weird, quality to the translation when you see it in German" "That's Ray Barrett who usually plays bad-tempered characters in Australian films" "This is a strange story about a lost dog" "It had nothing to do with the main plot but sometimes, I don't know how it happens, sometimes, stories like that of a lost dog become more important than the beginning of a normal film" "We should say to the listeners that it's great to hear the English version, which is included on the DVD" "I think you need the kind of cockney accent that this bad-tempered guy has" "Yes." "Although here it's an Australian accent, of course" "What I'm interested in is the repetition of some of the imagery" "Here we see all those construction machines, which I believe I have seen in some of your other films" " I can't think which ones" " Desolate construction machines and military equipment in the Algerian desert" " That's in "Fata Morgana"" " Yes, exactly" " The camp could also be in "Stroszek"" " That's right" "It's incredible how many of these themes are repeated and intensified in your work" "Let's look at the American Indians and the Aborigines" "What's the difference between them?" "Well, in both cases it's a clash of civilisations" "It's a clash of completely different cultural concepts" "In "Fitzcarraldo" the Indians, who, strangely enough, help to carry the gigantic ship across the mountain, have a completely different dream" "The Aborigines here have a different dream as well" "For them it's a place where the green ants dream, that needs to be defended against explosions and bulldozers" "The sky looks almost like that of Patagonia" "They actually speak their own language" "The people that we see here, the Aborigines, came from somewhere completely different, over two or three thousand kilometres away from the north of Australia, from a place called Yirrkala" "That's near the Gulf of Carpentaria" "It's to the east of Darwin" "A group of Aborigines with a functioning community was living there" "The Aborigines that you come across in the Australian outback have lost their social structures" "They have huge problems with alcoholism up in Alice Springs, which is roughly the geographical centre of Australia" "When they get their social benefits on Friday, most of the Aborigines are so drunk that by nine o'clock in the morning they are unconscious and have to be collected from the streets" "I saw terrible things there" "But this group was totally intact" "Something like this was hard to find." "It's not easy at all" "Contact with this group had been established a long time ago" "We discussed with them in great detail what we were doing, and to what extent I could invent my own mythology" "The Green Ants mythology does have similarities to aboriginal mythology, but it has been partly invented by me" "How's that?" "There are, for example, certain places where lizards have their dreams" "Dreams and dream time are very complex religious and cultural aboriginal concepts that are hermeticaI and almost inconceivable to us" "These days there are lots of New Age people hanging around who believe they can experience that, too" "Of course, that's bullshit" "This is the first real dramatic moment" "He almost stood in the centre of the explosion" "These are seismic tests where explosions are carried out at specific times and in specific places to record the echo from the earth's interior" "This is how you can tell what the sub-structure consists of" "In this case it's uranium" "But I don't think this is ever clarified" "It's nice to hear their language" "You'll hear it in a moment" "Basically, this is the conflict" "This is, well, the luddite theme, the contradiction between continuity and daily life, or machines and technology." "That's a theme that comes up a lot in your work" "Yes, but here in Australia it was an open and almost daily conflict" "It was nearly part of their daily lives, at least during that time" "And things did become hostile" "That incident with the bulldozer actually happened in another area" "A bulldozer driver just shovelled the Aborigines away" "He really came quite close to them and nearly buried them" "I experienced a similar incident in Holland when filming "Nosferatu"." "A Caterpillar driver drove into our car, into the driving seat of a truck which we wanted to use, to get rid of the 10,000 rats that we were using in the film" "I grabbed an iron bar that was Iying round and started hitting the Caterpillar vehicle" "I scared the driver so much that he actually stopped" "He had already driven his shovel through the window and hurt two of our crew" "So this is a scene that I'm very familiar with!" "I like the way the Aborigines react" "They just dust themselves off and sit back down again" "This is Coober Pedy town." "It's very spread out, just like a Western town" "When we were filming, it was still a settlement without any administration" "There was no police, no administration, no mayor." "Nothing" "Only shortly afterwards, did they get a municipal authority" "There used to be Yugoslavians and Greeks who were digging there" "It was a strange, rough place" "On the left you see an important man, it's the guy who plays Ferguson, Norman Kaye" "He's a very well-known actor in Australia" "In a film by paul Cox, a friend of mine and fellow director, asked me to take on one of the character roles" "Do you remember which film that was?" ""Men of Flowers" and another film, but I can't remember the title" "In both films I starred with Norman Kaye" "That's how we knew each other and I knew that he had class, he was..." "Miliritbi is the name of the case against Nabalco, I think" "This guy is called something else." "He's Wandjuk Marika, and there's his older brother, who is called Roy Marika" "This is a hilarious scene that shows the clash of cultures, with the help of that machine" "And then the liberals come in." "He is brilliantly cast" "We had to invent our own company, called A.S. Mining, because Nabalco approached us with their lawyers and threatened me that if I were to use the name Nabalco, they would sue me immediately" "I didn't think it was worth it" "It didn't matter whether it was Nabalco or another company" "It was part of the daily news then" "At this point, the film develops a certain kind of tone that I don't really like anymore" "There's a kind of righteousness, a sort of moral know-it-all" "Even though I was never involved with the Green Party, it was part of the political climate of the time" "I think the Green Party, when were they founded and became, for example, here in Germany, better known?" "In the '80's" "Since the '80's they've been in parliament" " Before then it was..." " Chaotic and not well structured" "I think that's right, if I'm correct in what I'm saying, but I don't know" "Strangely enough, this righteous tone seeps through and I can't stand it anymore today" "That's the only thing I don't like about the film now" "It's not just about ecological, but also about mythological issues" "Yes, and maybe I should mention that my political position always differed from that of the Green Party" "I've always said that their main goal is to hug whales and to protect certain species of night owls from extinction" "They are also interested in the well-being of lettuce leaves" " This is a..." " Trenchant?" "...trenchant way to put it ...and nobody in the Green Party was concerned about human extinction -  the extinction of peoples, the extinction of cultures and languages" "I always said, "For God's sake, start looking at humans!"" "There were 60 different languages in Australia when I was there, that were becoming extinct because they are only spoken by a few people now" "When the last person of a tribe dies and his language dies with him we experience a huge cultural loss that's irreparable" "It's worse than if a kind of grapevine snail dies because a dam is being built" "And that is and always has been my criticism of the green movement that rightfully demands certain things from our civilisation today" "But by doing that it's missing a big part of the picture" "Maybe we should get back to this aboriginal guy who appears in court and who is dumb, even though he speaks his own language" "He is called dumb because he is the last one who still speaks his language and nobody can translate it anymore" "I like it that both aboriginal spokesmen exude such power" "Yes." "Both men had great authority within their group" "They also had good control over the younger men that you can see here" "They always wanted to go to the liquor store and they demanded that we provide them with a TV on location, for the evenings, a TV and a video recorder" "In the evenings they wanted to watch Kung Fu movies or porn movies" "Otherwise they wouldn't have come along" "Alexander von Humboldt wouldn't have liked this at all, saying that something like this is sacrilege!" "But that's how it is and what we see here is one of the..." "Oh, here in the middle you can see my brother, Lucki Stipetic, as an Australian policeman" "He appears here" "He's very important to me, my younger brother, who has been doing production, finance and other things for me for 30 years" "He's the most important man in my life." "For once, he appears in a film" "I love that moment" "Here are the usual negotiations and promises" "Today you get a percentage of the profit" "That has become the norm today when dealing with land rights issues with Aborigines" "Therefore, some of these communities are much better off financially now" "The basis has improved" "In the 20 years since this film was made noticeable changes have taken place" "One should say that a certain part of the population, intelligent people, university students, morally active people, have achieved many good things" "How does this differ from American politics in terms of issues relating to native reservations?" "Well, you can't just talk about American politics in general" "At the moment, politics under Bush seems to be taking us backwards and questions like that aren't really considered" "For them it's important that somewhere in the arctic new sources of oil can be found and forests can be deforested" "Questions that concern the native people, the North American Indians, are being ignored" "But in terms of the general population there is a great interest in the native Indians" "But this is partly due to sentimental... feelings" "Shamanism and New Age thought, I think it's simply unbearable" "America hasn't found a proper way to deal with this yet" "That's Nick Lathouris, a Greek-Australian who I liked a lot" "Here you get that tone again that I don't..." "I don't like this tone here" "It's nicely put together like a Western" "But maybe it's only the setting that..." "Yes." "There used to be a guy who lived in a... water tank, he had knocked off its metal legs" "This is based on that story" "It's a great scene, but the way it's used here in the film..." " I wouldn't do it again" " I think so, too." "Yes" "I'd do it in a much more subtle way, or else in a much more bizarre way" "Yes" "I don't know" "It's only that particular tone that annoys me today" "What's being said here is a metaphor of a train that is speeding towards a collapsed bridge and in this train you can only walk backward to the last carriage" "One can say that the film is full of great ironic comments about colonisation" "The guy playing the missionary is Tony Llewellyn-Jones" "He's a friend of mine who did a lot of good work in Australian film production" "He also helped us to get permission to shoot" "That wasn't so easy especially since Aborigines were involved as well" "There were certain rules, certain approval procedures" "Of course, you come across those missionaries everywhere in Australia" "I've experienced scenes like that." "It makes you want to run away" "This is on the outskirts of Coober Pedy" "Some of the mine workers actually dug themselves cave dwellings into the sand and the rocks" "In the background you can see that some buildings..." "They'd normally use cave dwellings in order to cool down because it was incredibly hot, it was over 122 degrees in the shade, sometimes" "Oh, yes, that's a guy I'm really fond of who helped out working on the English script, the screenplay" " Bob Ellis" "He plays the supermarket manager" "That is actually a situation that I experienced in a supermarket" "The film is full of these kinds of images" " That's another one you've often used" " Yes" "Directly from "Fata Morgana", I remember that I myself made that crane, that hook, swing because I knew it would look better." "I don't know why" " That's early in the morning" " Yes" "And the music is, I think, "Requiem" by Faure" "Was it quite a logistical challenge to film here?" "It wasn't so difficult, actually." "We could accommodate people in Coober Pedy" "I was staying outside the town, near the opal fields in a little trailer, a little mobile home" "Our set designer, Ulrich Bergfelder, made many things for our accommodation" "He was a very important member of our crew and went on to work on important projects with me later on" "He worked on "Fitzcarraldo", operas and all kinds of projects" "I always liked the way he was able to make a location habitable" "He'd make a motel that you wouldn't dare to enter, suitable for accommodation." "He'd install a kitchen and..." "Very pleasant" "These are questions I always thought about, mathematical stuff" "The science of topology" "How the universe is constructed and how it could be distorted" " It's a theme in "Kasper Hauser"" " Yes, exactly" "These things come up all the time, non-euclidean geometry" "There is also the famous "Klein bottle"" "You have to think of a bottle, it's three dimensional" "There is an inside and an outside" "But the mathematician Klein proved that there is an object that has an inside but no outside" "Then there's the question of how many points you'd need in the universe to be able to get to a stable position" "These questions are studied by cosmologists today" "I have been thinking about these questions for years" "I wouldn't include this today" "But what was just said was one of the most popular phrases of the '80's" "That's true." "But I have to repeat, I was never part of any popular movement" "Elvis mania passed me by" "I wasn't interested in the '68 movement." "In fact, I opposed them" "I wasn't part of the Green Party" "It's still a mystery to me today" "This is a very nice scene." "That radio there... was my radio" "I had it when we filmed "Fitzcarraldo" in the jungle and I played loud music on it" "During bad times I played what we'll hear in a second" "A very lonely man" "I think he often has a toothache." "He feels lonely and has despondent thoughts" "He's a very likable character" "He reminds me a bit of "Homer Faber"" "Maybe, yes." "Now we hear the piece I love so much" "It's Argentina during the World Cup" "It's when they became world champions for the first time and..." "Here" "A great radio announcer." "I've never heard anyone like that" "In Argentina and brazil you often hear things like that" "But he was... the god of all radio announcers" "And I still like listening to those Argentinean goals, to hear him cheering." "That really cheers me up" "That's an insult for..." "Australian Aborigines, "bungs"" "It's just like the Americans calling the Vietnamese "gooks"" "Or "bimbos"." "dreadful" "Another question I asked myself earlier was, what you would have done, if you have ever thought about it, if you didn't live in the 20th or 21 st Century and film didn't exist?" "How would you have employed your talent to explore, with what means?" "Yes, that's a good question" "I think we just saw something I might have done" "I might have become a mathematician and would have done research on..." "non-euclidean spaces" "Or else I would have..." "I surely would have written" "I'm good at that" "I don't know, it's difficult to say" "An astronomer, maybe a mathematician" "He's wearing two watches!" "That's Melbourne" "We organised everything from there" "That scene that could be from "Stroszek"..." " Yes - ... as if he is walking through New York" "I was living with a friend and colleague, paul Cox whose films I had starred in a few times" "There's the weird incident in the lift that I really like" "We need to watch this" "Something really weird will happen" "The lift stops" "How successful was the film?" " The original was in English?" " Yes" "Was it running in other countries?" "Definitely in Australia, I presume?" "It was shown in Australia and here, but it wasn't really successful anywhere" "I always did films that I thought would be successful" "The story is simple, easy to understand, but at the same time profound" " It's also a lively story" " And it's also very humorous" "That's a funny bit with the lift" "I do believe there was something special about the way that this film was received by the audience" "I had made "Fitzcarraldo" prior to this film and before that a few very difficult films" "People were expecting me to break some kind of endurance record, that this will be even more spectacular, that I'd make an even bigger movie, shot in all of Australia" "Or that I'd, I don't know, shoot a film on K2" "That was actually a project that I wanted to do" "At the time I spent some time with Reinhold Messner" "Now the lift is stuck again, isn't it?" "Now they realise that it was only their imagination" "I love this scene, it contains some nice moments" "What I actually wanted to say is that" "I went with Reinhold Messner and Hans Kammerlan to Karakorum" "They had just climbed two mountains in one go that were over 26,000 feet high" "Up one mountain on one route and then down on a different route" "And up the next mountain and down again using a different route" "Nobody had ever done that before" "I had made the documentary "The Dark Glow of the Mountains" with Messner because I wanted to see if I could make a movie on K2" "I had a big story that was strange and difficult to make" "Three days after I got there and had walked past K2 I realised it was impossible, so I cancelled the project" "But word had gotten around" "People knew about it and expected me to shoot a film on top of a mountain" "They expected something quite outrageous" "And then it was a pretty simple film in the Australian desert" "People were disappointed about that" "Yes, but surely it was shown on TV in a number of countries?" "Yes, of course, and strangely enough, it's still around today" "It's shown regularly in the United States and other countries" "And now you can get DVD versions" "I remember I was disappointed as well when it was first released for the same reasons that you just mentioned" "But a few days ago I saw it with pleasure because it's very humorous" " And..." " I like watching it as well!" "But I have one reservation and I've mentioned it several times already" "It's this sort of prevailing tone that I don't like anymore" "It would have been so easy to avoid it, but it's done and I have to live with it" "But it doesn't cause me any sleepless nights" "The interesting thing is that the era is defined by this prevailing tone because if you look at the pictures, you wouldn't necessarily think it's an old film" "That's true but none of my films represent an actual era" "You wouldn't recognise that a film is from the end of the '60's, or the from the beginning of the '80's" "You can't recognise a particular fashion style in my films" "It's impossible." "But in this case, strangely enough, it is possible" "There are several moments where nothing really happens" "I like that" "Yes, this is the main theme now, with this green airplane that we saw on the runway in Melbourne earlier" "It impressed them so much." "This was my invention, of course" "And here they've created a runway" "A big catastrophe is going to happen with that plane" "It's a plane that they really want, for reasons that are still unknown to us at this moment" "But later we find out that this is the big green ant for them, the winged ant which is flying away across the sky" "Yes, that stuck in their mind." "They wanted that plane" "We got some construction vehicles in motion there" "It's impressive" "When I see this, I think that the time you spent in Africa, years ago, influenced you greatly" "Yes, it probably did." "I started travelling quite young" "I was 18 or 19 when I first went to Africa" "Funnily enough, it never went smoothly" "I either got really sick, or something else happened" "I'd been locked up and all kinds of other things" "What they mention here is actually a big problem in a lot of communities" "There are young people sniffing glue and other things, like fumes or alcohol" "Unfortunately that's a problem of many primitive people who have been abruptly thrown into a civilisation that is thousands of years ahead in its technical and organisational development" "None of the primitive people that I know of were able to cope with this" "For example, the Eskimos." "I went to Alaska to shoot something and you can see the same thing" "Or bushmen in the Kalahari desert in the south of Africa" "Wherever you go, it appears that the problems are almost identical" "That means alcoholism, the breakdown of social structures, criminality" "And I don't know what else." "It really is terrible" "It's a kind of cultural unemployment" "No, worse than that, it's a shock you never recover from which causes destruction that I believe is irreparable" "There is a possibility that things will improve a bit in Australia" "But a lot of the Aborigines have been culturally sucked into a civilisation that originated in England" "This is an ant expert" "Yes, that was one of my big problems" "I wanted to have hundreds of thousands of ants that were all facing one direction, like filings" "We were doing tests for months and tried to cool the ants down so that they became practically immobile" "But it was impossible, we couldn't do it" "I think this is Ralph Cotterill" "I like this actor an awful lot" "This scene is quite unusual for this film because the camera is usually fixed on a tripod or a crane" "Here it's suddenly filmed with a hand-held camera" "It's strange, in the middle of the film is a centre that is not still, but full of movement and..." "A great digression" "They're almost getting ecstatic" "I never saw it as a stylistic inconsistency" "It's very strange, that's..." "These calm images are centred around this scene" "It's great how the white guys are getting excited, as opposed to the other people, who are indifferent." " And here we have..." " wonderful!" "...the main star of the film!" " The star of the film" " The airplane" "This runway already existed but we enlarged it" "We wouldn't have had enough money to build a new runway but..." "The guy who just got up in his cowboy hat gets more important from now on" "You can see him on the right, wearing the checked shirt" "That's Gary Williams, who was a very important man during that time in the aboriginal political movement" "I really liked him, he was an intermediary between the white civilisation and the Aborigines" "The plane is handed over." "It's still cheap, for the mining company" "In the background you can see paul Cox, the photographer" "He's a good friend of mine" "I wanted him to be in front of the camera for once" "He's a great photographer, quite apart from the fact that he's also a great director" "While I was staying with paul Cox, I also got to know..." "Bruce Chatwin" "That was almost certainly during the same time, maybe a few weeks earlier." "paul Cox is on your right" "I was living with him and found out through a newspaper that Bruce Chatwin was also in Australia to introduce a new book" "I found out who the publisher was and called them, but Chatwin was doing research for his book, "Songlines", in the Australian outback" "I said that I'd like to meet him and left my phone number." "Shortly afterwards I got a call and was told that if I phoned a number in Port Augusta I'd reach him" "I called him and he said, "Wow, you're the one with the films!"" "He always carried a leather bag with five of six books and one of the books was "Of Walking In Ice", which I'd written" "He was on his way to Sydney and then back to London and I said to him, "Why don't you come to Melbourne instead?"" "And he came." "I asked him what he looked like" "He said, "Like a public school boy" ""I'm blonde and I'm wearing a leather rucksack"" "And we spent 48 hours talking almost non-stop, only interrupted by little naps, telling each other stories." "He told about three times as many as me" "We got on so well from the moment we met" "And that was important, because later I shot the film "Cobra Verde", which is based on a book by him" "When he died he gave me his leather rucksack and said, "You're the one who has to wear it now, you're the one who's walking" ""You are the one who has to own this rucksack"" "I like how he sings" "He claims to be a pilot but it turns out he's just a mechanic who only repairs motorbikes" "By the way, it was quite difficult to get the Australian air force to lend us this plane for us to use it for this film" "We negotiated for a long time, but everything worked out in the end" "Now we see the big court scene" "Yes" "I think it's interesting because the film becomes British all of a sudden" "Well, the Australian judicial system is based on the British one" "The Queen of England is still the head of state... in Australia" "What did you find so interesting about this?" "Maybe it was because the original inspiration for the film was a real court case" "Nabalco versus Miliritbi and others" "On the left you can see michael Edols, a director who made beautiful documentaries about and with Aborigines" "I became friends with him" "He started making a film during that time in Nicaragua called, "Ballad of the Little Soldier"" "Denis Reichle, another great friend of mine was having some problems with the film" "They were stuck and not making any progress, so he asked me to take over from michael Edols" "And I did" "So one film basically led to another" "I think I released two films by michael Edols at the time" "Yes" "They were very unusual" "Yes, I like this" "The whole topic is quite interesting, even the arguments themselves" "I like it that it's filmed like a traditional court room drama and that it actually works" "This expert here, for example, is much more believable than in Hollywood movies" " How long did this scene take you?" " I think two days" " What?" "The whole scene?" " Yes, the whole court room scene" "We weren't allowed to film there any longer because real trials actually took place in that court" "And we didn't have much money" "We had to pay for the extras, the lighting, and all kinds of other things" "It's strange to see them in their suits" "It looks really weird" "Both of them actually spoke very good English" "Roy Marika on the left spoke nine languages... fluently" "Six or seven Aborigine languages, as well as English and some Dutch, I think" "A lot of the Aborigines grow up bilingual because in traditional communities, children grow up in a moitié, the family half that is their mother's side and usually the mother belongs to a different tribe and speaks a different language" "Both of them were fluent in several languages" "I like this moment" "They are all talking about dream time and he doesn't know how to turn off his watch!" "I like these moments that are completely bizarre" "This was actually a very important legal point, the way hearsay is allowed as evidence in trials like this one" "There was a famous case from the Gold Coast, which is Ghana today" "It was Angu versus Attah" "It was a ground-breaking trial that allowed hearsay, for the first time in English judicial history, as evidence" "It's a very complex... judicial question" "Yes, I actually studied that court case" "It's very interesting, he summarises it quite well" "That case wasn't about tribal customs, it was about who of them was allowed to live in the governor's palace" " What I like best are the faces" " Yes" "I think the atmosphere of a court case is portrayed well" "I think so, too." "It's very..." "Besides the fact that the question that's being argued is interesting, you also show an interest in the art of arguing itself" "It's different to the judicial system in the USA, where..." "It's dramatic ...the prosecution and the defence confront each other like in a duel and whoever is the better performer in front of the jury wins." "It's also about personal gains and losses" "Prosecutors against the defence" " It's totally different" " I like this scene a lot" "You really get the feeling that they are taking the matter seriously" "Yes" "That's a bit strange now, it's very legalistic" "I really liked this guy, I don't even remember his name" "He was from a tribe with only 24 speakers left" "In this case, we said that he's the last speaker left" "It's michael Edols again" "I want to get back to what we were talking about earlier" "I was interested in people in Australia who were the last, the only, definitely the sole speakers of their language, the last of their tribe" "I had met a man in Port Augusta, in the south of Australia, who was living in a nursing home" "He was called "the mute one" by the nursing home staff" "He could say three words in English, but that was all" "Nobody could talk to him and he couldn't talk to anybody, because nobody spoke his language anymore" "I'm sure he was over 80 years old and the only thing he was looking for was some kind of contact" "So he always went to the coke vending machine, throwing in one coin after another, and listened to the sound of the falling coins" "When the coke cans fell out of the machine, they made a clunking noise" "But he didn't pick them up, so all cans fell on top of one another" "He listened to those sounds like they were some kind of dialogue" "During the night the carers in the nursing home opened the vending machine, took out all the coins, put the coke cans back and put the coins back into the guy's pocket without him noticing" "This was so that he could start again the next day" "That was so..." "That made such an impression on me, I'll never forget it" "I still see him today, how he was shuffling across the corridor" "I've never seen a person looking so lost" "And I based this guy in the film on him" "And that's the case I'd quote if somebody asked me what I dislike about the Green Party" "During the case, there were objects shown that were taboo and weren't really recordable as evidence in Anglo-Saxon law" "That's a very similar tone to the closing words of the judge in the court case, Nabalco versus Miliritbi" "We got some activists together, they were actually authentic" "And you can see how this movement expressed itself at first" "It's probably more pleasant to watch today than at the time" "The guy on the right is one of the brutes from "Mad Max"" "I've forgotten his name" "It's possibly Ralph Cotterill, but I'm not sure anymore" "I think that's a beautiful shot" "Yes, this became the film poster picture because that image reveals such a contradictory antagonism" "It's quite difficult to translate the broken English of the Aborigines appropriately into German" "I think we managed quite well here." "I haven't heard the film in a while, heard and seen it" "I think the dubbing turned out quite well" "And with this film it was very delicate and difficult in general, I always knew that" "With all your films the original language is a very... important aspect" "That's right." "But, of course, we didn't have a choice" "We had to dub the film because ZDF sponsored and co-produced the film" "So it has to be... translated" "That's Gary Williams" "They have beautiful faces" "The film has a very strange ending" "It's very strange and totally made up" " It really looks like an insect" " Yes" "But only if filmed from a certain angle" "So if this film is some kind of lesson, a learning experience, how did it actually help you to evolve?" "Would you say this film brought about some change in you, which caused you to move on and do further things?" "I think it's wrong to say this was only a practice run" "I've never made a film as a practice run" "This project was as important as "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser" or "Fitzcarraldo", or whatever" "There never were any practice runs, or in-between films, or things I just did on the side." "Definitely not" " It's difficult to say" " It's great how "drunk" the plane is" "Yes, that was difficult to do and the real pilots sitting in the plane took some risks" "It's really difficult to do that" "Because the plane is hard to navigate" "It's hard to get it to wobble, like we see here" " To get back to..." " Yes." "What did this film mean to me?" "After "Fitzcarraldo" I spent about two years licking my wounds and recovering financially, physically and in other ways" "But there were already quite a few projects that were in the pipeline" "For example, in the same year I shot "The Dark Glow of the Mountains" in the Karakorum, and in Nicaragua "Ballad of the Little Soldier"" "I filmed all these projects in quick succession" "One in Australia, one in Nicaragua, one in the Karakorum" "It happened very quickly that all these other projects followed" "My problem was always that I couldn't keep up fast enough with the films I wanted to do" "I still have that same problem" "I've just..." "I've just finished two films in less than three months." "They were two feature length films" "I edited them and did the sound in less than three months" "I'm half finished with another film and I've just published a book of prose called, "The Conquest of Futility"" "And I'm soon to star in a film" "Sometimes there's so much happening that I can't keep up" "I think that was the problem at the time." "I can see clearly that I was putting myself under enormous pressure and I was very relieved to have finished the film" "That topic really moved me and I'm glad I got if off my chest" "But that's how it always was with my films." "There was always something that I needed to get off my chest" "And it's become a film on a screen or you can get the DVD and put it somewhere in your shelf" "Or you can move on" "The end reminds me a bit of "Signs of Life"" "Yes, it's very melancholic" "There's always a Requiem" "And again, it conveys the same kind of mood as when my mother died" "That's part of the film, and such images and the soundtrack are for me a direct translation of, "my mother is gone"" "For example, this is an image that I really like" "It makes you feel left alone, abandoned." "But we've all experienced that" "Everyone will experience that" "People that have been very important die and are gone" "I used those motorbikes because I wanted to create this kind of fog" "And there's a car that's racing across the foreground, to the left" "That's one of our people." "I think Ulrich Bergfelder drove it and nearly crashed it" "That's a dream I had myself" "You wouldn't expect a scene like that in such a film" "It's strange how he stops, but the camera stays fixed on him" "It was obvious the plane would crash because it had hardly any fuel" "So the story is being resolved now" "It's a pretty bleak ending." "The plane is gone and the drilling goes on" "And we are told poems that we don't understand" "In this case, what we just heard will be clarified" "Yes, but I mean for the Aborigines, with their songs" "I've experienced things like that with Aborigines, which are completely incomprehensible to us" "Very ritualised things that are completely removed from us" "I like silent moments like that" "Here it looks good, but it's only possible... with those faces" "It's only possible with that mysterious background and the incomprehension on our part" "We've reached a point where we don't understand anymore how they think, how they see things and how they include mythology in their daily lives" "And how their daily life revolves around it" " That scene looks a bit familiar" " Yes" "I never actually thought about it but the atmosphere is familiar" "Do you sometimes think about these images and what they mean to you?" "I can't really answer that in this case" "I was deeply fascinated by these images and I knew they had to be part of it" "I can't really explain today, 20 years later what this image means" "But it's perfectly in tune with the rest of the film" "It's very blurred and strange, and not really comprehensible" "But at the same time, very real and very dreamlike" "It's the most amazing thing and I haven't seen anything like it since" "Passarela was the captain" "And Kempes, Mario Kempes" "They're the ones who scored the goals in those days" "A corner" "It's probably not possible to create a bleaker ending than this!" "Maybe that's part of the reason why this film wasn't more successful" "No film ends this bleakly and cheerlessly" "We've heard from Hollywood again and again that a film should end full of hope, with a victory or a happy ending" "It's more like "ashes to ashes and dust to dust"" "This time the door doesn't slam shut" "This landscape stretched over 50 km" "It's unbelievable, very stylised and strange" "Incomprehensible." "You can actually see holes in the foreground" "In the middle you can see a vertical hole" "The people working in the opal mines just dug those holes and piled up the soil and the sand" "You can see what has been going on there for the last 20 years" "It's a typical last scene, just like in a Western" "I thought we could show a tornado as the last thing" "But then people would say we had reached the letter F and the tornado would have to be called "Fergie", or something like that by the meteorologists" "And that would have been the end, but I changed my mind" "Yes, it's strange" "I have to say, I I've been growing really fond of this film lately" "Yes" "I don't have a problem with it anymore" " OK, Laurens, thanks a lot" " Thank you" "DVD Subtitles by international Broadcast Facilities"