Werner Herzog: the secret between Los Angeles and “The Wild Blue Yonder”

September 14th, 2009
references

Excerpt from a “Vice Magazine” interview:

Even though you’re not part of the system, would you say that living in Los Angeles makes it easier to deal with the business aspects of filmmaking?

It’s not making anything easier. Filmmaking has always had its complications, but I’m not in the culture of complaint. Los Angeles is just a very exciting city. There’s great excitement, there’s vibrant culture, and there are a lot of things going on here that I wouldn’t relate to filmmaking, but yet they trigger films. For example, I was fascinated by the Galileo space probe, which at the end of an incredible odyssey was sent on a suicide mission into the atmosphere of Jupiter, where it burned into superheated plasma and was gone. Only 30 minutes from where I live there is a mission-control center in Pasadena, and because of this fascination with Galileo I found out that there was a completely unknown NASA archive in downtown Pasadena in a warehouse. I discovered footage of astronauts who filmed on 16-mm celluloid back in 1989, and it is such fantastic footage. In a way it was the backbone of a science-fiction film I made called The Wild Blue Yonder. So you see, the excitements are everywhere, and they don’t have to be connected with Hollywood or production companies.

Tags: city, haunted space, photopia