Werner Herzog leads workshop in Spain, voice cast for Bong Joon Ho Toon

In an exclusive interview with Variety, German maestro filmmaker Werner Herzog discussed his plans to head the third Film Accelerator program, organized by Barcelona-based La Selva. Herzog and his longtime cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger will be on hand to mentor the 25 directing and 25 cinematography aspirants who will work together to create short films no longer than 10 minutes.

On the first day he gives them a framework on which to base their project. “They don’t come with a pre-formulated plan for their projects,” said Herzog, who revealed he lent his voice to ‘Parasite’ director Bong Joon Ho’s upcoming hand-drawn animated film about deep-sea creatures.

This wouldn’t be the first time for Herzog, who has lent his distinguished gravelly voice to many other roles in the past, most notably in episodes of Adult Swim’s “The Simpsons,” “The Boondocks” and “Rick and Morty.” “Metalocalypse.”

The immersive accelerator will take place from September 21 to October 1 on the island of La Palma, one of Spain’s remote Canary Islands, where a volcanic eruption took place three years ago. Herzog and the workshop students will honor the resilience of the residents of the island of La Palma, who endured 84 days of devastation by the Cumbre Vieja volcano.

He cites a similar workshop he held in the Peruvian rainforest in 2018, where he mentored students from multiple countries. “In the first minute of the first meeting, I instructed them to make a film in the context of ‘fever dreams in the jungle’,” he said, adding that he helped them find locations and provided them with a video file of hundreds of local actors to choose from.

The participants are free to choose any format, whether it is fiction, a documentary or even a poem or essay, he pointed out. “They will have to start filming and then edit on their own laptops,” he said, adding that this workshop is different from the previous ones because they pair a DP with a director to make short films together, 25 in total. “They will have to deliver in a maximum of nine days as we will look at them all on the tenth^e day,” he noted.

“It is not for amateurs, we have selected people who have had a shot at some short films before,” he emphasized. From these projects, about 10 to 12 of the best pieces will be selected for a showcase. “We showed the latest crop at the Locarno Film Festival, where some were even better than the films shortlisted for the Oscars,” he said.

Always keen to pass on what he’s learned, he founded his own Rogue Film School, which “teaches you how to pick security locks and forge documents like shooting permits” and has written a 550-page guide to the ins and outs of making of guerrilla films.

Herzog is also featured on the award-winning online education site MasterClass, where his filmmaking course offers “six hours of relentless instruction” that covers storytelling, cinematography, location scouting, self-financing, documentary interview techniques, etc.

At 81 years old, the prolific filmmaker behind such seminal classics as “Fitzcarraldo,” “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” and “Grizzly Man” has no plans to slow down. He has just completed his documentary ‘Theatre of Thought’ and is in pre-production for another documentary he plans to shoot in May and will shoot again early next year. He has published three books in a year and a half and is currently writing another book.

Herzog claims that in his decades-long career he has written all of his screenplays with the exception of two, which he has still significantly adapted. “I work quickly. Normally it doesn’t take me more than a week to write a screenplay. It’s like copying what I can already imagine on the screen,” he said. Variety.

The methodology behind the Film Accelerator was first initiated by the late Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami (“Through the Olive Trees”) and further developed by the Argentinian Lucrecia Martel (“La Ciénaga”, “Zama”) and Herzog himself. Each edition examines the connection between the teacher’s cinematic oeuvre and its interaction with space, context, population and culture.