Werner Herzog travels to Fort Gettunkirchen to investigate the mysterious death of local factory worker Dorem Clery in Piotr Winiewicz’s feature film debut About the hero. Vicky Krieps also stars, as does Stephen Fry. “But our narrator Herzog is not who he seems, and the film is not what we expect…” synopsis warns. after all, “About the hero is an adaptation of a script written by an artificial intelligence trained on the subject of Herzog’s work. The fictional narrative it generates is ironically self-reflexive, intertwined with a series of interviews with artists, philosophers and scientists, reflecting on notions of originality, authenticity, immortality and soul in the age of artificial intelligence.
The film is an exploration of Herzog’s past comments about the role of technology in filmmaking: “In 4,500 years, computers won’t be able to make movies as good as mine.”
About the hero“The Movie,” co-produced by Tambo Film, Pressman Film and artificial intelligence company Kaspar, is being sold by Film Constellation at a time when artificial intelligence has become a hot topic in Hollywood and beyond. The film will have its world premiere on Friday as the opening film of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), which runs from November 14 to 24.
Artist and filmmaker Winiewicz interviewed THRGeorg Szalai talks about the film’s long creative process, Herzog’s character, what his experience with film and technology taught him about artificial intelligence, and what his next steps might be.
How did you come up with the idea for this film? Are you interested in technology?
I don’t know much about this technology, but I find it very interesting. The starting point for me was when Google launched Google Compose, which was the autocomplete feature that I learned from you. I think 60% of my emails are written from it. The funny thing is, at some point I realized that no one questioned this. We just take it for granted. So later on I wanted to do something with technology more and more. You see, Werner said no machine in 4,500 years could make a movie as good as mine. I wonder what the world will be like in 4500 years.
But those are just reflections, existential reflections. We have a sense that we are so superior, but at the same time, I also experience that the technology is imitating me and doing it really well. So I have a question: can we reverse this process? So there was this quote from Werner Herzog from the beginning, but it took time. The idea was conceptual, but I knew we needed to focus.
But then it was like: let’s just focus on Werner Herzog, because if we talk about patterns and how those patterns translate, he’s probably the one with the most, broadest filmography of any filmmaker who has a very unique The voice, the very unique accent and the vocabulary. He is a writer and has written many books. So, it makes sense. But just thinking about his quote – absolutely not [taking on the quote as] A challenge. It would be foolish to try to make your first film and possibly go up against one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.
How did you find the AI company and software Kaspar?
The Mystery of Caspar Hauser is one of my favorite Werner Herzog films. This is still true. I’m probably more fascinated by language than technology. This is the language of cinema. But there are also clear connections between language and large language models. But I’m not a programmer myself. I’m lucky that I’ve worked with a producer who is very passionate about technology and has a lot of experience with different experiments. So we decided to develop this project together, but the technology didn’t exist yet. But then we started working with Asborne (Cuthperson, one of the film’s executive producers). He is a machine learning engineer and is responsible for training all models. It was an interesting process because we had to learn each other’s vocabulary – we had to teach him film vocabulary and he had to teach us programming and technical vocabulary. This is the process of learning and dialogue. And then we ended up forming a company to co-produce the film.
This is a difficult and extensive process. It’s not exactly a traditional way of making movies. We received significant research grants and developed different experimental and artistic projects throughout the process, which helped us develop the technology needed for the film. This is a long process. I remember talking to some producers who were worried that the program would turn into a PhD because it sounded like an academic program. Now, six years later, it’s been a long Ph.D. But a lot has happened, technology has evolved, and discussions have changed.
Was there a key tip or input that was crucial in getting Casper to come up with a script?
No prompt can be turned into a script. No: write me a script. This is actually a long process and is being edited. As machine learning engineers train models and try them out, some things fail. A few months later we tried to test it. This isn’t chatting – you just write something and there are tons of words and sentences.[An engineer]showed us this text the next day, and we were like, “Wow, that’s really impressive.” This was 2018, 2019.
The text reads: “This is a movie about a hero who has unexpectedly mundane dreams.” You hear Werner say it not only because the concept of dreams is so present, but it’s also such a great sentence. It turns out there is this waterfall. It generates so much text. There are a lot of theories about what happened to (dead characters) because (artificial intelligence) never repeats itself. So a lot of contradictions arose.
So, then we started editing the script, me and Anna Jules, a real screenwriter. We were basically editing it second by second to make it coherent. In a way, fictional narratives are also expressions of the investigations we undertake to understand what happened there.
Piotr Winiewicz during the filming of The Legend of Heroes Courtesy of Bernd Hermes
Courtesy of Bernd Hermes
As a native German speaker, I immediately thought that Gettukirchenburg was a fictional place. But I have to admit: this movie makes you wonder what’s real and what’s not, and I ended up googling it just to make sure it wasn’t a real town after all…
This is a fascinating part. With current technology, most models such as ChatGPT are fairly predictable. You ask and you get what you want. It’s one way or another. But here, it’s like you never know what’s going to happen. We’ve also been checking to see if those people don’t exist and if those places don’t exist. There’s something original about it, like these strange dreams, more like nightmares. So, it’s been a very interesting process.
Do you use artificial intelligence technology in production or post-production?
I don’t want to spoil it because I kind of like the idea that people don’t know.
From the beginning, we knew we needed to create a coherent visual style because we knew there would be a documentary layer and a fictional layer. So it’s important to have this coherent visual language. The film is intentionally segmented in a way, but there’s music to tie it together and the visual style.
I wanted it to have an artificial feel. But I think it’s interesting how things have changed so much since we started, and even from last year to now. People look at it now and ask: is this generated?
There are some big names in the movie, like Vicki Cripps and Stephen Fry. How did they get involved?
This movie is such a journey, and these things just happen. We interviewed Boris Groys (media theorist, philosopher and art critic), who I consider to be my favorite author. So that’s important to me. Vicky is my favorite actress. We started working with Pressman Films because it was an American co-production. That company made a lot of my favorite movies— american psychopath, wall street, wastelandand Brian DePalma’s film. So it was Sam (Pressman) who introduced me to Vicki. We talked about the project and then we ended up collaborating because I also love design and she was doing this art installation in Los Angeles. So there’s this weird connection. Everyone comes with some kind of curiosity.
There’s a Stephen Fry-like character in the script. But then I actually ended up meeting Stephen in Los Angeles because he actually talked a lot about artificial intelligence and we just spent a lot of time talking about it. So I don’t know how, but it just happened. Just a lot of intuition. I’m really happy that a lot of people believe in me – there are a lot of lovely people. Vicky and I talked a lot because she believed things would happen to her. Then a series of events occurred. It’s a strange web of events. I think the film is also, in a way, a symbolic network of things that people are connected to or not connected to. Maybe that’s why it’s a documentary, because everything is a record of this strange process.
What is Werner Herzog’s role? There’s a scene at the beginning of the movie with his recording that allows you to train an artificial intelligence on his work…
This is really important to me. This is a message from 2018, when we decided to address this issue. We got the audio memo back because his son (who I also know) was working on a movie with him. We got this memo saying this was going to fail and that was a good start. It’s important for us to have a conversation. We met several times: before filming, when we started editing, and most recently when we showed him the film. So it’s like we’ve been having discussions, which is really good because, of course, he’s still skeptical. But he was very generous in sharing his experience and lots of advice with me.
What are some of Werner Herzog’s key techniques?
How important casting is. And don’t spend too much time editing. But it doesn’t work that well because it’s a pretty complicated editing process.
What did you learn about artificial intelligence in filmmaking from making this film?
I learned a lot. As I mentioned, this movie was never a challenge. I also don’t think this movie is a statement, a personal statement. I think this movie is a conversation. It’s about these dualities – on the one hand, we should be skeptical of this technology. The same technology is used not only for fake news, misinformation and the algorithms that create our opinions, but also for wars, conflicts and the arms trade. So the consequences are serious. But the movie also has this duality, and I love the complexity of it. Creatively, we can make a lot of great movies and we have a lot of great filmmakers. But we also make a lot of general stuff. Artificial intelligence and technology are not the problem. The question of who uses these technologies, and who owns or runs them, will be a bigger problem than artificial intelligence. I probably trust pure analytical algorithms more than the (elected) President of the United States.
Piotr Winiewicz during the filming of The Legend of Heroes Courtesy of Bernd Hermes
I have to ask you soon about this sex scene involving a toaster…
There was a lot of discussion before we shot the scene. But it was fun because we wanted to play with clichés. Of course, because those (artificial intelligence) models are biased. They are racist and sexist. The history of film is filled with racism and sexism, so we’re thinking about things like that.
The story of this scene is quite long and I don’t want to spoil it too much. It sounded interesting on paper, but it took us a lot of time. Because this is also a question of whether to direct and how to direct. We discussed questions like: Is it sex or masturbation? Do you make any noise when you masturbate? Who’s filming? Could it be the male gaze? Do we want to personalize it? What can I do to be respectful? I guess it turned out to be just a mix of those discussions.
Do you have any new film projects in the works?
When we watched the film with Werner, he told me: “You have to make a normal movie now. You need to make a movie.
I’m working on a romantic comedy with Pressman Films. It’s a dark piece, but I thought it would be fun to make. It has a writer, so we’re developing it together. But it’s still early days.
I’m also working on a documentary, but I can’t tell you much about it.
