Over four decades, Werner Herzog has shot films in the African bush and the Amazon rainforest, the jungles of Thailand and the wilds of Alaska. Yet the oft-honored German director never thought he’d get to Antarctica, much less make a documentary about it. But after applying for and receiving a National Science Foundation grant, he spent six weeks at the South Pole. The result is Encounters at the End of the World, an odd, beautiful look at the people, animals, and ideas one finds on Earth’s coldest continent.

Herzog recently spoke with Pop Omnivore about Antarctica—plus space travel, the end of the world, and goat-riding chimps, among other things.

You’re exploring Antarctica in your new movie, yet you allege that the quest for fame and glory has ruined the spirit of exploration.

Well, we’ve already damaged the dignity of Mount Everest and the South Pole. And there are all these absurd quests nowadays to make it into the Guinness Book of World Records. [I think real] adventure ended with the crazy race for the North and South Pole. I mean, adventure in its original sense—of the medieval knight setting out into the unknown and coming back having changed his perspective, his life—belongs to earlier centuries. It started to die out when men would meet for pistol duels at dawn, and damsels in distress would faint on couches. That was a time when adventure still had some validity. Now it’s over. It’s over. If you want to book an adventure trip to New Guinea, to the “headhunters,” then do that.

You say the divers in Antarctica’s frigid water look “like astronauts floating in space.” What’s the real final frontier—space or Earth’s oceans?

Probably oceans. There are still a lot of unexplored areas out there. Besides, our solar system—and whatever is beyond our solar system—is not reachable for us. No matter what technology is coming up, we won’t reach it. Period.

So you don’t think a Star Wars version of space travel is possible?

No, that’s only in the movies. The next star outside the solar system would take hundreds of thousands of years to reach. It would be 550 generations [till the first humans would arrive on Alpha Centauri]. But those people wouldn’t even know why they set out and who they were—they would be complete freaks, breeding in madness.

So it’s impossible for us. We will not reach it. Period. And it’s beautiful that it remains the fantasy of Star Wars.

Tell me about the “professional dreamers” you met in Antarctica.

Everyone there has an unusual biography. In the galley you find a retired judge who washes dishes. The man who drives the Caterpillar is a philosopher from Bulgaria who speaks profoundly and wonderfully about our planet and our existence here.

What about the animals? In one scene you show a “deranged” penguin that breaks from its flock and makes for the distant inland mountains. What did you think about that?

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of whether there is such a thing as insanity among animals. Why is it—and I posed this question at the beginning of the film—that only humans ride horses? Why is it that such an intellectually highly developed creature as an ape, a chimpanzee ... why does a chimp not straddle a goat and ride off into the sunset? Why is it that certain species of ants keep flocks of plant life as slaves and milk them for droplets of sugar?

Those are unusual questions, but I pose them anyway. I believe that sometimes a question is better than the answer.

Humanity, you say, evolved out of “violent” ocean life, and we see images of single-celled organisms with “borderline intelligence.” Why?

When you take a close look at underwater life, it’s immediately evident there’s a constant and permanent danger out there, and the food chain down there is absolutely relentless. So I have the feeling it must be sheer hell to live in the oceans as one of these creatures, [and that we did well to] crawl out from this terror, onto solid land, to get away from this hell underwater.

The “ecstatic truth” you seek in your films: Did you find it in Antarctica?

What I always try to do is to go beyond the mere facts—to find something deeper, something that illuminates us, that moves us in a state of almost ecstasy, where we step out of our own existence and experience something that’s different from what you normally experience when you watch television. Because I think the facts per se do not constitute truth. That was always the mistake of cinéma vérité.

But here [I shot] images that are beyond what we had experienced [before], of what we had seen in cinema. The underwater footage, for example, is absolutely wonderful. It’s like being in outer space somewhere.

Scientists in your film say that our “presence on this planet seems unsustainable,” that the “end of human life is assured.” Do you agree?

Yes. And it doesn’t make me nervous, either.

Why?

These scientists are looking at the history of biological life on our planet, and it’s been a constant chain of cataclysms and catastrophes. We had the time of the trilobites, and they disappeared. We had the time of the dinosaurs, and they disappeared. And we’ve had a very, very short period for Homo sapiens. It’s quite evident that this is not sustainable, for many, many reasons.

[The end of the world] is not going to come that quickly. But it doesn’t matter whether it comes in 5,000 or 50,000 or 500,000 years. It doesn’t really matter.

What if it happens sooner—like in your lifetime?

Martin Luther, the reformist, gave a great answer when he was asked, “What would you do if tomorrow the world came to an end? And he said, “Today I would plant an apple tree.” My answer is, “Today I am going to make a movie.”

Are we hastening our own demise?

We’re certainly accelerating it. But there are other factors that may be the more important. There are microbes out there that want to finish us off. An asteroid might hit the Earth. And of course we’re wasting too many resources. There are too many human beings. That’s the problem of problems—the sheer number of human beings.

Environmentalists, the green movement: Are they addressing the right things?

Those in the green movement are too [concerned with] certain plants and animal species. No one ever speaks about the disappearance of human cultures and human languages. Within 50 years nearly 90 percent of all spoken languages will be gone forever. That’s the worst concern.

Last question. This film was dedicated to Roger Ebert: Why?

I dearly love the man, because he’s deeply insightful into cinema. And he’s very deeply afflicted by illness: He’s battling cancer, and he’s lost the ability to speak. But he’s still battling on; he’s a soldier. I love the good soldiers of cinema, and he’s one of the very last ones. And I always try to be a good soldier of cinema myself. So I am saluting my dear comrade.

And besides, I got to say: “Roger, here’s a film you can’t write a [bad] review about. It’s dedicated to you, so you aren’t allowed to review it.”

-Jeremy Berlin

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