“I immediately said, ‘You will fail. It is such a stupid idea. It’s phenomenally, abysmally stupid. I will not take part in it.'” Herzog, in Venice along with his typically idiosyncratic new film Bucking Fastard starring Kate and Rooney Mara, was referring to About A Hero, a AI-generated “pseudo-documentary” from filmmaker Piotr Winiewicz. The film, screened at 2024’s IDFA documentary festival, describes its Herzog-centric narrative as being “based on a script written by an AI trained on Herzog’s collected works.” The actual Herzog, however, has a decidedly different take on the project.
“He wanted me to explain things and have my voice in it,” Herzog told interviewer Ryan Lattanzio. “I said, ‘You are alone. There’s such a thing as free speech, which I respect. So go ahead and fail.’ And it is a failure, period.”
Reviews at the time were perhaps a bit more diplomatic (Variety called its mix of deepfaked talking heads and murder mystery “blithely incoherent“). But the opinion of the flesh-and-blood German filmmaking legend (who’s put his actual thoughts on AI on film in the past) broadened to encompass the entire would-be AI revolution that has seduced at least one of his illustrious colleagues of late.
“It’s so standardized that AI can step in because there’s not real storytelling,” continued Herzog. “It’s mimicry of something that has happened before. And I welcome AI to replace all the idiots who are into nothing but repeating, repeating, repeating until it’s ad nauseam. When it’s ad nauseam, please, please, please let AI step in and do the job.”
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