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When you get to the end of this episode, you're gonna hear a long I don't wanna call it long. You're gonna hear a very good explanation of what this project is and why you want to buy it. Just be prepared for that, Like when you get to the end of the episode, get your credit card out and go to wherever you buy your audiobooks, because you're gonna be like, damn, I'm buying that. So get to the end and I'm gonna tell you a lot about it. I'm gonna just convince you just how good it is.
It's really good. We've been talking about it a long time. This is narrated by me Steven Arnello and Clay Nukem from the Bear Grease podcast, and it is a audio original. It's like an audiobook that you listen to, okay, and it's called Meat Eater's American History The Long Hunters seventeen sixty one to seventeen seventy five. It tells one of the most bloody, hair raising stories of hunting in American history.
It's out now, but listen to the show. Enjoy the show, but know that at the end of the show that you're about to listen to, I'm gonna give you the sales pitch to end all sales pitches, so you can if you're not convinced, you can listen and be convinced, or you can just know that you'll be convinced and buy it now. I don't really care. I just want you to get it and start listening because this is one of the things that I've made that I'm most
proud of. Meet Eater's American History The Long Hunters, available now and explained in greater detail at the end of the show. Is to stay tuned, everybody. I'm very, very excited to announce that I am seated here with the writer and film director Werner Herzog, who's made over sixty films and documentaries, including many I'm sure you heard of, and a bunch of them that you better have seen.
Little Deader Needs to Fly Rescue Dawn, the famous in my circle of people, Grizzly Man, Happy People, cav of Forgotten Dreams, which I believe is your only film that I managed to catch when it released in a theater in New York Cava Forgotten Dreams. His films deal with extremes, with struggle, with absurdity, with madness, with happiness, and many are fused, in my opinion, with a very unique perspective
on nature in the natural world. If you read about Herzog, you'll often find writers describing it his work as man against man, against nature, man versus nature. We'll find out if he describes it that way. I'm guessing he doesn't, as I believe that description would imply that nature is aware of man as an adversary. Mister Herzige, a couple of your own quotes, the universe is monstrously indifferent to
the presence of man. You also once said, I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder. Now, many documentarians who deal with the natural world I find personally seem to reflect the relationship with nature sometimes feels to me as though it's as though it's taught, as though it's something they picked up or
learned from their peers. It's oftentimes political. But our guest here today, I feel that the things he has to say about the natural world and the way that the natural world plays into his movies is wholly original influence me immensely, not just as a writer or TV person, but as a human. I'd say, for me on par with Cormick McCarthy, because both have these immense bodies of work that interplay together as something that is not schizophrenic,
meaning they carry this sort of intellectual trademark. And the last little bit of introduction I'll saying this is a very inside joke. When I'm arguing with production people, which I do in my line of work, I've a lot of times dealt with camera guys producers that want to catch the entirety of a process, and if they can't catch the entirety of a process, they don't want to use it. And I will say to them in shorthand.
I will take a line from Happy People and I will say the nets were set the night before, because there's a scene in Happy People which chronicles the lives of Siberian fur travers and subsistence hunters, and there's a scene that opens where they're just checking a net, and my camera guys would have been like, well, we can't use that. We never saw you set the net, to which I will refer them to Happy People, and I will say to them, the nets were set the night before.
And that's it. Go on with your movie. Go on with your movie. I want to start our conversation talk a little bit about your your childhood, which I was like, like, I said, my avenue to you and your work. It's just been your movies. I've been a fan of your movies for such a long time, and it wasn't I read your new book, which I haven't finished yet. It started a new book. It's every Man for Himself and God against all your life. Yeah, I didn't realize the extent of the poverty that you grew up in.
Well, it's easy to imagine when you grew up at the end of the Second World War and then mostly post war time and you have to imagine a scenario where everybody here in the country, in the United States is very well aware how Ground zero looked at ninety eleven. After nine eleven, complete devastation, but very limited, a very limited area on the island of Manhattan. But you have to imagine a whole country Germany, where seven hundred twenty or so cities were wiped out, the entire cities, some
of them not as completely. For example, Munich, where I was born, was only eighty eighty five percent flattened and destroyed. And it was one of these Allied bombing raids, carpet bombings that hit our neighborhood and everything around destroyed. And I was only two weeks old, fourteen days old, and where we lived was partially destroyed, and my mother picks me up from my cradle, which was covered with about a foot high shards of glass and bricks and debris.
But I was unhurt, And of course you get when your mother, you're naturally are scared. And she fled with my older brother and me into the remotest mountain valley in the Alps in Bavaria.
And your dad had split out on you guys, Your dad wasn't in the picture at this time.
He wasn't in the picture. Well, he was in the war when I was born. I was born nineteen forty two. The war was over nineteen forty five, and when he came back very soon divorced, and my mother was a singing a singing mother and had to raise Then she had another boy, my younger brother, so she had to raise three children, and there was never enough to eat. What I remember very well is starving.
Yeah, you tell a story of a lesson you learned about nagging your mother, You and your brother nagging your mother about how hungry you were, and her saying, if I could take it from my ribs, I would take it from my ribs.
Yeah, but I can't. But I can't, And you shut up boys in me. Of course that that was a serious moment, and it's engraved in my memories. So and and of course it was not only food. We had literally nothing. For example, we don't have didn't have mattresses. My mother stuffed burlap sacks with hay that she made from fern. But when you cut the stem of a fern, it hardens when it dries, it hardens like the tip
of a shark. Yes, she cut it with a side and it you would feel it at night when you shifted around, all of a sudden you were on two pencils that were stings stinging you. And and fern also hardens. It's not like hay more fluffy. It becomes almost like cementing. You have this little dents and I had to navigate the dents in my mattress. So my entire childhood, I never had a flat surface on which I slept. And
we had no running water. You had to go to the well with a bucket and bring in the water in no sewage system, no heating, no toy, no real I mean a toilet, but an outhouse which was adjacent to this little to this little house where we grew up.
And you talk about eating a someone killing a crow or a raven. Yes, yes, and you're being surprised by the the seeing fat, yeah, fat on a soup broth and being surprised but fat.
I never had seen anything like this until today. This means wealth. For example, the first time I ate a fried egg, what an ache in my life. I must have been about ten or eleven, and it was like an incredible feast. Never ate a chicken for me. Even I see, and even you see, even when you drive by the fast food Kentucky right chicken finger licking good, and it makes an impression on me because chicken means the definitive feast.
You mentioned another detail of your mother getting a loaf of bread with food coupons or I describe them, but then scoring the bread right in seven segments for each day so that she would part she would partition the breadh as the week's ration of bread. And in that passage you mentioned you don't elaborate on it, and I was looking for you to elaborate on it that you said that you have no tolerance for the culture of complaint.
Sure, yeah, yeah, I get it, But explain that to me. Well, I cannot make it the norm. How I grew up, it was an unusual, unusual childhood because it was in the aftermath of a catastrophic war that Germany actually had started, and the catastrophe came from our own people, from our society, from our.
Leader adult Fitland. It was it was really so bad that we knew now what we got. We got, and each one of us had a thin slice of bread per day, and the kind of grooves that my mother carved into the loaf of bread. We knew this was the only thing we have, and of course she would also make some food from dandelion leaves and from syrup from some trees and replacing sugar which we didn't have.
So when I see in our kind of society's western highly technical societies where a lot of food is being thrown away in the United States, I think more than forty percent of food, and I find it outrageous. And I never say anything because it was my experience and I know the value of food. I now there's something which has to be honored, and it in a way, it pains me when I see so much food being thrown away. Because of my experience, it was unusual, but I never I never speak out loud.
But you.
Know, for God's sake, I would be the last one. That's not in my nature. Because you have to determine how you live and whether you live a life of consumerism or whether you are more cautious with wasting resources that we have. And I think when you are in other societies hunters and gatherers, they are more careful and cautious. There's no doubt in my heart, because that's how we've organized as biological creatures. And so how can I say.
I see people in the restaurant complaining to the waiter that this wasn't any good and give it back to the kitchen, and so I don't like this complaint. And it's not only about food, it's about whatever. Our lives are so difficult, and gasoline has become so expensive, into all these things. Yes, deal with it, deal with it in the right way, but don't complain too much.
There was a I got two questions stacked up in my head and when I was going to ask you, and when I thought about asking you and decided not to. But now I'm going to ask you because you alluded to it.
Uh.
My father fought in World War Two serving the European Theater and maintained, I don't want to say we we joke about it now, but maintained a deep suspicion of Germany through to the end. Rightly, So zero for Japan, didn't zero for Japan. Father? Well, no, no, no, I'm not
gonna that. But what was the It's kind of like, outside of a subject matter, I'm like anything, but or that I'm an expert on but what was the How did you perceive when you're thrust in at a young age, when you're thrust into such like this, this devastating situation, and so many of your countrymen are being killed, your cities are being destroyed, You're starving. What is your perception of Germany? Is it gone?
No? No, of course not. I'm still a German citizen.
No, no, I'm saying at that time, how are people feeling about?
You know?
I mean, is this all happening to them? Is it a thing they created? That was your mom's perception?
It's a different response some of them. You still until today you have denious You even have Holocaust denials, which is the most absurd of all, because it's one hundred thousands of times documented survivors are there, the bodies were found, I mean, and and a crime of proportions that the world has never seen in any country throughout the entire history of the human race. Nothing like that has ever happened. So you, of course, you have to ask yourself what
went wrong? What made Germany lapse into a culture from a very solid culture of philosophy, mathematics, writers compose us, you just name it. How does it lapse into a culture of barbarism within very few years. So of course that gave me to think, and of course it has importance always rest something is resonating from from that in my entire existence.
But where the pot? What was your sense of or perhaps this would be a question that you'd have to answer on your mother's behalf. Where what was the sense of blame? There was the blame the wise was the blame on England the US for doing this?
No, I think the overwhelming, the overwhelming part of the population knew it was self inflicted. And you have to also see one strange thing when you speak about Germany. As a child, and even when I was six and eight years old, I didn't know that Germany existed, that there was such a thing like Germany. For me, this
valley in the mountains that was the world. And beyond that, yes, there was Austria because a border was close, and some young men, that bold young men would secretly smug goods from Austria into Germany, and some of them were my childhood heroes. But I did not notice. I had no concent except that there were countries, I mean Austria, tiar role. Yes,
our valley and something beyond it. And my very first memory that I have about I was must have been two and a half years Allied bombers hit the city of Rosenheim, and my mother took us out of bed, and it was in middle of the night ice colt must have been March or April. Still snow out there and very fine. The distance at the end of the valley you could see the entire sky, not burning, not flickering, so a very slow pulsing of red and orange. And
she said, boys, the city of Rosenheim is burning. But the city of Rosenheim is forty miles away that far, an entire city burning, And for me it was a very essential moment because I apparently started to understand there's a world. There's a world out there, not our valley alone and not the waterfall in the ravine behind the home, that there was something out there that was different and dangerous and burning, and there was such a thing like
a war. Of course, we saw American soldiers coming in, but they were very genial with kids and befriended the kids. And for the first time I saw an African American and I was completely enthralled. A huge, big, big guy with a big, resonant voice. A little bit. I could always compare him to Shaquille O'Neill, a very very big man with a very big heart and a wonderful voice, a soft, wonderful voice. That was that was for us.
We only knew it from fairy tales. The moors, oh the more and there was a more and that was completely completely fascinated and I knew, yes, it's true that some foreign countries like Africa and you have the moors, and there are moors in America. How about that.
That particular city that burned that the story you're telling your book demonstrates a little bit of the of a different perspective on collateral damage then you see in warfare today, where in warfare today there's so much public emphasis on not you know, targetings of billions where you're hitting, and you're telling that story that Allied bombers are actually trying to get to a different place entirely, yes, and they can't get over the mountains because of the weather, and they
just find a town.
Ye sure, and they they want to return to the base empty. And it was probably the reason why the city of Rosenheim was destroyed in a gigantic contralt contra flagration. So but only later let me add up one thing with a sky in the distance pulsing in flames. It made me curious, and I knew there was something out I wanted to to understand. I wanted to learn so and that's why I moved out, and that's why I
have been so much around. And it's very strange because people ask me, why can you say that you are a writer. And I have always maintained that my writing will live longer, my prose, my poetry will probably live longer than my films. How do you somehow compare that why it is a conflict between filmmaking. No, it is not. And I have a simple almost like a formula, films on my voyage and writing is home.
Oh that's your Your films are your forays out into the world.
Yeah, writing is home.
Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. That brings it to a question that I was hoping to share with you, to ask about, Like I said, I had, I was unfamiliar with the level of poverty that you that you grew up in.
Oh it doesn't it doesn't matter.
No, no, no, this is no no, no, no.
I don't want to be commiserated for children. It was a wonderfully incredible time and we had to take responsibility. We had to go out foraging. We were the ones who would catch trout in the creek, but since we
had no fishing gear, we caught them by hand. You can catch trout slow movement, and they flee under under stones, They take refuge under under tufts of grass overhanging into into the creek, into the water, and you know where they're hiding, and you have to be very very patient and cautious, and you actually can catch them with their own hands. People think I'm making it. You have probably done it yourself.
When so considering that that that childhood, it made me rethink you're film Happy People. Yes, And within the last day or two, maybe it was even our producer Krinn or Phil the engineer here, I mentioned happy People and he said, you mean that I remember who he said. They said, you mean the people that seem miserable but
they're happy. And I wondered about that or some joke like that, meaning I just remember watching Happy People, which is about Siberian hunter gatherers and fur trappers, and just seeing someone carpeted into mosquitos. I mean it was like they had apparel, like they're apparel was made of mosquitos, you know, but just working away and uh, without complaint, Yeah, without complaint. And that's what I thought about, because because in Happy People, there's no no person meditates on the
meaning of happiness. No person says, well, you know, in spite of appearances, I'm quite happy. There's no matter. It's just the title, it's Happy People. But then it's this portrait of people. And and no, a viewer would not watch Happy People and someone said, what did you watch a movie about, they wouldn't say, I watched the movie about these very happy people.
Yes, and not only happy, they are dignified. They lead a life full of dignity, of awe, of wonder, of nature, of being out there, a life that takes a lot of deep meaning. I envy them. And when I see them in on a on a screen, there's only one wish, old man, I would like to join them.
Oh yeah, I can see that.
And the fact that they do not have let's say, electricity and air condition and mosquito repelling and you just name it. Just their dogs, insane intelligence and rifleent and fishing gear. And they live an incredible life, so fulfilled, so wonderful. And whoever whoever sees this, and I believe those who who actually have ever hunted, they will immediately understand instantly. Yeah I envy them.
Yeah you when you made Grill, I had watched your films, but became interested in your thinking about nature. And you're thinking about animals like I had seen a Geary Wrath of God. I'd seen fitz Crawl though, which are great stories, really enjoyable films, and and and and it sparked a curiosity in me about how you view things. But then
it then the Timothy Treadwell incident happened. So just to give listeners a quick run through Timothy Treadwell, I think he's born in the late fifties, if I'm not mistaken. He had been a he was wanted to be an actor. He had actually was in competition with Woody Harrelson.
Well, that's what he claims.
We do not know excectly.
We can look at him and say he was a failed.
Actor, failed actor.
And then and then deeply, deeply into alcohol and drugs. So he was struggling, struggling to get out of addiction, and in a way that brought him to Alaska because out there in nature and with a task too that he put on his own shoulders to protect the bears against the bad guys, the poachers. Poaches hardly existed all but that was his his fiction under which he lived,
and he got himself straightened out in a way. And when you look at Team, of course he has moments where he unravels and where he's completely falling apart, but moments of deep insight, moments of poetry, moments of beauty, what he's doing, what he's seeing, how he describes it, how he depicts things, a wonderful, wonderful kind of life out there in the wilderness.
In my world at that time, there was this what was getting at about when I became interested in your in how you view these because in my world at that timing, you know, fairly serious outdoorsman, strong Alaska connections. There was just people reveled in his death and it was just how stupid he should have known. What a nutjob.
And I would find myself before you did your film, I would find myself joking like that man would out camp any person I know, and I would say, I would love to see you go spend yeah, thirteen summers, Yes, in an alder thicket on the Alaska Peninsula.
Population.
Ye, go do that and then come tell me how stupid the guy was. You might not agree with what he stood for, you might not agree with his practice, but like there was a tenacity and a sort of outdoor expertise. And then your film came out and it's like I had joked about it and commented on it, but your film came out and was so it was
so like open hearted and fair. Yeah, but the proper condemnation, the proper respect, which just painted a wholly different picture than what you got from the media, which was just nothing but a nut job.
Yeah, well that was a small part of the media. But of course it's also unusual that the filmmaker has an ongoing argument with his protagonist who was already killed by a bear ten months before.
Ten months when you're working on that, you got to it right away.
Yeah, well I never met him. Of course, he was dead when I heard about and his girlfriend was also killed and eaten by the same bear. So it doesn't matter that I'm that I differ from him, and I differ from him in some basic I said, with caught caution in quotes basic philosophy. He was more a little bit towards New Age, which I can't stand, this pseudo philosophical babble. But behind this new agey aspect of wild nature there's something which I call the disneyization of wild nature.
For Treadwill, the bears were wonderful, big hearted, fluffy creatures, and you had to approach them and if possibly even hug them and sing a song to them, and tell them how much you love them. And one of the native Alutic people on Kodiak Island, he says on camera, there was something wrong. You do not love the bear. You should You should rather respect the bear and respect the territory, keep your distance, allow the bear, it's territory, but you do not need to love it. You do
not love the bear, respect it. And that this kind of philosophy that went awry into Walt Disney fluffiness somehow, unfortunately, unfortunately cost him his life and the life of his girlfriend, and a life of two grizzly bears who were shot by park rangers who found them still feasting on the bodies.
How when you heard how did you first hear that story and jump into that project.
Well, it was unusual, because I do things that come with vehemence at me, and it was one of those cases where something stumbles in me into me. I was at a producer's place down in the valley, a few miles away from here only where I'm sitting, and he had helped me very generously with finding partners for a film, and I paid him a visit just to thank him. And at the end we were sitting at a glass table full of messy papers and fedexis and half eaten
lunch salad. And so when I got up, I got up and I had miss I couldn't find my car keys. I swear to God, I was searching for my car keys, not for a movie, and I had placed it on the table and I look at the car key, and he sees it and thinks I spotted some paper and shoves an article to me. It was one of the first magazine articles about Timothy Treadwill, and he says, read this, we are doing a very interesting project. So I took it and my keys went home. And I was sitting
literally here, just at this table next behind you. I was sitting there, and normally I don't read these things. I read it, and you know what, I was instantly back in my car and I rushed down and I said, this is this is big, This is so big I cannot believe it. And I said, how far are you in preparations? We have to start in eight days at the latest. There's hardly any time left. We have to travel.
And then I asked who is directing the film and he said, listen, very very carefully, he said, I'm kind of directing the film, kind of directing these film. So I sensed he didn't know exactly what I was, what he was doing, or how to tack it is. And I looked at him and I said, no, I will direct this movie now. And was kind of surprised and shook my hand and said it would be an honor. And I made the film in that movie, but it
was you see, what was clear, this is big. And there's a storyteller as somebody who makes movies and also a writer. I know this is big.
In that there's the famous scene where you I believe you're at a kitchen table and you put on the headphones and you're able to hear the recording. There was a camera rolling for six months during the attack, and you hear the recording, and your comment does your comment does more to convey the horror of what you're hearing than perhaps hearing it.
Because I say comment, I barely comment.
But you say no one, You say no one should listen to this, Yes, and never let anyone listen to this.
And my comment is even stronger because her camera is over my shoulder. You see only the back on the side of my head, and the camera is on the woman who owns the tape, who has worked with treadwell for long, long years, and she tries to read from my face, but I'm hearing how horribleiss it is, and she starts to cry. She can tell from my face that there's something terrible that I'm hearing. No, And I said to her, please don't ever listen to it. And
I said to her something very stupid. Please you should rather destroy it, which she didn't do. She was smart enough not to do it. But she separated her from the tape and put it in a bank vault, so it's locked away from her. And you see, as a filmmaker, you do not have to to put everything out, even though it was say and it would have sensationalized the film. Everybody wanted me to include it into the film. The distributor, the TV network, the production company, everyone said, And I said,
I will address the tape because it is known. It's out there, but I will make the decision. And after I had heard it, I said, it's not going to be in my film. You have to take me out, but I will resist to be taken out. I'm a formidable opponent. Be careful, i will fight. And this is not going to be in my film because there's such a thing as a dignity and the privacy of an individual's death, and you do not you do not publicize
it and sensationalize it. Period. So and I understood. And another example, because I saw the film two days ago for the first time in many years, The White Diamond. It's about a jungle airship some sort of that maneuvers in the canopies of trees and nearby in in Guyana. Yeah, and there's a waterfall that kaye to a waterfall three times the height of Niagara Fall, not as much volume of water, but a formidable waterfall.
I've been waterfall, you have been.
Wow, h and you have seen the swifts. There are swifts that come down. They come down from from the sky. They form VORTI sees a vortex and then they shoot down and with his speed that is higher than free fall, they swish behind the waterfall, behind this massive curtain. There's a gap, and they have a million and a half a million nests behind there. And I was curious, and we lowered a strong guy in the team, actually also a mountain climber, lowered him on a rope with a
camera and he filmed it. And a few days later, a local tribal leader tells us, Ah, you filmed that here. But you know, for us, in our culture, there's a secret, because they are gigantic snakes and that keep the secrets of our people, that keep the treasures of our hearts, and nobody of us would ever look behind the waterfalls. And very politely he says, could it maybe? Could it be that you just saw it, but you don't publish it. And that very moment I said, it's not going to be published.
Yeah, that little bit of h Yeah, but I guess there's something. There's something bigger, that bigger than filmmaker. There's something bigger that you have to live with than the films put out for people to enjoy.
They're bigger things. And filmmaking, let's face it.
You've done a number, You've done two, You've done three films about people. You've done three films about people who were shot down or survived air crashes. Yeah, and land in the jungle. So you did one about a woman the soul survivor from an air crash.
Yes, and Peru was this the jungle of.
Yeah, a plane was struck by lightning. She was buckled into a row of seats, yes, which maybe acted as a parachute. It's just inexplicable. But she and a number of other people's, a number of other passengers fell ten thousand feet hit the forest.
Cannopy ten thousand. I think it came down, but we can only estimate from five thousand meters altitude fifteen sixteen thousand feet. And she survived it. And probably it's mysterious. I mean, there was a violent thunderstorm at the eastern slopes of the Andes and this updraft may even take
you high up into the sky. It could happen. And she was on a window seat on the three seats her mother in the middle seat, an obese Peruvian man immediately falling asleep snoring on the aisle seat, and she has fragments of memory that she sailed on strapped to the row of seats, and she complained, she said, people say I left the plane. Now the plane left me,
she says. And you know, I was always fascinated by her story because I was booked on that very flight and a huge chain of coincidences took me out of this. And also something as he was had the seat, the empty seats next to her. It's what we call the maple seat effect. If you have the seed of a maple, you have the seat, and then something like a wing and it's virals. It keeps spiraling down to the ground.
So that may have saved There were actually other, probably other survivors, because some people were found sitting and leaning against a tree, so they must have crawled there. And it was a very eerie scene. When the first rescue people arrived, they had actually given up the search after
ten days or eleven days. It was hopeless because the plane had disintegrated in thousands of fragments and rained down, so there was no impact site that it could spot from the air and suitcases had opened in mid air because it was Christmas eve Day and there were presents dangling in the jungle trees and also human intestines is decoration. I mean, it's an eerie must have been a very very surreal sight.
But she survives.
She survived because she knew about the junkie. She had grown up with her she had grown up with her parents at an ecological station, biological station in the jungie. And then you understood what was going on around.
Yeah, and then you did two films about You did a fictional film and a documentary about an individual a US airman I think a Navy pilot and he was shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War. Survives all these just horrific conditions. When he finally gets rescued, they can't the guys at the helicopter pilots that rescue him came tell what he is. They don't know who he is. They find a half eaten snake and his backpack and it's this airman that had been missing for I don't know how many half.
Half yeah, yes, uh.
And thinking about those and then thinking about when you were doing the may when there's there's a documentary made about you, making Fitzgrawal though I remember you saying some of the birds in the jungle and you said the birds here I'm paraphrasing you said, the birds here don't sing, They scream in agony. What what? But you've spent a lot of time in the jungle, yes, I mean, do you what is your how do you feel about the jungle? Where jungle?
I say it also in in some written texts in my book Conquest of the Useless, and at some point I'm saying I love the Chungie yet against my better knowledge. But you see, you cannot take it completely out of context. When Les Blank was filming me, it was right after we had two plane crashes, two small aircraft that brought provisions and extras to us. We have just had our camp for eight hundred people in the jungle burned down.
We ran into a border war between Peru and Ecuador, and my leading character was became so ill that we had to fly him back out to the United States, and his doctors wouldn't allow him to return. Then there was an attack of the tribal group far far up in the mountains that had suffered from the drought. There was a dry stry season in recorded history in memory. And they had wandered down with a drying river in
search apparently of turtle eggs. And they clashed through two three people, local people, much againer, native tribal people who had been fishing for us and looking for turtle eggs. And they shot them in the dark of the night. And the man was shot through his throat and had an also deflected arrow at his shin, and a woman shot by three arrows into her body very close, a cluster of three arrows, and so, and we had to operate them on the kitchen table. They would have died
if he had tried to transport them. And I was with mosquito repellent spraying away the cloud of mosquitoes, and with the other hand a torchlight illuminating the operation. And all this happens on a daily basis. And then Les Blank says, let's speak about the jungle.
So in a way that was the frame of mind, was usual in.
The frame of mind, should be mentioned at least, otherwise it sounds like a crazy statement. It was a very natural statement.
When I describe that movie to people, I describe it probly the way many people do. Where it's the story of a of a rubber baron trying to move a boat from one drainage to the next, and it's just as impossible.
That's a huge steam boat over a mountain.
Yeah, and so what you do in the movie, which sounds funny in this age of special effects and cgi what the movie does the exact and the making of the movie does the exact insane thing that is portrayed as an insane thing in the movie.
No, I do not agree insane. Okay, it is number one. I knew it was doable, and I did it. And it is not insane because it's a big metaphor somehow dormant in us, so big, like let's say don Quixote tackling with his lands the windmills. It's something described, of course by Sevantes and we know, a yeah, that's somehow in us. It's a metaphor or Mobby Dick the Hunt
for the White Whale, things like that. And I knew a ship pulled over a mountain by force of human strength and turnstiles and coiling up ropes, and I would move it over a mountain. It's a big metaphor, not insanity, because it's deep inside of us and it has something that I could articulate and others couldn't. But since I articulated, we have a metaphor, one more of the metaphors that are probably dormant in many of us. Absolutely not insanity, clinically sane, so to speak.
But I did stay in corrected.
And at the time, of course, there was no digital effect. It was done in nineteen eighty one.
You had to do it when you had no not.
Not necessarily because twentieth Century Fox at the time wanted to produce the film, however, only with a miniature plastic replica and what they called in a good Jungle, and they meant the botanic garden in San Diego. And I asked them, gentlemen, what's the bad jungle then? And that it became frosty and I knew I was alone and I had to do it alone. I was also the producer of the film, and so I don't want to miss this work.
What a how do you look at with all the movies you made, sixty over sixty movies and how many books you don know.
It's probably eighty movies by now.
And a dozen books or so.
Yeah, in poetry, and I just finished yet another book. You have to take it seriously that that I am deeply inside convinced that the written stuff, the pros, the poetry, has somewhat direct impact something. And it's not the events you see if you're in my memoirs, if you look after event, event event, Yes, of course a wild events. But it's a style, it's a prose. That's what makes the book on.
I mean, you're a I mean like from me to feel the need to tell you this, but I mean, you're a phenomenal writer. And reading your book, I had said Karen, our producer, I had said, I had kind of given up on literary memoirs in exchange for memoirs autobiographies of people who have a you know, a story to tell, right, and this book but this book is. But this book is a combination of those two things.
I mean, this book is. This book is of a high literary merit, like like you know, as a writer, as a person who loves the language, it's of high literary merit, but also does that heavy lifting of telling a story that really ought to be told, which is how you came to view the world the way you do and produce the work that you did. But I have two last questions. With all that work, how do you gauge which How do you gauge which are the your favorites? Like which are the ones you shouldn't have done?
What are you going to do?
You can stop right away. I love them all, I truly love them all, and they're all good. They're all good.
There's no one you wish you could put ba in the box.
No, for God's sake, never only over made that body. I would allow you to put it away and put it back, but you have to be aware that. Of course, I'm critical as well, and I see mistakes. Yes, I do see mistakes, and I see how I evolved as a kid who made films because I made my first film at the age of nineteen.
I know you made your first phone call at seventeen.
That's true. Yes, nobody, Yes, nobody nowadays believes it. Everybody with a cell phones and applications. So I literally made my first phone call it age seventeen. Yes, all these films, I see mistakes, mistake here, mistake there, but I accept them. I can live with it. And it's the same way like with a mother. You do not ask the mother your five children here, which is your favorite? And you
know who the favorites are. My favorites are all the children that have the worst defects, the child that has squint eyes, the child that has a stutter, the child that has a limp. And I would be as a mother the lioness to help them, defend them, make them proud, shine as great and wonderful as they can shine.
You mentioned a minute ago you said, over my dead body, Uh, let's move on to your dead body for me? What I have no idea? What you'd say to this? What? What do you what do you hope and fear about? What's going to happen to you when you die? Like? What do you are? Do you entertain an idea?
No, I won't be around anymore. I always said, posterity doesn't interest me because I won't be around there anyway.
However, But like what what I mean? Do you do you picture? What is your idea? I don't know, get like I don't want to get like terribly personal in a way, it's on card. But what is your idea of an afterlife?
I think it's highly likely that there's no afterlife.
So your posterity like you don't care about that, and then it's.
I won't be around here. However, I did something which was not in my catalog of behavior and thinking, and my brothers and my wife Lynna convinced me there are ad films, negatives, mixes, tens of thousands of photos, manuscripts, you just name it, documents. It should be somehow preserved. And I started a non profit foundation which is has the oversight of the state of Bavaria, where all the rights of all my films, of everything I've created went
in Bavaria. Well, because because my culture is Bavarian.
I feel like you owe that. I feel like you owe that to the America.
No, because you you do not see where I come from. English was only my fourth or fifth language. I mean, but that's the language. It doesn't matter. It's I would not write a novel like The Twilight World in English. I write it in German and it's translated.
And your your new book was translated.
Sure, yes, very well. The best translator arguably from Germany into English has done it. Michael Hoffmann. It's in German prose.
Yeah, but you but you have zero problem communicating in English?
Yes, but I do not write poetry in English. You can only do it in your in your mother tongue. But let me go back to the to the after life. Yes, my my work will have after life because it's owned now by a foundation, a nonprofit foundation. In other words, if I become impoverished tomorrow, I cannot sell the catalog of my films to Time Turner Classics or you just name it, because I do not own them anymore.
You're protecting yourself and yourself.
No, I don't need protection against myself. I understand that. And I was clearly told, sat down at a table by my wife in She said to me, you think your films are your property? Yes, many of them that I produced and wrote and directed technically legally, they are my property. But you know what, you really do not own them. The people own it. The people, the audiences out there, they own it. They owned the books, they own your pros, they own your poetry, they own your memoirs.
So and I'm completely at ease with that and let let life go on. I won't be around And that's totally absolutely fine, because we are made into all biological life is made like that. I'm totally at ease, I likes.
I got one last question for you, Okay, I haven't gotten to the end of of every Man for Himself and God Against All your new memoir. Do you this one's for from my kids? Do you in the end of that book get into acting in the Mandalorian or is not address in the memoir?
I believe I am addressing it, but briefly. But the end it has a very very strange end that he will never see anywhere in world literature. And it has to do with something the Japanese soldier hero Onoda, who fought the Second World War twenty nine years still after the end of the war in the Jungling in the Philippines, and he had survived one hundred and eleven ambushes and being fired at. And he says to me, because we were discussing time, does present time existent? Is there only
past in future? And present time is a fiction? Which actually is And he says, but sometimes you can see the future, because one day a bullet was fired at him, and the sun very low, and he sees a bullet coming right at him, and with the sun it has this orange copper kind of glow, and he knows it will kill him, and he only had time to rotate his body to the side and whist it whizzed by his body. And I was writing on my last chapter.
I knew it was going to be the last chapter, the absence of images, the absence of the human race on this planet, maybe two hundred thousand years in the future. And I was typing at a window was out there, and all of a sudden, I have this sensation a bullet is coming at me, because I saw in somehow I sense something golden and greenish iridescent came shooting towards me. And I look up, but it was not a bullet. It was a hummingbird. Sometimes they shoot straight like that.
And I looked at my text. In the moment I had reached I thought, I don't I shouldn't write any more word. And the text stops in mid sentence. The book, the entire book stops in mid sentence.
And that's it.
That's it.
Did you get a lot of pushback from an editor?
Now they loved it in audiences those who read it. You will see when you finish reading the memoirs, you will like it, I guess.
So thank you very much for joining us. Check out patience. Well, check out all of his movies, and especially check out every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog, and then do yourself a favor and watch Happy People.
Yes, they're highly advisibly.
Thank you very much. Picture. We've talked about it a lot. We've talked about it, we've promoted it, we've pimped it. It's here, it's finally ready. You can go right now and get it. You can go right now, go to where you buy your audio books, go to where you buy your audio originals, right now, and you can get it. It's done. You can get it right now, beating the table because you can get it. What can you get? You can get me Eater's American History The Long Hunters
seventeen sixty one to seventeen seventy five. This is the beginning of a big project, and this is just the first one. We're doing the first installment of meat Eaters of American History, where we explain in great fun, lively, bloody detail, chunks of American history. The one we're starting with is the Long Hunters. If you wonder what a long hunter is, Daniel Boone was a long hunter. Everybody knows Daniel Boone, like, oh, he's some kind of pioneer or explorer. Well he was,
but he was a long hunter. He was a white tail deer skin hunter. That was his business, that was his craft, that was his trade. The peak of the long hunter era, mean the peak of the white tail deer hide business, as we're going to explain in this thing, runs from about seventeen sixty one to seventeen seventy five. If seventeen seventy five sticks in your head as some a year something happened, that's because it's right before seventeen seventy six. And if you're any kind of American, you
know seventeen seventy six Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War. Okay, there's a reason that this era ends then, and this you will learn this reason and be fascinated by this, Like why would the long hunters who are hunting white tailed deer skins, having all kinds of adventures and getting killed like flies, why would that all of a sudden end with the American Revolution? You will learn when you get meters American History, Long Hunters seventeen sixty one to
seventeen seventy five. It's an audio original. You can't read this, you can only listen to it. It's narrated by me, Steven Ronella, my friend Klay Nukeom and exhaustively researched by me Eater Trivia thirty time champion, whatever the hell he is, Doctor Randall Williams. It's out now now. This is the
definitive telling of the story of the long hunters. It's perfect for you if you are a person who understands or wants to understand how backwoods hunting actually happened in the years before the American Revolution, and how market hunters, these are people who hunt for a living, how they actually went ab out their business of killing, skinning, selling scores or hundreds of deer per season, which if they
were successful, could be more lucrative than farming. Really being a long hunter, if you got lucky and lived, and you got lucky and had a good hunt, you got lucky and all your stuff didn't get stolen by Native Americans, or they wouldn't view it as stolen. They would view it as taking their stuff back from you, which you stole from them. Was more lucrative than farming, is more lucrative than being a builder, more lucrative than all that.
In this we start out that there's a phenomenal opening to the book which is going to hook you like a circle hook. But we quickly get into this question what is a long hunter? Now? Like I said, you know, the most famous one of all Daniel Boone, But he was only one of a generation of backwoodsmen who were hunting white tailed deer for the commercial high market. I was tempted to say one of a generation of Americans.
But as we'll get into, the idea of America hadn't taken shape, and the long hunters did not identify as Americans. We talk about that about some of these long hunters like Daniel Boone becoming these sort of honorary founding fathers, but they were anything but founding fathers of America. These guys participated in hunting expeditions beyond the line of British colonial settlement to supply a booming as will explain, global marketplace for white tailed deer skins you might expect from
the name. They were gone a long time, months or even years at a time on hunting trips, killing hundreds of deer, killing thousands of deer. These adventures include some of the most hair raising and jaw dropping stories of
wilderness living and deer hunting known to man. In this audio original, you're going to hear about buffalo stampedes, bear attacks, people get lost, bodies getting found, long journeys, close calls, in the rise and fall of a forgotten trade, and the skin of a creature that remains America's favorite big game animal. We've always had market hunters. We continue to have market hunters. Okay, keep this in mind as you as you go about getting into this story. We explain
all this. You've got market hunters who hunt for whale oil. Okay, if you've read Moby Dick, you've read about whale oil market hunters. You've got market hunters who hunted for beaver pelts. So if you're familiar with the exploits of say Jim Bridger, he was a market hunter. After beaver pelts, you have market hunters who hunted for buffalo hides and buffalo meat. Buffalo Bill Cody you probably heard of, he was a buffalo meat market hunter. Davy Crockett market hunter, generally black
bear meat market hunter. But these guys were from the era when the thing that the market hunters were after, the money to be made was in deer skins, But our story is not. It's the story of the rise and fall of trade in this particular animal. These guys were engaged in a risky business, and this chapter of history, this broad story that we telling, this includes no shortage of life or death adventures. As you'll see, Daniel Boone is one example. He in this area that we describe
and we described as the first Far West. We'll explain why we call it the first far West, And as you'll learn, the second Far West is the one you think of when you think of far West. When you hear far West, you probably think the American Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains. As we'll explain, that's the second Far West. This is the first Far West, and it was just as harrowing Boone, Daniel Boone, you heard the name. He
probably don't know. He lost two sons, He lost his brother, he lost his brother in law, all in the first Far West. And those are some heart wrenching stories. But even these father son tragedies were not limited to the Boons. Here's a snippet of a story we tell about long hunter named Henry Skaggs, who witnessed his own son's death as well. This happened in the late seventeen seventies when Skaggs was hunting with about twenty long hunters and what
is now Kentucky along the Green River. They're out, they get attacked by Indians. They lose a bunch of their horses. Most of the guys that are with Skags turntail and run. They want to head back to the settlements, but three of them stick it out. It's Henry Skaggs, his son
John In a hunter named Alexander Sinclair. They go over the Cumberland Gap, and if you've heard of the Cumberland Gap, you're gonna at the end of this, when you buy this, listen, you're gonna know more about the Cumberland Gap than anybody you've ever met. They go over to Cumberland Gap and begin their hunt, but it's one of the worst winners on record. Hunters that winter were reporting large numbers of
deer simply frozen to death near Salt Licks. And if you're thinking, what the hell's is salt Lick, you will know more about Salt Licks than anybody you've ever met. When you finish listen to this. So Skaggs keeps hunting out right, all his friends take off and sk Eggs hunts it out and we tell this whole story. His son gets sick soon after that guy Sinclair, who's with him, heads off to run his trap line, never to be seen him again. Henry Skaggs leaves his sick child and
goes to try to find the guy. All he can finds a hole in the ice, and he deduces that the guy must have just fallen through the frozen surface of the Green River drowned. Apparently, the river freezes back up shortly after that, Skags his boy dies, but the ground's so frozen he can't dig a grave, so he stuffs his boy's body into a hollow log and stoppers up the ends. He then returns to a station camp.
If you're like, what in the hell's a station camp, you will learn very well what a station camp is. And then Skags alone now, after losing his partner and his son, spends his whole winter under an overhanging rock near a salt lick and kills whatever animals he can find that approach the lick, and then in the spring makes his way back to the settlements. This is like nothing compared to other hardships you'll encounter in this story. Some of these stories blow away anything you'll hear of
the Rocky Mountains and the mountain men. Here's another one in May seventeen seventy one. This is a story we tell in great detail. Daniel and his brother Squire Boone, are headed back to the settlements after a long hunt, and they need to stop to shoot some game for meat that they're gonna bring home with them. They set up camp and Squire is just heading out to hunt when he sees a lone figure coming in the distance.
He's cautious about it. He doesn't know who it is, but it winds up being a guy named Alexander Neely, who they'd been hunting with and had vanished on a previous long hunt. The guy's all messed up, his clothing's torn, he's starving to death. His arms and legs are all
cut up. Neely explains that he had got separated from a group of hunters and tried to shoot his gun fire off his gun so they could hear him, but he burned up all of his gunpowder, so he had no way of shooting his gun anymore, and never found his hunting partners. Tried to make his way back to the settlement with no gun, so he's got no way of obtaining meat, gets hopelessly lost, and then one day he's resting against a downtree and a dog shows up.
This dog probably belonged to an Indian hunter, and it runs up to greet him, but Neely strangles the dog and roasts it and makes jerky out of it and stores that jerky in a sack made out of the dog's skin. When Squire Boone finds him, he still got some of this dog jerky in the dog skin bag, and Squire Boone comments how it was quite alive with maggots. This is all stuff you're going to hear about. It's
just it's stuff that blows your mind. And I had been my whole life, I've read about the long hunters, and these are all like so many of these stories like that one, for instance, are stories that I had never known until he got into this project. Like this is the level of detail stuff that we drug out through research to bring out in this project. And there's
other stuff that's going to really blow your mind. Because you might have heard a lot about Daniel Boone or heard the term long hunters even but there's stuff you might not know, like even just the intricacy of game laws back then in the first Far West, meaning there was restrictions on the kind of hunting that these backwoods frontiersmen were supposed to do, whether or not people listened
to him or not. There were restrictions passed by lawmakers to try to discourage these colonial backwoodsmen from engaging in the deer skin trade. So this is an era when Daniel Boone these other Euro American hunters are literally having like running gun battles with Native Americans over access to deer herds. Meanwhile there's people trying to impose game laws
on them. There was a law meant to prevent these so called quote disorderly persons from hunting deer quote merely for the sake of skins, which lawmakers pointed out were clandestinely carried out of the colony in order that the hunters could avoid paying taxes, or that legislators in some areas had explicitly banned the practice of shooting or killing any deer just for the skin. You could not kill a deer for the skin while leaving the flesh in the woods to rot. If you did, you were subject
to a fine. And in this project, as you're listening to this, you'll learn like how that could be reconciled with this history of people who are killing hundreds or thousands of deer for the skins. Likewise, to try to discourage over harvest by market hunters. In North Carolina, check this out, they had a law that prohibited you from hunting deer if you didn't have a settled habitation in
the colony. So nowadays, when you hear people complaining about out of state hunters, there were rules like that in place them and we lay these out. I think the reason most stories miss this stuff is because they have an audience that isn't going to understand or they fear they won't understand it anyways. But our audience understands this, and you're gonna be like delighted in these kind of intricacies. You needed to have in certain places. Check this one.
You needed to have five thousand corn hills within the colony in order to be illegal deer hunter, meaning they would at that time they would say like no, no, you gotta have you gotta have you can't be from out of town, you gotta have land. Not only you gotta have land, you have to have five thousand corn hills. And you'll learn what a corn hill was and why
that mattered if you wanted to hunt deer. South Carolina at the time Boone was out being Boone, South Carolina passed the law that made it illegal to hunt more than seven miles from one's own home in an effort to try to restrict these commercial deer hunters who would come through an area and wipe out the deer to get the hides. There were exceptions of these rules, meaning
they still even back then. You've heard of depredation permits now, even back then, pre America, okay, pre Declaration of Independence, there was exemptions for landowners who needed to kill deer to protect their crops, and there were exceptions for people who needed to kill deer for food what they called the necessary subsistence of himself or his family. But even then,
they had provisions. Back then, if you killed a deer for food, you were not allowed to sell or dispose of the skin, because they were trying to deter these frontier settlers, these crazy backwoods wild men from hunting deer for skins. These restrictions combined with declining deer numbers are part of what pushed the long hunters to go further and further west into the farther reaches of this first
far West. Now, what we wanted to do with this book, I'm just giving you a handful of examples of stuff you're going to learn. We're talking. This is hours of material that's like expert researched and very succinctly presented. This is just me talking about this thing. But this thing
is different because it's it's perfect. Okay. What we wanted to do in the book is we wanted to dig into the historical sources so we could tell you who these guys were, like really, who they were, where they came from, what their backgrounds were, what their circumstances were, what pushed them into this this very deadly bloody trade, Why they engaged in the deerskin trade, which means we have to explain what America was then, who Americans were then,
what the globe looked like then, what cattle ranching was, like, why there was a shortage of leather, And telling this we explained all this other stuff like why did they use the rifles they use When you hear of a Kentucky long rifle. What did that mean back then? Now you shoot it because it seems old and antique. They shot them because it was the most sophisticated weapon you could get your hands on. They were shooting state of the art equipment, cutting edge equipment. Why was that the
way it was? How did they camp? Because I mean, remember, no, they didn't have flashlights, they didn't have lighters, they didn't have tents. But they're gone for two years killing deer in the woods. How did they camp? What did they eat? What were their interactions with native people? What were the long hunter's interactions with tribes the Shawnee, the Cherokee, who had a rightful, thousands of years old claim to these hunting grounds. And this becomes a really complicated thing that
will explain. The long Hunters had this idea of this area, against all historical evidence outside of these things that they saw when they were there, they had this idea that it was unclaimed. And we're gonna talk we talk a lot about that. Why did the long hunters think there was on this landscape the first far West? Why did they think it was unclaimed? And why did the Shawnee and Cherokee and other tribes know that in fact, that
was not true. It was quite claimed. They had been hunting it a long time and they were not going to stand by and watch these euro Americans come in and rape and pillage the landscape and deplete it of deer. So we explore this, just like very different perceptions of the American wilderness. To the long hunters, it was wilderness, it was the unknown, it was the dark and dangerous. Right to the Shawnee and Cherokee, it was home. It
was their hunting spot. And this disagreement takes many shapes and forms, and we dig a lot into this so you can understand this interplay of America and Native America on the landscape. How did the long hunters like actually hunt deer? This is something like there are audience is going to want to know because you might just read
a normal history book they hunted deer. But you know about hunting deer, right, You know about bait, you know about blinds, you know what still hunting is, you know what deer drives are, you know what ambush hunting is.
We tell you how they were so effective, like how they hunted deer, and a normal history book might be like they sold the skins, they processed the skins, but you want to know more, we tell you, like like how they skinned them, what they did with those skins, step by step, and we're honest with you when there's parts of that explanation that we don't know, and we
tell you why we don't know what we know. We tell you why, how we know what we know, and we were straight with you when we tell you what's not known. How the skins get the market, and then how did those skins travel across the Atlantic to craftsmen and consumers in Europe and get this? How did piracy pirates?
How did piracy play into this whole thing. It includes a deep dive on the global financial circumstances, the global economic circumstances that drove the deerskin trade at that time, and all of this plays into explaining what would cause a person who could become some humdrum farmer to instead risk fairly certain death, pretty certain death, damn certain trouble and risk to go out and become this thing called
a long hunter. Me Eater's American History The Long Hunters seventeen sixty one to seventeen seventy five, narrated by me Steven Ranella and Clay Newcomb available now wherever you get your books.