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In outsider visionaries such as Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo or Timothy Treadwell, renegade German director Werner Herzog has created some of cinema’s most memorable monomaniacs – characters singularly obsessed with finding mythical cities made of gold, with building opera houses in the middle of the rainforest, or with befriending wild grizzly bears.
But suggestions that they could be role models for the modern-day neurodiversity movement send this famously fearless film-maker running for the hills. “I don’t like the term neurodivergence and ADHD, or whatever – it sounds like political correctness, which scares me under the table,” Herzog said at the Venice film festival.
The protagonist pair of Bucking Fastard, the new film that Herzog has brought to the Lido, slots right into his gallery of single-minded outsiders. Real-life sisters Kate and Rooney Mara play siblings Jean and Joan Holbrooke, who have separate bodies but speak in unison, dress the same and share the same preoccupations.
First they fall in love with their washed-up heart-throb neighbour (played by Orlando Bloom) and exact revenge when he marries another woman, then they embark on a quixotic quest to dig a tunnel connecting a cave in County Sligo to the Orkneys. Contemporary psychiatrists might detect behaviour consistent with autism or ADHD hyper-focus. Not Herzog.
“I do not relate to all these trendy terms – I just can’t hear it, it dusts out of my ears,” said the Bavaria-born US-based director, speaking in the idiosyncratic, heavily accented English familiar to viewers of documentaries like My Favourite Fiend. “Neurodivergence sounds like there’s some sort of clinical aberration – these sisters are dead centre.”
His first non-documentary feature in 17 years, Bucking Fastard revisits old Herzogian themes but also breaks with them. The film is loosely based on the lives of Freda and Greta Chaplin, an intensely mutually attached pair of twins from York whom the German director met in the 1980s and who coined the spoonerism of the title in a court hearing.
Like the Chaplins, the Holbrookes are ostracised by their family and neighbours, but in the film they also show resilience and find allies and supporters. “What is certainly different [to my earlier films] is that the sisters are not just nice, they’re vengeful”, said Herzog. “They are arsonists, they destroy things.”
The Werner Herzog of social-media parodies is bleakly preoccupied with the cruel chaos inherent in the natural world, telling stories of suicidal penguins, man-eating bears, and birds “who don’t sing but screech in pain”. Yet in Bucking Fastard, the sisters rescue a young fox who, contrary to the warnings of a gang of overzealous hunters, doesn’t infect them with rabies.
“We had in mind to have a baby fox they would warm under their armpits, but we could not find one all over Ireland,” Herzog recalled. “There was an animal dealer who told me, ‘I can get you a little fox, but only under one condition: you must never ask how we got it.’” Herzog declined. “I’m not in this business. You want to dig up a den and bring me a little fox – I’m not into that.”
At 83, could the radical doomsayer of European art-house cinema be discovering his sentimental side? “What I do is lively and creates some inner life, some excitement and some joy in the storytelling,” Herzog said. “I’m not a control freak.”
His taste for pathos, however, remains irrepressible. Bucking Fastard features a sequence shot inside a large karst cave system near Postojna, Slovenia, which Herzog described in similarly reverential tones as the French subterranean landscape in 2010’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams: “It is a landscape of the soul, a landscape of the imagination.”
His old-fashioned way of looking at the world keeps winning him young admirers, he claimed. “A huge amount of audiences that contact me these days are 15, 16, maybe 17 years old,” he said.
Last year, he started his own Instagram account, where he has posted reels of himself barbecuing, doing DIY and unboxing packages. He said he did it at the behest of his youngest son, who told his father he shouldn’t be so isolated from his audience. Since he still doesn’t own a own mobile phone, however, he hasn’t been able to check out the content-creating competition.
“I had a big retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2024, and the audience was all, all, all young people. The curators told me there was a Godard retrospective right before mine, and the people who came to that? They were all Godard’s age. They were all over 80.”
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