- Hello, welcome to a special Q&A recording
of "Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds,"
one of the 50 official selection titles
at the 45th Toronto International Film Festival.
This film plays as part of TIFF docs,
which is generously sponsored by A&E Indie Films.
My name is Thom Powers
and I'm TIFF's Documentary Programmer,
celebrating my 15th year at the festival.
I'm honored to be here with the film's two directors,
Werner Herzog, coming to us
from Los Angeles, California,
and Clive Oppenheimer outside Cambridge, England.
They were last at the festival together
for their film "Into the Inferno" four years ago.
Thank you to our audience for being part
of TIFF during these unprecedented times.
We are grateful for your support to keep TIFF going
for years to come.
This film is eligible for the People's Choice Award.
You can vote for your favorite films at TIFF.net/vote.
Werner and Clive, thank you for being here.
Like I said, you were at TIFF four years ago
for "Into the Inferno."
Werner, can you start by explaining how you came
to focus on meteors?
- Well, it is a continuation of what we have done before.
So Clive was the father of the project, so to speak.
And I had the feeling when he came up with the idea
that this was fantastic because we haven't seen much
of meteorites anywhere in movies,
well, science fiction movies, but they're kind of silly,
and to take it more seriously and to bring
in mythologies and cultures and science
and lining it all up, it was a wonderful idea.
And I always said,
we have to lift scientific films to a new level
where you have as a kid,
you would be excited and have the joy of seeing this.
And if one kid wants to be a scientist after that,
it would be great.
- Clive, in the last film "Into the Inferno."
You're talking about volcanoes, which is your life's work.
How different was it into meteors
where you don't have the same expertise, I believe?
- Absolutely.
It required a lot more research.
With the "Into the Inferno," I knew all the locations
that we filmed in, many of the people
that we had conversations with on camera
and of course the themes.
So there was very little new research for me to do.
Although meteorites is still a geoscience topic,
which means that I can read the literature and more
or less understand what's going on,
I nevertheless had to read a lot more going
into the very different avenues as well,
the more anthropological side of archeoastronomy,
for example, as well as
the geological side and things like planetary defense.
So it was a really ramifying topic to get
into and very, very fascinating.
- So Werner, you talk about the way the film
weaves together science and mythology.
Often we compartmentalize those two different things.
One is rooted in things you can measure
and one is rooted in oral histories and traditions.
Can you talk about your desire to bring them together?
- Well, I think science and filmmaking has much in common.
We are trying to articulate the invisible,
the things that we cannot comprehend yet.
And we try to articulate it.
This same quest is both in science and in filmmaking
as if there was something dormant in the real world
and inside of ourselves.
And both science and filmmaking can dig it up
and can make it visible.
And of course, what Clive said about science,
that's only part of it.
It's also casting.
You've seen documentaries.
What is overlooked quite often is the quality of casting.
It's like in feature films.
And Clive came up with fantastic people whom we met
and with whom we had our discourse and we jumped
into the unknown.
And to make these people out of nowhere
into somebody whom you really love instantly,
and that's part of what the filmmaking skill is.
And of course, some of the things we couldn't film like
in Mecca, the black stone
which is in the southeastern corner
embedded in the southeastern corner of the Kaaba.
And you're just not allowed
as a non-Muslim to go there.
It's a sacred site.
So of course you stay out,
and we took some footage from a faithful pilgrim
who filmed a moment with his cell phone.
- Clive, can you talk about what you get
out of those conversations you have
from indigenous histories and others
that you're talking to?
- I think one of the very fascinating things
is how deep some of these mythologies are rooted in time.
And quite often we can connect
the geological evidence that we might see written
in the rock record with what has been conveyed
for many, many generations through oral traditions.
We saw this for instance in Australia with some
of the Aboriginal people in communities around
Wolfe Creek impact crater that we talk with.
These stories really resonate
with what we see in the geological record.
And that for me is something that is quite humbling
in a way, but we only discovered scientifically
Wolfe Creek Crater in 1947 I think,
it was seen from the app by some geologists.
But of course it was known to the Aboriginal people
for many, many thousands of years.
- But Clive we should also talk
about you because the way you are so presentable
on camera, that's the great asset that you are
the one who does the conversations and you do
it for example, Aboriginal people
in Australia or on Torres Strait,
the kind of decency within the curiosity in you.
So there is no cultural appropriation.
There is no kind of a dominant white scientist
is asking now somebody from the Aboriginal community.
The way you do it is just fantastic.
And that's what makes the film so warm and lively
and brings in humor.
And you got it also.
So you are the most presentable presenter, you should,
I think if BBC is ever looking for a successor
of David Attenborough, you should be the one.
- Well, you've got your casting tape start, Clive.
- Oh no, it's really everybody who has seen
the film knows it already now.
You have seen him and you know,
that he's absolutely phenomenal.
We need these kind of presenters.
- I mean, I don't think we can ever really escape
our cultural baggage.
And I certainly, it weighs upon me a little
as we do this work, especially in the way that we work,
which is to parachute in for a day or two
for a shoot rather than really live in a community.
So we asked an awful lot of the people
that we have conversations with, and it is
the most engaging part I think of the filmmaking
is to try in a short space of time to really
delve in to what people think
about these topics that we're looking into.
- Werner, I wanna ask you about visualizing meteors
because one of the kind of mysterious things
about meteors is the lack
of being able to see them very easily.
But you came up with lots of different striking
visuals that will stay with me for a long time to come.
Can you talk about that challenge of finding ways
to visualize meteors?
- Yeah, it was a beautiful challenge.
Originally, I was asked by some of the financiers
"Well, we would like to have some real events filmed."
And I said, fine, yes, we'll place a camera
in Antarctica and wait for 800,000 years.
Maybe some big one is streaking by.
And if you plant one,
someone on a mountaintop
in Hawaii islands, let's wait for two million years,
and I think we might be lucky.
So of course it was off the table.
But you see some of these meteorites and they are
almost invisible because they are like dust only.
A jazz musician in the enormity
of people opens a new branch of science and we see them
and now they published a book
which is really beautiful of large photos
of micrometeorites, smaller than a speck of dust.
And all of a sudden in enlargement 3,000 times.
Magnified data. Phenomenally beautiful.
A new form of art, new form of sculptures.
- Werner, do you remember Peter Zeitlinger,
our Director of Photography was very keen
to explain that he could
add some really impressive fireballs to our footage
in post production.
And I mean, it was the same thing with, "Into the Inferno."
I thought the volcanic action was pretty spectacular,
but Peter really insisted that you could make
this so much better.
So that's something that we've always been keen
to push back.
We really want the genuine thing.
We did take a very light-sensitive camera to try
and film a meteor shower
in Australia, but it still produced noisy imagery
that we couldn't use.
- I'm glad that Werner brought up
the Norwegian jazz musician
because that's a striking moment to me in the film.
And I think it exemplifies this idea
of the citizen scientist, that you don't need
a PhD to practice this.
And I wonder if either of you can reflect
on that idea that science is kind of open to everyone
to be a part of.
- Well, it's curiosity.
It's a fundamental deep curiosity
that's in the human race.
And it's a wonderful thing.
And I kept saying to Clive, and I kept saying
to everyone who was involved,
if we have a single child, a single kid that would
be excited enough to decide to become a scientist,
we have done our job well.
And of course it will entice young people.
It's about the movie, the movie's about the joy
and the excitement and the ecstasy of science.
And it's about the joy of filmmaking.
The tone in the filmmaking, the joy of making the film,
for example, in Chicxulub
in the Yucatan Peninsula, really a godforsaken place.
And my commentary says something that normally
you don't see on National Geographic.
It says, this town is so God forsaken, you want to cry.
And then I play a song that was downloaded
on YouTube 250 million times.
And the song alone makes you cry.
So it's a way
of doing films that corresponds
to the joy and the excitement of science.
- Just to chime in on citizen science.
It's true that it can contribute an enormous amount
to pushing the discipline forward or even creating
new disciplines as with these micrometeorites.
I think that it's doubled edge though.
There's also, sometimes it gives an opportunity
to say to the public, you decide your fate, you know,
we won't let the experts advise you,
you make your own minds up
on whether you want to stay on that volcano or not.
It's not our problem.
So there is another side to that coin for me.
- Clive, for those of us who have been watching
Werner's films over the decades, traveling the globe,
many of us must have wondered what it would be like
to travel with Werner Herzog, 'cause he has such
a unique perspective and an ability to find
these incredible characters, and someone who has
traveled with Werner Herzog from Antarctica to many
other continents, can you describe
what that's like when you're in a godforsaken beach resort
in Mexico and the camera goes off?
- Well, there are two sides to it.
There's the professional side,
which is of course we're there with a very
focused mindset on coming away
with the components of the film that we want.
And we go into that very professionally
with our whole team.
But of course there's also a part of travel,
which is dining together
and riding in the vehicle
across the Australian desert together where we have
a lot of fun.
Werner has a very fine singing voice
which one will discover when dining
in Mexican restaurants.
He has a very good rendition of "Bésame mucho" for instance,
and I think Werner's yet undiscovered.
He too could have 250 million hits on YouTube
covering one of these great pieces of music.
- Let me add one thing about Australia.
You see, I think we had one or maybe two tents
out there in the desert.
And now came the question how our cameras were
put together and it was very sensitive to place,
and we put them together, and all the sound equipment.
And I said the cameras should sleep in the tent.
We should sleep outside in the sand,
which I think pretty much everyone then did.
So the equipment is more important
than us being in a tent.
- (laughs) Oh, well, that speaks to the quality of images
that you brought back.
As I wind this up,
both of you are world travelers and I wonder
what it's been like for you in these months of lockdown,
under the pandemic, to what it's meant to your work,
what it's meant to your psychology to not be on the move?
Werner and Clive, can I ask you to reflect on that?
- Well, for me,
I had to cancel two theatrical premieres of two films,
recent films, and I had to cancel a workshop
in the jungle in Columbia, in there myself.
So it's okay.
You have to live with it and you have be disciplined.
Otherwise I am very lively working in writing.
I do prose text and I write poetry.
So my days are filled.
- Clive, I mean, your work as a volcanologist,
volcanoes don't stop because of a lockdown.
What does that mean for your work?
- It's postponed a lot of plans, canceled plans,
workshops, field work.
I should have been in North Korea
over the summer and also had a project
in Chukotka in the far east of Russia.
It's been a great disappointment not to travel
with the film.
I would have loved to do that in person.
I know Werner is a bit more jaded about festivals.
For me, it's still a huge amount of fun and part
of the reward of filmmaking.
But on the other hand, I had colleagues
who have gotten ill with this disease.
And the impact on me has really been very very trivial.
It inconveniences and personal disappointments,
nothing more than this.
So I hope at some point
it will be possible to resurrect some of our field work.
We'll have to see.
- Well, I thank you both for making the effort
to have this connection with us across the airwaves
in lieu of being together in Toronto.
It's been wonderful to have you as a guest in the past
in Toronto, and we hope that can happen again sometime
in the future.
- Yeah- - We're working on a trilogy.
- We should connect back to the real audiences
and really have the laughter of people shoulder
to shoulder pack in your theaters.
So that's what's gonna come back soon.
- All right. Thank you both again.
- Thank you. - Thank you, Thom.