In Werner Herzog’s films, the main characters tend to be ambitious explorers who find themselves crashing in spectacular failure. Aguirre, the Wrath of God follows a 16th-century conquistador who sets out to find El Dorado, only to end up on a raft, demented and alone, adrift on a stagnant river. In the documentary Grizzly Man, Timothy Treadwell becomes so adept at cohabiting with wild grizzly bears that he comes to believe he’s one of them – until he gets eaten.
Now the maverick German director, who has made 52 films over a 44-year career, is launching The Wild Blue Yonder. The movie, which he describes as “science fiction fantasy,” tells the story of two interstellar voyages. The first is undertaken by an alien race fleeing a dying planet with hopes of colonizing Earth, the other by human astronauts who set out to explore the liquid world the aliens left behind.
Instead of spending millions on Spielberg-style effects, Herzog went low tech and high geek. He spliced together documentary footage from NASA and the National Science Foundation’s US Antarctic Program. He created “characters” from documentary-style scenes with actual physicists and astronauts. But this being a Herzog film, the lyrical images are tempered by characteristic pessimism. “The film ends our illusions about intergalactic travel,” Herzog says bluntly. “We will not do it. We cannot manage it. It’s just too far.”
The result isn’t quite documentary, isn’t quite fiction – call it a cine-mashup. Even the director himself, who admits to having seen “very, very few science fiction films,” can barely pin it down. “It’s something else,” he says, placidly sipping a cup of hot tea in the sunny living room of his Laurel Canyon home in Los Angeles. “It just emerged by itself.” Of course, that it emerged from Herzog’s mind means that The Wild Blue Yonder may be the strangest sci-fi film since Stanley Kubrick’s 2001.
It began with a suicide mission. In September 2003, nearly eight years after the unmanned space probe Galileo began surveying Jupiter and its moons, NASA sent final orders: Plunge directly into the depths of the gas giant and vaporize. Herzog was drawn to the grandeur of the spacecraft’s demise, and he started combing through the Galileo program archives at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. There he stumbled across a forgotten 16-mm film from the 1989 space shuttle mission that deployed the probe. Shot by the astronauts themselves, it was hardly Imax material; it mainly depicted the crew going about their repetitive daily routines. But where other filmmakers might have seen grainy zero-g B-roll, Herzog found “poetically charged material.”
About a year later, Herzog watched some video taken by Henry Kaiser, his soundtrack producer on Grizzly Man. Kaiser, who moonlights as a research diver, had shot the footage on an expedition to the Ross Sea, off Antarctica. The mesmerizing images of ethereal jellyfish and swarms of crystalline microorganisms mingling in a cobalt twilight beneath a 20-foot-thick sheet of ice looked like downloads from an extraterrestrial iPod. “I felt, ‘This is not our planet,’” Herzog says.
He doesn’t recall exactly what inspired him to stitch the underwater footage together with NASA’s material, but something clicked. “I saw a film very clearly in front of me,” Herzog says. In his reimagining, the shuttle astronauts are no longer deploying a probe – they’re embarking on a one-way mission to a planet in the distant Andromeda galaxy. And Kaiser’s jellyfish are native not to the Antarctic but to that alien world, with its liquid helium atmosphere and frozen sky. Herzog’s name for this exotic place: the Wild Blue Yonder.
“I knew it would defy all the rules of whatever a major studio might expect from a science fiction film,” Herzog says. He’s not kidding. With its dour, Teutonic chapter headings, languid, utterly actionless plot, and soundtrack that sounds like intergalactic Gregorian chant, The Wild Blue Yonder is about as far from a Matrix-style popcorn flick as you can get. But what Herzog’s film lacks in adrenaline, it makes up in sheer visual rapture.
Take the sequence titled “Mysteries of the Blue Yonder,” in which the explorers finally reach the faraway planet. It opens with a wide shot: A vast, vaulted ice canopy stretches over the horizon as two human silhouettes descend through a glowing portal into the dim indigo void. They fan out weightlessly, their breath echoing like whispers in an empty cathedral. Something approaches – a speck, silently swelling into what looks like a translucent bullet lined with undulating fringes of silk. The creature hovers in close-up, then darts away in a cascade of ice shards; dissonant music fades, then swells as the humans forge farther into the blue-green deep. The raw material may have come from Kaiser’s Antarctic adventure, but with just a few deft cuts and some haunting voice-over, Herzog has conjured a convincing liquid exoplanet. (James Cameron, eat your heart out.)
Herzog certainly has himself convinced – which is part of what makes the movie work. Throughout our conversation, he corrects me if I dare break the spell by mentioning Antarctica: “No, no, it’s not the Antarctic,” he says firmly. “It’s Andromeda.”
While many of Herzog’s genre-bending movies get classified as documentaries, he isn’t known for a Smithsonian-style reverence for the historical record. In fact, the director has always had an ambivalent relationship with facts. During our interview, he seems disappointed when I produce a tape recorder. “The reporters who don’t use tape are always the ones who get the story right in the end,” he says with a twinkle in his eye. His 1971 film Land of Silence and Darkness, about a community of blind and deaf people, includes fabricated “interviews,” while Lessons of Darkness opens with a title card quoting Pascal – but the epigraph is simply made up. “You shouldn’t mix up fact and truth,” Herzog says. “I do not trust facts so much as I trust human ecstasies.”
Still, courtesy of NASA scientists, there are plenty of facts in The Wild Blue Yonder. Roger Diehl and Ted Sweetser, both engineers at the Jet Propulsion Lab, plot interplanetary course trajectories on a whiteboard; Martin Lo, a JPL mission designer, explains something called “low-energy chaotic transport.” Herzog knows it sounds like malarkey, but this time the science is on his side. “The kind of mathematics he’s talking about sounds like sheer fantasy,” Herzog says. “But the ideas behind it are completely legitimate.”
So how did Herzog get a bunch of NASA geeks to take part in a film that dismisses the idea of space travel? “It was kind of embarrassing for me,” he says. “Here are these astronauts who’ve done these wonderful things. What do I say now?”
Herzog decided to be honest about his skepticism when he went to the Johnson Space Center in Houston to ask for help. Luckily, he found that inside the hyperrational heart of a space cowboy lives the soul of an artist. “He was very direct in telling me what he thought,” says Lo, who recalls their conversations fondly and thinks the finished film is “really beautiful.” But when pressed for what, if any, common ground he has with Herzog, Lo pauses.
“I’m not sure you always have to agree with someone to create a piece of fantasy,” he answers. “If I were very political about this, I would have refused to work with him. But I see this as an artistic process. There’s nothing wrong with his way of doing things.”
The respect is mutual. “There’s an inherent beauty and elegance in what those at the forefront are doing, discovering these new mathematical paradigms,” Herzog says. “Nobody has ever seen this continent – they are the first ones. I envy them.” So envious – and grateful – is Herzog that in the film’s end credits, the very first title card thanks “NASA, for its sense of poetry.”
John Pavlus (xjparker@gmail.com) wrote about virtual talk shows in 14.04. 
credit Jill Greenberg
As a director, Herzog is relentless – and a bit eccentric. For other movies he has hauled a steamboat over a mountain and hypnotized his actors.
credit © 518 Media/Hemispheric Pictures - The Herzog Collection
Oceans apart: For The Wild Blue Yonder, Herzog repurposed NASA film of astronauts on the space shuttle (seen here) and documentary footage shot in Antarctica’s Ross Sea. The movie depicts an expedition to a dying planet in the Andromeda galaxy; the under-water environment represents the liquid helium atmosphere and frozen sky of the crew’s destination.
credit © 518 Media/Hemispheric Pictures - The Herzog Collection
Oceans apart: For The Wild Blue Yonder, Herzog repurposed NASA film of astronauts on the space shuttle and documentary footage shot in Antarctica’s Ross Sea (seen here). The movie depicts an expedition to a dying planet in the Andromeda galaxy; the under-water environment represents the liquid helium atmosphere and frozen sky of the crew’s destination.
credit © 518 Media/Hemispheric Pictures - The Herzog Collection
When they arrive on the imaginary planet called the Wild Blue Yonder, astronauts encounter alien creatures, played by Antarctic jellyfish.
