Werner Herzog, 84, returns with 'Bucking Fastard' at Venice, still chasing impossible dreams

Werner Herzog walked into the Venice Film Festival at eighty-four years old with a new film called "Bucking Fastard," and the title alone—drawn from a courtroom spoonerism uttered by real-life twin sisters decades ago—signals that he remains exactly what he has always been: a director who finds his stories in the margins, the impossible places, the dreams that reasonable people abandon.

The film tells of Jean and Joan Holbrooke, two sisters played by Kate and Rooney Mara, who move and think in perfect synchronization. They share dreams. They love the same man, who does not deserve them. When he rejects them both, they flee to the Irish wilderness and begin digging a tunnel through a mountain, convinced they can excavate their way to the Orkney Islands—a place that exists only in their collective imagination, where true love might actually be possible. The Mara sisters perform with an uncanny coordination, their bodies and voices locked in unison, which is precisely the point. Herzog has spent more than six decades making films about people who refuse to accept the boundaries of the possible, and these two women are his latest incarnation of that obsession.

The film draws loose inspiration from Freda and Greta Chaplin, twin sisters who became tabloid fixtures in 1980s England, but Herzog has transformed their story into something characteristically his own: a meditation on ecstatic dreaming, on the human refusal to accept limitation. He sees the through-line to his own past work immediately. In "Fitzcarraldo," made in 1982, his protagonist dreams of building an opera house in the middle of the Peruvian rainforest, and Herzog's crew actually hauled a 320-ton steamship over a mountain to film it. The sisters digging their tunnel are engaged in the same act of beautiful futility. "It is the dream of an ideal country, which doesn't really exist," Herzog told an interviewer in Venice.

This is the world Herzog has inhabited for over sixty years: active volcanoes, the Sahara, the Arctic Circle, the Peruvian jungle. He has filmed in places where most people would not venture, and he has pushed his collaborators—and himself—to the edge of endurance to get the images he needs. When he made "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" in 1972, the story of a conquistador chasing El Dorado, his star Klaus Kinski nearly abandoned the production. Herzog told him that if he left, the director would follow him and shoot him dead. The threat may have been theatrical; the intensity was not. His documentaries carry the same extremism. In "Grizzly Man," he examined the life of Timothy Treadwell, an animal rights activist who spent years living alongside bears until one of them killed him. In "Little Dieter Needs to Fly," he followed a German-American pilot who survived escape from a Laotian prison camp. For "La Soufriere," he filmed in an abandoned town in Guadeloupe next to a volcano about to erupt, talking to the single resident who refused to leave.

Herzog does not distinguish sharply between fiction and documentary. He admits to inventing scenes for his documentaries and filming real events for his features. For "Rescue Dawn," his 2006 adaptation of the Dieter Dengler story, he had Christian Bale eat live maggots on camera—Herzog demonstrated by eating some himself—and wrestle with a real snake. "Film does not have so much to do with reality as it does with our collective dreams," he said. He thinks of himself not as a director but as a poet, and his aim is what he calls "ecstatic truth," something that moves beyond mere documentation into the realm of vision. The message he wants to send is simple: "Every grown-up man should move a ship over a mountain. Every grown-up woman should dig a tunnel through a mountain range. Just go out and do it." Rooney Mara understood immediately. "Being willing to show up every day and dig a tunnel through a mountain for love—that's not crazy," she said. "Everyone else is crazy for not wanting to do that."

The Venice audience received "Bucking Fastard" warmly, but critics split. Some embraced Herzog's ecstatic weirdness. Most found it confusing, clunky, nonsensical—one reviewer called it a "muddled-up fairytale," playing on the film's garbled title. Herzog himself noted that the film contains humor throughout, though it shifts registers: dark humor, Bavarian humor that even Germans might miss, humor that Americans and Mexicans tend to catch more readily. At eighty-four, he shows no signs of slowing. He launched an Instagram account last year—his younger son manages it, since Herzog still owns no smartphone—and discovered that eighty-five percent of his followers are between fifteen and twenty years old. Young people are finding his films on streaming platforms and recognizing in them something their own generation craves: a singular human being who refuses to compromise, who marches to his own rhythm, who makes people love him for it.

Herzog is already deep in post-production on his next film and working on a Taschen photo book. He has not abandoned his most impossible dream: making a film in space. NASA declined him. A Japanese billionaire planning a lunar mission refused to take him aboard. But Elon Musk, Herzog said, has promised him a seat on a Mars mission if it happens. At eighty-four, with a career spanning more than six decades, Herzog is still reaching for the unreachable, still convinced that the extraordinary is not a luxury but an obligation.