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Werner Herzog travels to Getunkirchenburg to investigate the death after a local factory worker named Dorem Clery dies under mysterious circumstances in Piotr Winiewicz’s feature film debut About a Hero. Vicky Krieps also stars, and Stephen Fry appears. “But Herzog, our narrator, is not who he seems, and the film is not what we expect…,” a synopsis cautions. After all, “About a Hero is an adaptation of a script written by an AI trained on Herzog’s body of work. The fictional narrative it produced, ironically self-reflective, is intertwined with a series of interviews with artists, philosophers, and scientists reflecting on the notion of originality, authenticity, immortality, and the soul in the age of AI.”
The movie is an exploration of a past Herzog comment about technologies’ role in filmmaking: “A computer will not make a film as good as mine in 4,500 years.”
About a Hero, a production by Tambo Film, Pressman Film, and AI company Kaspar, is being sold by Film Constellation, lands at a time when AI is a big focus topic in Hollywood and beyond. It is getting its world premiere on Friday as the opening film of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), which runs Nov. 14-24.
Artist and filmmaker Winiewicz talked to THR‘s Georg Szalai about the long creative journey of the movie, Herzog’s role, what the experience with the film and technology taught him about AI, and what might be next for him.
How did you come up with the idea for the film? Do you have a big interest in technology?
I didn’t have that much to do with the technology, but I found it quite fascinating. For me, the starting point was when Google introduced Google Compose, which was this auto-complete that was learning from you. And I think it was writing maybe 60 percent of my emails. It was just funny that at some point I realized that nobody even questioned that. We just took it for granted. So then, I wanted to more and more do something with technology. Lo and behold, Werner says that no machine will ever make a film as good as mine in 4,500 years. And I was thinking about how the world will look in 4,500 years.
But those were just reflections, existential reflections. We have this feeling that we’re so superior, but at the same time, I was experiencing that the technology was mimicking who I am and doing a pretty good job. So I had this question: Can we reverse this process? So there was this Werner Herzog quote from the beginning, but it took time. The idea was conceptual but I knew we would need to focus.
But then it was like: let’s just focus on Werner Herzog because if we are talking about patterns and how those patterns translate, he is likely the filmmaker with probably the largest, most extensive filmography, with a very distinct voice, very distinct accent and vocabulary. And he’s a writer and has written loads of books. So, it just made so much sense. But it’s just thinking about his quote – it was definitely not [taking on the quote as] a challenge. It would be stupid to try to make your first film and can go against probably one of the greatest filmmakers.
How did you find the AI company and software Kaspar?
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser was one of my favorite films from Werner Herzog. It still is. I probably had more fascination with language than with technology. It’s the language of cinema. But there is also this clear connection between language and large language models. But I’m not a programmer myself. I was quite lucky that I was already working with one of the producers who was very much into technology and had loads of experience with different experiments. So we decided to develop the project together but this technology was not there yet. But then we started working with Esbern (Kaspersen, who is one of the executive producers on the film). He was a machine learning engineer who is responsible for training all the models. It was a funny process because we had to learn each other’s vocabulary – we had to teach him film vocabulary, and he had to teach us programming and technology vocabulary. So it was this process of learning and dialog. And then we ended up actually starting a company that co-produces the film.
It was a difficult and extensive process. It was not exactly a conventional way of making a film. We got lots of research grants and developed different experiments and artistic projects throughout that helped us to develop the technology that we needed for the film. It was a long process. I remember talking to some producers who were afraid that the project would turn into a PhD because it sounded like an academic project. And now, six years later, it is a long PhD. But lots of things have happened, and the technology has developed, and the discussion has changed.
Is there a key prompt or input that was key to getting Kaspar to come up with a script?
There was not one prompt that turned into a script. It was not: write me a script. It was actually a lengthy process, and it was getting edited. Because the machine learning engineers were training the model and trying things out, some things failed. After some months, we tried to test it. And then it’s not a chat – you just had to write something, and there would be just a waterfall of words and sentences. There was this text that (one of the engineers) showed us the next day, and we were like: “wow, that’s actually impressive.” That was 2018, 2019.
And the text said: “This is a movie about a hero dreaming up surprisingly ordinary dreams.” Not only do you sort of hear Werner because that notion of dreams is so present, but then it’s also just quite a great sentence. There was this waterfall. It produced so much text. And there were all those theories about what happened to the (dead character) because (the AI) never repeats itself. So there was lots of contradiction.
So, then we started working on, editing the script, me and an actual scriptwriter, Anna Juul. We were basically editing it second to second to make it coherent. To some extent, the fictional narrative is also an expression of this investigation that we went through just to find out what’s going on there.
Piotr Winiewicz while shooting ‘About a Hero,’ courtesy of Bernd Hermes
Courtesy of Bernd Hermes
As a native German speaker, I immediately thought Getunkirchenburg was a made-up place. But I must admit: the film makes you wonder so much about what is real and what isn’t that I ended up Googling just to make sure it wasn’t a real town after all…
That was a fascinating part. With technology now, most of the models, such as ChatGPT, are quite predictable. You ask and you get what you want. It’s one way or another. But here it was like you just never knew what was coming. We’ve also been checking if those people don’t exist and those places don’t exist. There was something original about it, like these weird dreams that were more like nightmares. So, it was this quite fun process.
Did you use AI technology in production or post-production?
I don’t want to sort of spoil it, because I kind of like this idea that people don’t know.
From the beginning, we knew that we needed to create a coherent visual style because we knew that there would be documentary layers and fictional layers. So it was really important that it has this coherent visual language. The film is somehow intentionally fragmented, but there is music that binds it and the visual style.
And I wanted it to have an artificial feeling. But I think it’s quite funny that things have changed so much since we started, and even from last year to now. People now watch it and ask: is that generated?
You have some big names in the films, such as Vicky Krieps and Stephen Fry. How did they get involved?
This film was such a journey, and these things just happened. We spoke to (media theorist, philosopher, and art critic) Boris Groys, and I think he is my favorite writer. So that was important to me. Vicky is my favorite actor. We started working with Pressman Film, because it’s an American co-production. And that is a company that did so many films that I love – American Psycho, Wall Street, Badlands, and films by Brian De Palma. So it was Sam (Pressman) who introduced me to Vicky. And we talked about the project, and then we ended up working together because I also like design, and she was doing this art installation in Los Angeles. So there was just this weird connection. And everybody came with some sort of curiosity.
There was a Stephen Fry-like character in the script. But then I actually ended up meeting Stephen in L.A. because he actually talks so much about AI and we just spent so much time talking about it. So I don’t know how, but it all just happened. There were just lots of intuitions. And I’m really glad that a lot of people trusted me – there were so many lovely people. Vicky and I talked a lot because she believes that things happen to her. And there was a chain of events that happened. It was this weird network of events. I think the film is also, to some extent, this symbolic network of things that people connect to or people don’t connect to. Maybe that’s what makes it a documentary because everything was the documentation of this weird process.
What was Werner Herzog’s role? There is a scene early in the film with a recording of him allowing you to train the AI on his works…
That was really important to me. And it is real this audio message from 2018 when we decided that we’d work on this. We got this audio memo back because his son, who I also know, was shooting with him a film. We got this memo where he says it’s gonna fail, which was a great start. It was important for us to be in a dialog. We met a few times: before we were shooting, when we started editing, and most recently when we showed him the film. So it’s like we’ve been in a discussion, which was really nice, because, of course, he remains skeptical. But he was very generous in sharing his experience with me and a lot of tips.
What were some of Werner Herzog’s key tips?
How important the casting is. And don’t spend too much time editing. That didn’t work out that well, because it was a quite complex editing process.
What did you learn about AI in filmmaking from making this movie?
I’ve learned a lot. As I mentioned, the film was never meant to be a challenge. I also don’t think the film is a statement, a personal statement. I think the film is a sort of dialog. It was about these dualities – on one hand, we should be skeptical about this technology. The same technology is used in fake news, misinformation, and algorithms that create our opinions but also in warfare and in conflicts and arms trades. So there are serious consequences. But then there is this duality, and I like that it is complex, to the film. In creativity, we can produce a lot of great films, and we have so many great filmmakers. But we also produce a lot of generic things. AI and technology are not the problem. It’s the people who use the technologies, and the questions of who owns or who runs them, that are going to be a bigger problem than the AI. Purely analytical algorithms, I would probably trust more than the President(-elect) of the United States.
Piotr Winiewicz while shooting ‘About a Hero,’ courtesy of Bernd Hermes
I must quickly ask you about this sex scene involving a toaster…
There was so much discussion before we shot the scene. But it was funny because we wanted to play with the clichés. Because, of course, those (AI) models are biased. They are racist and sexist. And the history of cinema is pretty racist and sexist, so we were thinking about things like that.
It’s quite a long story with this scene, and I don’t want to spoil too much. It sounds funny on paper, but we just took so much time. Because it was also a question of whether I should direct the scene or not and how it should be directed. We discussed things like: is it sex or is it masturbation? Do you make sounds when you masturbate? Who’s shooting it? It it going to be a male gaze? Do we want to make it personal? And how can I do it respectfully? I guess the result is just a mixture of those discussions.
Do you have any new film projects in the works?
When we watched the film with Werner, he told me: “You have to make a normal film now. You need to make a movie movie.”
With Pressman Film, I am working on a romantic comedy. It’s a dark one, but I think there will be lots of fun making it. There is a writer on it, so we’re developing it together. But it’s still quite early.
I’m also working on a documentary, but I can’t tell you much about it.