the mandalorian

Werner Herzog to Jon Favreau: Sorry to This Man

“Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn’t see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival.” —Werner Herzog, Lion King (1994) fan Photo: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

Here is a quote from director Werner Herzog on the jungle of South America:

Of course, there’s a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they — they sing. They just screech in pain. It’s an unfinished country. It’s still prehistorical. The only thing that is lacking is — is the dinosaurs here. It’s like a curse weighing on an entire landscape. And whoever … goes too deep into this has his share of this curse. So we are cursed with what we are doing here. It’s a land that God, if he exists, has — has created in anger. It’s the only land where — where creation is unfinished yet. Taking a close look at — at what’s around us there — there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of … overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle.

And here is a quote from director Werner Herzog on The Jungle Book director Jon Favreau:

I do not know what other films he has made.

You don’t?

No.

If you had told us five years ago that Werner Herzog would play a role in a Jon Favreau–directed Star Wars series, well, we’d eat our shoe. But it’s true, Herzog plays a “mysterious figure” in The Mandalorian, which premieres today on Disney+. His character is credited only as “the Client,” and he sets the plot into action by hiring the Mandalorian himself to bounty-hunt. In an interview with Variety, Herzog explained that it doesn’t actually matter that he hasn’t seen Star Wars, saying: “You shouldn’t feel upset that I haven’t seen the ‘Star Wars’ films; I hardly see any films. I read. I see two, three, maybe four films per year.”

Among those rarefied few films was the original, animated Lion King, which Herzog calls “wonderful.” That being said, he had no idea that Favreau directed a box-office behemoth Lion King adaptation this year, one with uncanny valley, dead-eyed talking animals that make a case for Herzog’s horrors of nature.

So what does Herzog watch when he’s not ignoring the existence of Favreau’s movies? WrestleMania and the Criterion Channel, mostly, but he’s also been into the Kardashians, truly making him the Grizzly Man of television: “As vulgar as they may be, it doesn’t matter that much, but you have to find some sort of orientation. As I always say, the poet must not close his eyes, must not avert them.”

Werner Herzog to Jon Favreau: Sorry to This Man