Werner Herzog has a bit of a wild reputation. He’d like to set the record straight.

“I’m the most organized, the most focused, the most friendly person you will ever see on a set,” the German director says. “Period.” Everything else, he adds, is “the craze of media who want to create a Werner Herzog that is a fiction.”

This is, of course, the man who hauled a 320-ton steamship over a hill in the Peruvian jungle for Fitzcarraldo (1982), and, on the shoot of Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), also in the jungle, threatened to kill his star Klaus Kinski if he walked away from the film [as recounted by Herzog himself in his 1999 documentary My Best Fiend.] This is the man who ate his own shoe after losing a bet to Errol Morris, and who once carried on with a BBC interview after being hit by an air rifle, calling it “not a significant bullet.”

But when Herzog came calling, Kate and Rooney Mara signed up anyway.

The Mara sisters play the leads in Herzog’s Bucking Fastard, as Jean and Joan Holbrooke, Irish sisters who speak, think and move in unison, share the same dreams and love the same man. After their neighbor and former lover Gareth Mulroney (Orlando Bloom) marries someone else, the sisters embark on a campaign of arson, ambush and assorted misdemeanors to win him back, become tabloid fixtures and are assigned a social worker (Domhnall Gleeson) to help them adapt to modern life.

They eventually decamp to Ireland’s West Coast to live with their widowed aunt (Marion O’Dwyer), where they begin chipping away at a cave in a mountain range, convinced the tunnel will lead them to the Orkney Islands, in their minds a mythical place where true love is possible.

The film is loosely inspired by Freda and Greta Chaplin, identical twins from York, in northern England, who spoke in unison and became widely known after a 1981 court case made them tabloid sensations. HanWay Films is handling worldwide sales.

Bucking Fastard premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival Thursday night, drawing a warm six-and-a-half-minute standing ovation for Herzog and his cast.

Sitting down with THR ahead of the premiere, Herzog and the Maras spoke about their synchronized performance, the film’s surprising vein of “Bavarian humor” and Herzog life lessons in “really not giving a shit.”

Why did you both want to work with Werner Herzog?

ROONEY MARA For every reason under the sun. I would have loved to have just been a PA on the set, just to watch him in action. It’s one of the greatest experiences one can have.

KATE MARA I’ve been fascinated by the way Werner makes films ever since I saw one of his documentaries, so to get to work on a film with him has always been a dream. And then to read his script about these sisters and their bond and this love story was incredibly magical.

There are a lot of stories about the extremes you have gone to on films. Did you have any trepidation?

KATE MARA Zero trepidation about that. The scariest thing for us was just: How are we going to do this? How are we going to do an entire film in unison and in sync in that way? But I had zero worries about working with Werner.

WERNER HERZOG I can tell you why: because I’m the most organized, the most focused, the most friendly person you will ever see on a set. Period. Everything you’re hinting at is the craze of media who want to create a Werner Herzog that is a fiction.

KATE MARA It’s passion. To me, that’s one of the most important things you need in a director — passion, and somebody who cares deeply about filmmaking.

Why did you want the two Mara sisters for this dual role?

HERZOG I had a story, and I thought about whether it should be twins. And I found the two sisters, and it was immediately clear this was finally a solution. I wrote the screenplay very quickly, in five days, and we were done with pre-production in five, six weeks and started to film. We had some rehearsal time, the first time in my life, in all of my films, that there was enough money to do rehearsals. We had two weeks. After a week, I said, “Stop this. Meet me in front of my camera. You’re so good. Stop it.”

Speaking and moving simultaneously is central to the performances. How did you find a way to do that as actors?

KATE MARA It felt very much like a song, like a rhythm. Once we figured out what that song was and what the rhythm was — which happened way faster than we thought it would — it just made sense to us. It was an unspoken sort of thing. Rooney and I worked a lot together before working with Werner, trying to find our tricks.

ROONEY MARA We had a voice coach we worked with before Werner, who gave us tips, exercises we did together. We weren’t really sure until we got into rehearsal with Werner. We were like, “What the hell are we doing? What is this?” And then when we started doing it in front of him, he liked it so much. It flowed more naturally than we had anticipated.

HERZOG By the way, we did very few takes. I would shoot two or three takes, and that was normally it. Sometimes a single take for a very long scene. Period. I’m a one-camera guy. I do hardly any coverage. There was no coverage. Two shots, and that was it. Two takes.

KATE MARA We would be done hours early sometimes.

HERZOG We finished at 3 p.m., 3:30 in the afternoon. We could have gone until 5, 6, 7 without overtime, and I said, “Let’s wrap it.” I’m not exaggerating, and the film was done under schedule and under budget.

You’ve compared this film thematically to Fitzcarraldo and Grizzly Man. Where do you see the connection?

HERZOG We shouldn’t overdo the connections. But with Fitzcarraldo, it is evident: There is a great dream about opera in the jungle, and for that the protagonist moves a big ship over a mountain in the jungle. Here in this film, it’s the dream of an ideal country, which doesn’t really exist, the Orkneys, where real love is possible — and you would rather dig a tunnel through a whole mountain range to find this country. Everybody should dig a tunnel. Every grown-up man should move a ship over a mountain. Every grown-up woman should dig a tunnel through a mountain range. It’s very simple: Just go out and do it.

That seems to have been your attitude throughout your career, given that you didn’t have a film education.

HERZOG Yes, but I’m not acting blindly. I know what I’m doing. I know that I’m a poet. I dream big, but I do the doable, and that’s what I try to preach to young filmmakers. Yes, dream big, but please do the doable. Moving a ship over a mountain is doable. Digging a tunnel through a mountain is also doable. Do that.

What surprised you about working with him?

ROONEY MARA The specificity. For some reason I imagined things would be a little bit more wild and freewheeling. I didn’t imagine the precision and specificity with which Werner works.

HERZOG I interrupt and say no. Mid-take.

ROONEY MARA Mid-take. Because you had something specific in mind.

KATE MARA Agreed.

You founded your own Rogue Film School, and you have an audience among very young, up-and-coming filmmakers. Why do you think that is?

HERZOG It’s not film students alone, it’s audiences in general. They are very young. I started an Instagram account — my younger son does it, he knows how — and he tells me 85 percent of those who read it and love it are between 15 and 20 years old. Because my films are now available on the internet, on streaming platforms, all of a sudden, from one day to the next, there are 800,000 people who speak about one film of mine. There’s a film club in, God knows, Missoula, Montana, by 15-year-olds, about my films. The answer is simple: They are just very good, and they discover it.

ROONEY MARA I think it’s also that you are a singular human being. You are yourself. You really don’t give a shit. You march to the beat of your own drum so thoroughly, and people love that because that’s what we all want to do. That’s what we all aspire to do. And so many of us are not doing that.

HERZOG But I’m just a poet.

This is the first time you two have appeared on screen together. Why did it take this long?

KATE MARA It’s very difficult to find two roles that are equally interesting and good in a film, and then also find a director that we both passionately want to work with. We found all those things in this. It was really simple. Nothing came our way before that made sense in all areas. We couldn’t really believe it.

What was it like to perform together as sisters?

ROONEY MARA It was a very surreal experience. Strange, because it’s not like we were in scenes playing off of one another the way you normally would with a scene partner. We were playing the same thing. There’s maybe only one scene, and a few moments other than that, where we’re even looking at each other. We are focused on the same thing. It’s really one performance.

KATE MARA We’re experiencing the other actor that we’re in a scene with together. So it’s impossible to compare it to anything else. We’ve never had an experience like that before. It’s great for codependency.

So you’re jointly forming a single performance rather than doing two separate ones.

KATE MARA It’s as collaborative as you could possibly be.

HERZOG It’s unique. We haven’t seen anything like this in film history.

You are best known for collaborations with male actors — Klaus Kinski, Christian Bale, Nicolas Cage. You’ve had a few leading female roles, but not that many. Was the approach different with these two actresses?

HERZOG With every single one, with every single actor, I speak differently. I act differently. I bring them into the film, make them give the inner life of them onto a screen. There’s no school. And by the way, the greatest with whom I ever worked is the unknown soldier of cinema, Bruno S., who plays a leading part in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and in Stroszek. He’s the deepest, most tragic one with whom I ever worked. All of the others are actors. He was not.

The film is funnier than some might expect.

HERZOG Thank you that you saw it. There’s always humor in my films, and it came across, apparently. Sometimes it’s a dark humor. Sometimes it’s a very Bavarian humor that even Germans wouldn’t understand. Americans easier. Mexicans, yes, they immediately get it.

Will that surprise audiences?

KATE MARA Werner is one of the funniest people. If you know him and his work, or if you watch him speak about anything, he’s got the greatest sense of humor.

ROONEY MARA We had so much fun. I laughed more than I have in years making this film. We had so many fun moments.

Did it live up to the myth of Werner Herzog?

ROONEY MARA It exceeded it.

HERZOG But from the beginning I told them, I have to load an entire film onto these two shoulders, so that’s big. Are you ready for that? And of course they were. I’m a lucky man that they were immediately ready. Yes, we will carry that.

You are often drawn to extreme characters, figures who exist outside of normal social structures. Is that something you see in yourself?

HERZOG They’re not really borderline. Even in Bucking Fastard, I don’t see them as borderline. They make a lot of sense to me. It’s only unusual that they have apparently one dream together, one love for an undeserving man, and they speak in unison. So that’s unusual. But otherwise, they’re the most normal human creatures for me that you can imagine. They do the thing we all should do.

ROONEY MARA I agree. I think everyone else is crazy. Being willing to show up every day and dig a tunnel through a mountain for love — that’s not crazy. Everyone else is crazy for not wanting to do that.

HERZOG Thank you for saying that, because I keep saying I’m the only filmmaker who is clinically sane. All the rest is not really right.

What can the rest of the film business learn from how he works?

ROONEY MARA There’s so much you could learn from Werner. Again, it’s that willingness to show up as yourself and not be swayed by any of the noise. To have that tunnel vision of, this is who I am, and this is what I’m doing, and this is how I do it, and I’m a poet, period.

KATE MARA It’s very inspiring to watch.

HERZOG The work on my set is like open-heart surgery, only in whispers, going straight for the essential and nothing else. That’s it.

KATE MARA You can hear a whisper from a mile away, and he will tell you so. The set is very quiet, which is great.

HERZOG No cell phones, no video playout, one camera, very few takes. I do the slate.

ROONEY MARA And almost no crew. He does the slate. He’s in there, crawling around within the scene. It’s very special.

You’ve shot in the jungle, the desert, the Arctic Circle, and you’re still making films in your 80s. Where do you still want to explore?

HERZOG I have my next film almost finished. I need a week more and my next film will be finished, so I’m way beyond Bucking Fastard. I’m also finishing a book at Taschen, the publishing house, of photos from my films. So I’m still working a lot. I love what I do.

Is the dream still to go to space and make a film there?

ROONEY MARA What? You want to go to space?

HERZOG Yes, I would like to be out there. I have tried. I spoke to NASA, but they didn’t take me. And then there is a Japanese billionaire who is planning a spaceship around the moon, without landing, returning — he refused to take me on board.

ROONEY MARA We should set up an online petition

HERZOG So let’s wait. Let’s wait for the rocket for me alone. I’ll be on board.

KATE MARA If anyone can do it, you can.

HERZOG By the way, Elon Musk promised me that if he goes on a mission to Mars, I would be on board. But God knows when that’s happening, and I am very critical of his idea of colonizing Mars with a million people. That’s a pipe dream. We will have astronauts there, a handful at a time, and they will explore, but we should not colonize. That’s an obscenity. We should rather keep this planet inhabitable.

Lee Chang-dong has finally returned to feature filmmaking. 

The Korean filmmaker has been on an extended eight-year hiatus, which he blames on his “pathological timidity.” 

“Unless I have that conviction, I cannot make myself begin the work, no matter the external circumstances or what others around me say,” he tells Deadline via Zoom from his office in Korea, ahead of his trip to Venice, where, this weekend, his latest film Possible Love, a title full of conviction but also comedy and sharp social critique, debuts in Competition.

Director Lee helmed the film from a screenplay he co-wrote with Oh Jung-mi. The pair previously worked together on Chang-dong’s last film, the excellent Burning (2018). The story follows two married couples whose lives become uniquely intertwined. There is Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon), who lives a quiet life with her husband, Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), and their young son Cheol. 

Ho-seok has been laid off from his job following an incident that has stunted his life and his ability to communicate with his family. We only learn what that incident was after the family meets Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), a documentary filmmaker engaged in a project about the lives of laid-off workers, and her ultra-wealthy husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung). When Mi-ok agrees to be filmed, she grows close to Ye-ji, creating an uncomfortable friction that shakes both of their households.

Running just short of three hours, Possible Love is a masterful return by Chang-dong. Below, the filmmaker, joined by one of his leading men, Sul Kyung-gu, discusses why it has taken him almost a decade to make Possible Love. The filmmaker says he initially shelved the project, fearing he wasn’t the most suitable messenger for a film about labor rights. Chang-dong also explains why there is a tribute to Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog at the end of Possible Love, and why he believes so many contemporary Korean filmmakers have been so successful at interrogating the relationship or, as the Marxists would say, struggle between labor and capital in their work.

Netflix will release Possible Love in cinemas on October 23. The film hits the streamer on November 6.

DEADLINE: Director Lee, where did this idea come from?

LEE CHANG-DONG: Some years ago in Korea, a Korean conglomerate went through mass layoffs. That was met with an all-or-nothing strike from the labor side. There was also a merciless crackdown by the authorities. At the time, I remember thinking it would be a transformative event in the Korean labor market. I also knew it probably meant the beginning of a normalization of such restructuring of conglomerates that would greatly change the lives of these laborers. I wrote a screenplay, but at the last minute, I started to ask myself: Am I worthy of telling a story like this? I mean, do I have the right? Documentaries had already been filmed about the subject. Could I really justify turning this into a dramatic film? I couldn’t get a clear answer to that question, so I shelved the project. A lot of time passed, and then my co-writer, Oh Jung-mi, came up with the idea of telling this story alongside the tale of a documentary filmmaker. That got me thinking I could do this project. And that led me to revisit the project. 

DEADLINE: I went in blind, so the documentary element really surprised me. What do you want people to take away from that aspect of this story?

CHANG-DONG: This is the story of all people who make films, no matter what kind of film it is. It could be a genre film or a dramatic film. As filmmakers, we deal with and portray people’s lives, and therefore, we are bound to be strongly connected to social issues. And as we deal with the pain of others, we must think: are we really making sure to treat them as we would our own, candidly and honestly? Or are we just consuming it to make our films? This question is inseparable from the work for those of us who create films. That’s why I wanted to take that question and expand it, not only in relation to creators but also to audiences. I hope they can think about their relationship with themselves and others.

DEADLINE: Sul, you’ve worked with Director Lee before. When did you first hear about this project?

SUL KYUNG-GU: I first heard about Possible Love last March. Director Lee and I met about two years ago, at the end of 2024, and he didn’t mention a new project. In fact, when we’re together, we still often meet with fans of our previous film, Peppermint Candy. A few months after that meeting, he reached out to me and told me about Possible Love. At the time, I was perplexed because I was already attached to a different project, but I knew I had to make this work. I spoke with the other director and begged him. Finally, they made it work for me.

The actual story and meaning of Possible Love wasn’t even important to me. What was important to me was working with director Lee Chang-dong again. I didn’t even ask to see the screenplay. Director Lee actually asked me, “Hey, you’re not even interested in reading the screenplay at all?” When I first read it, it just felt like a Lee Chang-dong script. It quite literally smelled of him. It had his fragrance. When you get something that Director Lee writes, it concerns you in the sense that you really want to make it work and do it well. 

DEADLINE: Director Lee, people have been anticipating your next film for some time now. It has been almost a decade since Burning. Do you ever feel anxiety about that anticipation? 

CHANG-DONG: I remember promising people after Burning that my next film would not take as long. But regretfully, I wasn’t able to keep that promise. I did have many people reach out to me asking when I would make my next film. I think that you could almost say it’s an obsessive side of me, almost a pathological timidity or whatnot. But unless I have that conviction, I cannot make myself begin the work, no matter the external circumstances or what others around me say.

DEADLINE: The music in this film is wonderful. Jung Jaeil, who has previously worked with Director Bong and Kore-eda, worked on the score. How did you two work together?

CHANG-DONG: I have never been a fan of using a lot of music in my films. This is just something that I carry as a filmmaker. I feel like the music tends to emphasize emotions outside the film, and I believe the musicality of the films should lie within the film itself. And so I shared these thoughts with Jung Jaeil. I told him that I would like the music to be limited to a minimum yet still convey the film’s structure and emotions to the audience. He understood me completely, and I really think that the results he came up with were just right.

DEADLINE: There’s a tribute to Kieślowski’s Dekalog at the end of this movie. This isn’t an adaptation from that film series. What is the connection?

CHANG-DONG: When I was writing this script, Kieślowski’s Dekalog was being adapted into a new project, with different feature films being assigned to each of the series. I was offered the chance to take part in the project. This film is unrelated to the Dekalog one, but I thought I could integrate the commandment they were dealing with in that film into this story: the 10th commandment, “Thou shalt not covet”. All the other nine commandments are about human action. However, the 10th commandment is all about human desire, so I thought that in today’s capitalist world, we could really deal with the question: can we truly live without coveting others’ lives?

DEADLINE: You mention today’s capitalist world. Can you both tell me: Why are so many Korean filmmakers able to so skilfully and powerfully deal with our relationship to labor and capital in their films?

CHANG-DONG: That’s something I’m personally curious about as well. But what I can say is that it goes to show just how rapid an economic change and development the Korean society has experienced over the past decades. Just a few decades ago, Korea experienced a tremendous war. We were one of the poorest countries in the world, and within a few decades we achieved very rapid economic development. However, as a result, we had to pay a grave social cost, and I believe the aftermath of that change is deeply rooted in our society. Within that process, we also experienced a political change, which led to conflict about academia and intellectuals. This has all been engraved in the Korean people, and I believe it is why we deal with these issues in such a serious manner. We carry it all with us in our everyday lives.

KYUNG-GU: I agree. It is a result of the rapid change our society went through and the intense conflict that led to it. And I think we are going to have a lot more stories to come going forward as well.

With all due respect to the performances of Matt Damon in The Odyssey and Ryan Gosling in Project Hail Mary, I came away from Wild Horse Nine, which had its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival on Thursday afternoon, with the strong impression that John Malkovich was now the clear frontrunner to win the best actor Oscar. But by Friday evening, when Elsinore had its world premiere in Telluride, I was forced to revise my hypothesis.

That’s because the Irish actor Andrew Scott gives a performance for the ages in Elsinore as the Scottish actor Ian Charleson, who was best known for starring in the best picture Oscar winner Chariots of Fire, but whose most impressive accomplishment was how he insisted on continuing to act — in the role of Hamlet at London’s National Theatre, no less — even after he was diagnosed with terminal AIDS.

The response inside Telluride’s Palm Theatre to the listing of Scott’s name in the film’s post-credits — as both a producer and the lead actor — was undeniable. It’s a sensitive and shattering performance from an actor who just keeps getting better, as demonstrated in everything from his film performance in All of Us Strangers, which premiered in Telluride three years ago, to his stage performance last year in Uncle Vanya, in which he singlehandedly juggled 10 different characters.

In the Oscar race, Malkovich could have a slight edge because he’s older (73 versus 49), because he has been doing important work for longer and because his film is all but certain to land noms in a bunch of categories, including best picture, whereas aspects of Elsinore other than Scott’s performance are more of a question-mark.

I wouldn’t count out the possibility of noms for Olivia Colman for best supporting actress (she plays Charleson’s doctor), Stephen Beresford’s script for best original screenplay (even though the film’s credits say it was inspired by “an idea” from someone else), Valerio Bonelli’s film editing (particularly awesome late in the film as he cuts between Charleson on stage and at home), Stefan Gregory’s original score or even the film for a best picture nom. But the truth is that Scott’s performance is so extraordinary that other aspects of the Simon Stone’s film — which The Hollywood Reporter’s critic has argued is solid but less spectacular — could be overshadowed.

One final note. Quite a few actors and actresses have won Oscars for their portrayals of LGBT characters facing adversity and/or tragedy, including William Hurt for Kiss of the Spider Woman, Tom Hanks for Philadelphia, Hilary Swank for Boys Don’t Cry, Sean Penn for Milk, Jared Leto for Dallas Buyers Club and Rami Malek for Bohemian Rhapsody. But none of those people were themselves gay, and indeed never has an out gay actor or actress won an Oscar. Scott could well become the first.