
The set of Herzog’s latest movie, the Oscar-nominated documentary Encounters at the End of the World, was one of the most inhospitable locations he has worked on. Previously, he has scaled volcanoes, suffered calamities in jungles on three continents and filmed in war zones; even so, there was something elementally terrifying about the reality of a working day in Antarctica.
He was invited to film on the southern icecap by the US agency the National Science Foundation, which offers a limited number of grants to artists. Herzog proposed using a two-man crew – a cinematographer, plus himself as soundman – which meant he saw off a rival proposal from Titanic director James Cameron, who wanted to take a crew of 36. “You have to understand that to maintain one person for one single day in Antarctica costs roughly $10,000,” Herzog says. “Every drop of water requires desalination. One leaf of salad has to be flown eight hours from New Zealand. Cameron would have absorbed so many resources that he was not invited.”
Herzog’s Encounters is an alternately mordant and ecstatic portrait of a harsh environment and the people who live there; not oddballs, Herzog insists, but research scientists, philosophers and vulcanologists, who we see peering into viciously active lava fields. There are the expert divers who drill 30ft vertical holes through the icecap to access its frigid, sci-fi underside, and then dive below to film. “These people only seem odd because when you look at the media and magazines, there is this kind of uniformity of people. Down there, you have characters who do not fit into magazines.”
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