“Ghost elephants”, interview with the director Werner Herzog, Lifetime Achievement Award recipient

August 31, 2025

Werner Herzog, director , "Ghost Elephants". A new documentary , the Lifetime Achievement Award to one of the most influential cinema directors of all times.

"Ghost elephants", interview with the director Werner Herzog, Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Angelo Acerbi

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Werner Herzog presented his last documentary “Ghost Elephants” in the frame of the 82 Venice International film Festival. He is also the recipient of one the Lifetime Achievement Awards that the festival gives every year. We met with him before the world premiere of the film.

An unusual origin of a film for him

Werner Herzog met doctor Steve Boyes through a mutual friend; they met and it was immediately clear there was something very big he was after. He went to visit him in Namibia on a potential documentary they were trying to shoot; he was curious about it and all of a sudden he was filming. It’s not a wildlife film that he expected to do. It is a film about dreams, about like a quest for Moby Dick.

A movie about a dream that you don’t know if you want to reach it or not

Werner Herzog says that’s exactly the underlying theme of “Ghost Elephants“. And at the end, when Steve Boyce actually manages to make some pictures with his cell phone of these mythical elephants. “And I said to him, now, do you think it’s really good that you were successful?You have to live with your success. Now, from now on. Without a dream, with a success of a dream“, commented Werner Herzog.

A lifetime achievement award he still have not elaborated

Asked about the reception of the Lifetime achievemnet Award, Werner Herzog is baffled and still elaborating it. “Was I in a dream? Was I like a sleepwalker going through? I know I got it, it’s here, You see it here and It was heavy. And Francis Ford Coppola spoke very kindly about my film, so I assume it was for real. But as I’m sitting here, I’m also thinking, did I only dream this?”

Plot

For a decade, Dr. Steve Boyes has been in search of a mysterious elusive herd of Ghost Elephants in the highlands of Angola, a wooded plateau — virtually uninhabited, but in size as large as England. He sets out with master trackers from Namibia, the bestremaining in the world, but there is a deep underlying question: would it not be better to keep these gigantic elephants rather as a dream, as ghosts, as the White Whale, than findingthem in reality?

Written by: Angelo Acerbi

Guest

Werner Herzog

Film

Ghost Elephants

Festival

Mostra del Cinema di Venezia

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