While George Clooney grabbed the cameras with his bow tie and received the Golden Lion at the Palazzo del Cinema, in the adjacent Darsena room a film was born that needs more qualifiers than just auteur cinema. Werner Herzog’s wild imagination brought two Hollywood sisters, Kate and Rooney Mara, to work together for the first time. And to do so mimetically, interpreting the text and gestures in unison and as a single being. Something very disturbing and in pursuit of one of Herzog’s “essential” films. And there are only a couple that “reach very, very deeply to the core of who I am,” warns the German director.
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The plot of Bucking Fastard, summed up practically, is the possibility for two sisters to glimpse the truth of who each of them is. Or the abyss of truth. And all this happens, as usual with the director of Fitzcarraldo or Nosferatu, in the lane of the unexpected and through the secret paths of the soul where you always have to chip away, in this case to open a tunnel that leads to a spectacular cave in Slovenia. Herzog and his ability to take the viewer to the revelations of the hypnagogic state…
The project began 45 years ago, when Herzog met two sisters who spoke in unison, something that had never been done before
It all started 45 years ago, when Werner Herzog met two sisters who spoke in unison, but in a new language. Since then, the project has been latent and this Thursday it saw the light at the Venice Film Festival. It could not be carried out without actresses who could do something like that, the director who does not distinguish between documentary and fiction explained to the press. “It had never been done. But upon meeting the Maras, it came to life very quickly.”
This is one of Herzog’s three films about obsession, “but I believe the theme of the film is love. It turns into passion and then into obsession,” says Orlando Bloom, the “fucking bastard” to whom the protagonists refer in a mimetic dyslexia. “We live in unusual times, but it is wonderful to see the empathy these two sisters awaken and how important it is to them. And that is the most important thing for me today: empathy.”
Never before had so many trendy media and influencers who tug their ponytails attended a press conference of the good Herzog. Orlando Bloom and the Mara sisters attracted mobile cameras like honey to bees. Every gesture, every word… what do Kate and Rooney have to say about this experience, whatever it may be?
“At first it was very intimidating, the idea that we were going to play, in a way, the same person – Kate begins -. But we discovered quite quickly that, after a lifetime together, with all that shared history and a childhood in which we played together, there was already an implicit world between us that we didn’t have to try too hard to create. So, once we found our rhythm together, it was quite… fun. I had never laughed so much. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience, really very special.”
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After a lifetime together, with shared history and a childhood in which we played together, there was already an implicit world between us”
Kate Mara
For Rooney, once they discovered the rhythm of speaking in unison, it was almost like a song. “As if we had some kind of shared rhythm that we didn’t need to express with words. It was very musical and arose quite naturally.”
Herzog says everything was so simple that, for the first time in his life, he had enough time and funds to do real, existential rehearsals with the two sisters. “But they were so good from the first moment that, after five days, I said: ‘Let’s stop. See you in Ireland, in front of my camera.’
Being in that cave, with those wedding dresses, driving that train all night… was a very surreal experience”
Rooney Mara
The second set, in the caves of Slovenia, Postojna, shapes a landscape of the soul, a landscape of the imagination. More than 20 kilometers underground, with an internal train and even a post office. But in the film it is an invention, there is nothing realistic in the search. “And that is precisely its beauty: it is poetry,” the filmmaker points out.
They could only shoot there at night, during the day 30,000 tourists pass through. Which added an extra degree of lyricism, shooting in the middle of the night. “But it was quite unsettling. The first time we shot there it seemed a bit scary,” says one of the Mara sisters. “It helped us a lot to shoot those scenes, because everything seemed very… it didn’t seem real. It really seemed like a dream.” “Yes, being in that cave, with those wedding dresses, driving that train all night… it was a very strange, very surreal experience.”
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