Werner Herzog at the IFC Center

A lifelong ambition was realized as I got to meet director Werner Herzog at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village. Herzog is the director of many films, including the classic Fitzcarraldo (1982), starring Klaus Kinski and Claudia Cardinale, and the award-winning documentary Grizzly Man (2005), as well as, more recently, the excellent Bad Lieutanant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), starring Nicholas Cage. He was there to introduce and answer questions about his Death Row Portraits, a tv mini-series about prisoners awaiting execution that was screened specially at the IFC Center, in two episode installments.

As he pointed out in the post-screening Q &A with the audience, these portraits are not supposed to be didactic pieces. He merely states at the beginning of each 47-minute portrait that he comes from a different culture (Germany) in which the death penalty is banned. He considers himself to be a "poet," not an activist. Intriguingly, he informed us that one of the death row inmates admitted to two further murders in the course of an interview with Herzog. He believed that this and other interesting things were revealed in the interviews because he treated the prisoners very differently from their families  and their legal counsel.

In the clip below he is talking about getting the best out of actors, and tells anecdotes about Klause Kinski and Nicholas Cage.