05/09/2026 - VENICE 2026: The legendary German director tells us about his return to fiction filmmaking, his collaboration with Rooney and Kate Mara, and the movie’s dedication to David Lynch

(© Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it)

Werner Herzog’s Bucking Fastard is a bucking weird movie: devoid of any obligation to realism, the lead characters, Irish sisters Joanie and Jeanie Holbrooke (Rooney and Kate Mara), speak almost exclusively in unison, and live beholden to their dreams and desires. They won’t accept the marriage of their previous boyfriend, Gareth (Orlando Bloom), whom they shared, so they begin an ill-fated stalking campaign; seeking more transcendent experiences later, they try to burrow through a cave in Sligo to the Orkney islands in Scotland.

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Understandably, critical reactions have been divisive so far, yet admiration for Herzog’s quixotic vision will surely grow as the film plays a wave of festivals this autumn, including Toronto, San Sebastián and New York. The morning following the premiere in competition at the Venice Film Festival, we met with Herzog to find out more.

Cineuropa: It’s been reported that this film has been in the works for several years. How did it come together now?
Werner Herzog: It was actually not the work of several years; it came very quickly. I wrote the screenplay in five days. When I told my producer [Ariel Leon Isacovitch] the story in the car once, he told me to sit down and write it. So I wrote it in a week, and we had very short pre-production, and then, almost immediately, we were shooting. There were 26 days of filming, and we were under schedule and under budget, so it was not long or stretched-out.

The Mara sisters must have relished the challenge of portraying the Holbrooke sisters. How did you collaborate with them to create their performances?
Well, it was always clear that we had to invent the two sisters. They are not twins, but two sisters who are so close that they dream the same dreams, speak in unison, fall in love with the same man and make the same slip of the tongue at the same moment: “Bucking fastard.” So, it was clear that should be the title.

[The Mara sisters] were immediately on board. They immediately had confidence, and they had some sort of dream to work with me. And apparently, they liked the films of mine they had seen. So, the question was a technical one: how to make them speak in unison? And it's actually not a technical question; it's a question of how to align yourself with your own sister. And, sometimes in ancient Greek tragedies, it’s done through syncing up their breathing, and then stepping out on stage. But instead, they were actually singing or humming their earliest childhood song – that brought them into synchronicity.

One can see echoes of your characters like Kaspar Hauser and Fitzcarraldo in the Holbrookes. But were you thinking of the characters in this film in terms of the modern understanding of neurodiversity or mental health?
All of my films have a worldview in common, and you recognise it immediately. But it is obvious this had to be a unique film. Two actresses being like one person is unprecedented in film history. You cannot learn from any other film, and it will stay singular.

There’s a rigid convention in screenwriting that characters have to develop and go through a change over the course of their arc. I think the sisters are finally able to create a reciprocal bond with the fox they save from culling, allowing them to connect with a being beyond themselves as a unit, as a duo. Their previous attempt with Orlando Bloom’s “weak” man is a failure.
You are just repeating the idiocies of the screenwriting gurus; it's brainless. And don't preach their brainless Bible to me! And you see, the fox does not shape the relationship, because it appears very late in the movie. Don't get nervous if the film is unique in its form of narration. It has the logic of a dream.

Making note of the film’s opening dedication to David Lynch, how else do you feel it’s in conversation with his work?
You shouldn't read too much into it. When I was editing, I said to my editor, “Oh, I would like David Lynch to be the first person sitting with me during its premiere.” So that was basically it. He was the one I wanted to show first. But of course, he died, and we had deep respect for each other's work. We were very different in what we did, although in one film, we did collaborate [My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done].

The natural world is captured beautifully in the feature, especially the caves. It suddenly becomes closer to your documentaries, in the best way.
No, no, it's a pure world of fantasy. The gigantic caves, with the railway inside, were actually shot in Slovenia. It’s a tourist attraction: the underground post office, the ballroom with the chandeliers… So it's a very strange, imaginary world: it's a landscape of the soul.