Francis Ford Coppola doesn’t have a film premiering in Venice this year, but the 86-year-old Oscar winner is duly present for the 82nd edition. His pal Mike Figgis’ behind-the-scenes portrait “Megadoc,” about the production of Coppola’s 2024 cinematic cause célèbre “Megalopolis,” debuts out of competition this week. And at the festival’s opening ceremony Wednesday night, Coppola took to the dais to champion his longtime friend, the German filmmaker Werner Herzog, recipient of the festival’s honorary Golden Lion for lifetime achievement. (“Vertigo” icon Kim Novak will also receive one later this week.)
Herzog’s new film “Ghost Elephants,” about an elusive herd of the Angolan creatures, debuts in Venice this week as part of the festival’s robust documentary slate, which also includes new films from Laura Poitras and Sofia Coppola.
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“One must celebrate that someone like him can exist,” said Coppola of Herzog, the 82-year-old documentary and fiction auteur whose films have spanned everywhere from the Caves of Lascaux in “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” to pushing a steamboat up the Andes with Klaus Kinski in “Fitzcarraldo,” or alongside conservationist Timothy Treadwell in his last days for “Grizzly Man.”
“His work burst into my life with ‘The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser’ [from 1974], ‘Aguirre, the Wrath of God,’ and ‘Fitzcarraldo.’ I have never seen such films as these, all unique and very different from one another, and all magnificent,” said Coppola, who put up a penniless Herzog at his San Francisco house to finish the script for “Fitzcarraldo.”
“He’s written operas, he’s directed roles, he’s acted. He not only can fill the pages of an encyclopedia — Werner is one so, so filled with exuberant creativity. … We all joined together at my home in San Francisco, where there was always fun conversations and much learning and enthusiastic discoveries. I was working on a play at that time, and remember introducing one of the cast members, Lena, who eventually became his wife. So when it comes down to is this: If Werner has limits, I don’t know what they are. Werner’s life and his very existence send a challenge to everyone out there: copy, if you can. And all of us truly wonder if anyone ever will. Werner, I will eat my hat if anyone comes [along] who can do it.”
A tearful Herzog took to the stage at the Sala Grande on the Lido di Venezia. “Francis has been extremely kind and generous to me,” Herzog said. “We know each other for half a century by now. He’s been generous, inviting me at a time when I didn’t have money to pay for a hotel room. I stayed at his house in San Francisco and wrote my screenplay of ‘Fitzcarraldo.’ Both of us came very close to making a very big film about the conquest of Mexico together, seen from the perspective of the Aztecs, a film project that did not materialize, but it’s a wonderful time when we plotted about it. And, of course, without Francis, I would not have met my wonderful wife, Lena. In fact, it is not true that we are 30 years together. Now it is to be correct: 29 years, 11 months, and nine days.”
Herzog — whose “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans” and “My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?” both played Venice in competition in 2009 — concluded, “I have always tried to strive for something that goes deeper beyond what you normally see in movie theaters. Go into a deep form of poetry that is possible in cinema, searching for truth in unusual ways. Truth is always somehow in cinema. It’s mysterious and elusive, and I always try to do something which was sublime or something transcendental. This may sound a little bit lofty. So in fact, I do believe that all this has similar reasons. I always wanted to be a good soldier of cinema.”
Later in the opening ceremony, competition jury president Alexander Payne took to the stage hours after navigating questions about Gaza during the jury press conference. Protests surrounding the ongoing genocide in Gaza are roundly expected to dominate event space and news chatter throughout the fest.
The jury also includes filmmakers Stéphane Brizé, Maura Delpero, Cristian Mungiu, and Mohammad Rasoulof, and actors Zhao Tao and 2025 Best Actress Oscar nominee Fernanda Torres, who together will look at 21 films from the likes of Paolo Sorrentino (whose “La Grazia” opened the festival), Yorgos Lanthimos, Noah Baumbach, Park Chan-wook, Kathryn Bigelow, Guillermo del Toro, Olivier Assayas, Mona Fastvold, Benny Safdie, Jim Jarmusch, and more.
“My fellow jurors and I express our great honor of being asked to serve on the jury of this year’s Venice Film Festival, and we offer our greatest respect and warmest congratulations to all the superb filmmakers whose work we have the privilege of seeing with virgin eyes,” Payne said following a tribute reel montaging moments from his career, from “Sideways” to “The Descendants.” “I encourage my fellow jury members and myself to consider that we know something about cinema, but also nothing at all, to look at each movie simultaneously with the eyes of a professional but also with the eyes of a child who is perhaps seeing a film for the very first time. We know that each of the films will be some kind of miracle, as the existence of cinema itself is a miracle, and we approach our work with the spirit of great joy.”
