“The Film Is Not About AI, Not About Werner Herzog, and Never Aimed To Embrace AI Technology”: Piotr Winiewicz on His IDFA Opening Night Doc About a Hero

Piotr Winiewicz’s About a Hero is as mindbogglingly complex as its eye-catching logline is simple: “A murder mystery – unwittingly starring Werner Herzog.” More precisely, the Polish filmmaker’s doc is actually an adaptation of a script in which the aforementioned cinematic maverick travels to the fictional Getunkirchenburg to investigate the strange death of a local factory worker named Dorem Clery. Even stranger, that screenplay was written by “Kaspar” (as in Kaspar Hauser), an AI trained on the Herzog oeuvre. With a look inspired by the work of German photographer Thomas Demand, the film, shot mostly across northern Germany, also features “real” sit-down interviews with scientists, philosophers and artists; along with AI-generated visuals and a Herzog voiceover (artificially created by machine learning models naturally). There’s even a deep fake Herzog, albeit one that registers as more creepy than real. (Though perhaps that makes it extra Herzogian.) So to learn all about this meditation on “originality, authenticity, immortality and soul in the age of AI,” Filmmaker reached out to the Copenhagen-based director (and artist and production designer) just after the film’s debut as the opening night selection at this year’s IDFA (November 14-24).

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.