"We can't take it off the map."

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By Alison Willmore on 03/03/2008

The new issue of The Believer is all about film, and there are two unmissable offerings up in full on the web. The first is a transcript of Werner Herzog interviewing Errol Morris (whose "Standard Operating Procedure" premiered at Berlin a few weeks ago), or perhaps the other way round, at Brandeis last year. The conversation roams from truth in documentary film to serial killer Edmund Kemper to a fight they once had:

WH: I said that we were going to do a film there in Plainfield, and that really upset Errol a lot. He thought I was a thief without loot. This was his country, his territory, his Plainfield, and I shot in Plainfield. I shot a film, Stroszek, which I think is forgotten and forgiven by now, and we can maintain friendship over this now.
EM: I told Werner: For you to steal a character or a story isn't real theft. But to steal a landscape, that is a very, very serious crime.

WH: I understand that. I take it to heart, but there actually is a film out there, and we can't take it off the map.

EM: It's a very good film.

WH: It has a beautiful end with a dancing chicken, and I really like it.

EM: Yes.

In the second, Chuck Klosterman dwells, in typically discursive Klosterman fashion, on road movies, the once-discussed movie optioning of a road trip he took and documented for a magazine, Gus Van Sant, "Vanishing Point," "Old Joy," and the following equation:

(MAN + MACHINE) - (GOD V. SOCIETY) + NATURE/HIMSELF

Also online in full — Devin McKinney's argument that Henry Fonda was "the right man, the only man" to play the role of Scottie Ferguson in "Vertigo." A list of the other goodies available in the print version is here.

[Photo: Werner Herzog's "Stroszek," New Yorker Films, 1977]

+ Werner Herzog [FILMMAKER] IN CONVERSATION WITH Errol Morris [DOCUMENTARIAN] (The Believer)
+ ON THE ROAD (The Believer)
+ THE RIGHT MAN (The Believer)

Tags: Chuck Klosterman, Errol Morris, Henry Fonda, The Believer, Vertigo, Werner Herzog