Werner Herzog Brings Two Mara Sisters to Venice for the Price of One

Bucking Fastard, Werner Herzog’s first fiction film since 2019, belongs to a hallowed lineage of cinema about weird gals getting into mischief. And yet, as Herzog admitted at the press conference ahead of the film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival, it may also be the most unique film he’s ever done: “It will never happen again in film history, I think, and has never happened before.” (For optimal results, please read all of Herzog’s quotes in your own best Werner Herzog accent.)

That’s because Bucking Fastard’s stars, Kate and Rooney Mara, are not just acting together onscreen for the first time in their careers. They are acting in unison. Playing a pair of sisters living in Ireland, they say the same words at the same time, with the same mannerisms. Or, as Herzog put it in an Instagram video announcing the film was coming to Venice, they “love the same man, have the same dream, and even make the same slip of the tongue.”

The film was inspired by the real-life duo of Freda and Greta Chaplin, British twins who similarly spoke in unison and whom Herzog says he once knew; a scene where Domhnall Gleeson’s caretaker teaches the girls how to open a can of sardines was taken directly from his interactions with them. (Though as always with Herzog, it may be helpful to treat such claims as not entirely objective truths.) But the actual story “was only a stumbling block to stumble into this” film, the director said. The project languished for decades over a shortage of acting twins who could play the parts. “No real-life actresses could do this,” Herzog recalled. However, producer Jeremy Thomas eventually offered a way out of the impasse: What if they were not twins but sisters? He suggested the Maras, and, astoundingly, the stars said yes. 

Once that happened, the project came together incredibly fast. Herzog revealed that he wrote the script in only five days. After the initial funding fell through, Bucking Fastard was entirely financed by Nets/Liberty co-owner Clara Wu Tsai (which may be one of the most random factoids about this incredibly random movie). Because of his unique working methods, Herzog typically plans for a long series of rehearsals before production begins. But after less than a week, Herzog stopped rehearsing and declared them ready to shoot.

“At first it was very daunting, the idea that we were going to be kind of playing the same person,” Rooney Mara said. “But we found pretty quickly that having a lifetime together and all this history … there was just an unspoken world between us that we didn’t have to work very hard to create at all.” 

This rapid pace continued during production. Orlando Bloom plays the sisters’ love interest, a ne’er-do-well limo driver. “I wanted you to step beyond what you are known for, the heartthrob for teenies,” Herzog told Bloom. “Now you are the ‘bucking fastard.’” But an actor who came up on huge blockbusters like Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean was unprepared for the speed at which the German auteur was prepared to move. Bloom recalled complaining after getting only a single take for his biggest scene. Herzog eventually relented, allowing him a couple more times to go again. But that was “the spirit of the film,” the director said. He compared it to “open heart surgery — going to the essentials right away.”

Herzog operates the clapboard on his own movies. Like a conductor at an orchestra, it allows him to take the emotional temperature of his ensemble. “You have to know the moment. When do they have the flow? When do they have the rhythm? The synchronicity is only the side effect,” he said. What was it like acting opposite two co-stars who were essentially playing one single being? “It’s like when you look between someone’s eyes,” Gleeson recalled. “It was like looking between two eyes from the same head.” 

Bucking Fastard is dedicated to David Lynch, whom Herzog once hoped would be the first person to screen the film. “We had a deep understanding of each other’s work,” he said. He agreed with a journalist who pointed out the commonalities between his new work and some of his older classics: “There’s a common worldview … It belongs to the essential films that I have done. There are a couple of films I can say that are essential. They touch deep, deep into my core.”

And yet, besides the obvious fact that it features two women moving and talking as one, Bucking Fastard also marks another break from what Herzog has done before. At the press conference, a journalist noted that his filmography is notable for its unromantic view of animal life. The pitiless monkeys in Aguirre, the Wrath of God, the blank stare of a bear in Grizzly Man, his immortal quote about how “birds are in misery; I don’t think they sing, they just screech in pain.” And yet, his latest film includes a subplot in which the sisters learn to look after a wild fox. Was he becoming more sentimental about animals? Herzog’s answer proved he may well be.

“All over Ireland, where we announced it everywhere, we could not find a baby fox, which would have a deep emotional guidance for the sisters. They would warm it under their armpits and feed it with little milk bottles,” he recalled. “But since we couldn’t find a little one, there was an animal dealer who told me, ‘I can get you a little fox, but only under one condition: You must never ask how we got it and where we got it.’ And I said, ‘No, I am not in this business. I know what you are planning. You want to dig up a fox den and bring me a little fox. I am not into that.’” 

The film also includes a climactic moment with a deer, which, in a rarity for a 21st-century film, is not CGI. Rather, it was an actual deer, “a stag which miraculously [came] into the cave in Ireland,” Herzog recalled. “It was completely mysterious, and it was not in the screenplay.” Turning to his leading ladies, he asked, “You had no idea what the deer was going to do, nor did I know. You had to face it. Can you tell me about it?” 

“I was not frightened. I love deer,” Rooney said. For Kate, meeting the deer was a magical experience: “It looked deep into my soul.” One of the funny things about spending so much time around Werner Herzog is that eventually, you find yourself starting to talk like him, too.