Werner Herzog Reveals Touching Reason Behind ‘Bucking Fastard’ Dedication to David Lynch Ahead of Venice Premiere
Acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog said he and the late David Lynch “have a deep, deep understanding of each other’s work.”
Ahead of the Venice Film Festival premiere of Herzog’s latest feature, Bucking Fastard, he sat for a press conference with cast members Kate and Rooney Mara, Domhnall Gleeson and Orlando Bloom on the Lido.
The Fitzcarraldo and Grizzly Man director — who is also picking up the Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement Award on the Lido this year — was swiftly asked why he has dedicated the film to the iconic Lynch (Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Dune), who died in January 2025 at the age of 78.
He responded: “During editing, I said to the editor just casually, ‘That’s a film that I would like David Lynch to be with me in the first public screening’ — which is in a few hours. […] We had a deep, deep understanding of each other’s work, although we were quite different. And I had the feeling [that] I wish he could be my first audience… I wish we could turn the wheel of time back and invite him tonight,” he added with a smile, “but it doesn’t happen like this.”
Bucking Fastard follows the Holbrooke sisters, Jean and Joan (the Mara sisters in their first-ever appearance together onscreen), siblings who share a deep, nearly supernatural bond. The sisters dress alike, think alike, and speak simultaneously. They even fall for the same man, the rowdy rogue Gareth Mulroney (Bloom, playing with a thick Irish brogue). Their joint obsession with him leads to legal proceedings and a restraining order.
Herzog said that, for the first time, he wasn’t in need of a two-week rehearsal period with his actors. “They were so good instantly that I said, after five days, ‘We stop that. I’ll meet you in Ireland in front of my camera,’” he recalled. “It was complete confidence in them, and they took it with ease.”
Rooney Mara said being real-life sisters aided that much-needed synchronicity. “I think we found pretty quickly that having a lifetime together and all this history and a childhood of playing together… There was just an unspoken world between us that we didn’t have to work very hard to create at all,” she told the room. “Once we really found our flow together, I’ve never laughed so much. We had so much fun. it was a very once-in-a-lifetime, unique experience.”
Her elder sister added: “Once we figured out the rhythm of our speaking in unison, it felt almost like a song. It was very musical and it happened quite naturally. Surprisingly, it came with a lot of a lot more ease than we were expecting.”
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The movie is loosely based on the real case of British identical twin sisters Freda and Greta Chaplin, the subjects of a tabloid court case in the 1980s. The film’s title refers to a synchronized verbal slip the sisters made in court. Gleeson plays Timothy, a government-issued social worker who is assigned to the sisters to help them adapt to modern life after the two become tabloid sensations.
Gleeson said at Thursday’s presser that it was a little terrifying working with Herzog, and rightly so. “You know that you are in a master’s hands, and so you trust the hands that are holding you,” said the Irish star. “I think it should be scary, and it should feel like a risk every time they call action, or every time Werner does the clapperboard. But you feel safe.”
“And also,” he continued, “my experience was the opposite[of] the sisters, and that was an extraordinary thing to witness. It felt like looking between two eyes from the same head, you know? The experience was beautiful. And if [Herzog] asks again, I will say yes.”
Herzog’s film takes reality as a jumping-off point. When the sisters decide to “dig a tunnel to an imagined land, where true love is possible,” you quickly become aware you’re in more existential, Herzog-esque territory. The German director has said Bucking Fastard forms an “operatic triptych” alongside 1982’s Fitzcarraldo and 2005’s Grizzly Man, two other works that explore human obsession, isolation and a desire to defy the bounds of nature or society.
More surprising perhaps is the tone of the new film, which has more humor and touches of romantic sentimentality, rare, if not completely absent, from Herzog’s large body of work.
Herzog reportedly turned down an offer of an out-of-competition slot in Cannes to screen Bucking Fastard in competition in Venice, where it premieres Thursday night and is up for the festival’s Golden Lion.
The film was produced by Clara Wu Tsai (Blue Bayou), Ariel Leon Isacovitch (Theater of Thought), and Agnes Chu (Spiderhead), with Kieran Corrigan, Emanuele Moretti and Andrea Bucko. HanWay Films is handling worldwide sales.
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