Werner Herzog on IMAX, AI and 3D

The earliest paintings were made over 32,000 years ago — the very first forms of art and culture. They weren’t discovered until 1994, when cave explorers in France stumbled into the Chauvet Cave. More than a decade later, filmmaker Werner Herzog was allowed rare access to the highly guarded prehistoric site to shoot what would become the lauded 3D documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams. It is a strange and moving film, one wherein Herzog convincingly argues, in his heavily enunciated German accent, that these caverns are the birthplace of “ze mo-dern hu-man soul.” Fifteen years since its premiere, the movie has achieved a cult-like status, and for a short time, you can now see it back in theaters as a 6K restoration on IMAX screens — housed in some of the largest and loudest cineplexes in the world.

When I first saw Forgotten Dreams, it was at a small independent theater in Seattle. In 3D, the experience was intimate — limestone stalactites and stalagmites press toward your face — and appropriately claustrophobic. Rewatching it at a press screening at the AMC Lincoln Center (the only “real” IMAX theater in New York City), the effect was, frankly, overwhelming. The clarity and detail of each grain of limestone wall, suddenly maximized across a screen that the human eye can barely take in all at once, makes Chauvet feel even more alien. The walls almost resemble skin — freckled with crystals, scarred by time.

“This is what 3D was made for,” raved one critic. Yet, Herzog didn’t set out to make a 3D film. In fact, he doesn’t really like them. Even seeing James Cameron’s Avatar, lauded as the hallmark 3D film of this century, Herzog was unimpressed. (“Avatar could be in 2D in a big theater,” he tells noti.group.) But when he was in preproduction, Herzog was allowed a visit to the Chauvet caves two months before filming and was struck by the experience of seeing the cave paintings up close. “All of a sudden I discover there are wild bulges and recesses and caverns and rock pendants — a world that is only existing in 3D because the painters 32,000 years ago utilized the formations,” he says. The cave painters — arguably humankind’s earliest artists — did not work on flat surfaces; in fact, the shape and texture of their canvas informed how and what they painted. “A bulging rock is now a bulging neck of a bison that attacks you,” Herzog says, as an example. Herzog may not be a fan of 3D films, but it suddenly made sense for his cave painting doc.

Still, shooting in 3D in such a specific environment came with its own challenges. For one, no 3D cameras existed that were small enough to be brought into the Chauvet cave, so they had to be created. “[The film] was shot in 3D with our own camera, our own data management, our own ‘brain,’” Herzog says, crediting Estonian filmmaker Kaspar Kallas for building the equipment (“a very, very intense and wonderful man”). But the setups, though custom, were also held together by glue and gaffer tape. (If you want more nitty-gritty details, there’s a great technical writeup by the film’s director of photography, Peter Zeitlinger, available at Mubi Notebook.) The movie was shot in 2K with SI-2K cameras, GoPros, and amateur-grade Canons. But today, the standard is 4K, and if you’re putting things on a screen as big as IMAX, you can go as high as a resolution of 6K or even 8K.

(Another fun fact: One of Sam Mendes’ James Bond movies, Skyfall, is often credited as being the first feature film to use drone footage — something that you see ubiquitously today. But Cave of Forgotten Dreams, released a year earlier, is actually the first. The crew hand-built a camera rig that could attach to a drone.)

In 2010, James Stewart, a 3D producer, was brought on to help refine the original film’s 3D experience before an early version had screened at Toronto International Film Festival. A decade later, he began overseeing the team that would restore it for IMAX, a process that began during the covid-19 pandemic and would stretch out for another five years. But Stewart’s enthusiasm for the film has never waned; in fact, this newer, more immersive theater experience has him even more excited. “In IMAX, it’s just mind blowing,” he says. He estimates he’s seen the movie over a hundred times, and even still, each viewing stuns him so much with its clarity that it makes him want to “lick the cave walls.”

The work of film restoration is not unlike the work of archeology depicted in the film: the act of preservation. Stewart led a small team of under 10 people working over five years. From the extracted raw 2K footage, the movie needed to be rebuilt frame by frame, and Forgotten Dreams, being a 3D movie, was actually double the work, since there is a separate stream for the left eye and the right eye. (Aside from the meticulous patience required, the team also needed new software to extricate the outdated and oddly specific codecs of the original footage.) Finally, there is the effort to get that footage from 2K to 6K, which took experimental software and a lot of different hardware “to scale it up without just blowing it up,” Stewart says, clarifying that no AI was used. The team also rebuilt the film’s audio, a similarly painstaking process going from a 5.1 mix (six speakers) to a Dolby Atmos mix (up to 100 speakers).

According to Stewart, the first Avatar kicked off a “3D revolution,” though in the years since, it’s seemed like filmgoers’ interest in 3D has waned. That interest didn’t translate into 3D TVs for home cinema, and even each successive Avatar film, though still billion-dollar behemoths, has been less and less lucrative. From the way Stewart talks about “the greater 3D community” who work on these projects, it sounds like a small group of people with specialized skills. He’s also critical of the ways 3D is used in films — though he doesn’t name the bad examples. Still, he believes that for great filmmakers, it can become a powerful tool for storytelling. He cites Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, Ang Lee’s The Life of Pi, and a pair of Wim Wenders documentaries, Pina and Anselm, as “masterful” examples of 3D done right.

Stewart is proud that Cave of Forgotten Dreams regularly appears as the runner-up on lists of the best 3D films of all time. (Behind Avatar, of course.) But he still thinks the strength of the movie is Herzog himself — “the way he speaks and his writing and the way he tells the story.” And as awe-inspiring as the caves are, it’s just as impressive that Herzog and his small crew were able to capture so much given the limitations. The caves were dark; their equipment was limited; for preservation reasons, they could only shoot for a few hours a day over the course of a week. “It’s like, ‘Go make a film and then by the way, it has to be a transcendent visual experience.’ They’re like, ‘Well, you know, we’re lucky to get any footage at all.’”

Herzog himself was not hands-on with the restoration. (He admits “the digital, real work, I do not understand.”) But seeing his film for the first time in IMAX was “a very deep experience.”

I asked Herzog if he often revisits his films — there are dozens of them, many considered classics. Outside of attending retrospectives, he rarely rewatches his work. When he does, though, he is happy with how they’ve held up. “My films do not seem to age,” Herzog says. “Cave of Forgotten Dreams, you can show it 150 years from now and it still will be completely fresh.” He’s thankful that he doesn’t have to be embarrassed when his grandchildren will eventually see his movies.

Herzog, now 83 years old, appears to live out of step with time. Last fall, on Conan O’Brien’s podcast, Herzog recounted the story of not being able to get his car out of a parking garage in Dublin because he was unable to download the parking garage’s app. But there is a misconception that Herzog is some kind of Luddite. Sure, he still carries a non-smartphone, which he shows me over Zoom, but Herzog emails and video chats with his family around the world. He’s online enough to know the White House has turned a scene from Encounters at the End of the World into a horrible meme.

He is not entirely anti-AI either. He believes we have to be “vigilant,” but sees the way it could create “phenomenal and glorious possibilities in pharmaceuticals, medicine, and mathematics.” As for AI-generated film, Herzog is unimpressed: “All what I’ve seen so far is dead on arrival. Slick and well made, but completely dead. It does not acquire the soul of poetry.”

So many filmmakers — and really anyone in a creative field right now — are reckoning with the encroachment of AI, and there is little consensus of how it will disturb the relationship between artmaking, labor, and commerce. But these conversations are troubled about the immediate future; Herzog, perhaps ever confident from having confronted millennia-old of human art in a limestone cave, remains unafraid.

“When you look at Cave of Forgotten Dreams, there’s a deep sense of awe in it, of wonder and mystery. And it has a soul that is not only the filmmaker’s soul. It is a strange soul of human beings who 32,000 years ago created these paintings,” he says, “and AI cannot create this.”