Werner Herzog saw the first 30 minutes of Barbie, declares them "sheer hell"

Set aside his filmmaking, his acting, his work as a teacher, novelist, and producer, and let’s all acknowledge this: There are few people on the planet capable of delivering a really good soundbite like Werner Herzog. It’s not just the iconic accent. (Although, the accent helps.) It’s that Herzog is, under the dour persona, an inveterate showman and shit-talker, with a finely tuned wit that makes him one of the most consistently funny interview subjects on the planet.

Which is why we did something we wouldn’t normally do, and subjected ourselves to several minutes of Piers Morgan’s YouTube show this week, to catch some of Herzog being Herzog. The interview is full of good Herzog moments—when Morgan tries to get him to give a kneejerk take on “cancel culture,” citing allegations of horrific abuse against Herzog’s long-time collaborator/enemy Klaus Kinski, Herzog gave a nuanced, thoughtful response instead of buying into the interviewer’s bullshit. But the big, headline grabbing bit of the interview comes right at the end, when Morgan asks Herzog: “Oppenheimer? Or Barbie?”

Amusingly, Herzog notes that he hasn’t seen Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer at all, but says he did catch the first 30 minutes of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie: “I wanted to watch it, because I was curious, and I still don’t have an answer. But I have a suspicion: Could it be that the world of Barbie is sheer hell? For a movie ticket, as an audience, to experience sheer hell—as close as it gets.”

Now, in context—and despite the way Morgan reacts—it’s not clear to us whether Herzog is offering a qualitative assessment of Gerwig’s movie, or genuinely speaking to its neon pink depiction of Barbieland, a world in which ostensibly happy “people” play out basic routines with no capacity for understanding any of the ennui or despair clawing at the edges of their psyches. His stated desire to eventually finish the movie suggests at least a hope of the latter, but either way, what a gift to the movie’s marketing department, huh? We can already see the stickers on the home video release: “‘Sheer hell, as close as it gets’—Werner Herzog.”