Dreams of a Lost Tribe: Werner Herzog in Conversation with Mark Danner

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Conversation: Werner Herzog and Mark Danner

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Ghost Elephants

Directed by Werner Herzog

U.S., 2025, 98m

Werner Herzog, who attended the first Telluride Film Festival in 1974 and, in the years since, has premiered more than 35 films at the festival, returns with a striking new documentary. Ghost Elephants follows Dr. Steve Boyes, a scientist who has dedicated years to finding a herd of elephants long thought to be extinct. The film follows his quest, led by indigenous trackers, including the tribe’s leader, deep into the Angolan highlands. Herzog spoke with Mark Danner about the journey.

Mark Danner: What a beautiful film it is. I wanted to start by asking you one phrase from your script: humans fighting against creation.

Werner Herzog: It’s in reference to the Angolan civil war, which I think lasted 27 years. These was terrible times. Not only did two political factions fight against each other, they embarked on a much wider form of destruction. Drunk soldiers shot anything that moved: humans, elephants, hippos, rhinos, gazelles, buffaloes. In the film you see endless bones and skulls from horizon to horizon.

And then there was the 15-minute safari. Hunters would be dropped by a helicopter in the middle of elephants, and the helicopter would nudge elephants right in front of your rifle, you’d shoot it at short distance, and then fly out 15 minutes later.

It was an attitude about hunting that was at that time different from what have now. But that kind of hunting is not completely over.

Danner: There’s something very elegiac about the film. It takes place after so many creatures are gone. You are seeking what are called “ghost elephants,” and they seem to be survivors of something like a holocaust. You feel that they’re that they’re survivors, and they’re not long for this world

Herzog: There’s something destructive underlying within our nature. It’s not only Angolan civil war or Africa. I show pictures from the 1880s from an American newspaper of trains in the American Midwest that moved slowly through the prairies and on the roof and from the windows, gentleman hunters would shoot at buffaloes left and right. The train wouldn’t stop. They were not interested in the horns, the hides, the meat or anything, it was just sport.

The biggest of all elephants that was ever recorded, which now is in the Smithsonian Museum, was shot for sport in 1955. Sports Illustrated made a big article about the sportsman who set this new world record. That was the attitude.

But I didn’t make a wildlife film. What happens for elephants now may only be an illusion, a dream. You barely see any elephant or wildlife, maybe half a minute or a minute, maybe. But you see the dreams of elephants. You see elephants where you cannot believe your eyes how strange and beautiful it is. Underwater. These are as beautiful as any passages I’ve seen on a movie screen. I cannot imagine anything more beautiful than that.

Danner: Like so many of your films, this one has at its center a man obsessed, Steve Boyes, who wants very much to find the ghost elephants. But, as you say in the film, if he finds them, you say, “He must live with his success.”

Herzog: From the beginning, there’s an there’s an argument going on. Would it not be better for Ahab never to have found Moby Dick, his white whale, but rather to continue to strive for it, search for it? That search is the most important.

Danner: For Boyes to find the elephants might cause other people to go to that location to see them, and further endanger them.

Herzog: In this case, the highlands in the northeast of Angola are all wooded. There are no villages, no roads, no bridges, no airfields. This entire area is the size of England. Our film shows the hardship to get there. Seven days by four-wheel drive, 150 miles on motorcycles that you have to hoist through rivers without bridges. You have to carry them on your shoulders. Then the next 50 kilometers on foot. And then, every single day, 10 hours non-stop hastening after moving elephants. This is not stuff for tourists.

It’s never going to be like Mount Everest with whole battalions of climbers lining up kilometers deep to climb to the summit. It’s not going to happen. It would be a desecration

Danner: Did you spend many years on the film?

Herzog: I got into the film without much planning. I was persuaded by the leader of the expedition to come to Namibia. A South African team already had been shooting for quite some time, but conceptually they were insecure how to tackle it. I was asked if I could you come and help a little bit. From day one, it was clear I had to take over. They were very happy to hand it over to me. Overnight, I found myself with a film as if it already had been inside me for 20 years.

Danner: The king said the only way you can see the elephant is to ask for permission.

Herzog: Asking for permission is not just something bureaucratic. You kneel down and he would invoke the spirits.

Mark Danner, a Resident Curator at Telluride, has written on politics and foreign affairs, focusing on war and conflict, for three decades, including as a staff writer for The New Yorker. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. His latest book is Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War.

Danner: That king is charismatic.

Herzog: Oh, he’s wonderful. You’ll never see a king as beautiful as that one.

Mark Danner

Dreams of a Lost Tribe: Werner Herzog in Conversation with Mark Danner

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