What inspired you both to make Fireball?
Clive Oppenheimer: I visited the Korean Polar Research Institute three years ago, and they have a wonderful meteorite collection. The meteorites are all in nitrogen-filled cubicles behind a glass window in an ultraclean room. It was an incredible veneration of these objects, and for me that resonated with the veneration of meteorites throughout human history—for instance, the black stone at the Kabba in Mecca, which was brought from heaven by the Archangel Gabriel and given to Abraham to put in the wall of the Kabba. That resonance made me almost instantaneously think, ‘I need to call Werner. We have another film to follow on from Into the Inferno that takes a geoscience topic but looks at all of the myths and the anthropological connections with the science.’ It’s really the entanglements of nature and culture.
Werner, when you got that call from Clive, what were your thoughts?
Werner Herzog: I was immediately onboard. There were no thoughts, I just jumped. I immediately knew there was great casting, the characters lined up, the selection of events and locations. I had the feeling that the historical and cultural repercussions were enormous. It’s not only the entire Muslim world, over a billion people, who venerate the Black Stone—which with all probability is a meteorite—but all the others: the aborigines in Australia and the South Korean team in Antarctica. Some of the funniest moments in the film we have from the South Koreans because a few years ago in Antarctica they recorded a big find of a meteorite, a big black slab on the ice, and their exuberance and wild excitement is exactly the excitement of our movie. It’s actually very, very funny, and their loose-gun commentary makes it even more joyful.
CO: The film touches on creation and destruction and the idea that life on earth was seeded by organic matter that was delivered by meteorites eons ago. And the idea that perhaps life even exists throughout the universe carried on interstellar dust. And of course, the existential threat that we see in science-fiction movies of a big inbound asteroid and what we might do about it. Once you dig in, you realize that this is a topic that is very, very interwoven with humanity over human history.
Clive, there’s a scene in Fireball when you’re out on the ice in Antarctica looking for meteorites with the South Korean research team and you yourself find one. What was that like for you?
CO: It was very, very special. I’d been looking for quite a long time. I think that there is an expertise in all of these things. People who are good at collecting fossils will see things that I would tread on without noticing. So I really felt I could come away with not finding anything at all. And then I saw one. And then I saw another one almost at the same time. And I was so excited. I was worried they might move away or something, I don’t know, so I threw my backpack down by the little one and thought, ‘I have to get to the big one before it disappears down a crevasse.’ It was very, very thrilling. Then the expert came and joined me and he at once recognized that this was a very, very rare meteorite. Something like ninety-five percent of them are called ordinary chondrites—they’re not ordinary at all but they’re the most common meteorite—and this was a different type altogether and the scientists were very excited about it. So that made it even more extraordinary for me to have had the privilege of finding it.
Have you learned more about that meteorite since then?
CO: A little bit. They initially thought it might have come from Mars. Only about a hundred Martian meteorites have ever been found on earth—these arrive after a big chunk of rock hits Mars and it flings bits of the Martian crust into space. I was very excited that this might be the Koreans’ very first Martian meteorite. But it turned out not to be one of those, but rather a very rare class of meteorite. It’s now known as BDT19007 and I will continue to follow its scientific journey. It’s come all the way from the asteroid belt, it landed in Antarctica a hundred thousand years ago, and now it’s in the lab probably in various places around the world being studied.
Did they break it up to study it?
CO: The journey of meteorites has just begun when they are found by the scientists. They have to be classified and the unusual ones are probed further. They’re so rare that, for example, the Koreans want a piece of a meteorite found by the Americans or the Japanese or the British and they trade. And the museums do the same thing. So some of the very historic meteorite finds that are in museums have bits of them missing because over the years bits have been cut off and traded for other specimens or donated to scientific laboratories.
Fireball explores the idea that life on earth arrived on a meteorite. Were you aware of this theory before you started making the film?
WH: Yes. It’s a well-known speculation that life—or at least the building blocks of life—may have come from outer space. There’s a lot of research. We do not have the evidence yet, but it may come sooner or later. We just don’t know. But the research is very serious and it has intensified.
CO: As far back as the nineteenth century, there was a German scientist who thought he could see fossils in microscopic slides taken of meteorites. And this really captured the public imagination and it gave credence to this idea. Fred Hoyle, the British astronomer, famously ran with this and said that even viruses came from outer space. Believe it or not, there is a paper published suggesting that Covid-19 was delivered by a meteorite that fell in Wuhan Province. I don’t think that there’s much scientific credibility in that but as Werner says, if not life, the building blocks of life. They’ve found sugars in meteorites, very recently they’ve found evidence for protein in a meteorite. I knew about organics in meteorites, but I’d never thought of the complexity of them. They’re things with a hundred carbon atoms and nitrogen and they’re very, very complex organic compounds. As a geologist working on volcanic rocks that are completely inorganic, I struggle to conceive how these very complex organic molecules are formed in space.
WH: I would like to add that whoever claims there is life out there and it has been transplanted to our planet is a fraud. We don’t have the data yet to confirm it. But let me add another thing—and I don’t want to sound like it’s science fiction, I say this in very prosaic terms—we know we have the same history with the entire universe, we have the same physics with the entire universe, we have the same chemistry with the entire universe. So the assumption that there might be life somewhere else is not completely wrong. The assumption is fine.
CO: There was a meteorite found in France in the nineteenth century and somebody—they never found out who—pushed a seed into it. That fooled scientists for a long time.
One of the things that’s wonderful about Fireball is the scale of it. Even as it looks at very specific rocks, it can’t help but create a sense of awe about the cosmos we are a part of. What was your greatest moment of awe in making the film?
WH: Of course, the film is full of awe, and that’s the essence of filmmaking and the essence of science. There is the awe of seeing the micrometeorites—just specks of dust—enlarged three thousand times. They’re the most beautiful sculptures on God’s planet and each one is different, each one has its own fantastic shape.
Then there is the unthinkable, the impossible, the forbidden thought when we dig into quasicrystals that should not exist. According to human science for the last two hundred years, it was unthinkable that these orders of crystals were possible. Digging into that was exciting for me.
And sometimes it’s the size of the event. What came down in Chicxulub had the energy of maybe a couple of hundred million Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs. It’s unimaginable. But Clive describes it as if he were a witness. He’s such a wonderful presenter and makes it absolutely visible what must have happened sixty-six million years ago.
CO: A moment where a lot of the themes connected for me was filming on Mer Island in the Torres Strait. It’s a long way to go particularly with a lot of film gear and a film crew getting into smaller and smaller aircraft as you island hop to Mer, which has a population of about four hundred people. It’s where the anthropologist Alfred Haddon visited in the late nineteenth century and made one of the very first, if not the first, anthropological films of the islanders dancing. We went there because we knew of a dance where fire torches are beaten together, and the embers recreate the shooting stars across the night sky. For the islanders when they see a shooting star, it’s the soul of a departed one going to the netherworld. When we arrived, they hadn’t performed this dance for fifty years on the island and they were very reluctant to perform it. They said, ‘This is our tradition, this is the most important thing to us, forget about what else we have, what do we really have? Our tradition, our belief.’ When one of the elders agreed to stage the dance, he first had to instruct some of the younger men in the choreography and the song. They performed it as the sun set on the beach and sure enough the embers flew into the night sky and that was very, very extraordinary to witness.
WH: May I add that what it notable is that for half a century they hadn’t performed it. They had to make it up in their memories, the dance. So the film revived a tradition that has been dormant for half a century.
Another thing about Fireball that’s very powerful in this moment we’re living through is the depiction of death, the sense that everything could all be over in a flash. How did this film make you feel about death?
CO: One of the observations we make in the film is in a way to look back and say how pathetic we are with all of the conflict. Look at the cosmos, look at earth’s history. Look at the mass extinctions that we see in the fossil record. That’s one of the things that makes me think about how people have thought about death over human history and prehistory. And these ideas of the netherworld and heaven or the heavens are fairly ubiquitous throughout time and throughout cultures. That to me is very interesting because it connects something that is fundamental to the human condition with something that is very much about geophysics and cosmology.
Fireball is the second film that you’ve done together. What do you most appreciate about each other in making films together?
WH: I think we bring different skills to a movie and we are able to combine these skills. It’s a unique concoction. It brings a new energy to films on science and to documentaries in general.
CO: I think we’re interested in many of the same things and yet we come from very different perspectives. And Werner, let’s face it, we’re both rogues.
WH: Yes.
CO: The way we work is complementary. It has its tension, it has its joys and its ecstasies and what comes out of it is something that neither of us could do alone. I think also what’s been very fortunate for me to work with Werner is that we’re working on unscripted documentary.
WH: We do have some common denominators. Curiosity, a sense of awe, joy of science, joy of cinema. So it’s very easy to get the two of us together. I keep saying Clive without me could be a great successor to David Attenborough for BBC or National Geographic. He has it in him. He has some very specific qualities that you do not see on the screen anymore.
Where do those qualities come from? Do you think they’re innate?
WH: They are acquired qualities, I think. Well, curiosity is probably something innate but it’s innate in all of us. You see it when you watch little children. The funny thing is that I’ve seen only wonderful five-year-olds: great curiosity, great sense of awe. They are spectacular. But when they are fifteen, they’re all boring. And what has happened in between, that’s my question.
CO: Werner’s films are like a piece of music that you love and you can listen to again and again, and each time you’ll hear something that you never really noticed before. I hope that’s something that carries in the films we’ve made together—that someone could watch them again and again and see new connections that they hadn’t noticed before. The film isn’t something just to watch once. It has a deeper layer than that.
In both of the films you’ve made together, it’s like we’re with you on a journey of discovery as opposed to being on an expedition where you’re teaching us things. There’s a marvelous energy of unfolding in these films.
WH: That’s exactly what Clive’s quality is. He is a character onscreen and he has a very keen sense of cinema so it’s something that makes it easy to work together.
CO: With Into the Inferno we filmed in five locations in five countries. Here we filmed in a dozen locations, and we had topics from origins of life to existential threat to planetary defense to micrometeorites to quasicrystals… we had many interconnecting themes! The magic really was in weaving it together. At the outset we had the idea of the narrative arc of the film, but for me it was very extraordinary, as we pieced it together in the edit, that the individual episodes absolutely demanded where they needed to be. It was very, very clear.
So what’s next then?
WH: I don’t know. I’m writing at the moment, I’m writing prose text and I’m writing poetry. Nothing connected to cinema. And we were lucky because we shot the film last year until December and then during the lockdown it was edited and mixed and all these things so we were just finished when nobody could work anymore.
CO: I got home from filming on Christmas Eve and then we edited in Los Angeles in January, so we were very lucky.
Since you both seem so driven by curiosity and here we are, all locked down, what are you each most curious about now?
WH: Well, I do read as always. I do not watch that many films. And writing is always going into new terrain. In the morning when I sit down to write, I don’t know what my next sentence is going to be.
CO: I have two primary school-age kids who’ve been at home since March so the creative headroom is very narrow at the moment. But I’ve really developed a curiosity for the history and philosophy of science. I’ve been looking recently at the roots of volcanology in the late eighteenth century, and I’m really enjoying connecting ideas that we have now with what people were thinking over two hundred years ago. So that’s my current passion, digging into a history of science, which is also partly a history of travel.
What do you hope people will take from Fireball?
WH: Simple answer. If one young kid gets excited about science through this film and decides to start as a scientist, we have won the battle. A single one.
CO: I have the same feeling, actually. If one person says to me, “That blew me away,” that’s job done. If someone comes away with a renewed or reignited sense of awe and wonder for the cosmos, that would be the reward.