You first met Werner Herzog on Mount Erebus volcano in Antarctica, when it was 25 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. What was your initial impression of him?
Clive Oppenheimer: We knew he was coming. It was my fourth trip to Erebus so I knew what Erebus was going to be like—but I didn’t know what Werner was going to be like. Before he showed up, given his reputation, there was concern that he was going to want us to do all sorts of crazy things on a relatively dangerous volcano. But when I actually met him I found his personality completely magnetic. He’s one of the most charismatic people I’ve ever met. One of my strongest memories is of sitting around the dinner table in our field camp; we always insist that everyone dine together at the end of the day. I reveled in Werner’s stories about all his adventures. I’d brought out some of the movies he’d made and it was just fabulous: We were up at 10,000 feet in a little hut in a remote field camp, watching the films and Werner was giving a commentary.
At what point did you decide to do a film together? Was it your idea or his or a moment of joint inspiration?
CO: Werner and I stayed in touch after meeting on Erebus. We talked about volcanoes and making a movie but only in very general terms. But when I wrote a book on eruptions in prehistory, Werner very kindly wrote a cover puff for it and when it was published in 2011 I sent him a copy of the book and I wrote on the front, “Are you ready to make a demented volcano movie now?” So that was the trigger point. We met in London and had lunch. We’d been casting about for names for the film and as I left I said something like, “Werner and Clive head off into the inferno!” It was kind of a joke but it stuck. It took a long time for the funding to come together. It took us about three years to secure.
Werner is famous for his tireless curiosity and his prolific output. What was it like to make Into the Inferno together?
CO: It was wonderful. I’ve dabbled in documentaries and made short appearances in them but I always wanted to do something much more substantive. I’d been pitching ideas over the years but nothing had come to fruition. And in hindsight that was a great thing because I don’t know that I would have had the maturity to pull it off earlier on. To end up collaborating with Werner was a dream come true. All of the places we wound up filming were places I had research connections with and I helped to set up most of the interviews. The film was a team experience too because we had very much the same crew throughout. Basically, we had a lot of challenges and a lot of fun. We had a smorgasbord of volcanoes and people living on and studying them. But the magic of the film is how Werner weaves a narrative out of it at the end of the day.
How did you decide which volcanoes to feature?
CO: I was keen for a number of ingredients. I wanted us to go to places that are not widely known. A lot of volcano documentaries go to Pompeii or Hawaii, for instance. That’s why North Korea seemed a fantastic opportunity. I was very keen to go to Eritrea for similar reasons, but we were unable to get the film permits so we went to Ethiopia; I really wanted to go somewhere in that part of the African rift, to get the deep time perspective because our species grew up in the shadows of very large explosive volcanoes there. I was also keen to go to Indonesia, in particular Merapi Volcano, because that part of the film looks at how you deal with very contemporary volcanic risk; there are a million people living on the slopes of that volcano. And also Merapi it is central to the people’s cosmology and we timed our filming to coincide with festivals that celebrate that. Vanuatu was a place with some very spectacular volcanic activity: one volcano with a lava lake and one that explodes every twenty seconds or so. Iceland offered an example of a colossal lava eruption in the late eighteenth century and its impacts on the environment and the climate, and also I wanted to look into a tenth century eruption, which is conjured up in an epic poem in the Codex Regis. We were looking at all of these different places and the people’s beliefs and customs through the lens of the volcano. We didn’t forget to cover some of the science, too!
Your passion for volcanoes is on display throughout Into the Inferno. What is it about them that drew you to make them your life’s work?
CO: In some ways it was chance. I didn’t study much volcanology as a bachelor’s student. But I traveled around Indonesia before I went up to university, and I had a textbook about volcanoes with me by a guy named Peter Francis. I’d been given a list of about thirty books to study but it was the only one I read. And it was a great companion in Indonesia because of the country’s many volcanoes. That book sowed a seed, and the guy who wrote it ended up being my PhD adviser. I’d initially thought I would go into seismology, but when I was applying for PhDs I saw a project advertised that involved going to various volcanoes to take measurements with a little infrared thermometer. It may have been the lure of the fieldwork in Italy and Latin America that convinced me to apply. I certainly haven’t regretted it.
What I’m good at is making observations. I’m best suited to being outside on the top of the volcano figuring out how exactly I’m going to get measurements. I really enjoy the fieldwork and then poring over the data. It can take months, even years, of working with the data until a pattern emerges that amazes and surprises you.
It’s clear from the film that you have a deep love for Indonesia, a country that has more volcanoes than any other on earth. But do you have a favorite single volcano?
CO: Erebus. It was my lucky day when I fell into the US Antarctic Program. Erebus is over 12,000 feet high. It’s got phenomenal views. When it’s clear, you look across the ice shelf towards the Trans-Antarctic Mountains and there are all of these glaciers that are golden at a certain time of day. You’ve got the ice caves, which are like Alice in Wonderland worlds; you’ve got the lava lake. It’s a wonderful place to live for a month and scientifically it’s been the most rewarding volcano I’ve worked on because we’ve been able to make very, very detailed observations of the lava lake. The lake is the top part of the volcano’s plumbing system but it gives us information about what’s happening much deeper down and helps us to understand what’s going on beneath other volcanoes around the world. It’s actually not a crazy thing to study Erebus even though it’s a long way to go.
Volcanoes are places of myth and mystery and as the film notes, in some ways they are very alluring. But of course, they can be incredibly dangerous. What’s the hairiest experience you’ve ever had on a volcano?
CO: I’ve been on Erebus when it’s been throwing lava bombs over the top and that’s been pretty close to my risk tolerance. But you’d be extremely unlucky to get hit because they’re not carpeting the slopes of the volcano, they’re just a few discreet bombs falling around. There was a volcano in Costa Rica when I was a PhD student: I could hear these loud percussions and then I saw quite a big column of ash and rock hurtling out of the crater. I did leg it out of there. I don’t think I was in peril but I did get out of the way. In fact, some of the hairiest experiences have been more related to security. Volcanoes tend to attract an exotic breed of humans. I’ve had a number of guns pointed at me at a number of volcanoes. We had a bad situation once in Ethiopia.
What do you think is the biggest public misconception about volcanoes?
CO: We think of volcanoes as places that erupt violently but the big events are really quite rare. Most of the time most volcanoes are very tranquil, extremely beautiful places that people live upon, growing crops, tending livestock. That’s why there are some very deep oral traditions that trace back millennia that relate to how people coexisted with volcanoes. The catastrophe might be a long time in the future or a long time in the past.
Another thing about volcanology is that it touches on many other disciplines. Obviously on geology and hazards but also on climate studies, archeology, history, mathematics. You can come at it from so many different angles. Our conferences have people coming from all of these fields and working at the interfaces between them is where things get really interesting.
What moment from the experience of making this film will stay with you the most?
CO: That’s a tricky one because there are so many and the film is still very, very fresh. Definitely the camaraderie that we had. Werner is a very funny man actually. He claims to have no sense of irony but I don’t think that’s true. And finding those human fossils in Ethiopia was really quite a thrill. I never imagined that they’d let me stomp all over this area where they had all of these incredibly rare fragments of human bone from 75,000 years ago and let me dig them up, not knowing what I was doing. Holding the Codex Regis in Iceland was a thrill. There were so many highlights. But I think the laughter is the thing that will stay with me in the longest. We found every opportunity to have some fun.