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The Current Transcript for June 5, 2019

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

Prologue:

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JUSTIN TRUDEAU: The strength of the families and survivors who bravely shared their truth has shown us the way forward. Our country can and must do better, and we will.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, signalling his acceptance of the wide-ranging report on the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and its use of the word genocide. But when it comes to concrete action, it is not clear which or how many of the inquiry's recommendations it will implement. In a moment, our rotating cast of thinkers weighs in on where it might start.

AMT: And then: she grew up living the only life she knew. A religious fundamentalist who embraced her beliefs and worked to convince others to join the fold. And then, she walked away.

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AMBER SCORAH: I feel like I was living a half-life when I was in the religion. And what happens is when you leave, yes, it's difficult. But You have to deal with your own mortality. But life is actually very beautiful.

AMT: Amber Scorah faced a new world when she left the Jehovah's Witness. She shares her story in half-an-hour.

AMT: And we're pulling this one out of my pile of favourites today.

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WERNER HERZOG: Just follow your vision and don't be afraid. You have to be intrepid to follow it no matter what is going on left and right and what the trends are. And that's always my advice.

AMT: If there's anyone who embodies following your own vision it is Werner Hertzog. He picked up a film camera at 19, when no one thought he was worthy. And when he showed up to talk to me, I didn't think I was worthy. I'd only seen some of his 60-plus films. I didn't even know he wrote opera. He was called, is called, the greatest film director alive. No intimidation factor there. The conversation we had that day became one of my all-time favourites. Because I learned something about how this great man thinks. And it still makes me smile to think about it. We are going to play my conversation with Werner Herzog again in an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is "The Current".

Part one: MMIWG panel

Guests: J.P. Tasker, Kathleen Martens, Tanya Talaga

JUSTIN TRUDEAU: We have commissioners who came back with findings of fact, and with calls to action. We accept their findings, including that what happened amounts to genocide. There are many debates ongoing around words and use of words. Our focus as a country, as leaders, as citizens, must be on the steps we take to put an end to this situation.

AMT: Justin Trudeau, speaking yesterday at the Vancouver summit focussed on gender equality. The prime minister has promised action after the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls delivered its final report Monday. It is unclear what steps the Liberal government will take to deal with a cycle of violence the commissioners call a genocide. Or whether voters are prepared to embrace its call for all Canadians to take responsibility for ending this. For their thoughts on what to expect I'm joined by our weekly rotating national affairs panel. J.P. Tasker is a senior writer and reporter in CBC's Parliamentary bureau in Ottawa. Kathleen Martens is an online reporter for APTN National News. They're both in our Ottawa studio. And Tanya Talaga is at the Toronto Star columnist and author of "All Our Relations". She's with me in our Toronto studio. Hi everyone welcome.

J.P TASKER: Good morning.

KATHLEEN MARTENS: Good morning.

TANYA TALAGA: [A greeting in Anishnaabe].

AMT: J.P. Tasker, let's start with you. The prime minister says he accepts the report's findings, including the use of the word genocide. What does that mean in practical terms?

J.P TASKER: Well, there could be international implications for recognizing genocide, of course. If you look at the UN Convention on the prevention of genocide, it's not hard to see why the inquiry came to that conclusion. There are a number of bits in there that seem to check some boxes in terms of what's happened in this country, including imposing you know measures to prevent births. We had forced sterilizations in this country, of course. The forced transferring of children from one group to another. The Indian Residential School comes to mind with that. And also causing serious bodily harm and mental harm. So you can see why the inquiry believes that over the sweeping history of this country, it's perhaps not impossible to come to the conclusion that genocide is something that's been perpetrated on Indigenous women and girls in this country. But I think it's interesting to see how the prime minister tried to shift the conversation. Beca in that clip there, he said it's perfectly fine to debate certain words. You know we can focus on some of these things in the days ahead. But we shouldn't be solely focussed on one word. We can't let genocide monopolise the debate on the inquiry's work, and we can't be transfixed by that one word. Because there were so many other recommendations — 231 calls for justice and a 1,200-page report. Some concrete solutions that we can start to put in place in this country to really help you know fix some of the issues that Indigenous women and girls are facing. Some of the endemic levels of violence that they've had to face over the course of the country's existence. And I think the prime minister is trying to say listen, we can have this debate. It's a worthy one. I accept the inquiry's findings. But let's not focus on that one word alone. And that's perhaps good advice.

AMT: Well, J.P., when a prime minister says I agree this was genocide, does he get to say it's just semantics.? I mean that's a legal term. He's the head of a country.

J.P TASKER: Well, and that's perhaps why he didn't give the straightest of straight answers. You know on the first day, he was facing heckling from the crowd at the inquiry's closing ceremony to say the word genocide. It wasn't in his prepared remarks. He didn't go off script to include that because obviously CBC News had been reporting over the weekend the genocide was in the final report. He didn't do that. And I think it's largely because, as I said, there are international implications to all this. We could be hauled in front of the U.N. or some sort of thing like that because we've acknowledged this. It's a profound statement to make for the leader of this country because the report wasn't situating all this in the past either. They were saying current state action and inaction also helped perpetrate a genocide against indigenous women.

AMT: Tanya Talaga, so he's talking about moving beyond semantics and focussing on action. How do you interpret what you heard from the prime minister?

TANYA TALAGA: I was there in Gatineau on Monday, and we all heard him not say the word genocide. And the thing is that while he said it, later on, you know you have to say the word, you have to believe the word. It's not just about saying the word. This is not just about semantics. And it's also about teaching the Canadian public about what's happened in this country. You can't move on. We're not going to be able to move on as a country unless we start embracing the true history of this nation and what's been going on. You know, this is not the first time we've used the word genocide this among Indigenous people we've known this to be true for a long period of time. Well, for hundreds of years. You know Murray Sinclair and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission also discussed genocide, but they used the phrase cultural genocide. But if you look at what genocide is, that is what has been going on in this country. And the prime minister can't skirt around that. Yes, we need to move forward, and we have to start looking at all those 231 calls for justice. But we also need to talk about what has gone on here. Canadians need to realize it and get it in their minds and understand. And we need to discuss this before we can actually move on as a nation, accepting this is actually what's happened.

AMT: Kathleen Martens, you were also there on Monday for the report's final release. What do you make of it how the government is responding now?

KATHLEEN MARTENS: Well, I'm with Tanya. I wonder why he didn't say it Monday in Gatineau? But he did say it later that night in Vancouver. You know, I've been thinking both that every night as I walk home from the office. What was it? Was he waiting for advice from lawyers? Was he waiting for his advisers? Did he get on the plane to Vancouver, and think about it, and relax, and say yeah maybe I can at least attributed to the report. I don't know? Maybe it could have been a friendlier audience out there than it was. I'm not saying they weren't friendly, but if he would have said it, would there have been cheers or would there have been jeers? I would have been curious to hear that.

AMT: Does the report not call for like looking at these cases, these specific cases again, Tanya? In terms of like opening up cold cases or looking at them through a different prism?

TANYA TALAGA: It does. It calls for making sure we get it right, you know? And there have been so many cases. And we can't forget too that the RCMP did travel you know with the inquiry, and they are looking at cold cases. There are cases that are out there. But I when I asked Marion Buller about those cases, she said those are outside of our jurisdiction, the RCMP does not report to us, so we don't know what they're looking at what they're actually doing. But families, individual families, have told her you know we have been contacted by not just the RCMP, provincial police forces, city police forces. Cases have been starting to open up, but I think that not as many as, and she said this to me as well, not as many as I would like.

AMT: If they are going to open up those cases, do they have to look at them through the prism again of that legal word: genocide. And war crimes?

TANYA TALAGA: I would hope so that they would. I mean this all needs to be now defined. And how do we move forward now that we have this word that's here? And are we accepting this word? You know the RCMP came out and talked a little bit about the report, but it didn't talk very much about it. What's needed now is a plan. You know, the prime minister did speak about the very first call for justice, which is developing a national action plan, and that's very true, that needs to be developed. Because that national action plan is really far sweeping in scope. And it looks at things like justice, and housing, the social determinants of health, you know access to water and education, all those things that we know for a long time have been needed to make things better. But looking at the justice system is very much a part of making things better. And how do we define that? We need to do the hard work now, and put everybody on the same page. So all of those police forces know what they're looking at, and look at it through a different prism, you're right. And looking at it with with grace. Looking at it with kindness and empathy as well. Because that hasn't happened for the families. I mean time and time again, I know my colleagues will probably tell you the same thing, we have heard from families that no one listens to them. That police don't answer their phone calls. They don't have any updates. They've heard nothing about what's going on with their missing and murdered loved ones.

AMT: So J.P., there are 231 recommendations, which ones are we most likely to see the government actually work on in this finite period of time before an election?

J.P TASKER: Well, we only three weeks left of the sitting of Parliament, so there's not much they can do in that time period. But they've said they will roll something out. You know there were some practical considerations in the report. You know no-cost legal services for women fleeing violence. Better funding for women's shelters, which is you know something that they could work with the provinces on right away. Changing the rules around restraining orders or protection orders as they're called in this country to help women get away from abusive partners. You know recruiting more Indigenous police officers. I was shocked to learn there's less than ten Inuit RCMP officers in the entire country. I mean they police all of the far north in this country, and yet, there's only ten in the service. That's something the government can get to work on right now. You know amping up its recruitment efforts. But also, they could make changes to the criminal code. A big recommendation in this report was to stiffen penalties for people who perpetrate spousal abuse. You know to strengthen the law when it comes to degrees of murder. As it is right now, a lot of people are just being charged with second degree murder when there is a crime against a partner. The inquiry wants to see that bumped up a bit. They want to see first degree murder charges for more people because they feel like the penalties that Indigenous men and non-Indigenous men are you know being handed down by Crown attorneys just aren't enough really for justice for the families. So those are things that the government can start to work on. We know that they are already taking action. This is a line from Carolyn Bennett — you know the Crown Indigenous Affairs Minister. She says look, you know in the last four years, we haven't been doing nothing. We haven't been waiting for the inquiry to report. We have legislation before the parliament right now to massively overhaul the child and family services regime in this country, which we know is being called by many "The Millennium Scoop" because it has so many qualities like "The Sixties Scoop" and the Indian residential school system because just so many First Nations children are being taken from their families. And, of course, being taken from their families and being placed in foster care a you know often a path to poverty, and that leads to violence, of course, as we know. So there are things that they're they're working on right now you know massive investments in the last budget. You know 25 per cent of all new spending in the last federal budget was on Indigenous issues. So I think the government takes us seriously, but of course, there's more to do now that they have 231 more recommendations to contend with beyond the 94 calls to action that we had from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

AMT: So I'm wondering, Kathleen, your own sense of how this is playing out in the country?

KATHLEEN MARTENS: Well, I'm in somewhat of a bubble, you know? I this beat for writing for an Indigenous audience Inuit, First Nation, non-status, and they are already upset with the government. You know, after what happened with Jody Wilson-Reybould, they take that seriously. They didn't like it. You know, if I can refer to them as a they. In general, the responses that I know I got to my stories when I reported on it, and my colleagues, was they were already upset. So then this report comes down. It has a very strong finding. It uses strong language. And yet, the government you know the prime minister doesn't even say the word or or accept the report's finding in front of the audience that really needed to hear it. And so what I've been hearing over the last couple of days is that you know they need to see something pretty soon and pretty strong from the government if they would even consider voting for this government again. You know there's a lot of unhappiness. There are things that weren't done. You know all the boil water advisories haven't been lifted.

AMT: And, apparently, three-quarters have though.

KATHLEEN MARTENS: Okay.

AMT: And that's what the Liberal government is arguing.

KATHLEEN MARTENS: You get those tweets too?

J.P TASKER: Yeah, they've gone from 105 in 2015, they're down to 58 now. And they say they're on track to eliminate all of them by 2021, of course.

AMT: One-hundred-and-five to 58 is not three-quarters, but keep going.

J.P TASKER: Yeah, that's what they're the latest data I just pulled when I did some research on it yesterday. So they say they've been making progress on these issues, of course, it's slow going because there are just so many issues to contend with. But as I said, you know five billion dollars in new spending in the last budget alone that was the largest line item included in the 2019 budget.

AMT: All right. Obviously, Kathleen, you're saying that's just not that's not resonating.

KATHLEEN MARTENS: Well, that's right. It's just another on a pile of what is viewed as broken promises. And even though the prime minister may say the word doesn't matter, in the words of Kayak Robinson, one of the commissioners, she said words do matter., And they very early on in their inquiry said it was genocide. And it's important for them. I know Marion Buller, the chief commissioner, said the same thing. We don't need to hear it from the prime minister's mouth, but I don't think all the commissioners are on that same page. Even Michelle Odette said I thought I was hoping he would have the courage to say it. It was very interesting to hear. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall when they would have had some of their meetings you know pre-report coming out, as they debated using the word.

AMT: I want to ask about another story involving the treatment of women by the courts. The Senate appears poised to pass a private member's bill that would mandate judges to undergo training about sexual assault law. Where is that, J.P.

J.P TASKER: So it's been a long battle Rona Ambrose, the former Conservative interim leader, this was kind of her swan song project before she took off and handed over the reins to Andrew Scheer. And it's called the Just Act because it legislates training for four federal judges on sexual assault. And it really important because there are so many people on the bench in this country that just don't come from a criminal background.

AMT: Just federal judges though? What about provicial judges?

J.P TASKER: Nope, because the federal government only has jurisdiction over federal law.

AMT: Because a lot of these cases start out in provincial court.

J.P TASKER: They do, they do, and that is the limitations of this legislation, of course. But she hopes that it will inspire other provinces to take action. We've already seen Prince Edward Island, for example, mandate this sort of training for their judges. They're inspired by Rona Ambrose his action. But yeah, it's been stalled in the Senate for three years. And finally, we're starting to see some action on that front because so many lawyers who become judges just don't come from a criminal background. They're tax attorneys. They're litigation attorneys. They're working on patents and copyrights. They don't really know what's going on in the criminal justice system. And Rona says they have to have some training. They need to have some more sensitivity.

KATHLEEN MARTENS: They rely on stereotypes a lot of the time.

J.P TASKER: Absolutely

AMT: Tanya, I wonder what you think about that story in relation to the first story we're talking about here?

TANYA TALAGA: Well, you know, you need to go deeper than just the judges. You need to go and look at court officials, you need to look at guards.

J.P TASKER: Police.

TANYA TALAGA: Police, of course. You know you need to look at so many other things. And I'm going to get back even farther and say we need curriculum changes in this country because you can't wait until we get the lawyers, the lawmakers, the politicians, the teachers, up to a level where they're making all the decisions, and they're making large decisions over the lives of Indigenous people or even the teachings of Indigenous people when they don't have the teachings themselves. You know, and this does get back to the provinces it's true. But education curriculum must reflect the true history of this country. And it's also sort of loops back to what we were talking about earlier with the word of genocide — getting Canadians to understand and know what that means. We need to start from the bottom. You know it's great that there is a piece of legislation. It's really sad that it's taken three years just to train judges. I mean, really? What's the hold up in that?

J.P TASKER: Yeah.

TANYA TALAGA: But we need to go deeper.

AMT: Kathleen, what do you think?

AMT: Well, I agree. You know what we heard at the inquiry, I went to several of the hearings, people were saying I'm pretty sure a crime was committed against me. But when I went in to report it to the detachment, I was told to go home, or you know maybe I could talk to the perpetrator or maybe I could sort things out. You know they were away. It's very much you have to become an advocate for yourself. A lot of the family said they had to become their own detectives. They had to become their own search and rescue organizations, you know? Because that service just wasn't available to them due to you know small detachments, resource issues, whatever, they're thrown into having to advocate for themselves for these services that many of us take for granted in larger centres.

AMT: So where does it go from here, J.P.?

J.P TASKER: You know, it's going to be a very daunting task for this government I think to have so many recommendations before it because some of them are just systematic changes. They're not things that can be changed overnight. You know we have a culture in policing in this country. We have a culture in the court systems. We have a culture with Crown attorneys you know being willing to give plea bargains to so many offenders as opposed to going to trial for Indigenous women and girls. And there hasn't been systematic change. It is not just something that can be done by one bill.

AMT: And let me ask you, sorry to interrupt, I just I realized we're going to run out of time. What about the opposition parties? I mean we're talking about the Liberal government. We are facing an election. How much of this becomes something that they pick up?

J.P TASKER: Well, there has been a paradigm shift of sorts. Cathy McLeod, the Indigenous Affairs Critic for the Conservative Party, said they would have a call to action for themselves. You know if they are elected, they would respond to the inquiry. And I think it's because we're seeing record turnouts from Indigenous peoples in elections. Last time, you know there was a 20-point increase amongst turnout on on-reserve voting stations. So they're becoming a voting demographic that matters to parties. So they can't just ignore them. They have to respond to their needs if they want to get their votes. And their votes matter, especially in rural and northern ridings — battleground ridings where across this country.

AMT: We have to leave it there. Thank you all of you for weighing in.

J.P TASKER: Thank you.

KATHLEEN MARTENS: Oh, you're welcome.

TANYA TALAGA: Miigwech.

AMT: I've been speaking with J.P. Tasker senior writer and reporter in the CBC Parliamentary bureau in Ottawa. Kathleen Martens is an online reporter for APTN National News. They're in our Ottawa studio. Tanya Talaga is a Toronto Star columnist and the author of "All Our Relations". She's in our Toronto studio. Let us know what you think. You can tweet us: @thecurrentcbc. Or you can find us on our webpage: www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the "contact" link. And stay with us. The news is next, and then we're looking at a life inside the Jehovah's Witness religion from a writer who left that world behind.

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AMBER SCORAH: They will dis-fellowship is what they call it. And everyone knows to shun you, not speak to you. Even if they pass you on the street, they don't acknowledge you.

AMT: Amber Scorah talks about leaving "The Witness". I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is "The Current".

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Part two: Toronto Island doc, Amber Scorah

Guests: Amber Scorah

AMT: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, and you're listening to "The Current".

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AMT: Still to come: as I approach my final day here at "The Current", we're going to revisit some of the interviews that have stayed with me over time. You'll hear some of those over the next few weeks. In half-an-hour, it's going to be my conversation with one of the most visionary, uncompromising, boundlessly curious artists working today. Filmmaker Werner Herzog talks about everything from documenting the lives of people living in the shadow of a volcano, to the surprising way he thinks of his own creative process. You'll hear that. But first, Making a splash on the Island.

AMT: Lake Ontario has hit record-breaking water levels as of last Friday. Surpassing a high watermark set two years ago. For residents of Toronto Island, in the city's harbour, that means a lot of sandbagging and rubber boots. Most homes and businesses will be fine. But the water is causing headaches for that community — at least for its adults. For island kids, it's a different story. The watery landscape has transformed their worlds in ways that are pretty exciting if you're part of the under-ten crowd. "The Current"'s Willow Smith got a tour of the flooded Island from some small tour guides.

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ELSIE HAMMON-BONAR: My name is Elsie Hammon-Bonar.

EAMON HARRIGNTON-BONAR: My name is Eamon Harrignton-Bonar, four years old.

ELSIE HAMMON-BONAR: I am eight years old. We're seeing a humungous puddle, with a big pump, and fences around it. It's crazy, and dug up dirt. This is super deep! It's like a foot deep!

EAMON HARRIGNTON-BONAR: There is a ginormous puddle, with four metres down!

ELSIE HAMMON-BONAR: They're pumping all the water.

WILLOW SMITH: How many pumps are there right now arround the island?

ELSIE HAMMON-BONAR: About 50. Oh, that's deep. It's like really deep!

WILLOW SMITH: And what does this look like normally? Explain what we would normally be looking at?

ELSIE HAMMON-BONAR: Just Some grass, and I would usually ran over to a willow tree. But now, it's like a foot deep or maybe like a foot-and-a-half deep. So it would probably got to my knees.

EAMON HARRIGNTON-BONAR: I don't like it when it's super high because I don't want anybody to fall in.

WILLOW SMITH: Have you fallen in?

ELSIE HAMMON-BONAR: I was sandbagging the other day, and it is was a bit hard. And me and Eamon selled lemonade. Well, we really didn't sell it. We gave it out to people. Limeade it's called. Now, I'm going to go show my auntie and cousin and brother the sign of a cart of the carps because I think it's trying to say watch out, carp are nearby!

WILLOW SMITH: And where are the carp? Remind people what's weird about where the carp are.

ELSIE HAMMON-BONAR: The carp are basically on the road. And like right now, we're passing where I saw the carp. They were three humungous creatures — almost as big as my brother. My parents think of flood they seem annoyed with all the water. And this is at their schedule. We're at the beach, and it's completely flooded. There used to be a lot more beach than this. like I could walk right now... if there was no flood, I could walk right now onto the beach. But if I were to walk it right now, I would walk right into the water. My friends think of the flood that it's really cool. And we're even going to do a play of how the flood feels like to us. My feet are soaking because I decided to wear crocs with holes in them. The best outfit for a flood is a bathing suit and a raincoat and flip flops. Right now, I'm dumping water out of my shoes because they're soaking, and I hate wet feet.

EAMON HARRIGNTON-BONAR: And I was going into an enormous puddle in the universe. And my socks are wet!

AMT: Sounds from a transformed, soggy Toronto Island, complete with carp on the road. Thanks to "The Current"s Willow Smith for the visit.

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AMT: You're listening to "The Current" I'm Anna Maria Tremonti.

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AMBER: Today we explored dicey territory. This question comes from Jorge. Dear Amber, please explain why do Chinese people make so much noise when they're eating? I've brought in an expert eater, it's David. David's our sound guy here at ChinesePod.

DAVID: Hey, Amber.

AMBER: So for Chinese people, like it's not impolite to make noise when you're eating —mouth noises?

DAVID: No.

AMBER SCORAH: Oh, really? Okay, so if you make mouth noises in Chinese, does it mean anything?

DAVID: It means you like the food. It's delicious. And we appreciate the food.

AMBER SCORAH: Oh.

DAVID: Especially when you eat noodles.

AMBER SCORAH: Oh, really?

DAVID: I make a lot of noise.

AMT: That's from a podcast called "Dear Amber", from about a decade ago. Host Amber Scorah would chat about everything from surviving subway travel in China, to the ubiquity of surgical masks. Her show became a huge hit. It made her a podcasting star. But there was a problem with that: she was supposed to be leading a quiet, unobserved life in Shanghai. Because she'd gone there in the first place as a Jehovah's Witness with a goal of making new converts in a country where that's not allowed. Her newfound podcasting popularity was not the only big change in Amber's life when she was in China. She also left her faith behind, and left the country. She's written a memoir about leaving "The Witness" why she left, and how she built a new life, despite a personal tragedy. Amber Scorah joins me from New York. Hello.

AMBER SCORAH: Hello, Anna Maria. Thanks for having me today.

AMT: How did you end up becoming a podcast star when you were supposed to be living a quiet life in Shanghai?

AMBER SCORAH: I had been listening to a podcast that was a Chinese language learning podcast. I mean, I had a very solid drive to learn Mandarin because I wanted to learn how to communicate with Chinese people so that I could convert them to my religion. But the more I listened, I just fell in love with podcasts. And so I wrote the company and asked them if I could work there — part-time, of course. I had only ever worked part time my entire life to support myself in my preaching work.

AMT: Let's talk about your work in China. How did you preach and search for people to convert in a country where Jehovah's Witnesses were not allowed to do that?

AMBER SCORAH: So we had to be careful. And part of being careful was to first vet people for a long time, to get to know them well before we ever revealed what our purpose was. So I would just try and meet people, go out to parks, or go out to bookstores, just find places where there were friendly people I could strike up a conversation and a potential friendship with.

AMT: So you'd kind of be friends, and then you'd eventually tell them?

AMBER SCORAH: Yeah, and I mean like slipping in the Bible is an awkward proposition at any time, you know? But particularly so in China, where the Bible is not something that it's part of everyday consciousness.

AMT: How long a process would that be, Amber?

AMBER SCORAH: It would depend. You're basically trying to discern whether the person had any connections to the Chinese Communist Party or the government or any family members who were potentially people that would turn you in for the preaching work that you were doing.

AMT: What made you passionate enough to want to preach in China?

AMBER SCORAH: Well, I was a third-generation Jehovah's Witness. I was born into the religion. And I honestly believed it 100 per cent. I thought I had the truth. And my motives, I felt they were very pure. I just really thought that Armageddon was coming. Jehovah's Witnesses believe that the end of the world is imminent. And so when you have that mentality, if you think you're a person who cares about people, you just want to try and save people's lives.

AMT: Well, we did ask the Jehovah's Witnesses International Organization for a comment about its activities in China. We did not get a response to that question. But I want to talk to you a little bit more about your own history in the religion. Talk to me a little bit about what it was like for you as a child — the good and bad aspects it brought up in your life?

AMBER SCORAH: My background is a little different than some Jehovah's Witnesses because my parents had become inactive in the faith. So I went periodically to the meetings. My grandmother would take us. I don't know if hearing this stuff made me kind of a weird child or if I was already a weird child? But when I would hear them talk about Armageddon, some people were gonna be saved, and others are going to be destroyed any day now. Even though I was very young, maybe seven years old, I took it very seriously. And I started to have nightmares and insomnia — fearing that I was going to die at Armageddon. Because the message we got at the meetings was if you aren't all in, that means you're out. You know there was this dark side, but then the good side of it felt so good. And all of a sudden, my everything made sense, you know? I had the answers to any troubling questions of life, and that was something that really cemented me and glued me to the group.

What are the core beliefs of being a Jehovah's Witness?

AMBER SCORAH: They believe that they are the one true Christian religion, and the only people who are acceptable to God. They take a very literal translation of the Bible. So the parts of revelation that talk about God's judgment day, the masses of people, the vast majority, will go off into destruction. And they believe they are the ones, Jehovah's Witnesses only, who will be saved at this great war of Armageddon. And then after that, they believe the world will be turned into a paradise. Kind of like back to the original Garden of Eden state. When you have that world view, it informs a lot of the ways you live your life. And so some of the other core beliefs of The Witnesses are that you should not go to college or pursue a career because the main purpose of life is to save yourself and save others.

AMT: So you made the point that some you only ever worked part-time.

AMBER SCORAH: Yeah, exactly.

AMT: So you didn't go to college?

AMBER SCORAH: No, and I really liked school. I was a good student. And I discussed it with my parents, and we all decided together that it would be a bad idea because all it would serve to do is provide a distraction from what was important in this time of the end.

AMT: Talk to me a little bit more about the rules you had to follow?

AMBER SCORAH: Some things overlap with many different fundamentalist Christian groups. For example, like no premarital sex. There's a lot of positive things like trying to teach you to be loving, this type of stuff. But then they also have certain beliefs that decades ago were sort of picked out of the Bible by the leadership at the time, and it's just sort of not evolved. One of those is that you should have abstain from blood. Even if it will save your life, you should not take a blood transfusion. They also there's sort of like a separation from mainstream Christianity in the sense that they weed out any what they consider pagan traditions like Jehovah's Witnesses don't celebrate birthdays or Christmas because these holidays have pagan roots.

AMT: What happens if you don't follow the rules?

AMBER SCORAH: It depends. It depends how serious it is. But a lot of them will lead to what they call judicial action. So for the more serious sins like, for example, premarital sex, or if you took a blood transfusion, down the line all the way to child molestation, you will have to go before the elders and confess your sin. And they will ask you questions. And ultimately, they will decide whether you are repentant or not. So if they do decide that you are not repentant enough, they will disfellowshipped you is what they call it, which effectively means that they make an announcement at the Kingdom Hall from the platform during the meeting that you are disfellowshipped, and everyone knows to shun you, not speak to you. Even if they pass you on the street, they don't acknowledge you.

AMT: The Jehovah's Witnesses International Organization website has a section on disfellowshipping and excluding people from the community for acting against the teachings. And they do say it's done out of love to help the person who has sinned. You were excluded from that community. Did you see that as love?

AMBER SCORAH: Oh yes, definitely. Because when you're you sort of have a certain worldview, and you've been trained in that worldview. I too felt like oh, this was the right thing for them to do. And the reason why they can sort of spin it as love, even though it probably sounds to most outsiders is not a very loving act, and it doesn't feel like a very loving act for sure when you're subject to it. But for a Jehovah's Witness, that most important thing is that you stay faithful so that you can survive Armageddon. And so if you do something that causes you to be unfaithful, and you're allowed to just continue in that conduct, and everyone condones it, well God sees it, and he's gonna kill you in Armageddon for it. So the most effective way to get you back is to cut you off so that you will come to your senses. It's a very effective motivator. I mean some may call it emotional blackmail, but it works sometimes.

AMT: Well, we're getting ahead of ourselves a little bit though because I want to know more about China, and where your decisions started to shift. How did being in a completely different culture start to change your way of thinking?

AMBER SCORAH: It happened slowly. So I already felt that in learning this new language, my mind had started to be excavated in a way. Like it was for Chinese, you have to learn an entirely new way of thinking. And then being immersed in this different culture, many of the things that came very naturally to me that I thought made sense when I was in China, I would find that it was almost the opposite, and it still made sense. It took some time, but my mind started to realize that my own way of doing things wasn't the only way of doing things. And when you're in a religion that tells you have the absolute truth, this is the only path, that can start to feel a little bit strange.

AMT: Especially I guess you're sort of moving through a culture that has thousands of years of brilliance behind it, right?

AMBER SCORAH: Entirely, that is very true. And it was a factor because as I was studying with my Chinese Bible students, some of the things I would be teaching from the Bible, the student would tell me oh like Confucius said something like this. And I did have moments of clarity long before I left where I would feel as embarrassed just to think that here I was you know this woman coming from some Western country to this culture telling them with absolute certainty you know throw away those thousands of years of wisdom and history and culture, and trade it in for this hundred-year-old religion because it's the truth.

AMT: So as you face these doubts, and you and you see the world through a different prism, how do you end up leaving your religion?

AMBER SCORAH: It's definitely not easy, and it's not the kind of religion where you can just sort of fade away without anyone noticing, especially in the position I was in because I was married to an elder in the congregation.

AMT: So how did your husband react to the kinds of doubts you were having? How did he find out?

AMBER SCORAH: Well, for a long time, I didn't share them. It's a very dangerous thing to admit that you have doubts about the faith. Because in our religion, that's basically the worst sin you can commit.

AMT: And one day you blurt something out in front of your husband. What happend?

AMBER SCORAH: Oh yeah, we would study the Jehovah's Witness publications at our meetings. And and so I was preparing for the meeting, as I always did. And there was an article that basically raised sort of a problem that was occurring in certain congregations that the Watchtower leaders were trying to address. And that was that there were study groups forming of people who were learning like Hebrew and Greek so that they could study the Bible in its original language, which seemed like a really great idea to me by this point because I thought like why what would we be afraid of? There's nothing to be afraid of. But the article went on to say that absolutely not. And that the only place that we should be getting our understanding from was from what we called the governing body, who are essentially the leaders of the Jehovah's Witnesses. And I just blurted out is this some kind of a cult or something? And my husband looked at me like, and was like what did you just say?

AMT: We did request interviews with the Jehovah's Witnesses International Organization, as well as the Canadian branch, and they declined. They pointed us to their website for information. And the website has a section explaining why they are not a cult that, and I'm quoting, here far from being a dangerous cult, Jehovah's Witnesses practice a religion that benefits its members and others in the community. End quote. What do you think of that?

AMBER SCORAH: I mean I think the word cult is a very charged word. And I think it means different things to different people. If you had told me when I was a Jehovah's Witness that I was in a cult, I would have been really angry and strongly denied it. Because you don't feel like you're in a cult. I don't think people who are in a cult ever think they're in a cult. They think they're in the truth. I'm not here to criticize or attack the Jehovah's Witnesses or their beliefs. But to me, the more important thing is to take a look at the practices, and whether the practices of a group cause harm? I think that every religion has the potential for good or bad. But my experience with the witnesses was that as long as you're following all the rules, everything is fine. And yes, it does have positive effects in your life, and it is a wonderful community. I love many many of my friends who are Jehovah's Witnesses still to this day, even though they don't talk to me. But the retribution I felt personally after having a very moderate doubt, It wasn't like I was ranting and raving in the coronation, but just the fact that I questioned something, the reaction I got did not feel right. It didn't feel normal because I was very quickly isolated. I was told that if I talk about this stuff, I will be disfellowshipped. That, in fact, they just told me to stay away. Basically if I wasn't willing to reform my thoughts back to where they should be.

AMT: Given that, how did you build a new life for yourself after leaving the religion?

AMBER SCORAH: It was not easy. I've spent a lot of time alone. I was still in China when I left. Like in the beginning, I just didn't feel like I belonged anywhere. I didn't know how to live in the real world because I had been taught that that world was scary, and that the people were worldly and bad and I would be sort of like chewed up and spat out. But I also couldn't go back to the old world because it just it wasn't possible for me anymore. It was just one step by one step. I had to become outgoing even though I'm kind of a shy person, and just make friends one at a time. Figure out how I would support myself, where I was going to live, it was basically just like starting a new life.

AMT: And several years after leaving China, and leaving the Jehovah's Witness, you had to face personal tragedy. Tell us what happened to your son?

AMBER SCORAH: So a number of years after I had left the religion, I had a child, a son. And when he was almost four months old, I had to go back to work. I live in the United States now, and there's no national parental leave program. So I didn't feel ready to leave him yet. But they told me if I didn't come back, I would have to just quit my job. So part of why I didn't feel I could quit my job, even though I would have if I could have, was that it had taken me so long to reach some kind of stability after leaving the Jehovah's Witnesses. It was hard to come to New York and have no degree, no real career that made sense to anybody, and just build a life again. That now that I had I had a sort of a stable job, I had health insurance, I knew that it would be irresponsible for me to quit the job. And so I found a day-care that was very close to my work so that I could go back and breastfeed him on my breaks. That first morning, after I dropped him off, two-and-a-half hours later, I literally ran back to the day-care. I was so excited to see my son. And when I got there, he was unconscious, and the day-care owner was performing CPR on him. So she had put him down for a nap, and he just never woke up.

AMT: Do you know what happened?

AMBER SCORAH: No. They did autopsy, and no one could ever determine the cause.

AMT: How did you cope with that, especially you had left a religion where there was certainty, and there would have been certainty about that too. How did you process that your little baby's gone?

AMBER SCORAH: Yeah, it was very hard. I mean I had already gone through a lot of loss. My father died when I was 18. And then after leaving the religeom, losing all of my community, and most of my family, was very difficult. But I think it's hard for anyone to cope with the loss of a child, even a religious person. However, when you are religious, it's different. There is a lot more comfort when you do you believe you're going to see them again. And then for me, because I had had this very intense belief system, and then later I realized that it wasn't all that I thought it was, it has been very difficult for me to just believe anything else. Because no matter how good any faith or religious belief system sounds, it always just sounds like a story to me. I can't believe it's true. So I had to find ways to get through. Grief is something, especially when it's a child, you just carry it around with you. Like it feels like a physical act sometimes. My heart feels broken. I just feel like I have to hold it together so that I can move through the world. But it made me realize that you don't actually need to have a religion in order to cope or get through or survive a tragedy. Although, it can be the inclination to turn to that. The people around me, even people I didn't know, were so supportive. And that was something that was really moving. And also, I had a daughter after Carl, my son, died. And though that does not take away the pain of not having Carl at all, obviously, it is a great comfort to be a mother again.

AMT: It's very life-affirming, isn't it? To be able to move forward, and still hold on to his memory, but move forward.

AMBER SCORAH: Yeah, and I mean I talk about him all the time too. And I still try to keep him in the world. And another way I did that was I became an activist for longer parental leave in the United States.

AMT: And that you have the roots in your Canadian upbringing for that.

AMBER SCORAH: That's right.

AMT: Knowing the difference.

AMBER SCORAH: I know, I felt like shaking everyone. I'm like it doesn't have to be this way, you guys.

AMT: How do you look back on your faith now? What would you say to family and friends who are still Jehovah's Witnesses?

AMBER SCORAH: I feel sad because I know that they will think of my book as some sort of betrayal. But essentially, it's my great hope that all of them could maybe just a question or like look into the beliefs. It's fine if they want to stay in it. It's everyone's decision. I believe in freedom of religion, definitely. But for me, having left, it feels that life has opened up. I feel like I was living a half-life when I was in the religion, you know? I thought the world was going to end. I was focussed on some future, some paradise future that was never going to come. And what happens is when you leave, it. yes, it's difficult. You have to deal with your own mortality. But life is actually very beautiful, and even though there's tragedy, there's a lot of joy. And when you realize it's not going to go on forever, even the day-to-day becomes more meaningful.

AMT: So where do you find your spiritual strength now?

AMBER SCORAH: One thing great about being a Jehovah's Witness is that you have the answers. Like every disturbing question of life, you can go in the publications and find an answer to that. It was a very comfortable place to live. It was quite relaxing. Actually, you didn't have to worry about climate change. You don't have to worry about the economy. Everything was going to be fixed by God. But if those answers you have are not true, well then they're meaningless also. When I moved out into this new way of thinking where I realized oh like life has an end, and the here and now is what matters, and that's kind of all that matters, everything took on new meaning. And so somehow for me, taking away this sort of veil of all of the religious explanations and solutions and just living in the present has become a very meaningful act to me.

AMT: Amber, thank you for sharing your story with us.

AMBER SCORAH: Thank you so much for having me.

AMT: Amber Scorah is the author of "Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life." She joined us from New York. Stay with us. In our next half-hour from "Grizzly Man" to "Into The Inferno". No matter the subject matter, filmmaker Werner Herzog has a way of making unforgettable films that open your eyes to a new way of seeing. We're going to revisit my conversation with him. This is "The Current".

Part three: Werner Herzog

Guests: Werner Herzog

AMT:: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, and you're listening to "The Current". As we approach the end of this season, and the end of my time behind the microphone, people ask me what's the interview you remember the most? What's your favourite interview? And sometimes I draw blank. I've spoken to so many people on this program, and a lot of people's words and ideas stay with me. And so we've decided to revisit some of the most memorable interviews that we've done over the past 17 years here. We're not going to get them all on. Some stand out because of a guest's strength of character, a depth of resolve, a search for hope in the face of trauma and adversity. Sometimes it's a person's boundless curiosity, and I think of Werner Herzog, and the burglars in his head. The 76-year-old German filmmaker has made more than 60 films in a career that's closing in on six decades. He's told stories about living among grizzly bears, POW's unquenchable thirst for survival, about the darkness of the burning oil fields, about the 3-D beauty of ancient cave drawings, and even volcanoes.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: A volcano]

AMT: That is apparently what the world sounds like when you stand on the precipice of an exploding volcano. Precisely what Werner Herzog did when he made "Into The Inferno. It's a 2016 documentary. It takes him and volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer around the world to visit active volcanoes in Indonesia, Iceland, North Korea, Ethiopia. It tells the story of the people who live in the shadow of some of nature's most powerful and dangerous" forces. "Into The Inferno" was what brought Werner Herzog into "The Current studio in October of 2016. And I was worried about this one. Did I know enough? Did I see enough of his films, and of course, I had not. There were 60 films. He even was writing opera. He's written books. In the end, he turned out to be a very generous interviewee. And I was gifted with one of the most illuminating discussions of my career. Here's that conversation.

AMT: I was mesmerized by that footage. It is spectacular.

WERNER HERZOG: Yes. Of course, it’s incredible spectacle out there that we normally do not see. Some of it, of course, was archival footage, some of the most spectacular comes from a French couple, Katia and Maurice Krafft, who in the seventies, eighties mostly made spectacular approaches to volcanoes, too close in fact, and it became some sort of a challenge that cost them their lives. They were both instantly killed by a so-called pyroclastic flow. It's this kind of like dust avalanche coming at you at a 100 miles an hour but it has something like 450 degrees Celsius heat inside. It would kill you instantly. So of course the question was always lingering: how close do we get? How far do we expose ourselves? And of course volcanologists always do some sort of dangerous work when they are close to a very active volcano. Predictions are not as precise, as for example predictions for bad weather.

AMT: So what is it like to stand on the edge of a volcano?

WERNER HERZOG: It's just very awesome, awesome to see what's boiling under us and it's just not—when you look into the boiling magma and lava of a volcano, it is literally everywhere under us on all continents. I mean you take a drill deep enough under the sea bed, it's everywhere. The entire interior of our planet is molten, extremely hot magma and nothing is really permanent here. The tectonic plates are drifting and shifting and creating friction sounds and that in fact actually creates volcanoes. But we shouldn't be panicky about it because volcanoes in fact created the atmosphere that we are breathing before there was methane.

AMT: So we need them. But again, when you were looking into the mouth of a volcano.

WERNER HERZOG: We filmed a volcano in Indonesia which was kind of quiet, a quasi-quiet for a couple of years. Even farmers were working where they shouldn't have been. And the volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer actually kept an eye on the volcano and saw that there was some something not right. Huge boulders, I mean the size of a whole building came tumbling down fast. In the distance they looked like small pebbles and he knew there was something not right. And all of a sudden it exploded. We filmed it. It didn't do any harm. But 60 seconds later, we were out. You turn your car facing “the exit” and you just don't hesitate a second and you flee. And we learned only days later that on the very same spot in another eruption, seven farmers were killed.

AMT: It just comes spewing out with heat. And I mean you've got a shot at one point where like the rim is so thin that somebody is actually straddling it. They’re sitting on it with a leg on each side taking measurements.

WERNER HERZOG: Yes. You have to—and our camera of course has to be cautious. You don't make a false step because it's vertically down into the crater itself.

AMT: You begin in Vanuatu. Can you describe what that part of the world is like?

WERNER HERZOG: It's very primordial. It’s volcanic islands covered in jungle. And you know you’re far out. The next significant land would be Northern Australia, but you’re a thousand miles away from it, east of it. So you have a feeling of the isolation of these places and of course, a native population there that is still in belief systems of their forefathers. And very interesting because I was interested in the people who live in the shadow of volcanoes, at the foot of volcanoes in their belief system, their demons, their new gods, their fears, their way of life of course was more interesting for my film than technical scientific data.

AMT: And in fact, you speak to a man named Chief Moses on the island of Ambrym in Vanuatu and he tells you what it's like to look into that island's active crater. We have a clip from your film. Let's listen to him.

SOUNDCLIP

I feel very frightened to look at the fire. I feel that I was not in the island of Ambrym. I thought I was somewhere else. I feel that how powerful that fire is. That’s how we believe the spirit are in the fire. The fire is burning through the spirit. We believe that the fire is burning through the spirit.

AMT: We believe the fire is burning through the spirit. Werner Herzog, talk to me more about the connection he makes between the fire and the spirit.

WERNER HERZOG: Well, in their belief system, it is actually a new god that they created, a mythical GI named John Frum, and they expect his return with a copious cargo of consumer goods. They hope that John Frum is going to bring chewing gum and fridges and jukeboxes and maybe even a Cadillac. And he's venerated like a god and it's very peculiar for us to see this, but I really earnestly look into their belief system and am very fascinated about it. That’s not looking down at them.

AMT: No, it’s understanding them. And in fact, he tells Clive Oppenheimer at one point that the volcano doesn't like—might not like foreigners. If you go up and you're a foreigner and you look in it, it will say who are you? You don't belong on my island.

WERNER HERZOG: Yes. You’re not of this world and the Chief, in fact, when he looks into the fire, doesn't believe that he's on this planet anymore. He says I'm not like I'm on my island anymore and it's like being somewhere on a foreign planet.

AMT: It's very real to them though.

WERNER HERZOG: Of course.

AMT: It’s their reality.

WERNER HERZOG: Yes because they have had frequent eruptions and also frequent tropical cyclones that a year ago destroyed their entire village. So it's punctuated by catastrophes what their daily life is. There is no—well, there is some daily life but it's constantly somehow overshadowed by volcanoes and by cyclones, by hurricanes.

AMT: You make the point that of all the volcanoes in Indonesia, there's not a single one that is not connected to a belief system.

WERNER HERZOG: Yes. You have to look into this mythology and for a Clive Oppenheimer, the volcanologist, it is important to understand how the local population is functioning, how they are believing, how they are speaking about the volcano because in one case six years ago, his expertise with his scarce emission measurements triggered a crisis management, meaning from one day to the next, 500,000 people were evacuated. They wouldn't have left if he and the Indonesians hadn't spoken to the locals in the right language with the right mythology. And it is estimated that this rapid evacuation saved at least, at least 20,000 lives.

AMT: That’s fascinating. You were also able to enter North Korea to observe the sacred Mount Paektu. What were your first impressions of North Korea?

WERNER HERZOG: Well, everything is different. Everything is unexpected. Of course I read a little bit about North Korea, but it's a very fascinating country and it is so isolated that inevitably, of course it has its own ways of life of communicating, of living in complete isolation.

AMT: You talked to a government guide. He was assigned to show you around the mountain area, the volcanic area. Let's listen to that clip.

SOUNDCLIP

All the Korean people frequently climb up this mountain but every time they climb up this mountain, they have a new feeling, a solemn feeling. And at the same time, they make up a new determination to work harder for the country with patriotism. And all the Korean people are now singing the song which title is, “Let Us Go to Mount Paektu.” And it clearly reflects the spirit of the Korean people.

[Sound: Piano, children singing]

AMT: How does the government of North Korea use that volcanic area to shape its own legacy?

WERNER HERZOG: That's a very interesting side of the volcano because traditionally and for millennia, for almost 5,000 years, this volcano was considered as a mythical birthplace of the Korean people. Now in the forties when Korea fought against the Japanese occupation, the war of liberation, the communist leader Kim Il-Sung appropriated the myth and declared the volcano is ground zero of the dynamics of the revolution, of the socialist communist revolution. And deliberately, I think, he built his secret hidden headquarters in some log cabins at the very foot of the mountain. So today, wherever you go, even in the city of Pyongyang, in the subway, you have propaganda posters or murals, mosaics of the leaders. Always the background would be the volcano. That's the mythical connection that the Korean revolution now has to them. So through the volcano, you can somehow explore almost all of Korean, North Korean public life and everything of course is a presentation to our cameras. High school students, I thought they were military because they wear uniforms. They sing and chant the same song about the wonders of Mount Paektu.

AMT: You caught them—actually you have this beautiful scene. You're on a wide shot and they're literally marching through the mist toward you.

WERNER HERZOG: They come out of the mist. Yes. I sensed something. I saw them going up and I knew they were still up and I quickly alerted the cinematographer. I said to Peter, turn it on, turn it on. And he said I don't see anything, I don't see anything. I said listen, they come from up there. And he pointed at it and out of nowhere, out of the mist, there was this formation of seemingly soldiers us with a red flag and they rejoice in the meeting, the volcanic crater and toss their hats and sing.

AMT: And sing, yeah.

WERNER HERZOG: The samg song. The same glory of Mount Paektu.

AMT: You know the other thing I noticed about them? They were all so thin.

WERNER HERZOG: Yes.

AMT: Their belts were literally like around their hips. We know you know that—we know what kind of lives that they—we think they do.

WERNER HERZOG: Yes. You see a lot between the lines and behind the images. It's interesting that Kim Il-Sung, the founding father of North Korean nation, has become president and then president for life and after his death, president for eternity. So this is the reason why his successor, his son, and now his grandson will never become president. There’s a president for eternity. And they have different titles. Of course they themselves have refused to accept the title of president. But there’s some sort of emergence, you can watch it, how a person with an aura of sanctity emerges right in front of your eyes and the entire population seems to be in the same ideology. We filmed in a stadium in Pyongyang, the largest stadium. More than 100,000 people are doing this, what I call the human pixels. They flip coloured cards and all of a sudden, it's a portrait of Kim Il-Sung. All of a sudden it's Mount Paektu with a rising sun. And it looks like some sort of the entire population, but it's an image seemingly in step with an ideology.

AMT: You have so many spectacular and riveting pictures of volcanoes and what's happening when you go to Iceland and you show us some of the footage from 2010 and when that big cloud basically paralyzed European and some North American air traffic. Do we forget that we are at the mercy of nature?

WERNER HERZOG: No, not completely at the mercy of nature. We’re kind of an adaptive species, maybe over adaptive, and we are somehow jeopardizing the health of our environment. So not completely, but we may have a real problem if there's an impact of a big asteroid on our planet or a gigantic volcanic explosion because it would darken the skies. It's not a regional event anymore. And some of these events that we are documenting in our film would darken the sky for a decade maybe. And that's really serious. I mean around the globe all the way to North and South Pole and Greenland and everywhere. And that's where there would be real trouble.

AMT: Nature's an important theme in many of your films. What are you trying to understand?

WERNER HERZOG: I like to look at it and I like—it's a certain form of awe. And looking at a volcano is something completely awe-inspiring. And it's, in a way, gives you the right proportions, the size of yourself and the importance of yourself and the fact that all these magma boiling under us everywhere couldn't care less about what we are doing.

AMT: That's a really important point that you make and it's interesting because it's such on a large scale and then I look at something like Grizzly Man, where nature in the form of the grizzly bear has the power over two people, one man essentially, and two people it ends up. That inability of humans to control what happens, even when we think we can.

WERNER HERZOG: No. I think we should not start to control grizzly bears by stepping five feet away from them and trying to protect them against the bad guys, the poachers, which only existed in the imagination of the protagonist of the film. And no, but more so, I think what tragically cost him his life and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard, was the fact that for him wild nature was some sort of thing out of a Walt Disney film, the Disneyization of wild nature. And that's a misunderstanding that you find very often in public opinion. We better should take a hard look at what it is and what the universe out there is. And everybody found it extremely strange and funny when I speak about the universe out there and the stars. They’re a mess. There is chaos and there's hostility and there is murder in nature and everybody finds it completely and utterly funny. And when you look at protuberances of the sun, solar flares which we see now in very, very clear images, you can access it in YouTube. It's a very, very hostile sort of star out there. You just don't want to land, get close to this one, although at the same time the sun is a creator and giver and maintainer of life.

AMT: And it is that—that juxtaposition that we forget, again as you say, that like the molten lava does not care about us.

WERNER HERZOG: Yes. I say it very beautifully in my commentary. They love to repeat it here. Couldn't care—monumental indifference about scurrying roaches, retarded reptiles and vapid humans alike. The audience gets a real jolt when they hear that one.

AMT: You did say it very beautifully and it's—

WERNER HERZOG: I love to do these things.

AMT: [laughs]

WERNER HERZOG: It's not what you would normally hear in a say, National Geographic film that you see on TV.

AMT: And when you are making a film, how much do you think about the audience who will watch that?

WERNER HERZOG: Well, I never made a film for myself. I'm not the one who would circle around his own navel. I always make films for audiences. However, I do not know who they are. It's very amorphous and very strange and I have learned that a film that I made in the late sixties, Even Dwarfs Started Small, a very rebellious, wild film. It was shown to inmates in a very large prison population in the United States and they went completely wild for it. All of a sudden, 40 years later or so, inmates in the prison and how is it seen in Brazil, for example, with young people. Films shift. They find new different audiences and with them, the film becomes a different perspective and different outlook and completes itself differently with an audience.

AMT: That must be very fulfilling for you.

WERNER HERZOG: [Sighs] I am cautious about that, about looking back too much. I am actually hardly ever watching my own films. I'm looking forward. I am plowing ahead and in a way, I follow. I've never followed a career. I do what comes with the most vehemence at me and then I try to cope with it quickly and effectively. In a way the distribution systems, traditionally as we have had it, haven't been flexible and fast enough for my output. This year, I've got three films out and now one we are talking about, Into the Inferno, is going to be released through Netflix. And they press a button on, I say it metaphorically, they press a button on the 28^th of October, I think. In 190 countries at the same time, the film is going to be out. It's a great achievement of the Internet.

AMT: Werner Herzog, we're pausing right there. Do not go away. My guest is Werner Herzog. His new documentary is Into the Inferno and as he says, it'll be available on Netflix, actually this Friday. We will link to the trailer on our website so you can see some of the incredible images that he has captured for Into the Inferno. That's on our website www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. We're going to pause for about 90 seconds. But in our next half hour, we'll hear more from Werner Herzog. And then after that, the CBC's Nahlah Ayed will join me. She's just returned from the Mediterranean where she was aboard a ship that was rescuing asylum seekers.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Every day, its rescue workers patrol off the coast of Libya, searching for asylum seekers put to sea by smugglers that are otherwise doomed to die.

[Men yelling]

VOICE 1: They saved thousands in a staggering crisis, usually measured in the millions.

VOICE 2: We’re here to preserve life and that’s really it. I don’t think anyone thinks that this is the solution. It can’t be.

AMT: Nahlah Ayed will be here to talk about her documentary, Saved at Sea. But when we come back, Werner Herzog will be here first. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM and online on www.cbc.ca/thecurrent.

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and this is The Current. If you're just joining us, filmmaker Werner Herzog is my guest in our Toronto studio. We've been discussing his new film Into the Inferno, about active volcanoes around the world. And if you missed the first part of our conversation, you can find it on our www.cbc.ca/thecurrent or you can download it and listen on CBC Radio app. Werner Herzog, Into the Inferno is being released on Netflix on Friday. Now before the break, you said you have three films this year and I'm interested in this new one called Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World.

WERNER HERZOG: It's kind of back to back. No, that was—sorry. That was about three weeks ago.

AMT: Still very new, but keep going.

WERNER HERZOG: Yes, I have Salt and Fire, a feature film, a narrative feature film about a mysterious hostage taking in Bolivia, where the leader of a scientific, small scientific delegation is taken prisoner and she’s deliberately stranded in the middle of the largest salt flats on our planet, together with two almost blind boys. It's very mysterious. Only at the end of the film you learn what happened and why it happened. So Into the Inferno, and now Salt and Fire. I’m getting films confused now. I still have yet another big epic feature film, Queen of the Desert, that hasn't been released in North America yet.

AMT: I'm waiting for that. Gertrude Bell. It’s the story of Gertrude Bell.

WERNER HERZOG: Yes, but it's not a biopic. People thought it was a biopic but it's more about poetry and space and loneliness and about tragic love stories of her. A biopic would be 10 and a half hours long and it probably would be boring as a movie.

AMT: I'm going to be really anxious to see that. Nicole Kidman stars in that, am I right?

WERNER HERZOG: Nicole Kidman, yes.

AMT: Because Gertrude Bell is the great unknown of the—she was the—

WERNER HERZOG: The Lawrence of Arabia. The female Lawrence of Arabia.

AMT: She was his mentor.

WERNER HERZOG: In a way, yes. He stole a lot of information and intelligence but of course, Lawrence himself was a very knowledgeable man and was deeply rooted in the world of the Arabs and in the world of Bedouins. But she was probably the one who understood the Bedouins better than any Western person, probably ever.

AMT: Do you ever sleep? How do you do all that work?

WERNER HERZOG: Oh, I'm not a workaholic. I'm totally relaxed. I do read a lot. My shooting days are normally over by 2:30, 3:30, 4, because I shoot what I need for the screen and everybody gets nervous. At least in the—let's say in the United States. “You didn't shoot enough coverage.” I didn't even know what coverage meant. But they need a shot from a helicopter from high above and ultra close-up of your eyes and from left from right, whatever. That was a significant moment when I did Bad Lieutenant with Nicolas Cage in New Orleans. Everybody was nervous. “You didn't shoot coverage and it's only 3:30 and we never go into overtime.” And I had to ask my assistant director what do they mean by overtime? And I was explained by coverage.

AMT: Why is that then, because obviously other actors working with other directors obviously have to do all that stuff with them. So what is it about your vision of a film even as you're shooting it that you’re—

WERNER HERZOG: I have such a clear vision what I see on a screen and that's why I write a screenplay very fast. I write a screenplay hardly ever longer than a week, five days because I see it and it's like copying it almost. And on the second day of shooting, Nicolas Cage, when everybody was even more nervous, it’s an apple box. He says something. He steps up on one end, he says crew, team, come here. Actors, come here. And he only said finally, I’m working with a director who knows what he's doing. And he steps off and goes to his car and his hotel. So from that moment on, the question of shooting coverage had disappeared. But what I'm trying to say is I’m not hectic. I do not work extremely long hours. I've never done that. I read. I sleep well. Even under harsh conditions and catastrophes that sometimes have happened, I sleep at night.

AMT: Was it always like that in this business for you?

WERNER HERZOG: Yes.

AMT: So how were you able to take your vision and for all of the work you want to do over time and work through a system where so many other people seemed to run up against different things? What makes—I don’t know what I'm asking you here but—

WERNER HERZOG: I think it's a sense of self-reliance. I believe it's at the bottom is self-reliance, a sense of not independence, it doesn't really exist. That's a myth. But self-reliance and it started very early when I was 15, 16, 17. Nobody wanted to produce the films I submitted. Of course when they saw me I was a school child and I was ridiculed. Kindergarten, hahaha is trying to make movies nowadays. And I knew I had to become independent or self-reliant. I worked while I was in high school, I worked the night shift as a welder in a steel factory and I earned enough money to immediately then produce my first featurette, 35 millimeter celluloid at the time. And this is an attitude that I have until today and it has carried me a far way. But that's not the real survival. The real survival is you have to have a clear vision and you have to be intrepid to follow it, no matter what is going on left and right and what the trends are and where the money goes and whatever. That's always my advice to the young ones. Just follow your business. Don't be afraid.

AMT: It's a wonderful piece of advice and you have all of these films coming out at around the same time. Are you already planning the next one, the next project?

WERNER HERZOG: Well, there's always things coming at me. I'm dealing with a burglar that has broken into my home in the middle of the night. And there are four or five of them and I deal with the one that comes with the most vehemence at me. So yes, the next burglar is already right there and it's mostly feature films that are on my radar right now. They’re already in the kitchen. They already have broken in.

AMT: Why do you call them burglars?

WERNER HERZOG: Because I didn't invite them.

AMT: Ahh.

WERNER HERZOG: You see, I have never planned a career.

AMT: And so these ideas come to you and you just know you must follow them or are they—

WERNER HERZOG: Yes. It's not easy to explain. Sometimes films stumble in to me. And it's not in an aggressive form like the film on Timothy Treadwell, Grizzly Man. I was in the office of a producer who has been very kind and helpful to me. And when I left, and he had a glass table with a lot of things on it, papers, FedExes, and so. And I swear to god, I was not looking for a film project. I was looking for my car keys that I had misplaced on the table. And I take a very sharp look in some area and he believing that I spotted something, shoves an article across to me and he says read this. We are planning a very interesting project. And normally I don't read that. I took it home but I read it. Fifteen minutes later, I was back. I asked about the status of the film. Yes, I had to start very quickly and I had a hunch and I said who is going to direct the film? And the producer has done some fine films but he was not secure at all. I think he's said now, listen very well. He said I’m kind of directing the film and I heard it: “well, kind of directing the film,” and I knew he was not completely sure how to tackle it. And I pumped my hand towards him and mustered my wildest Bavarian accent and I said no, I will direct this movie now. And he shook my hand and said it would be an honour. So it's—sometimes it happens like that.

AMT: That is fascinating. It's good to know that about you.

WERNER HERZOG: Yeah. I will direct this movie now. And if something comes along, I am a storyteller and I immediately know this is big.

AMT: That was a very important film on so many levels.

WERNER HERZOG: Yes. And I really love the fact that I understood it instantly and I responded instantly. But it's not responding to something that is trendy. I knew—

AMT: No, it was the character too, huh? It was the man.

WERNER HERZOG: Yes, and the fundamental understanding of nature and fundamental tragedy. And some big, big things that I knew it would touch a chord in the hearts of audiences.

AMT: Werner Herzog, it is a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you for coming in.

WERNER HERZOG: Thank you very much for having me.

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June 5, 2019 episode transcript

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