Werner Herzog on Kanye West: filmmaker praises musician's controversial 'Famous' video

When Lena Dunham first saw Kanye West’s controversy-baiting video for “Famous”, she called it “sickening”. Werner Herzog – the German filmmaker, philosopher and Tom Cruise’s unlikely Jack Reacher co-star – had a different reaction. “This is very good stuff,” he said. “I have never seen anything like this.”

(Of course, this is a guy who believes the "common denominator of the universe" is “chaos, hostility and murder.”)

Herzog was invite to give his take on the video by The Daily Beast, and appeared intrigued by its bedful of naked waxwork celebrities, including Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Bill Cosby, Donald Trump and Caitlyn Jenner – not to mention West and his wife, Kim Kardashian. The 10-minute video was directed by West himself and based on “Sleep”, a 2008 painting by Vincent Desiderio.

“The most interesting thing for me as a storyteller is... in a movie, yes, you do have a story, and you develop a story. But at the same time you have to be very careful and think about and organize a parallel story, a separate, independent story that only occurs in the collective mind of the audience,” Herzog said.

“And this video gives you space for creating your separate parallel story… You keep thinking, are these people for real? Are they doppelgängers? And what could be the story of them? What are they doing? How have they partied? What brought them together? So all of a sudden, the rapper gives me the chance to completely go wild on my own story.”

Musing on the idea of the “invented self” created by Facebook users, Herzog said he had noticed that he had his own online impersonators. “There are a lot of doppelgangers pretending to be me, trying to speak in my accent,” he said. “It’s all imposters, so our understanding of self has deeply and radically changed. It’s very fascinating.”

Herzog is on the promotional trail for his latest film Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, a meditation on the Internet and its effect on society. In another recent interview with The Verge, he was introduced to Pokémon Go and (naturally) soon identified the violent impulses embedded in what appears to be a children’s game.

Herzog didn’t actually appear to have heard of West before seeing the video, referring to him as “Kane”, not “Kanye”. But he did say he would accept the rapper to his “Rogue Film School” if he submitted the clip. “If he applies… with this film, I would invite him,” he said. “It really has calibre.”