A Significant Bullet

When we found out that Elton Brand produced Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn, it seemed like an amazing convergence of basketball and one of the most influential figures for this site. Then it turned out the relationship was pretty basic -- at a Q&A I went to almost two years ago, Herzog said he knew little about Brand's athletic career, met him through a mutual business associate, and found him to be an all-together pleasant individual. (The major revelation of the story was that said associate is a 300-lb ex-truck driver/nightclub owner.) An interesting moment, to be sure, but not a mind-breaking collision of worlds.

But now there's this, from a recent interview with Herzog in Vice:

La Soufrière is a good example of one of your many films where athleticism, or at least enduring very harsh and inhospitable conditions, was essential to the making of it. Are you worried about aging to the point where taking these types of risks and putting your body through these intense experiences are no longer possible?
No, I don’t really care about that. The connection between athleticism and cinema is in part, of course, metaphoric. It’s about the understanding of movement in space. That’s why I admire NBA players so much—how they move and how they understand space is just phenomenal. Besides, it is a statistical fact that a good amount of filmmakers have been quite athletic people. You don’t see that among painters or among musicians. I have never met a composer who was an athlete.

Surely a film about Ron-Ron bringing Asian pop music to the the ends of the world cannot be far off.

BONUS QUOTATION! -- From the press kit for Herzog's new film Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans: "I call upon the theoreticians of cinema to go after this one. Go for it, losers."