Interview: Werner Herzog & Steve Boyes Discuss 'Ghost Elephants'

The filmmaker and his protagonist talk about their work on/in the film and how advances in technology are NOT changing their respective quests for the truth.

Steve Boyes is such a perfect participant for a Werner Herzog documentary that he could have been created in a lab. For many years, the South African conservation biologist has been seeking evidence of an elusive herd of elephants located in a difficult-to-reach part of Angola. It’s another impossible dream, but Boyes believes, as he states in Herzog’s film Ghost Elephants, it doesn’t matter if they’re real or a dream. The future of all animals is to be in a dream anyway, as in, they’ll be just a memory.

Compared to other Herzogian subjects, particularly the adventurer-scientist type, Boyes is passionate and determined, yet not overly obsessed. He says in the film that it doesn’t even matter if he finds these elephants, and ultimately, it might be better not to encounter them at all. Herzog’s documentary follows Boyes on an expedition traveling with three KhoiSan trackers from an indigenous group representing our oldest ancestral origins and a spiritual connection man has to elephants.

Ahead of the release of Ghost Elephants, I talked to Herzog, producer Ariel Leon Isacovitch, and Boyes via Zoom. Below is a transcript of our conversation in full, including the moment I embarrassed myself trying to get Herzog to comment on the similarities between this documentary and the fake one he’s supposed to be directing in a silly fictional mockumentary he starred in 22 years ago. Apologies for not sharing the audio, but you can easily hear Herzog’s iconic voice in your head while reading.

Nonfics: What came first, the idea to do this film or plans for the specific expedition that it’s documenting?

Steve Boyes: Ten years of expeditions in the Angolan Highlands, a place that was locked away from the world for generations, for over 40 years, 27 years of civil war. In 2015, we get in there, or 2014, as tourists, secretly meet the governor, get a letter from the president, and, in armored vehicles try to get access to this completely undocumented, unknown landscape the size of England, and begin this journey. We find these extraordinary source lakes, launch into them, explore all the rivers, and start to find signs of elephants.

For these 10 years, elephants have been an underlying theme. Where are these giants, the biggest animals, when we’re finding everything else, hundreds of new species to science, new populations of cheetahs, wild dogs, and lions, all not known to be there? Twenty-six source lakes in the end. I found signs of elephants before we found and met people. There are so few people up there. That was a ghost, the first one, 10 years ago. We’ve been going up there pretty much throughout — except it gets tricky with the end of the rainy season, as you saw in the film — for 10 years.

How did you meet or hear about each other and decide to work together on the film?

Steve Boyes: A mutual friend said to come to dinner in Beverly Hills, of all places, and you must meet Werner. And we did. I think the restaurant closed on us. We were just talking about everything in the universe. And we spoke about the ghost elephants, about the link to the Smithsonian, and that was the beginning. 

Werner Herzog: I personally knew right away that this was big. As a storyteller, you know that. I was invited originally just to be an advisor. Steve invited me to come to Namibia to the northern Kalahari Desert, and when I arrived there, there was already a South African team working on this search, this quest, for a long time. But they had no real clear idea how to shape it into a story, into a movie. So after that, it was almost instantly clear I should do the conversations. The next day, everybody was clear: “Oh, please, step in completely.” And I said I don’t want to take the job of anyone. But everybody pushed me: “Please take over. Do it. Do it.” So overnight, I find myself with a film in my lap.