Werner Herzog is known for his uncompromising vision and his willingness to stare into the abyss, but the famed director revealed a softer, more personal motivation ahead of the Venice Film Festival premiere of his latest work, Bucking Fastard. Speaking to press before the film’s debut, Herzog explained that the dedication on the picture, which reads "For David," is a heartfelt tribute to his late friend and fellow cinematic pioneer David Lynch, who passed away earlier this year.
The gesture, Herzog said, stems from a decades-long mutual admiration that defied their wildly different artistic sensibilities. Lynch, the master of surrealist American dreamscapes, and Herzog, the German-born chronicler of ecstatic truth and human extremity, were unlikely kindred spirits. Yet Herzog described Lynch as one of the few filmmakers whose work truly unsettled him, and whose friendship sustained him through periods of doubt. The dedication, he explained, was not a marketing ploy or a solemn memorial, but a way of carrying Lynch’s spirit into a story that, on its surface, could not be more different from Lynch’s oeuvre.
Bucking Fastard, which premiered in Venice on September 2, 2026, with a runtime of 109 minutes, tells the deeply strange and intimate story of Jean and Joan Holbrooke, identical twin sisters portrayed by real-life siblings Kate Mara and Rooney Mara. The two women are so profoundly intertwined that they speak in unison, share the same romantic affections, dream identically, and even commit the same verbal slips at the exact same moment. The narrative does not attempt to explain their bond from within, but instead observes how the outside world - courts, journalists, would-be saviors, and opportunists - reacts to their uncanny unity. The film’s scope also extends to the animal kingdom, with wild and domestic beasts serving as silent witnesses, and even dips into geological time, as the sisters’ echoes reverberate in the Earth’s core.
According to Herzog, the project first came to him as a script that felt almost impossible to translate to screen, precisely because its central mystery resists conventional psychological explanation. He admitted that during pre-production, he found himself stalled, unsure how to approach the sisters’ shared consciousness without reducing it to a gimmick. It was Lynch, Herzog revealed, who encouraged him to abandon the search for a rational key and instead film the paradox head-on, trusting the audience to sit with discomfort rather than resolution. That advice, Herzog said, unlocked the entire production, and the dedication is his way of acknowledging a debt that cannot be repaid.
The film’s ensemble is as notable as its premise. Alongside the Mara sisters, the cast includes Orlando Bloom as Gareth Mulroney, Domhnall Gleeson as Timothy, and Irish actors Hugh O’Conor, Simon Delaney, Terry McMahon, and Shane Connellan in supporting roles. Production took place primarily in Ireland, a landscape Herzog has long favored for its brooding, mythic quality, and early reactions from Venice suggest the film is eliciting the kind of polarized, passionate responses that have defined his most celebrated works. The TMDb audience score currently sits at a robust 7.5 out of 10, indicating strong early approval from festival attendees.
Herzog was careful to note that the dedication does not imply any artistic kinship between Bucking Fastard and Lynch’s signature style. There are no red-curtained dream sequences, no doppelgängers lurking in diners, no cryptic log-lady prophecies. Instead, Herzog described the film as grounded in a rawer, more elemental strangeness - one that owes more to folklore and geology than to the subconscious. Lynch’s influence, he insisted, was purely moral: a reminder to stay true to the uncanny even when commercial instincts demand explanation.
The director also touched on the practical challenge of directing the Mara sisters, who share an off-screen closeness that reportedly rivaled their characters'. Herzog observed that the twins prepared for their roles by spending months together in a remote cottage without outside contact, developing a private language of gestures and glances that never made it into the script but informed every scene. He joked that by the end of principal photography, the crew was sometimes unsure whether they were filming Jean and Joan or Kate and Rooney, a blurring of identity that Herzog considered essential to the film’s eerie authenticity.
The Venice premiere marks a significant moment for Herzog, who at this stage of his career could easily rest on his documentary laurels. Instead, Bucking Fastard represents a return to the ambitious, unclassifiable narrative cinema that first made his name. The film’s official synopsis emphasizes that we never see the world as the sisters do, only how the world responds to them - through legal battles, media scrutiny, compassionate helpers, cynical exploiters, and the mute judgment of animals. It is a structure that leaves enormous room for ambiguity, and Herzog seems to relish that uncertainty.
As the festival circuit continues and the film moves toward wider release, the dedication to Lynch will likely draw renewed attention to the complicated relationship between two of cinema’s most singular voices. Herzog, however, prefers to keep the gesture personal rather than symbolic. He described the dedication as a private note made public, a way of telling Lynch, wherever he may be, that his encouragement still echoes. For a filmmaker who has spent his career listening for echoes in the most remote corners of the earth, that sentiment feels profoundly and characteristically Herzogian.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
