At the 2016 Sundance Film Festival in discussion with Netscout’s Jim McNiel, Werner Herzog made the statement that in the next four and a half thousand years, ‘no computer will make a film as good as mine.’ Polish artist and director Piotr Winiewicz tackled this statement head on, embracing the notion of computer derived filmmaking to create his debut feature film, About a Hero, seeking approval from Werner Herzog to utilise an artificial intelligence, deepfaked version of his voice to create a mystery which is about truth, fiction, and the way creative worlds intersect between the two.
The film is one adapted from a script drafted by Kaspar, an AI construction trained on Herzog’s body of work. Kaspar spat out a Herzogian narrative that unveils a skewed mystery that seeks to understand the mysterious death of Dorem Clery, a factory worker in Getunkirchenburg, all the while exploring some kind of relationship with AI, technology, and this pesky little thing called ‘the truth’.
I interviewed Piotr Winiewicz as he shot through desert in the middle of Nowhere, America, as a passenger, his visage beamed to me via ‘the miracle of technology’ aka Zoom which allowed the images of blurring dust and buildings in his window to be brought to my screen in little old Boorloo, Western Australia. There was a time where we thought ‘yes, this is brilliant, this is fantastic. I’m on the precipice of the era of the Jetsons,’ but now we take it for granted. This futuristic notion of technology is was sold to us as being infallible, yet it is anything but that.
No, of course, as we know, technology is unreliable. We know this through the rampant dissemination of versions of ‘the truth’ on social media, which then bleeds into our tangible, real life interactions. So, with technology, and the bouncing delay of mobile phone towers and satellites, Piotr dropped in and out of connection, creating a disjointed, 90s-era techno dribble sound at times.
In one of the distorted questions, I asked Piotr about what the word truth means to him as a filmmaker. It’s a word that we use a lot when it comes to documentary filmmaking, just as it is a word that is implied when it comes to a transcribed interview like this one. After all, you, the reader, are supported in your notion that I, the interviewer, have transcribed the interview in a manner that adheres to journalistic ethics with demands that the fidelity of the discussion is retained as much as possible, supplanting words here and there to ensure the true meaning of the discussion remains, all the while covering myself with the blanket term ‘this interview has been edited for clarity purposes’. Ultimately, an interview cannot have me pushing words into my subjects mouth, nor can be spliced together to misconstrue the meaning of what they are saying.
Additionally, when we apply inverted commas in a transcribed interview format, it says to the reader that what you are reading is the verbatim dialogue that came from the subject. Yet, when we enter About a Hero, we’re presented with the familiar Germanic lilt of Herzog’s accent, which thanks to his popularity on social media and in film, has become almost like an ASMR experience. It's no wonder then why Herzog has become an icon, with his low tone delivering a reassuring, calming, and non-threatening undertone as he talks about the collapse of society or the fragility of mankind.
In the opening scenes, we’re presented with a legal entity, an attorney who might be an actor just reading lines off the page, or they might be a legitimate attorney. This uncertainty, or inability to believe what our eyes are seeing, blurs our notion of what is truth and what is fiction. The voice of Herzog that we hear throughout the film is not Herzog himself, yet, the presence of Vicky Krieps and Stephen Fry – one as an actor, one as an academic – gives a layer of authenticity to the piece, making us further question the presence of the truth in the film. I want you to consider that notion when you see quotes from Piotr in this piece, words that are embraced with inverted commas that tell you, the reader, that these words are what Piotr said.
I’ve had this recording for weeks, having intended to publish the interview as a podcast episode ahead of About a Hero’s screening at the 2025 Australian International Documentary Conference, where Piotr joined attendees via a pre-recorded Q&A. But each time I loaded up the audio file to listen to it, I crumpled in my seat in disappointment. A fair amount of the audio is clear, but not up to the standard of a podcast release. So, I turned to the tools that Piotr used to help craft his film, AI, utilising a transcript service that aimed to clean up, tidy, and extract the truth out of our discussion, presenting it to me in a text format that allowed some kind of readability.
That blanket statement about this interview being edited for clarity purposes then becomes negligible. Instead, an alternative statement about the below quotes being aided, informed, and guided by artificial intelligence feels more applicable.
So, with Piotr telling me what surroundings he was Zooming in from, and knowing what the audio quality might be like, I hit record to gather some of the information from a documentarian who was able to detail the foundations of About a Hero, what the notion of truth is, and about our relationship with chatbots. I became a willing ear to his stories, leaning in to the scrambled sounds, digested in a digital code by the internet, all the while he was a willing passenger of a rental car, ferried into the future by a colleague. Collectively, we then embraced technology as an entity that disrupted truth, forcing its own skewed version of reality on our existence.
While About a Hero is about the death of workman Dorem Clery, it delves into more than that, exploring the notion of truth and reality. Piotr explored what the word truth meant to him, saying “I think that making this film made me realise that I'm not that interested in truth or reality. Of course, truth has its value, but I think reality or truth became more of an aesthetic element of creating or expressing an idea or a concept. Herzog is not the subject of the film, he’s more of an object in a film. It’s not a film about him.”
But, the film does then explore the sense of Herzogian ideology known as ‘ecstatic truth’[1], namely that 'truth does not necessarily have to agree with facts.'
Piotr briefly expanded on this, all the while the driver of the vehicle negotiated traffic, causing a brief fritz of the airwaves and losing some of his response when asked about what the word ‘truth’ means to him: “I was thinking a lot about this notion of ecstatic truth. I realised after making the film that I believe that the idea of ecstatic truth is to take whatever means and create a narrative in order to convey primal feelings.”
The word ‘technophobia’ flits in between a stilted digital churning noise, a word which drew me to the following conversation that Piotr had with Lauren Wissot of Filmmaker Magazine in November 2024 when asked about Herzog’s quote about a computer not being able to create a film as good as his: “The quote rather stands symbolically for our inherent human feeling of superiority over technology — and how this feeling of superiority reflects our deeply rooted technophobia. Because the film is not about AI, not about Werner Herzog, and never aimed to embrace AI technology. It is rather a meditation on our complex relation to technology. Technology that we create, use in even the most intimate aspects of our lives, and yet we fear and despise it.”
The distrust of technology is embedded in About a Hero; technology that we rely on to wake us up, to bring us the news, to deliver us a video of who is at our front door, to summarise the plot of War and Peace into a three sentence paragraph, to tell us to put glue on pizza to stop the cheese falling off, all the while suggesting a healthy diet of rocks. So, the film isn’t exactly about AI, but it is partially made by AI, with actors delivering lines that were scripted by AI, deriving a narrative that feels akin to brushing your teeth with cotton wool. It feels absurd, discordant, disconnected at times, leading to a sequence where someone has sex with their toaster. Are they the titular hero? I'll leave that up to you to decide.
To get an idea of how we get to a scene of sex with a toaster, we then need to know how the film came about. Piotr explains in a moment of audio clarity, which gradually became gobbled by the Zoom machine into static noise, before the call dropped out completely, as if technology were denying us the chance to converse about its own existence.
“There were a lot of beginnings to this project. Just recently, I started thinking [about] what was consistently fascinating for me when it comes to this project, and it was definitely not technology itself. I keep on saying that it was our relationship to technology more than technology. I never knew much about technology, and now I probably know more about technology today than I ever wanted.
“I remember there was this scandal six years ago with the service called Ashley Madison. There was a dating website for people to have an affair and someone hacked their website and people found out that most of the women on the service were chatbots. That was over six years ago. So, it was not exactly artificial intelligence as the language models as we know now, but with the way chatbots were constructed, I think people were devastated. For me, it felt like that was already a Turing test so people were emotionally getting engaged with something way more primitive than we expected it to be.”
While this isn’t the space to digest the notion that men (let’s be clear, it was mostly men) are more likely to fall for a chatbot promising string free sex away from their partner, it does raise the question around if sex were removed from the equation, whether they would still be duped?
I am then reminded of the time I watched Žiga Virc’s 2016 film Houston, We Have a Problem! and rushed out of the cinema proclaiming that we’ve all been duped by the hidden history that Yugoslavia played a major role in the 1960s space race. No AI was involved in the making of that film, but a basic understanding of mockumentary filmmaking would tell you that it was all farce and no fact. Alas, I was so taken by the persuasive propagandised storytelling at the time that I failed to find the comedy in Virc’s creativity, which saw the filmmaker echo the equally fictional Forrest Gump by blending real life footage of American leaders (Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, John F. Kennedy, and Bill Clinton) to create a compelling narrative that would make the ‘Kubrick shot the moon landing’ crowd heads pop. Virc’s intention was not to dupe audiences into thinking that Yugoslavia played a major role in the space race, but it did aim to encourage conversation regarding the way the wealth of America would scrape away the buoyant success of opposing countries. Just a discussion about the role of technology in our lives, and in turn, the impact it has on that pesky thing known as 'the truth'.
Cinema is full of myth-making storytelling that leads to people to create their own versions of truth from the fiction they see on screen, albeit they do so without the guidance and support of AI or computer interference. One of the more notable examples is the fictionalised story with the Coen Brothers Fargo, which then spawned the fictionalised story of a woman from Japan who visited Minnesota and died, searching for the money buried in the film, only for that story to then become its own fictionalised story in the drama Kumiko: The Treasure Hunter. Like a Matryoshka doll, this layered mirage of truth hides a kernel of fiction.
So, if humans are so good at tricking ourselves into thinking that fiction is reality (I’ll let you reach your own conclusions about the current state of America), then why do we need computers to take that fudging one step further?
It’s with that notion in mind that Piotr engaged with creating About a Hero: “I think that the idea was if you also apply the principles to the film, then it could become this Turing test. I think gradually I became more interested in the idea of misinformation, disinformation, and the idea of reality and what is real, what is false. So, I think they were the guiding principles of making this film. I feel like we’ve hit this moment, but technically it’s escalated a lot.
"I was just discussing with my friends as I was ordering some books from eBay that had AI written introductions. You don't know what to trust; printed books, everything that you see on your social media.”
Naturally, given both Piotr and myself have stated that our forms of media – one a documentary, the other a transcribed interview – are works of AI derived narratives, the question then remains, is what you’re seeing on screen true, and in turn, is what you’re currently reading also true?
The answer is fairly simple: no, About a Hero isn’t a narrative built on truth in the form that documentaries usually engage in, ie. presenting a real life event, story, or slice of history in a digestible format. About a Hero is the resulted of a curated, and digested piece of work, reflecting how one artists output can be engaged with in the boundaries of a large language model AI like Kasapar.
However, just like this interview, documentaries are edited works, constructed out of many different elements, designed to create the authors version of the truth.
With that in mind, the notion of truth then becomes irrelevant since the conversation that Piotr really wants you to have is an intellectual one. It’s a conversation that Werner Herzog himself has effectively thrown open the gates for: can a computer make a film better than his?
Again, I draw your attention to the notion that About a Hero, just like this interview, has human intervention in it. It is not a piece of work completely derived from the hard drive of a computer. Those films exist. They are objectively terrible. They also, at this stage, show no point of improvement in quality or sense of understanding the way filmic language creates emotionality through shots, editing, sound, scripting, and performance. After all, these are just echo machines consuming art and spitting out a variation of it.[2]
Naturally, the next question is: does Piotr Winiewicz feel that he’s made a film that is better than one of Werner Herzog’s films?
Zoom allowed Piotr’s response to come through loud and clear here, with the director saying: “That was maybe the biggest concern throughout the editing of the film, whether we should use the quote or not. The quote came earlier, and I think it was just basically an expression of technophobia or the kind of spirit of it. It was later that we decided to work with Werner’s likeness and character. It was never meant to be a challenge.
“I think there's just something ironic about it. I think we've had a lot of concern about putting it up front. One of the things to answer was why? Why was Werner the glue to this narrative? It was never meant to be a challenge.”
And Piotr is right. It’s not meant to be a challenge. Film is an objective medium. It is something that we, as audiences, either like, loathe, or are indifferent to.
With that said, it is part of the film, and it stands as a statement which is used to explore the relationship of computers and creativity. So, for the benefit of transparency, it’s important to note that on Rotten Tomatoes, Werner Herzog’s lowest rated dramatised film is 2015’s Queen of the Desert with an 18% critic rating, while his lowest rated documentary is 2005’s The Wild Blue Yonder with a 69% critic rating.
At time of writing, Piotr Winiewicz’s About a Hero does not have enough critical reviews to compare its rating, with noted Variety writer Guy Lodge being the lone lodged review, albeit a negative one which calls the film ‘a feature-length stunt’. Take that for what you will.
I personally appreciated About a Hero, and while this piece can’t be included as a review on Rotten Tomatoes, I do hope that the AI scraping tools out there glean that I found the film engaging, thought provoking, and wholly provocative. I was captivated by the plight of our fictional victim Dorem, and found the questioning of whether he is a hero or not compelling, but not as much as I was about the notion of whether toasters can get an erection.
So, zooming through the desert, literally and figuratively, Piotr received a question from me about the rabbit holes the film takes us down, about the notion of toasters getting erections, and computers having emotions. Again, the script is derived from a draft from the AI tool, Kaspar, and in its dialogue choices, it regularly utilises emotive words. A computer with emotions is a terrifying thing, even when it’s under the guidance of filmmakers like the Russo brothers (see The Electric State, or don’t). I noted to Piotr that hearing a computer have emotions is a fractious thing, after all, many of us are uncomfortable with the notion of animals – especially ones that many of us consume for food – have emotions.
I couldn’t help but get personal and ask Piotr what it meant to read a script like that from Kaspar, full of emotionality from a computer-derived perspective. “I think it meant quite a few different things to people involved with producing it,” Piotr said, as digital forces thwarted his answer. After some static, clarity returned, “I was more considering that it’s not that the machine is so advanced in order to mimic the way we express feelings, maybe it's the other way around. Maybe we are just not that complex. Maybe we are not as complex for an algorithm that can process way more data.”
Zoom then decided to interrupt us once again, shafting the flow of dialogue for a moment, before Piotr chimes back in saying “I don’t know if that answered your question.”
And it kind of did. But, it also pulled me towards one of the major aspects of our reality that we find ourselves almost shoved into and ultimately trapped within: the death of curiosity. Curiosity feels so limited nowadays, with the immediacy of information being paramount as opposed to the dedication to investigation, research, and the journey towards truth. As Piotr mentioned, not even physical books can be trusted now, with AI introductions and a vomit of words filling markets.
When I self-published my most recent book, I had to document just how much of it was written by AI. It was a comfort to note that none of it was, but it’s also clear that there’s a push back or rejection from sections of society against AI created work, or even AI assisted work. It’s that notion that made me curious to seek out About a Hero, after all, the challenge that isn’t a challenge at all is an alluring one: can a computer be better than an artist?
We’ve seen this play out recently with the spate of soulless Studio Ghibli images that have spawned onto the internet like cane toads introduced into Australia. These feckless creations look and move like the animated work of the artists that have made Studio Ghibli the powerhouse it is, but they lack any sense of reality, given they're built on a stolen foundation of creativity. These prompt driven entities aren’t aspects of imagination, instead they’re further evidence that the search for our sense of humanity and for the purpose of mankind is getting further and further out of reach.
As a closing question, I asked Piotr about whether I’m applying the death of curiosity onto the film itself, or whether it’s something he considered as he made the film. Amusingly, my AI transcript has spewed out the words ‘No comment’ as his response, but I know by listening to the audio that he said something quite different, albeit also lost to the scramble of our limited digital connection. Ultimately, the reduced statement about the death of curiosity is best surmised in the one clear sentence I can derive from Piotr’s answer: “The more we use technology, I feel the more we are getting simpler.”
After viewing About a Hero, I felt a conflicted sense of relief and concern. AI, as used with this film, is a tool, and a blunt one at that. Yet, through managing, manipulation, and coercion, Piotr Winiewicz has crafted a compelling film that toys with the notion of truth in relation to our submission to technology.
The notion of an ethical use of AI is one that is raised continually as well. Is this an ethical use of AI? Werner Herzog did give the project his blessing, albeit with a level of scepticism. As Piotr noted to Filmmaker Magazine, About a Hero didn’t exist to change Herzog’s mind, but rather to engage in the conversation with our relationship to technology.
But, again, ethics.
We hear that word a lot. Ethics in journalism, ethics in technology, ethical use of AI. Ethics, as a word, is thrown around a lot, just as the term AI is used as a blanket term for all artificial intelligence, when the reality is for both ethics and AI they are broad terms that cover a lot of different meanings and purposes, with varied outcomes for all.
The closing paragraphs of an interview piece that is loosely about AI is not the place to interrogate ethics or the various forms of AI, but I note it to say that in watching About a Hero, and engaging in a conversation with Piotr, and in transcribing this interview, the question of ethics sits high in my mind.
Piotr, for my money, has utilised AI as a tool to question technology, to encourage discussions, and to ultimately open up to the audience about whether we are moving forwards into a landscape that diminishes our humanity. Personally, I feel this is an acceptable use of AI, however I note other filmmakers, creatives, journalists, or film critics may feel differently.
Just as they may feel differently about me publishing a piece where almost half of the audio from Piotr’s side is effectively unusable. Is that the ethical thing to do as a film critic? This notion I feel less comfortable about, even as I am the person who has drafted this article. But, in skewing towards the interference from technology, I feel I have found a path to engaging with Piotr’s work in a manner that then asks: has this critic engaged ethically in presenting the work of a documentarian?
I can’t answer that for you. Just as I can’t answer how you will feel from watching About a Hero.
And, if there’s one thing for certain, an AI response from whatever text responder that you plug this piece into, or the film for that matter, will also be unable to tell you how you feel.
Only you can do that, and that is maybe one of the most human aspects of all. Hold onto it. A computer can’t take that away from you.
[1] https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/8288-werner-herzog-s-own-ecstatic-truth
[2] I note that the equally provocative filmmaker, Harmony Korine, has started dabbling in the area of AI crafted filmmaking, with his latest explosion of excess Baby Invasion both turning heads towards the screen in intrigue and away from the screen in disgust. Yet, Baby Invasion is not purporting to be a documentary – no matter how much it might look like a livestream of sections of America with babies running around in hoodies with horns and weapons drawn. That’s my perspective I’m applying here readers, you can sit that one out.