‘I don’t like the term neurodivergence – it sounds like political correctness’: Werner Herzog on fans, fanaticism and baby foxes

The Bavarian auteur talks directing Kate and Rooney Mara in Bucking Fastard and his popularity on Instagram In outsider visionaries such as Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo or Timothy Treadwell, renegade German director Werner Herzog has created some of cinema’s most memorable monomaniacs – characters singularly obsessed with finding mythical cities made of gold, with building opera houses in the middle of the rainforest, or with befriending wild grizzly bears. But suggestions that they could be role models for the modern-day neurodiversity movement send this famously fearless film-maker running for the hills. “I don’t like the term neurodivergence and ADHD, or whatever – it sounds like political correctness, which scares me under the table,” Herzog said at the Venice film festival. Continue reading...