I wrote Werner Herzog yesterday and asked whether Rescue Dawn will be included at the Toronto Film Festival roster. “At the moment we should treat the Toronto Film Festival as some sort of a rumor, as there is no clear confirmation yet,” he answered.
“I just arrived in London for music recordings with the cello genius Ernst Reijseger — we did the music together for my two movies The White Diamond and The Wild Blue Yonder, using five Sardinian shepherd singers and an additional singer from Senegal. With Reijseger I shall work on the transition of the film into the unreal. The score is being written by Klaus Badelt (who recently scored Poseidon), but Reijseger will contribute music for a very strange moment in the film.
“Last week I have done color corrections, ADR, and sound post-production. Some of the digital effects (yes, I do have a few of them) are almost finished, and mixing has to be done. My guess is that we shall have a 35mm print before August 20th.”
In a New Yorker profile of Herzog that appeared earlier this year, writer Daniel Zalewski wrote the following: “Herzog believes that modern life has disconnected humans from their most elemental pleasures. His films, accordingly, attempt to connect modern cinemagoers to their prelapsarian selves: the emotions are always primal, and landscape is integral to the drama. Herzog says, ‘You will never see people talking on the phone, driving in a car, or exchanging ironic jokes in my films…it is always bigger, deeper.'”