Werner Herzog will write and direct Bucking Fastard, a new drama which will star real-life sisters Kate and Rooney Mara.
It’s been six years since the last Werner Herzog drama, but Deadline reports that the director is ready to get back into the ring with Bucking Fastard, which will star real-life sisters Kate and Rooney Mara.
Surprisingly, this will be the first time the Maras have worked together. The film will tell the story of inseparable twin sisters, Joan and Jean, who live on the fringes of society. Production will kick off this spring in Ireland and Slovenia, with Herzog writing and directing.
Deadline’s report doesn’t mention it, but the film is believed to be based on the lives of Freda and Greta Chaplin, twin sisters who did everything together and even spoke simultaneously. They became famous in the early ’80s for being obsessed with their neighbour to such a degree that he took them to court. In his recent book, Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memior, Herzog said he wanted to make a movie about the Chaplin twins. “I want to make a feature film about the twins Freda and Greta Chaplin,” Herzog said. “In 1981 they had a short run in the British ‘red tops,’ or tabloid newspapers, and were famous for a few weeks for being the ‘sex-crazed twins’ who were so infatuated with their neighbor, a lorry driver, that he took them to court and had a restraining order taken out against them. Their story is unique. They are the only identical twins we know of who speak synchronously.“
Herzog continued, “We know that twins sometimes develop their own secret language when they are all alone by which they can exclude the rest of the world, but Freda and Greta spoke the same words at the same time. I have had the experience where they open the door, greet me, and ask me inside, all completely synchronous in word and gesture. I suppose this type of a conversation could be a ritual developed by practice. But later on, they answered questions they can’t have been expecting absolutely in unison. Sometimes they spoke separately, then Freda, for the sake of argument, would speak the first half of a sentence, at which point Greta would chime in with a word or two in unison, and then bring the sentence to a conclusion herself. Or the other way around.“
Although Herzog has been busy with acting roles, documentaries, and demanding to see the baby, his last dramatic film was Family Romance, LLC, released in 2019. It will be great to see another Herzog movie, and the subjects sound rather fascinating.
