"Into the Abyss", Werner Herzog's new documentary about Michael Perry's execution in Texas last year

Michael Perry

LOS ANGELES — “When I talk to you, it does not necessarily mean that I have to like you,” Werner Herzog, off-camera, can be heard telling the death-row inmate Michael Perry in the opening minutes of “Into the Abyss,” a new documentary about Mr. Perry’s execution in Texas last year for the murder of a 50-year-old nurse, Sandra Stotler.

“But I respect you, and you are a human being, and I do not think human beings should be executed.”

With that, Mr. Herzog begins to ask questions of Mr. Perry and those who had a stake in his life and death: Was it drugs? You had hopes? Why did the victims die?

It is a reporter’s drill, apparently designed less to resolve lingering questions about the crime — and the shotgun slaying on the same night of Ms. Stotler’s 16-year-old son and his friend — than to test Mr. Herzog’s antipathy toward the death penalty against a close encounter with murder and its consequences.

Mr. Herzog lives in Los Angeles, but has said that he would not become a United States citizen because of a deep aversion to capital punishment, born of his experiences as a child in wartime Germany. “Into the Abyss,” according to its producer, Erik Nelson, was rooted in Mr. Herzog’s plan to make a series of television documentaries about capital cases for the Investigation Discovery network.

“Werner fell down the rabbit hole of this one particular case,” Mr. Nelson said, in describing how “Into the Abyss” became a full-blown feature film.

Mr. Herzog, said Mr. Nelson, had just one filmed interview with Mr. Perry, in June 2010, about two weeks before Mr. Perry’s execution. Unlike Mr. Berlinger and Mr. Sinofsky, Mr. Herzog chose to dwell not on his subject’s claims of innocence. Instead he conducted a simple anatomy of the crime and its punishment, as did Truman Capote almost 50 years ago in his murder-case chronicle, “In Cold Blood.”

Among the details are shots of the cookie dough Ms. Stotler was making as she was gunned down, as part of a plan to steal her red Camaro, according to authorities. Mr. Perry, who confessed, then recanted and proclaimed his innocence, displays no remorse for the camera. But under Mr. Herzog’s questioning, a shaken officer, identified in the film as a member of a “death team,” renounces his support of capital punishment.

“It definitely haunted him,” Mr. Nelson said of Mr. Herzog’s experience with the movie, which will be released in theaters by IFC through its Sundance Selects label.

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Source: The New York Times, September 6, 2011

Werner Herzog’s Into The Abyss Picked Up By IFC’s Sundance Selects

Werner Herzog

In his fascinating exploration of a triple homicide case in Conroe, Texas, master filmmaker Werner Herzog (CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS, GRIZZLY MAN) probes the human psyche to explore why people kill—and why a state kills. In intimate conversations with those involved, including 28-year-old death row inmate Michael Perry (scheduled to die within eight days of appearing on- screen), Herzog achieves what he describes as “a gaze into the abyss of the human soul.” Herzog’s inquiries also extend to the families of the victims and perpetrators as well as a state executioner and pastor who’ve been with death row prisoners as they’ve taken their final breaths. As he’s so often done before, Herzog’s investigation unveils layers of humanity, making an enlightening trip out of ominous territory.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT:

I am not an advocate of the death penalty. I do not even have an argument; I only have a story, the history of the barbarism of Nazi Germany.

There were thousands and thousands of cases of capital punishment; there was a systematic program of euthanasia, and on top of it the industrialized extermination of six million Jews in a genocide that has no precedence in human history.

The argument that innocent men and women have been executed is, in my opinion, only a secondary one. A State should not be allowed – under any circumstance – to execute anyone for any reason. End of story. - Werner Herzog

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Source: The Criterion Cast, September 5, 2011