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Werner Herzog and Errol Morris in this month's Believer:

WH: Whatever it is, it makes people talk, and they say things that they would never say to any one of you here in the audience. They wouldn’t say it to me either, but Errol makes it by dint of his face.

EM: It becomes a documentary, whatever that is, by the element of the unpredictable. Now Werner goes to Antarctica. He has a limited amount of time and a limited amount of materials. He has no way of doing any kind of prep. And so the movie emerges. It’s emergent, if you like, from just what happens there. I feel that the element of spontaneity—and there’s a strong element of spontaneity, of the uncontrolled, of the unrehearsed, the unplanned, in every single film he’s made.

WH: Yeah, that’s where real life enters.

EM: I feel that element of spontaneity because so much of what I do is controlled. The element of spontaneity is not knowing what someone is going to say to me in front of the camera, having really no idea, of being surprised. I know that there’s this moment in all of the interviews that I’ve loved where something happens. I had this three-minute rule that if you just shut up and let someone talk, within three minutes they will show you how crazy they really are. And it has happened time and time and time again.

WH: And you have a great sense for the afterthought. The interview is finished, it’s over, and Errol is still sitting and expecting something. Then all of a sudden there comes an afterthought, and that’s the best of all.