--- title: 'Werner Herzog Has Two Sisters Digging Through a Mountain. He Has Done This Before' type: 'blog post' section: 'Craft' standfirst: 'Bucking Fastard premieres in competition at Venice on September 3, with Rooney and Kate Mara as inseparable twins tunnelling through a mountain range toward a country where love is possible. Forty-four years after Fitzcarraldo, Herzog is still moving earth to measure what a person wants.' author: 'CinePixo' published: '2026-08-19' updated: '2026-08-19' about_people: - 'Werner Herzog' - 'Rooney Mara' - 'Kate Mara' - 'Orlando Bloom' - 'Domhnall Gleeson' about_films: - 'Fitzcarraldo (1982)' - 'Grizzly Man (2005)' - 'Family Romance, LLC (2019)' tags: - 'Werner Herzog Bucking Fastard' - 'Rooney Mara Kate Mara' - 'Venice Film Festival 2026' - 'Freda and Greta Chaplin' - 'Herzog Fitzcarraldo' - 'Peter Zeitlinger' sources: - 'https://www.screendaily.com/news/werner-herzogs-bucking-fastard-starring-rooney-and-kate-mara-filming-in-ireland/5203790.article' - 'https://www.screendaily.com/news/venice-film-festival-reveals-2026-lineup/5218820.article' - 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucking_Fastard' - 'https://deadline.com/2025/02/rooney-kate-mara-werner-herzog-1236279548/' - 'https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/bucking-fastard-kate-mara-rooney-werner-herzog-film-picture-1236215040/' - 'https://www.indiewire.com/news/breaking-news/bucking-fastard-first-look-werner-herzog-rooney-kate-mara-1235122726/' - 'https://deadline.com/2025/05/bucking-fastard-first-look-image-1236395025/' - 'https://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/2026' canonical: 'https://cinepixo.com/blog/werner-herzog-has-two-sisters-digging-through-a-mountain-he-has-done-this-before' publisher: 'CinePixo' --- # Werner Herzog Has Two Sisters Digging Through a Mountain. He Has Done This Before *Bucking Fastard premieres in competition at Venice on September 3, with Rooney and Kate Mara as inseparable twins tunnelling through a mountain range toward a country where love is possible. Forty-four years after Fitzcarraldo, Herzog is still moving earth to measure what a person wants.* By CinePixo, 2026-08-19 · Craft ## Two sisters are digging a tunnel through a mountain Werner Herzog's *Bucking Fastard* premieres in competition at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on September 3. Here is the premise, as reported: twin sisters named Jean and Joan Holbrooke, looking for an imaginary country where true love is possible, begin digging a tunnel through a mountain range. Read that again and check the date. This is not a young director's first idea. Herzog is in his eighties, and he has written and directed a film in which two women set about removing a mountain because the thing they want is on the other side of it. Forty-four years ago he made *Fitzcarraldo*, in which a man hauls a steamship over a hill in the Peruvian jungle to fund an opera house. Herzog hauled a real ship over a real hill to shoot it. The joke about him — that he keeps making the same film — has always been slightly wrong. The consistency is not in the plot. It is in his conviction that a person's inner life can be measured by how much earth they are willing to move for it. ![Rooney Mara smiling slightly, hair pulled back flat, in a black turtleneck and oversized black blazer against the blue Berlinale photocall backdrop, 2024.](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/70c3cff3-95f1-40bf-af0d-e0770b59069b.webp) ![Kate Mara with her hair swept back, in a black spaghetti-strap dress with a silver beaded neckline, at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival.](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/64d59c29-1323-4ec1-86ec-5f47f91b1b33.webp) *Photos: Elena Ternovaja · [CC BY-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) · [source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rooney_Mara_at_Berlinale_2024-3.jpg); Adam Chitayat · [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0) · [source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kate_Mara_at_the_2024_Toronto_International_Film_Festival_3_(cropped_2).jpg)* ## The two sisters are played by two sisters Kate Mara plays Jean. Rooney Mara plays Joan. They are sisters, and this is the first time they have acted together in anything. There is a lazy version of that casting, where the resemblance does the work and the film points at it. There is also a version where it becomes the only way to shoot the material honestly, because what the film needs is two people whose faces already carry a shared history that no rehearsal produces. The Maras have twenty-odd years of separate careers and one childhood. Herzog has never been a director who wastes a real thing on a decorative use. Orlando Bloom plays Gareth Mulroney and Domhnall Gleeson plays Timothy, with Hugh O'Conor also in the cast. Bloom is the more surprising name on that list, and the more interesting one — he has spent two decades in enormous films that asked him mostly to be handsome and brave, and almost nobody has handed him a Herzog script. ## The title is something two women said at once in a courtroom *Bucking Fastard* refers to a synchronised verbal slip the real sisters made in court. The real sisters were Freda and Greta Chaplin, British identical twins who became tabloid property in the 1980s after a man they had both become involved with obtained a restraining order against them. They spoke in unison, dressed identically, and were written about for years as a curiosity rather than as two people. Herzog wrote about them in his 2022 memoir before he wrote this film. That history is the reason to watch how this picture behaves. Two women who were treated as a spectacle by the British press are now the subject of a film whose title is a joke they did not mean to make. Herzog has renamed them, moved them to fiction, and given them a mountain to dig through — which reads less like a documentary impulse than like an attempt to hand them a myth instead of a headline. Whether that is generous or merely another use of them is the question the film has to answer for itself, and it is a real question, not a rhetorical one. Herzog's record here is better than most. *Grizzly Man* took a man who had already been widely made a joke of and gave him back his contradictions without excusing him. He is capable of the necessary care. He is also capable of finding a person magnificent in a way they never asked to be. ![Cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger laughing while holding a handheld microphone, in glasses and a grey jacket, at a screening and talk at the Slovenian Cinematheque in Ljubljana, 2026.](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/bc4a99bc-0803-4237-9808-1d910e9f0e72.webp) *Photo: Österreichisches Außenministerium (photo: Domen Pal) · [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0) · [source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peter_Zeitlinger_-_Österreichisches_Kulturforum_Laibach_-_03_(cropped).jpg)* ## The crew is the one he has kept for thirty years Peter Zeitlinger shot it. Zeitlinger has been Herzog's cinematographer since the 1990s, on *Grizzly Man* and a long line of others, and he is the reason a Herzog exterior looks both documentary-plain and slightly wrong. Ernst Reijseger wrote the score; he has been scoring Herzog's films for two decades, usually with cello and voices arranged so that a shot of rock or water starts to feel liturgical. Marco Capalbo edited. That continuity matters more than it sounds. Herzog's films are unpolished on purpose — they do not smooth anything down — and the people who know how to produce that effect deliberately are a small group he has kept close. *Bucking Fastard* runs 109 minutes. ![The two red-and-white banded Poolbeg chimneys rising over the low generating station on the Dublin Bay shoreline, seen across flat grey water from Booterstown in hazy light, July 2022.](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/7741d0f5-217f-4c38-9eeb-e30a395d05cc.webp) *Photo: Djm-leighpark · [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0) · [source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Poolbeg_Chimneys,_Dublin_Bay,_viewed_from_Booterstown,_19_July_2022_1630_(1649c).jpg)* ## Ireland, Slovenia, and a mountain that has to be believed Principal photography ran in Ireland, at the Pigeon House studios in Dublin's docklands, in Naas in County Kildare, and on Capel Street, with further scenes shot in Slovenia. Filming wrapped in April 2025. It is Herzog's first narrative feature since *Family Romance, LLC* in 2019, which he shot in Tokyo about a man hired to impersonate a stranger's father. The film was reportedly offered a Cannes slot in May and turned it down, which is a small thing that says something. Venice puts it in competition against Danny Boyle, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Martin McDonagh, Casey Affleck and Florian Zeller, with Maggie Gyllenhaal presiding over the jury. The prize is not the point. A man in his eighties has made a picture about two women trying to dig their way to a country that does not exist, and cast two actual sisters to do the digging. Whatever the jury decides when the festival closes on September 12, someone went out and shot that. On the Lido, on September 3, the tunnel gets its first audience. ## In this piece - [Werner Herzog](https://cinepixo.com/people/werner-herzog) - [Rooney Mara](https://cinepixo.com/people/rooney-mara) - [Kate Mara](https://cinepixo.com/people/kate-mara) - [Orlando Bloom](https://cinepixo.com/people/orlando-bloom) - [Domhnall Gleeson](https://cinepixo.com/people/domhnall-gleeson) - 1982 · [Fitzcarraldo](https://cinepixo.com/movies/fitzcarraldo-1982) - 2005 · [Grizzly Man](https://cinepixo.com/movies/grizzly-man-2005) - 2019 · [Family Romance, LLC](https://cinepixo.com/movies/family-romance-llc-2019) ## Sources - https://www.screendaily.com/news/werner-herzogs-bucking-fastard-starring-rooney-and-kate-mara-filming-in-ireland/5203790.article - https://www.screendaily.com/news/venice-film-festival-reveals-2026-lineup/5218820.article - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucking_Fastard - https://deadline.com/2025/02/rooney-kate-mara-werner-herzog-1236279548/ - https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/bucking-fastard-kate-mara-rooney-werner-herzog-film-picture-1236215040/ - https://www.indiewire.com/news/breaking-news/bucking-fastard-first-look-werner-herzog-rooney-kate-mara-1235122726/ - https://deadline.com/2025/05/bucking-fastard-first-look-image-1236395025/ - https://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/2026 Every factual claim above is drawn from these. The reading of them is ours. Source: https://cinepixo.com/blog/werner-herzog-has-two-sisters-digging-through-a-mountain-he-has-done-this-before Written for CinePixo. Nothing on this page is imported prose.