The Competition jury for the 2025 Venice Film Festival

Source: Aleksander Kalka/La Biennale di Venezia

The Competition jury for the 2025 Venice Film Festival

Francis Ford Coppola praised Werner Herzog as an “encyclopaedia” in awarding him the honorary Golden Lion at the opening of the 2025 Venice Film Festival.

“He not only can fill the pages of an encyclopaedia, Werner is one,” said Coppola, in his first public appearance since he underwent a heart procedure in Rome this month. “If Werner has limits, I don’t know what they are. Werner’s life and his very existence sends a challenge to everyone out there: top me if you can. And all of us truly wonder if anyone ever will.

“Werner, I will eat my hat if anyone comes who can do it,” concluded Coppola, in a nod to 1980 short documentary Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, in which the German filmmaker fulfilled a bet to Errol Morris to eat his shoe if Morris completed Gates of Heaven.

The typically stoic Herzog looked slightly emotional when embracing Coppola on stage and accepting his award.

“It feels odd winning a winged lion [the Golden Lion award] as so often I have been the elephant in the room,” said the director, whose latest documentary Ghost Elephants, following a mysterious herd of ghost elephants in the jungles of Angola, premieres out of competition in Venice today.

Herzog then related his friendship of half a century with Coppola, saying the US director “has been extremely kind and generous to me… inviting me when I didn’t have money to pay for a hotel room.

“I stayed at his house in San Francisco and wrote my screenplay of Fitzcarraldo,” said Herzog.

Herzog said that he and Coppola almost made a film together about the conquest of Mexico seen from the perspective of the Aztecs; and that although the film never happened, “it was a wonderful time when we plotted about it.”

Of his career, he said “I always wanted to be a good soldier of cinema, and that means perseverance, it means loyalty, it means courage, and it means a sense of duty.”

The evening began with an introduction by host, Italian actress Emanuela Fanelli, who landed a joke about Venice’s relationship to Cannes.

“These films are united by a single common denominator,” said Fanelli of the Venice selection. “If these films are here, it’s because evidently they weren’t selected for Cannes.”

The host also told a story about being scared but mesmerised by seeing the villain Ursula in Disney’s 1989 animated film The Little Mermaid, who she thought looked like her uncle. “Body-shaming was not a punishable offence in 1990, for Ursula or my uncle,” quipped Fanelli.

After a day of press conferences that was dominated by reactions to the ongoing Israeli siege of Gaza, the ceremony itself steered clear of political content.

The festival got underway with the world premiere of Paolo Sorrentino’s Competition title La Grazia starring Toni Servillo, with warm applause for the two home favourites in advance of and following the screening.

Competition titles launching today include Noah Baumbach’s Netflix film Jay Kelly starring George Clooney and Adam Sandler.

The festival runs until Saturday, September 6.

Topics