My parents divorced when I was five or six, at which point my legal name became Stipetić, which was my mother’s maiden name. I always felt much closer to my mother but chose to work under the name Herzog in part because it means “duke” in German. I thought there should be someone like Count Basie or Duke Ellington making films. It’s hostile and murderous out there in the universe; what looks friendly to us is actually two hundred thousand atomic explosions every second. The sun is a tiny grain of sand and there are many even nastier suns out there. Down here, we humans are living proof that
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