Werner Herzog is one of the greatest filmmakers of the 21st century, responsible for everything from acclaimed features like Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans to enthralling documentaries like Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World. Werner Herzog says things like “I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder” in his severe and hyponetic German accent the way other people say “nice weather we’re having!” and once ate his own shoe on camera. Werner Herzog is an auteur.

Werner Herzog also friggin’ loves WrestleMania.

In a Variety interview published today about his role in the upcoming Disney+ series The Mandalorian, Herzog is asked if he watches television. “I watch the news from different sources. Sometimes I see things that are completely against my cultural nature. I was raised with Latin and Ancient Greek and poetry from Greek antiquity,” he responds, before careening so quickly from high to lowbrow it’ll give you a neck sprain. “But sometimes, just to see the world I live in, I watch WrestleMania.” (The interviewer also asks Herzog if he felt any pressure working with director Jon Favreau, to which he responds “I do not know what other films he has made.” Ikonisch!)

Interestingly, Herzog has been bringing up WrestleMania in interviews for nearly two decades now. Here, in one place, savor his many thoughts on the wild world of professional wrestling. Because, as he would say, “a poet must not avert his eyes.”

2000, The Baltimore Sun

"Opera singers are never in close-up like on camera. In cinema, you have only one perspective, and that's the lens of the camera. Here they have to act for over 2,000 people in the theater. That's 2,000 different angles and 2,000 focal lengths. It's like watching a basketball game or WrestleMania.”

2002, The Austin Chronicle

“It's fascinating because something very crude, something very raw is emerging. A very raw, primitive form of new drama is being born, as primitive and crude as it must have been in the earlier Greek times before Sophocles and before Euripides, when something like this emerged for the public eye. I do believe that what is fascinating about WrestleMania is the stories around it: the dramas between the owner of the whole show and his son, who are feuding, and his wife in the wheelchair who is blind, and he is then showing up in the ring with four girls who have huge, fake boobs, and he is fondling them. This is almost sort of an ancient Greek drama—evil uninterrupted by commercials. So, what does it say? It says that this sort of thing is more important that the fight itself (which of course is all staged and all manipulated). And that's very interesting to me because apparently the emergence of a new drama has been understood by these people who invented WrestleMania.”

2005, TimeOut London

“You see reality TV, you can play video games in the virtual world, you’ve got Photoshop and WrestleMania… Our sense of reality is experiencing an onslaught of enormous magnitude.”

2006, NOW Magazine

"Reality TV, WrestleMania, The Anna Nicole Smith Show, it goes on and on. Film today is like the medieval knight who finds himself at the battlefield confronted by muskets and cannons. Warfare has changed."

2007, Fresh Air with Terry Gross

“Why do I watch Wrestlemania? My answer is the poet must not avert his eyes from what's going on in the world. In order to understand what's going on, you have to face it.”