When I reach Macfarlane via zoom from his Cambridge, England study, we discuss the loophole that he believes exempts him from Herzog’s threatened condemnation, and exactly how he and Frost were able to take Baker’s book and make it into an opera in the first place. In Herzog’s mind, The Peregrine, with its violent poetics and horror movie-esque transformation at its heart-it’s basically the raptor’s own Iliad-is the perfect book, and should remain a book.

That’s because Herzog believes that Baker’s profound meditation on raptors, that Baker spent a decade obsessively stalking in his corner of the British midlands, to be fundamentally unadaptable. Baker’s 1967 masterwork, The Peregrine into an opera, the first section of which will debut at this year’s Great Northern as Cold Air Rises. Macfarlane says Herzog doesn’t trust him despite their mutual admiration for The Peregrine-along with Virgil’s Georgics, it’s the only other book to appear on Herzog’s syllabus for his Rogue Film School. That’s because Macfarlane, along with the Australian musician Ben Frost, has adapted Herzog’s favorite nature book, the enigmatic British author J.A. From his first award-winning book, 2003’s Mountains of the Mind, about humanity’s fascination with climbing to the top, all the way through to his ninth, 2019’s Underland, about humanity’s descent to the bottom, Macfarlane has proven himself to be a most curious and eloquent investigator of our natural habitat.īut somehow, despite this veritable stack of deeply considered work, the great German director Werner Herzog has threatened to shoot him.

For the last twenty years, Robert Macfarlane has established himself as one of the most accomplished nature writers alive.

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