Dabbling in narrative filmmaking in-between his many documentaries, it was recently announced Werner Herzog was in production on his first animated feature, The Twilight World, based on his 2021 novel of the same name. Now we have another narrative project to add to his slate, one that comes with quite the intrigue in both cast and synopsis.
For the first time ever, Rooney and Kate Mara will star in a film together, Deadline reports. They’ll lead Herzog’s Bucking Fastard, which he is writing and directing. The film is based on the true story of inseparable twin sisters Joan and Jean, drawing from the lives of Freda and Greta Chaplin, who became sexually infatuated with their next-door neighbor and eventually received a restraining order. The title of the film, which begins production this spring in Ireland and Slovenia, is based on a simultaneous verbal slip the twins made in court.
“I want to make a feature film about the twins Freda and Greta Chaplin,” Herzog said in his recent book Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir. “In 1981 they had a short run in the British ‘red tops,’ or tabloid newspapers, and were famous for a few weeks for being the ‘sex-crazed twins’ who were so infatuated with their neighbor, a lorry driver, that he took them to court and had a restraining order taken out against them. Their story is unique. They are the only identical twins we know of who speak synchronously.”
Herzog, who visited the twins before their deaths, continued in his book, “We know that twins sometimes develop their own secret language when they are all alone by which they can exclude the rest of the world, but Freda and Greta spoke the same words at the same time. I have had the experience where they open the door, greet me, and ask me inside, all completely synchronous in word and gesture. I suppose this type of a conversation could be a ritual developed by practice. But later on, they answered questions they can’t have been expecting absolutely in unison. Sometimes they spoke separately, then Freda, for the sake of argument, would speak the first half of a sentence, at which point Greta would chime in with a word or two in unison, and then bring the sentence to a conclusion herself. Or the other way around. They wore exactly the same clothes, hairstyles, shoes. Their handbags and umbrellas were identical; they were as coordinated as a Rorschach test ready to be folded in two at any moment. When they walked, they didn’t walk in step like soldiers, left-right, left-right, but they had their inside feet together and kept time with their outside feet. It was the same with their handbags, which they didn’t both carry in their left hands; they carried them in their outer hands and their umbrellas with their inside hands. You could have folded a picture of them, and the two halves would have matched. Their gestures were synchronized, their physical awareness of each other continuous. Who was left and who was right in sitting or walking was for me the only way of telling which one was Greta and which was Freda at our early meetings.”