There is a reason Werner Herzog agreed to co-star as a villain in the forthcoming Star Wars show The Mandalorian. And it is not because he is a fan of George Lucas’s sci-fi franchise.

“I had a very, very vague idea of what Star Wars was all about,” Herzog said at the Cannes Film Festival, dismissing a beloved, multi-billion-dollar empire as if it were a USA Network show canceled after a single season. The very German, extremely quotable, zanily profound filmmaker did, however, need money to fund one particular rogue movie idea: Family Romance, LLC.

Traditional Hollywood financiers would not have gone for the filmmaker’s latest stunt, and for understandable reasons. He wanted to use an incomplete script he wrote himself, cast Japanese-speaking non-actors, and film in Japan—a triple-axel of daring, particularly considering that Herzog does not speak Japanese. But he dedicated his first few checks from The Mandalorian to making Family Romance, LLC, and was able to scrounge up a few other strange jobs, according to Herzog. “The only thing I have not done so far [to make money for movies],” he joked, “is bank robbery.”

Don’t get Herzog wrong; he actually likes the role he took in the Star Wars spin-off. “I asked for the full screenplays, and I looked into the part, and it looked good and interesting,” he said. Herzog also had experience playing a screen villain, having faced off against Tom Cruise in Jack Reacher. “The only reason for having me in the film is they needed somebody who would spread terror, and be frightening for the audience,” he said. “I said, ‘Yes I think I can give you this stylization.’ It came with great ease.”

Herzog has worked with fine actors like Christian Bale (Rescue Dawn) and Nicole Kidman (Queen of the Desert)—but with all due respect to those Oscar-winning performers, he prefers to take his acting cues from Mick Jagger.

“He was in the original cast of Fitzcarraldo,” Herzog said, referring to his 1982 West German drama. “Jagger would have a huge argument with the production manager—I don’t know what about, his mineral water or the per diem. And I would say, ‘Mick, the camera is rolling.’” The Rolling Stones frontman would immediately stop, “step in front of the camera, and he’s a demon. I like that a lot. . . . I step in front of the camera, and I can change from one second to the next.” And Herzog does have to shape-shift to become a villain: “My wife would testify to you privately that I’m a fluffy husband.”

But back to Family Romance, LLC. It is a micro-budgeted movie about the lengths humans will go for emotional connection, and the way one Japanese company, also called Family Romance, LLC, has already commoditized that impulse. The film is based upon an actual business in Japan—run by Yuichi Ishii, who plays himself in the film—that offers men to fill specific emotional voids in the lives of its clients. In the film, a few of these scenarios are explored; a woman, for example, hires Ishii to play a father figure to her pre-teen daughter. Another woman, who doesn’t trust her alcoholic husband, hires Ishii to walk her daughter down the aisle at her wedding.

Herzog first heard about the real-life business through Roc Morin, one of his former rogue film school students who lives in Tokyo and speaks Japanese. Though he already had a few projects on his plate, the filmmaker knew this concept was “so big we have to tackle it right away.” Herzog’s metaphor for projects like this—the ones that leap to the front of his production line—is as Herzogian as you’d expect: “It’s like you wake up in the middle of the night, because there’s some noise in your kitchen, and there are five burglars. One of them comes at you swinging with an ax, so you better deal with that one first. But there are still some four more. This was one of those where I would instantly know this was so big, I had to do it right away, no matter if Hollywood tried to throw millions at it. I knew they would never make a film as good as I would do it.”

Herzog claimed there was indeed a Hollywood “feeding frenzy” over the intellectual property undergirding this film. “I know that the company of Steven Spielberg, Amblin, wanted to buy the rights to it. I think Ryan Gosling wanted to buy the rights. But they moved slowly. By the time they put together a 140-page contract, I was already done filming. I was my own legal department, and wrote a legal memo that I sent to Mr. Ischii that was only two or three pages. He answered back, ‘Finally, a real summary!’ Speaking to me in very clear, very simple language impressed him, and we had an immediate rapport.”

Herzog wanted Family Romance, LLC to be a real rogue filmmaking experience—made outside of Hollywood. “I was sick and tired of things like completion bonds and insurance companies that dictate, ‘You cannot have this or that, it’s too risky,’” he explained. “I wanted to go back to my early days of filmmaking, like Even Dwarfs Started Small”—a film he made in 1970. “I financed it myself, and I wrote and directed, and I was my own cinematographer. So, of course, that way you can be fast.”

Directing Family Romance, LLC was not difficult for Herzog, he claimed, because he gave his cast the freedom to improvise as long as they hit certain points in each scene. “They didn’t have to learn a text; they had to learn a situation,” Herzog said. He was so certain of what he wanted, the filmmaker continued, that he did a lot of single takes, and shot merely 300 minutes of footage in total.

Herzog thinks that Family Romance, LLC-style arrangements are only the beginning of what humans can expect in terms of commoditizing human connection. “The existential solitudes in our generation are evident with aging populations and quasi-human connections on social media—which are all inflated on a level that is not completely what a human contact should be,” he said. “Touching the person, seeing you, getting the scent of our perfume, for example—all this is absent, and all of what we see on Facebook is manipulated. It’s a fabricated forms of self. This is billions of people; thousands of millions of people do that already. So Japan is only the vanguard of something that is inevitably coming at us.”

And humans will not be the only things available to purchase for those in search of connection. Herzog also referenced emotional robot companions being developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “They create very fluffy creatures with artificial intelligence, big eyes, and fluffy hair and they’re most sweet—but they can read 800 different facial expressions. My wife has experienced it, and she was skeptical. But this creature was brought in, and she said it put its head aside and made big eyes, and said, in a very nice sweet voice, ‘Oh, you are not trusting me.’ Which was exactly the right reading, and it engaged her in dialogue. She said, ‘In five minutes, I loved it.’”

Doesn’t Herzog worry about a Terminator-style scenario, in which the robots overtake the humans?

His answer was a resounding no—only because he has never actually watched Terminator, and has no idea what the film entails. After being brought up to speed on where that story ends, however, the filmmaker instantly waved it off as an impossibility. “That is movies. We still can turn off the electricity of the machines. Artificial intelligence is something we should be aware of, because of the speed at which it is coming. But it’s very exciting, exciting times.”

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