For the opening ceremony of the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, Venice has chosen two living monuments of world cinema: Werner Herzog, awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, and Francis Ford Coppola, invited to honor him with the official laudatio. These are two uncompromising and radical cinematic concepts. On one side is Herzog, an 82-year-old German explorer of the human mind and the wildest environment. One the other, Coppola, an 86-year-old American creator of family sagas and societal utopias, recently underwent heart surgery in Rome but is already ready to return to the stage. Festival director Alberto Barbera described the Bavarian director, who made seminal films like 'Aguirre, the Wrath of God', 'Fitzcarraldo', 'The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser' and 'Nosferatu the Vampyre', as a "tireless walker," a "physical filmmaker", and a "explorer of the visible and the invisible". And Herzog continues to work tirelessly: he has just finished the documentary 'Ghost Elephants', which he will present in Venice on Thursday, August 28, and he is already working on 'Bucking Fastard', a new feature film shot in Ireland, as well as an animated film based on his novel "The Twilight World".