Werner Herzog explains what it's like to be with those on death row, the subject of his new documentary, Into The Abyss:
What distinguishes death-row inmates, and what makes their perspective unique, is that they know exactly how they will die and exactly when they will die, and we do not. That makes the conversation so intense, but it’s very much about us as well. Secretly, it’s about us.
He elaborates in another interview:
The inmates are housed at Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas, but Polunsky Unit doesn’t have a death house. So they transport them forty-three miles to Huntsville, to Walls Unit. And many of them for a decade or more have never seen the world out there any more. … [One inmate who got a stay on his execution] tells me about his last trip, seeing the world there, all of a sudden everything is magnificent. It’s a glorious world out there. And when you do this trip, which I did, actually with a camera, these forty-three miles, it’s very bleak, it’s very forlorn part of Texas. And yet all of a sudden an abandoned gas station is magnificent. What he says, it resonates in me wherever I am looking around. For him this was Israel, it was like the Holy Land.
The Dish 