Director Piotr Winiewicz and producer Mads Damsbo came up with the idea to build an AI language model (named 'Kaspar' as a nod to Werner Herzog's "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser") and to train it on the body of work of Herzog, so that it would write a scripted narrative. 'About a Hero' is the result of that project. Winiewicz said Herzog's famous quote "a computer will not create a film as good as mine in 4,500 years" was partly the trigger for this project, and also a personal relationship with a former partner whom he only communicated via emails despite living together. It was around that time that Google introduced 'smart compose,' an algorithm that learns from your emails and it was able to predict your next words and sentences. Winiewicz said he felt that by that time 'smart compose' wrote 60% of his emails.
