by Paul Cronin
The twins introduced me to the Rolling Stones, and sometime in 1964 we all went to a concert in Pittsburgh. When it had finished, I noticed that rows of plastic seats were steaming; many of the screaming teenage girls had peed themselves. That’s when I knew this was something big.
How did you make a living?
I heard about a film producer who worked with WQED in Pittsburgh. He was planning a series of films on advanced, futuristic, rocket-propelled systems for NASA, and suggested I make a film about plasma propulsion, which involved me going to Cleveland to talk to scientists and visit what at the time was one of the world’s most powerful magnets. Journalists are always writing that I made films for NASA and abandoned a promising career as a scientist – even an astronaut – to become a filmmaker. The truth is that because they had a high-security atomic reactor in Cleveland, everyone who worked there had to be cleared through intensive security checks. I had access to certain restricted areas and talked to the scientists, but just before I was about to start work on the film it was discovered that I didn’t have a permit to stay in the country unless I was a student. I had violated my visa status, and soon afterwards was summoned to the immigration office in Pittsburgh.
It was obvious I was about to be thrown out of the country and shipped back to Germany, so I drove an old Volkswagen to New York during an extremely bitter winter, where I planned to look for work. I lived in the car for a few weeks, though its floor was rusted through and I had a cast from my ankle up to my hip because I had fractured my leg a few weeks earlier while playing around with the Franklin twins in Pittsburgh. They had a habit of ambushing me with the cheapest perfume they could find and soaking me with it. One day I decided to jump out from the third-floor bathroom window and tackle them from behind, but that hadn’t gone as anticipated. I couldn’t move my toes properly in the cast and they nearly froze, so I wrapped wads of newspaper around them to make sure I didn’t lose anything to frostbite. At night, when it got exceptionally cold, the homeless of New York – who live almost like Neanderthal men – would gather together on some empty, desolate street and stand huddling around fires kindled in metal trash cans, all without speaking a word. I didn’t make a particularly good impression on potential employers because I was in such bad shape, so I eventually cut the damned cast off with a pair of poultry shears and fled across the border to Mexico, near Guanajuato and San Miguel de Allende, then down to San Cristóbal de las Casas in the south.
Mexico is where you learnt Spanish.
And where I developed my love and fascination for Latin America. While I was down there I struggled to make a living, until I discovered a weak spot on the border, across the Río Grande from Reynosa in Mexico to McAllen in Texas. Every day thousands of day-labourers would commute across the border and return home at night because they had a special sticker on their windshield. I stole one, bought some television sets for people who wanted them down in Mexico – where they were expensive – and resold them. It was, I suppose, smuggling of a sort, though I ended up with only pocket change. One time a rich ranchero asked me to get him a Colt pistol made of silver because he wasn’t able to find one in Mexico, so I bought one and took it down there. I was able to support myself on these indiscretions, though from this years later came the legend I worked as a gun-runner.
I spent a couple of weekends as a rodeo rider in a charreada. They had three cowboys, or charros, in the ring who would catch the bulls by using lassos to pull the animal to the ground and then tie a rope around its chest. Then I would squat on it, at which point the bull would explode with rage. I saw some of them jump clear over a six-foot stone wall. I had no idea how to ride a horse, something that soon became patently clear to the spectators, so I appeared under the name El Alamein, which after Stalingrad was the biggest defeat of the German forces in the Second World War. I was injured every time I went out there in front of the crowd, which loved cheering on the idiot. One time I was in the ring with a bull that got on its feet and stood there staring at me. “BURRO!” I screamed. “YOU DONKEY!” I can still hear the crowd screaming. The bull became rather angry and tried to pin me to the stone wall. My leg – the one I had fractured in Pittsburgh – got caught and I sustained an injury that was so bad I quit there and then. Today it all sounds funny and I can look back at my time in Mexico with some humour, but it was rather banal and occasionally quite miserable, even if it was pura vida – the raw, stark-naked quality of life – as the Mexicans say.
I drove back to Pittsburgh and spent a few weeks with the Franklins, though I was in hospital for much of that time because I picked up hepatitis in Mexico. Eventually I flew back to Europe and travelled around for another few months before returning home, where almost immediately I started pre-production on Signs of Life. I still wasn’t taken seriously, even after the Carl Mayer Award and my short films, which by now had been screened at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival and other places. At the time Munich was the cultural centre of West Germany, and I was able to make contact with other filmmakers, including Volker Schlöndorff, who was about to make Young Törless and showed up at my door one day. He has been helpful ever since, the most loyal of all the friends I have among filmmakers, though his films are so different to mine. He defended me with great passion during some of my darkest hours, and more recently spoke the French voiceover for Cave of Forgotten Dreams.
This was also when I encountered Fassbinder for the first time. Rainer was always a solid comrade in our battle to plough fields that hadn’t yet been worked over. This pimply, chubby twenty-two-year-old showed up at my door one evening – it must have been around 1967 – and slammed down prints of his first short films. He looked like a peasant, though was actually quite sophisticated and streetwise; I immediately sensed there was something forceful about him, that here was real talent. “Watch these, now! I want you to produce my films,” he told me. “For God’s sake, Rainer,” I said, “do it like me. You must produce your own work.” I explained to him I wasn’t a producer like any other, that I didn’t make films on a mercantile basis by acquiring a project and then hiring a director. My company was established to make only my films. “You must have the guts to set up your own production company,” I told him. “Just go for it.” Later he was grateful I threw him out, and said I had shown him possibilities he never knew existed.
You have lived outside of Germany for years, but have you retained your German sensibilities?
You can’t stand on one leg in Hollywood; you have to be all there or else you’ll never belong. It was the dream of some German filmmakers to move to Hollywood and make American films, which meant leaving their own culture behind. That never interested me. Decades after leaving Germany, it doesn’t matter where my films are physically made; they are still very much Bavarian in spirit. I can leave my land but not my culture. Some Irish write in English, but they are still Irish. Today I function very much in English, but I’m still a Bavarian. Historically speaking, Bavarians have never considered themselves part of Germany. My first language was a Bavarian dialect; my own father sometimes couldn’t understand me, and one time he turned to my mother and asked her to translate. It was a culture shock when I went to school in Swabia for a few months, where everyone spoke a different language. I was teased because I spoke with such a thick accent, and at the age of about eleven had to learn Hochdeutsch – proper German, the language established by Martin Luther – for the first time.
Down in Bavaria there’s a different approach to doing things, a way of life I am inextricably intertwined with. Being Bavarian means as much as it is to be Scottish in the United Kingdom. Like the Scots, Bavarians are hard-drinking, hard-fighting, warmhearted and imaginative. The difference between a German and a Bavarian film is the difference between Kaiser Wilhelm of Prussia and King Ludwig II. Wilhelm was excellent at co-ordinating armies and starting wars, while Ludwig possessed an extraordinarily fertile mind and was a patron of Richard Wagner, to whom he was almost religiously devoted. He was completely ma
d and caught up in his own fantasies, but as a young man ended up as king because his brother Otto was even crazier. Ludwig designed a cable car suspended from a gas balloon that could carry him over the Alps, and nearly bankrupted the country by building a series of castles full of quintessential Bavarian dreaminess and exuberance, which became models for the ones you find in Disneyland. Wilhelm could never have come up with something like Ludwig’s extraordinary castle at Neuschwanstein, incomplete at his death in 1886, which is full of frescoes that portray scenes from Wagner operas. His Linderhof Palace was technologically ahead of its time, and contains a fantastical grotto full of dynamos that provided an array of lighting effects. It was constructed for a single private performance of Wagner’s Tannhäuser; Ludwig even designed the boat in which he personally rowed Tannhäuser to land. He was often up all night and would go out on an ornate sleigh he had designed himself, travelling through the winter forest with a couple of footmen, knocking on the doors of startled local peasants at four in the morning. He would ask for a glass of water, and in exchange hand over his most precious gold and diamond jewellery. Ludwig led a tragic life and was eventually forcibly removed from power; he died a mysterious death when he and his physician were found drowned in the shallowest part of Lake Starnberg. He’s the only person who could have made Fitzcarraldo apart from me. You see this kind of baroque imagination in Fassbinder’s films, the kind of unstoppable, roughly hewn and ferocious creativity he had. Like his work, my films aren’t ideological constructs, thin gargling water instead of thick stout, which we saw too much of in West German cinema throughout the seventies.
What do you miss about Bavaria?
An interviewer once asked me what my favourite season is. “Autumn,” I told him. For years I have lived in southern California, where there are no seasons to speak of. I yearn for them. And I could murder someone for a steaming pretzel fresh from the oven, covered with butter, and a beer. That’s what being Bavarian is all about. Living abroad means I rarely get to listen to the genuine Bavarian dialect, which I miss more than anything. A few years ago I was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz, Germany’s Order of Merit. I had no plans to accept, and attended the ceremony only after my brother called me to say that he had been asked by journalists, “The President has bestowed Herr Herzog with this honour, but he won’t show up. Why does he hate Germany so much?” Of course I don’t hate Germany, and especially not Bavaria, though not every development has been particularly enlightened. Today I look at Munich and see a city empty of all significance, invaded by Prussians and stripped of its Bavarian spirit.
You have spoken about happiness as being something you aren’t particularly interested in.
I find the notion of happiness rather strange, and do sometimes wonder why I seem to be different from many Americans, who even wrote the “right” to happiness into their Declaration of Independence. It has never been a goal of mine; I just don’t think in those terms. I barked at a Hare Krishna disciple one time at Miami airport because he insisted I take the book he was offering. “Aren’t you interested in happiness?” he asked. “NO!” A sense of justice is more important to me, and certainly more valuable than money and acclaim. I can’t tell you how many honorary degrees I have politely declined from universities that are reckoned to be the best on the planet, including Cambridge and a big one in New York. I’m not interested in decorating my hat with such things. I’m after something else instead.
What?
I try to give meaning to my existence through my work. That’s a simplified answer, but whether I’m happy or not really doesn’t count for much. I have always enjoyed my work. Maybe “enjoy” isn’t the right word; I love making films, and it means a lot to me that I can work in this profession. I am well aware of the many aspiring filmmakers out there with good ideas who never find a foothold. At the age of fourteen, once I realised filmmaking was an uninvited duty for me, I had no choice but to push on with my projects. Cinema has given me everything, but has also taken everything from me.
Is it true you don’t understand irony?
It’s a serious communication defect, one I have wrestled with my whole life, ever since I was able to think independently. I have no sensory organ for irony and am forever falling into its traps. I feel close to Kuhlmann because of this. Apparently he took everything literally, and around 1700, while the alchemists were searching for the philosopher’s stone, he dug for it in the ground with a spade in Silesia. A few weeks ago I received a phone call from a painter who lives in the neighbourhood. He told me he wanted to sell me some of his paintings, and because I lived nearby he said he could make me a deal. He started to argue with me, saying I could have this or that painting for only $10, or even less. I tried to get him off the phone. “Sir, I’m sorry,” I said, “but I don’t have paintings in my apartment. I don’t have art on my walls, only maps. Sometimes a family photo, but never a painting.” He kept on and on until all of a sudden he started to laugh. “I know this laughter,” I said to myself. The painter didn’t change his voice when he announced that he was my friend, Harmony Korine.
Let me offer another example. I am unable to distinguish a gay man from a straight man unless he shows up in drag and make-up. For me, a man is a man. Not long ago I was with film director John Waters – who I have known for forty years – on stage at an event. A single, blinding spotlight shone down on him, and sixteen hundred eyes stared out from the darkness. I stepped aside and from arm’s length looked at John with an intensified focus. I turned to my wife and whispered, “Could it be that John is gay?” Such a bold filmmaker, a man very dear to my heart. I admire his audacity, but I was truly oblivious to the fact that he is gay. I always just took him for John Waters.
After it was announced I was to receive the Bundesfilmpreis for Signs of Life, I got a call from the Ministry of the Interior. It was the minister’s personal assistant who called me. “Are you Werner Herzog? The minister would like to have a conversation.” I was then connected to the minister, who started stuttering and said, “Ah well, Mr Herzog. We have publicised the news that you have won the Bundesfilmpreis but … ahem … I have to personally take the matter in hand and humbly apologise. I regret to say that in reality it was not you who won the award, rather someone else.” I remained stunned yet composed, and replied, “Sir, how could this have happened? You as Minister of the Interior are responsible for many things, including internal security and the safety of our borders. In what kind of a state is your house? This letter in my hand has not only your signature, it has two others. I accept what you’re saying, but how could it have happened?” It went on like this for ten minutes, when suddenly the minister started to roar so hard with laughter that I recognised the voice of my friend Florian Fricke. “Florian, you bastard,” I said. He hadn’t even used a different voice when he was playing the minister’s personal assistant, but I still took them for two different people. That’s how bad my communication defect is. When it comes to irony, there are things common to almost everyone that are lost on me.
Compared to other filmmakers – particularly the French, who are able to sit around in cafes, nursing their coffee and waxing eloquent about their work – I’m a brooding, squatting Bavarian bullfrog, a country bumpkin incapable of discussing art with people. The French love to play with their words, so to master their language is to be a master of irony. Technically I can speak French; I have the vocabulary and know the grammar, but will do so only when forced to. Only twice in my life has this happened. One time, while we were shooting Fata Morgana in Africa, I was arrested. I was surrounded by drunken soldiers who aimed a rifle at my head, another at my heart and a third at my balls. I started to explain who I was, when the commander screamed at me, “ON PARLE QUE LE FRANÇAIS ICI!” They pointed at one of our microphones and asked what it was. I made the sound of an electric razor because our equipment would have been immediately confiscated if I had told them the truth. Then they wanted to open our cans of undeveloped film, so I spoke to them in Fren
ch before handing over three sealed cans, all full of wet sand. I insisted they find a darkroom before opening them, and we smuggled the real footage out of the country. The second occasion I spoke French was when we were making La Soufrière on Guadeloupe, which is French-speaking, though almost the entire population is African. We found the man we were looking for, the only person who had refused to be evacuated from the island, asleep under a tree. I woke him up and we talked. So under pressure I will speak the language, but only when there is a real necessity, otherwise I withdraw and become a denizen of the crag.
