Werner Herzog - A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin

by Paul Cronin

  What was the film’s budget?

  Three hundred and seventy thousand dollars, a third of which went to Kinski, so I couldn’t afford to take many people with me into the jungle; the entire crew numbered less than ten and we shot only a very small amount of footage in total. Although Kinski later insisted that I dined on caviar every night, sometimes I had to sell my boots just to get breakfast. I was the one who would take a boat out at four in the morning and go downriver to buy some chicken, eggs and yucca, or ate nothing if there wasn’t enough food to go around. Like Fitzcarraldo a few years later – where I traded unopened bottles of shampoo and aftershave I had bought in Miami for sacks of rice – Aguirre was a barefoot film, so to speak, a child of poverty. Some of the actors and extras sensed this might be one of the film’s virtues, so they never took their costumes off, even though they were full of mould because of the humidity. There is something authentic about the jungle that can never be fabricated, and if we had filmed in a studio I would have burnt through the entire budget in three days.

  Was the spectacular opening shot in the script or did you stumble across the mountain?

  I originally planned a scene on a glacier, 17,000 feet up, which started with a long procession of four hundred altitude-sick pigs tottering and staggering towards the camera. After a few minutes of following this line of animals, the audience would realise they are part of a Spanish army of adventurers, accompanied by hundreds of Indians. I tried things out with various pigs during pre-production, but none of them became altitude sick. Later a veterinarian in Austria did some tests, but after injecting a pig it became aggressive rather than woozy, so I ditched the whole idea, especially when several of the crew – some very tough men – became altitude sick up on this glacier. Taking all those people and animals that high up clearly wasn’t feasible.

  We ended up filming the opening sequence at a much lower altitude near Machu Picchu, on the side of a mountain that had a sheer vertical drop of 2,000 feet. It’s thick vegetation up there, though the Incas had dug out a narrow staircase in the rocks, which is the trail the hundreds of people in the shot are using as they emerge from the clouds. We started transporting everyone at two in the morning – plus horses, pigs, llamas and cannons – and when I finally arrived at the top of the mountain there was indescribable chaos. It was pouring with rain and extremely slippery, there was dense fog and the whole valley was completely enshrouded by grey clouds. The Indian extras came from an altitude of 14,000 feet, but many of them still got vertigo, and we had to secure them with ropes during shooting. I spent much of the time trying to persuade everyone not to go home, begging them to be patient. I must have run up and down those steps three or four times instructing people what to do. I didn’t want to use a megaphone; such things have to be done in direct contact with people. I somehow managed to convince them this was something special and extraordinary, and a couple of hours later was relieved that everyone was still in place as the fog and clouds suddenly opened up. We shot it only once, this line of people with the fog on one side, the mountain on the other. When the camera rolled I had a profound feeling, as if the grace of God were with this film and me.

  Kinski eventually realised he would be a mere dot in the landscape, not the centre of attention, and wanted to act in close-up, leading the entire army with a grim face. I explained he wasn’t yet the leader of the expedition, and in the end removed him entirely from the shot because I had the feeling the scene would be far more powerful if there were no human faces in it. Our concepts of the landscape differed profoundly. Kinski wanted the shot to embrace all of scenic Machu Picchu, including the peak and the ruins, which would have looked like a postcard or television commercial. I had in mind a very different framing of the landscape, an ecstatic one.

  Is Aguirre a metaphor for Nazism?

  Because their work is often seen explicitly in light of their nation’s history, there are misunderstandings lying in wait around every corner for Germany’s artists, writers and filmmakers. Even today Hitler’s legacy to the German people has made us hypersensitive. Like many Germans I am acutely aware of my country’s history, and apprehensive even about bug spray; I know there is only one step from insecticide to genocide. With Aguirre there was never any intention of creating a metaphor for Hitler.

  You worked with Thomas Mauch previously on Signs of Life and Even Dwarfs Started Small. Was your approach to filming in the jungle any different?

  Not really. I wanted to use a hand-held camera for most of Aguirre because the physical contact the camera had with the actors was an important element of the film. I never needed to explain to Mauch what I wanted; he intuitively knew. The final shot – with the camera circling and swooping around the raft – had to be as smooth as possible. A helicopter would have been too expensive for us, so Mauch and I boarded a speedboat and drove it around the raft several times. I manoeuvred it myself, just as when I drove the van through the desert in Fata Morgana. When a speedboat approaches a raft at forty miles an hour it creates an enormous wake, which meant we moved through the waves we were creating. I rehearsed with the boat, going faster and slower; the whole thing was done with great precision. I had to feel with my whole body what the water around us was doing.

  We shot the entire film with a single camera, which meant we were forced to work rather crudely during production; it added to the authenticity and spirit of the film. There was none of the glossy multi-camera sophistication you find in expensive Hollywood productions. Perhaps this is why Aguirre has survived for so long. It’s such a basic film; you really can’t strip it down any more than it already is. The camera I used was actually stolen from the predecessor to the Munich Film School. They had a lot of equipment – including editing tables and a row of cameras sitting on a shelf – but never let young filmmakers use any of it. I wanted them to lend me a camera but had to endure an arrogant refusal. One day I found myself alone in this room next to the unlocked cabinet, saw a couple of cameras smiling down at me, and decided to liberate one of these lazy machines for an indefinite period. It was lying there looking up at me, a basic 35mm silent Arriflex, the camera I ended up using to make my first dozen or so films. I never considered it theft. For me, it was truly a necessity. I wanted to make films and needed a camera, so I had some kind of natural right to this tool. It was expropriation. If you are locked in a room and need air to breathe, take a chisel and hammer and break down the wall. When you have a good story to tell, by dint of destiny or God knows what, you gain the right to do such things. I helped this camera fulfil its destiny.

  At one point Aguirre screams at a horse so maniacally that it collapses.

  The idea was that he would shout at the animal and it would pass out in terror. We visited various veterinarians and tried all sorts of methods to make a horse topple over as if unconscious, but the animals would just get drowsy and eventually fall asleep. The solution was an injection directly into the carotid artery that would make a horse collapse in twelve to fourteen seconds. We gave the animal the shot and rolled the camera. Kinski started his dialogue, then turned and shouted at the horse, which dropped to the ground; it was all timed to the second. I had originally intended a scene where Aguirre shouts at a huddle of pigs and they all drop dead, but it was a logistical nightmare. A few years later we shot a scene that was cut from Nosferatu in which the vampire is standing in front of some horses in a meadow. At the moment when he slowly raises his arm an explosive went off behind the camera and the animals bolted. It looked good, but in the end I felt it was too much like a circus trick.

  Many of my films contain animals, like jellyfish, which show up in several scenes, but I have no abstract concepts to offer that might explain how a particular animal signifies this or that. All I know is that animals have an enormous weight in my work, and some of the most hilarious performances I have ever seen are by animals, including those wacky television programmes where people send in videos of their crazy cat or piano-playing hamster. People always remember the
dancing chicken at the end of Stroszek. I encountered that freak show about fifteen years before I made the film, at a Cherokee reservation in North Carolina, and couldn’t get it out of my head; I knew that one day I had to return and film it. It’s also where I heard Sonny Terry’s harmonica music for the first time, which lingered in my mind. There was no doubt it had to be used at the end the film, and also, decades later, in Bad Lieutenant. It was too good not to recycle. I asked the owners of the chickens, which were in Alabama for the winter, to start special training months before we were due to film. Usually the animals would dance the barnyard shuffle for only five seconds and pick up a grain of corn after a quarter was deposited into the machine, but I needed this to go on as long as possible, so the owners set about intensively preparing the creatures for their big moment. It’s a very bleak image, accompanied by the rather miserable feeling that if you came back a year later, the animal would still be there, dancing away. But as with the last sequence of Land of Silence and Darkness, you know it fits perfectly, including the manic rabbit jumping on a toy fire truck and the duck playing the drums. Stroszek’s small crew of about ten people all found the scene very stupid and embarrassing; everyone asked whether we were really going to shoot such rubbish after spending so much time on this stupid film. “Please,” I said to Thomas Mauch, “just point the camera, press the button and let it roll until the film runs out. This is something very big. It’s unobtrusive when you look at it with the naked eye, but can’t you see there is something big about it?” Perhaps a great metaphor too, though for what I couldn’t say. It’s like those perfect goals you score from a theoretically impossible angle. Such things are beyond me.

  Chickens obsess you.

  Chickens in some forms – roasted, for example – are perfectly acceptable to me, but look into their eyes while they are alive and bear witness to genuine, bottomless stupidity. They are the most horrifying and nightmarish creatures in this world. During production on Even Dwarfs Started Small I watched a group of chickens trying to cannibalise a one-legged comrade, and in Signs of Life and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser I show audiences how to hypnotise them, which is ridiculously easy. Hold the bird to the ground and using a piece of chalk draw a straight line away from its head. Do that and they don’t budge an inch. You can also draw a circle around the animal and it will run in a loop until it drops from exhaustion.

  Many years ago I became fascinated by a rooster named Weirdo, who weighed over thirty pounds. His offspring, Ralph, was even bigger. The man who had raised these extremely aggressive animals had been forced to singe off their spurs with a blowtorch. Then I found Frank, a miniature horse, specially bred from sixteenth-century Spanish stock, who stood less than two feet high. I told Frank’s owner I wanted to film Ralph chasing Frank – with the tiniest midget riding him – around the biggest sequoia tree in the world, more than a hundred feet in circumference. It would have looked extraordinary because horse and rider together were still smaller than Ralph the rooster. Unfortunately Frank’s owner refused. “My horse isn’t going to show up for that,” he said. “It will make him look stupid.”

  4

  Athletics and Aesthetics

  For you, filmmaking is athletics, not aesthetics.

  It would be misleading to boil things down to a maxim like that, but let’s try to shed some light on it. Everyone who makes films has to be an athlete to a certain degree. Cinema doesn’t come from abstract academic thinking; it comes from knees and thighs, from being prepared to work twenty-hour days. Anyone who has ever made a film knows this. I have always appreciated a physical connection to my tools, from using the camera on location through to carrying prints of my films, each of which can weigh up to forty-five pounds, from my car into the projection room. What a relief to feel this weight, this substance, then let the heaviness drop away. It’s the final stage of the physical act of filmmaking. A coward in body is often also a coward in mind. I will continue making films only as long as I am physically whole. If I were to lose a leg tomorrow, I would stop directing, even if my mind and sight were still solid. Let me offer a metaphor: all my films have been made on foot.

  Have you always had this appreciation of all things physical?

  For years I played with a bottom-division football team in Munich. Although almost everyone else was a faster or more technically skilled player, I was able to read the game better than anyone and often ended up in the right place at the right time, the spot where the ball would land, which meant I would regularly score goals. I’m still something like number three in the list of the all-time highest scorers for the club, even though some people spent twenty years playing for the team. Knowing what was going to happen next on the pitch and how to use the space around me was my only quality as a footballer.

  I’m an excellent map reader and am rarely lost. You could take me down into the subway, lead me through the tunnels and spin me around three times, and I would still know which way was east. This ability to orientate myself has decided many important battles for me. When shooting interiors I always work closely with the set designer. Together we might move heavy furniture – perhaps the piano and bookshelf into this or that corner – to see how it feels. Physically rearranging objects in a room provides the knowledge necessary to operate within that space. With all this taken care of, I quickly work out where to place the actors in front of the camera. No time is wasted. Any aesthetic pattern that emerges within a shot always comes from a physical understanding of the environment in which the filming is taking place. I could never work competently in a space – interior or exterior – that I hadn’t experienced with my body.

  In the death scene of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, with all the characters arranged around Kaspar’s bed in a tableau, there is a perfect balance within the space. Even with two days to move the actors about, no one would have succeeded in filling that space more effectively. There is a short scene earlier in the film shot in a garden where we worked for six months during pre-production. Before we got there it was a potato patch, so I planted strawberries, beans and flowers myself. Not only did this patch start to feel like the landscaped gardens of the era, but when it came to filming I knew exactly where every plant and vegetable was. I usually have no patience for these kinds of things, but in this case it was vitally important.

  Why did you make The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner?

  I have always felt close to ski flyers. I grew up on skis and, like all children in Sachrang, dreamt about becoming a great ski flyer and national champion. I was in serious training until a friend of mine had a horrifying accident. He hit some rocks at sixty miles an hour, fracturing his skull, and was so badly injured that I was convinced he would die if I moved him even an inch. I ended up carrying him back to the village a mile and a half away, down a steep slope. My friend was in a coma for three weeks but miraculously recovered. This experience was the instantaneous end of my hopes of being a ski flyer. Then, in 1973, I saw the Swiss ski flyer Walter Steiner – the best of his generation – compete at Oberstdorf in Bavaria, where he jumped so far that he landed only thirty feet short of the flat. I had finally encountered the living embodiment of my dreams, someone who could move like a bird. It was almost as if it were me flying out there.

  Ski flying at the level Steiner practised is fantastically dangerous. The speeds reached on the slope mean the slightest gust of wind or patch of bad snow can cause a serious crash landing. God help the athlete who tumbles off the end of the ramp and is projected uncontrollably into the air, which is comparable to falling off a speeding express train. The other danger is flying too far and landing on the flat, which would be like hitting the ground after jumping from the Empire State Building. I knew just what Steiner must have been going through before each jump, and would joke with him, saying, “Walter, if I had continued to jump, I would have been your only true rival.” He was also a woodcarver and would leave his art on trees hidden up in the mountains, many of which remain undiscovered.

 
Though Steiner is an introverted, taciturn man, we had an instant rapport and he immediately understood my intentions. I told him that when I saw him in competition as a seventeen-year-old, trailing far behind all the others, I turned to my friends and said, “That’s the next world champion.” A few years later I was proved right. During production even the television network I made the film for kept reminding me that in the previous events Steiner had come in almost last, asking if perhaps I might rather choose a different jumper for the film. But I knew this man was the greatest of them all. Much of The Great Ecstasy was shot at Planica in Yugoslavia, where Steiner outflew everyone and even had to start lower down than everyone else, otherwise he would have landed on the flat again. Most ski ramps were truly lethal for someone with Steiner’s skill, and in the film he talks about the thousands of spectators down in the valley out for his blood, though he asked me to edit out the line. “Don’t put it in the film, for heaven’s sake,” he said. “I’ll never be able to compete in Yugoslavia again.” I told him it was important to include his thoughts on the subject, that people should have an idea of what it means to be up there against such inhumane demands. Steiner’s experiences in Planica actually helped facilitate an eventual change in the construction of ski ramps.

  You appear in the film.

  People who accuse me of self-promotion point to The Great Ecstasy as proof, but it was actually a requirement that I be in the film. The German television network in Stuttgart had a series called Grenzstationen [Border Stations], which included some remarkably good work. I knew there must be one person behind all these films, so I called the station and asked who was responsible for the series. I met with him and explained I had an idea that would fit perfectly, and half an hour later we had a deal. Any film I made for this particular series would have to conform to the network’s rules, one of which was that the filmmaker appear on camera. I never felt particularly comfortable with being physically present in the film, but because ski flying is so close to my heart I knew I could act as a competent commentator. When I finished The Great Ecstasy, I came to understand that if a film needed a voiceover commentary, it would be best that I spoke it myself; it’s more credible that way. I have the feeling my presence can give a film a certain authenticity, something you don’t necessarily get from listening to a well-trained actor with a polished voice. I realised there was value in me being the chronicler of events and presenting my own viewpoint on things. My work is never anonymous, and these days I would feel alienated from a film if I didn’t record the voiceover myself, including English versions, which make for a stronger connection to my original intentions than audiences reading subtitles. I’m aware that my voice has an interesting cadence and tone to English speakers; they seem to like hearing me talk. The same is true for Germans because, with its Bavarian inflections, my voice is similarly unusual.