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

by Paul Cronin

  Ballet and dance.

  All foreign to me. I also dislike concerts because I don’t do much listening when sitting in front of an orchestra. I’m too interested in watching the bassist’s hands shoot up and down, and never actually hear what’s being played. I could stare at something like that for an hour without taking my eyes off it. Although I’m a great lover of opera music, I generally dislike seeing other people’s productions. I often see a whole world when I listen to an opera and am inevitably disappointed when confronted with someone else’s vision. Let me put it this way: when I see an opera performed, I see images out there that are in direct contradiction to those in my head. The whole experience is miserable for me.

  Museums.

  They intimidate me, and anyway, nothing ever feels truly alive when hidden away under glass. There is a worrisome permanence about things in museums, and I rarely visit such places, though one time I did go to the British Museum because I wanted to see the Rosetta Stone. The decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics was an extraordinary achievement. I have been to Athens many times, starting at an early age, but only on my most recent trip did I muster the courage to visit the Acropolis.

  I hardly ever go to exhibitions and dislike the world of the vernissage; those crowds are the most repulsive of all. These days most art is too conceptual for me, with long descriptions pasted up on the walls of galleries. “Art” should reveal itself to audiences without written explanation. Most of what I see is garbage, sometimes literally so, like an installation with a few cardboard boxes thrown into a corner, an empty beer can and a dirty sleeping bag. This apparently represents the desperate fate of the homeless. I see an absence of dignity in contemporary art. There is too much emphasis on concept, not craft. Just as religion has been watered down by television evangelists, so has art. What makes me particularly suspicious is the speculative art market. A whole set of values is being continuously invented and manipulated, and vast amounts of real money are being paid out. A criminal conspiracy has developed between auction houses, galleries, artists, curators, museums and even those big, glossy magazines. It all reminds me of the prices attached to mediaeval relics, when fortunes were spent to acquire a nail from the True Cross of the Christ, or the bone of a saint. All this is wrapped in “art speak” – an abomination in itself – which makes the whole charade even more unbearable.

  Photography.

  I once had a pinhole camera, and more recently used a Deardorff – a large-format mahogany camera with bellows and plates – to take photos of ski flyers at the gigantic ramp at Kulm in Austria. This is the moment of absolute judgement for them. But generally, if something is worth photographing, I remember it in my head. None of those Japanese tourists snapping away before the aeroplane has even landed truly see the world around them. Real life – the birth of a child, for example – should never be viewed through a lens. In recent years I have developed a familiarity with photography because my wife is a professional photographer and has her own darkroom in our home. I marvel at the alchemy of the process, but generally don’t look at things in still images. I see them in terms of scenes and movement.

  Restaurants.

  Waiters in tuxedos intimidate me. It’s misery for me when being waited on; I’m literally close to panic. I would rather sit on the sidewalk munching potato chips than eat at one of those chic restaurants. I often stay in hotels on my travels, but for years avoided that world whenever I could. In Berlin I used to sleep on my son’s floor rather than stay in a hotel. It had nothing to do with money or physical comfort; I lived on a raft for weeks while shooting Aguirre. Today, ever older, I have reconciled with hotel rooms, though the little chocolates they leave on my pillow every evening exude an aura of despair, the same feeling that overwhelms me during the presentation of the official mascot of the Olympic Games, or when a film star becomes a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN.

  Zoos.

  I enjoy visiting them with children, otherwise I find zoos very sad places.

  Hobbies.

  I have no hobbies.

  How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck … was shot in Pennsylvania, at the World Championship of Livestock Auctioneers.

  I was fascinated by livestock auctioneers and had the feeling that their incredibly fast speech was the true poetry of capitalism. Every system develops its own extreme language, like the ritual chants of the Orthodox Church, and there is something final and absolute about how auctioneers speak. How much further can it go? It’s almost like a ritual incantation, frightening but quite beautiful at the same time; there is real music in their delivery, the sense of rhythm these people have. One of the auctioneers told me he trained himself by reciting, over and over again, “If it takes a hen and a half a day and a half to lay an egg and a half, how long does it take a broken, wooden-legged cockroach to kick a hole in a dill pickle?” Another was the only one in his family who would milk the cows, and as a young man practised out loud while sitting on a bucket in the stables. The jury of the competition was judging how wildly the auctioneers could accelerate their speech, but this was also a real auction, and at all times the auctioneers had to look carefully into the crowd for bidders. That might sound easy, but the buyers were competing among themselves. No one wanted anyone – except the auctioneer – to know they were bidding, so their gestures were minuscule, perhaps just a flick of a finger or a quick blink of an eye, and had to be recognised instantly in a sea of three hundred people. Within two or three hours on that day in June 1976, $3 million and over a thousand head of cattle changed hands. My dream ever since has been to do Hamlet with livestock auctioneers in under fifteen minutes. The auction takes place in New Holland, which to this day is one of the centres of cattle farming in the United States and home to an Amish community which tills the soil, raises cattle the biblical way and rejects capitalism and competition, making it the very antithesis of the auctioneers.

  Is America an exotic country?

  Take a look at those beauty pageants for four-year old girls and you realise it’s more bizarre than exotic. What I love is the heartland of the country, the so-called “flyover” zone, like Wisconsin, where we filmed Stroszek and where Orson Welles was from. Marlon Brando came from Nebraska, Bob Dylan from Minnesota, Hemingway from Illinois, these middle-of-nowhere places, to say nothing of the South, the home of Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. I like this kind of terrain, where you can still encounter great self-reliance and camaraderie, the warm, open hearts, the down-to-earth people. So much of the rest of the country has abandoned these basic virtues.

  I like America for its spirit of advancement and exploration; there is something exceptionally bold about the place. The idea of everyone having an equal chance to succeed, no matter who they are, is impressive. If a barefoot Indian from the Andes had invented the wheel, the patent office in Washington would have assisted him in securing his rights. I once visited a company in Cleveland that had two thousand employees and a twenty-eight-year-old boss. That would be unthinkable in Germany. When I made The Wild Blue Yonder I discovered an extraordinary cache of footage shot by NASA astronauts in outer space, and was told that because it was filmed by federal employees, the material was “property of the people.” I asked, “Can I, a Bavarian, be considered one of the people?” Such images, it turns out, according to American law belong to everyone on the planet. This is a unique and astounding attitude to the world. Naturally there are things in the United States I’m ambivalent about, just as there are when it comes to Germany. I could never be a flag-waving patriot. But there are many reasons why I have been in America for so many years. The country has always had a capacity to rejuvenate itself, pull itself out of defeat and look to the future. There has always been space there to create real change. I could never live in a country I didn’t love.

  Is Stroszek about the decline of the American dream?

  It came out of nowhere. At the time I wanted to make Woyzeck and had promised the title role to Bruno S.; he didn’t know Büchner’
s play, so I told him the story and he liked the idea. But two months before we were due to start shooting I realised this was a big mistake. It was clear to me that Kinski should play the part, so without hesitation I called Bruno to let him know. There was a kind of stunned silence at the end of the line. “I have already booked my vacation, plus some unpaid time,” he said. “What am I going to do?” It was clear that being in the film meant a lot to Bruno. I was ashamed of myself and wanted to sink into the ground because of embarrassment, so out of the blue I said, “We’ll do another film instead.” He said, “What film?” I told him, “I don’t know yet. What day is it?” “Monday,” he said. “By Saturday you will have the screenplay,” I said. “I will even give it a title now which sounds like Woyzeck. It will be called Stroszek.” I felt relieved, but after hanging up found myself on Monday at midday with a title and the task of writing a story for Bruno, which I ended up delivering on schedule. I still consider it one of my best pieces of writing and one of my finest films. The title comes from the name of the lead character in Signs of Life, which in turn came from someone I vaguely knew years before. I was enrolled at university but hardly ever showed up for class, so asked a fellow student to write a paper for me. “What will you give me in return?” he asked. “Mr Stroszek,” I said, “I’ll make your name famous.”

  The character Bruno plays in the film is close to his real self.

  Stroszek was built around Bruno. It reflects my knowledge of him and his environment, his emotions and feelings, and my deep affection for him. For that reason it was easy to write the screenplay, though even today it pains me to watch certain scenes of Stroszek. The sequence in the apartment when the two pimps beat up Eva Mattes and throw Bruno over the piano reveals how he really would have reacted to such treatment, the kind doled out to him for years when he was a child. “Don’t worry,” he told me before we shot the scene. “I’ve been hurt much worse before.” There is such magnificence in his performance.

  The scenes in Berlin of him singing and playing the accordion show exactly what he would do every weekend. Bruno knew the courtyards and alleyways of the city, and some of the songs he sings in the film he wrote himself. The place where he goes immediately after leaving prison is his local beer cellar, where everyone knew him, and all the props he uses in the film – including the musical instruments – were his own. Although Stroszek was scripted from start to finish, some scenes were improvised and based on Bruno’s real life, like the one where he talks to Eva Mattes about his mistreatment as a child. “When we start rolling,” I said to him, “go ahead and tell Eva about your feelings, your thoughts, your past. Do it any way you want.” The less I gave Eva to work with, the better she was. All I said was, “Make Bruno stick to the point. He has a tendency to rant about Turkish guest labourers and God knows what else.” She was so good in the scene because all she did was listen intently and gently encourage him. Often all she had to do was get Bruno to mention certain things and trigger specific responses. I didn’t really have to direct either of them.

  The idea of writing a critique of capitalism didn’t enter my head. Lines like Bruno talking about being in America came about because that’s where we were, though the film does reflect my experiences of Pittsburgh, where I saw the nation’s underside. I say that with great affection for the place. The film doesn’t criticise the country; it’s almost a eulogy to the place. For me Stroszek is about shattered hopes, which is clearly a universal theme, and it wouldn’t really matter if the characters move from Berlin to France or Sweden. I simply felt familiar enough with America to set the second part of the story there. I love the way we captured the country on screen, and when I watch Stroszek today it hasn’t aged for me, unlike many films from that period. One of the most important scenes has nothing to do with America, when Bruno goes to the hospital and talks to the doctor, who was played by my eldest son’s real doctor. I was fascinated by the fact that premature babies have an ape-like grip reflex and can support their own body weight, something the doctor demonstrates by having a baby hang from his two fingers. Apparently we lose certain instincts soon after being born, including this reflex, but premature babies retain the ability. You see a remnant of it when a baby born at nine months takes hold of your finger.

  What did Bruno think of America?

  He loved it. New York was a revelation for him, just as it is for everyone who experiences the city for the first time. The sequences there were all filmed in a single day because we had no shooting permit. We improvised a scene, then disassembled the camera, packed it up, carried it to the next spot, reassembled it, then filmed for a few minutes, at all times trying to dodge the police. The shots on the observation deck of the Empire State Building were quickly done by Thomas Mauch before the guards up there spotted us. From the deck we saw a boat arriving at the pier and decided to have the three characters arrive in the country like classic European immigrants, so we rushed over there and got a shot with the boat behind them, as if they had just stepped off. The shot of them driving on the New Jersey Turnpike was done with Mauch and me strapped to the hood with a rope; we didn’t have another vehicle to film from. The first time the police stopped us I told them, “We’re just a bunch of crazy Kraut film students,” and they let us go. Half an hour later the same cop caught us again. I bamboozled him out of his wits and we avoided being arrested.

  Where did you find Clemens Scheitz, the old man who appears in the film?

  I needed extras for The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and looked rapidly through various card indexes. I had seen more than two hundred faces when I found his. The agency suggested I choose someone else. “Although we work in the interests of our clients,” they said, “we should warn you that Herr Scheitz is no longer completely right in the head.” I told them I didn’t mind, that I wanted him anyway. I liked Herr Scheitz so much that I kept asking him to stay for one more scene after another, to the point where he basically appears throughout the film. I even rewrote the ending so he would have the final word.

  Although he was always complaining that Bruno smelt, Herr Scheitz was a charming old man, full of fantasies, able to explain in between gulps of coffee that he was in the process of writing a magnificent oratorio and at the same time working on a major scientific work that he would never write down in case it was stolen. He would talk about how he would never dare fly to Berlin, which at the time was deep inside East Germany. “Both the KGB and CIA would kidnap me and torture my secrets out of me,” he insisted. Apparently he had constructed a rocket that could hit a target dead on after a thirty-thousand-mile flight, and just by writing a few numbers on a restaurant tablecloth could prove that the moon landing was faked, Einstein was a fool and Copernicus a fraud, though apparently Galileo had some useful things to say about the universe. Newton was also an imbecile because in his colour scheme green was a colour, though every five-year-old knows that green is just blue and yellow mixed together. Herr Scheitz had his own scheme where the name “green” didn’t exist. I asked him what name he would give the colour, and he said, “Feilgau,” which is as meaningless in German as in English. It’s an invented word. I tried to create his character in Stroszek around his eccentricities and ended up putting him in both Heart of Glass and Nosferatu. The scene in Stroszek where he talks about animal magnetism was my idea, but it’s close to what he really believed. We were in the middle of nowhere when a couple of hunters, who had driven in from Milwaukee, pulled up. I asked if they would appear in the film. They kept saying, “But we’re not actors.” I told them all they had to do was listen to Herr Scheitz talking in German, and when they had heard enough get into their car and drive off. They didn’t understand a word he said, but played along wonderfully. The whole scene was basically shot in real time. There was one quick change of camera position while we ran around to the other side of the car, but otherwise what you see is exactly what happened. The two men drove off. I never knew their names and never saw them again.

  Who play the pimps?

>   Norbert Grupe was a wrestler and heavyweight boxer who called himself the “Prince of Homburg.” He lost a bout against the Argentinian boxer Oscar Bonavena in 1969, and became famous after appearing on a live sports talk show on German TV the following day. When asked by the interviewer about his crushing defeat, Grupe sat there in silence, staring ominously at this man throughout the entire broadcast. The situation became so dangerous that given one more question you knew he would have killed the interviewer; it was one of the most stunning moments I have ever seen on television.

  Before we filmed Stroszek, Grupe would drag me around, night after night, introducing me to all his pimp friends in Berlin, showing me the darkest depths of his life. He had been in prison a few times and was very dangerous, so other pimps would bring him along to settle fights. Many of his insults in the film – like “I’m going to bury that runt up as deep as he’ll go” – come directly from him. At one point during filming one of the crew was going to be celebrating his birthday. He was very into sports and we often played football together, so I said to him, “On your birthday I’m going to rent a gym with a boxing ring and go three rounds with the Prince of Homburg. As a present to you, I promise I’ll still be standing at the end of round one.” The Prince and I laughed about this, but two days before it was meant to happen he took me aside and said, “Werner, this is utterly stupid. You’ll be knocked down within thirty seconds at most and end up in hospital. It’s not worth it.” He was no dummy, though sometimes a very frightening man. I’m sure he was genuinely drunk in the scene where they beat Bruno up in his apartment. The other pimp is Burkhard Driest, a writer, filmmaker and actor who started out as a law student. Two weeks before his final exam he committed a bank robbery and hid the loot in his girlfriend’s apartment. She turned him in and he spent three years in prison, where he started writing. His book Die Verrohung des Franz Blum [The Brutalisation of Franz Blum] was quite successful, and by the time of his release he was a well-known character.