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

by Paul Cronin

  Once Herr Scheitz, Bruno and Eva get to America, we meet the character of Herr Scheitz’s nephew, a mechanic, played by Clayton Szlapinski. Clayton, who I had encountered a year earlier, really was a mechanic. I was driving from Alaska to meet Errol Morris in Wisconsin and needed to get my car repaired, and discovered Clayton’s wreckage yard about a mile and a half out of town. I immediately liked him and his chubby Native American assistant. When I returned to the area to film Stroszek I went straight to the garage because I wanted them both in the film, but the assistant wasn’t there. I asked Clayton about this and described the young man to him, but he had no idea who I was talking about. It turned out Clayton had hired him the morning I had shown up a year before, then fired him that same evening. We eventually tracked him down and asked him to be in the film.

  I don’t make a distinction between “professional” and “non-professional” actors. There are only two kinds of actors: good and bad. If an audience finds a performance credible, then it’s a good performance, and if an actor is good on screen then he or she is a professional. The same thing applies to technicians. A professional is anyone good at his job. I once spoke to the manager of a football team who said he could tell in sixty seconds if a player was gifted and could be of use to the team; he didn’t need two weeks of training. The first thing is to see how the player runs, then what the ball does with the player, then what the player does with the ball. When I direct actors I focus on what they do to the camera as much as what the camera does to them. Interactions between “professional” and “non-professional” actors can be interesting, but in my experience things work best when the former are in some way debriefed and told to do as little as possible, and the latter are given only the vaguest instructions.

  You thank Errol Morris in the opening credits of Stroszek.

  Errol, at one time in his life, was deeply involved in researching mass murderers. He had collected thousands of pages of the most incredible material and was planning on writing a book. Errol had spent months in Plainfield, Wisconsin, and kept telling me about this tiny town in the middle of nowhere with less than five hundred inhabitants. What’s so extraordinary about Plainfield is that, within a period of five years, five or six mass murderers emerged from the place, for no apparent reason. There was something gloomy and evil about the town, and even during filming two bodies were found only ten miles from where we were working. I felt it was one of those focal points where every thread converges and is tied into a tight knot. You have these places, these knots in the United States – Las Vegas, Disneyland, Wall Street, San Quentin prison – where dreams and nightmares come together. I count Plainfield, Wisconsin, among them.

  Errol was interested in the town because it was where Ed Gein – who inspired the Norman Bates character in Psycho – had lived and committed his murders. Errol had spoken to the sheriff and townspeople and even to Gein himself, and had hundreds of pages of interview transcripts, but was stuck with one puzzling question. Ed Gein had not only murdered several people, he had also dug up freshly buried corpses from the cemetery, used human skin to make a lampshade and cover some chairs, and decorated his bedposts with skulls. Errol discovered that the graves he had dug up formed a perfect circle, and at the centre was Gein’s mother. Errol wondered whether or not Gein had actually dug up his own mother. “You’ll know only if you go back to Plainfield and dig there yourself,” I said to him. “If the grave is empty, Ed was there before you.” We excitedly decided to meet there with our shovels. At the time I was in Alaska, shooting a couple of sequences for Heart of Glass, and on my way back to New York crossed the border from Canada and headed down to Plainfield. I waited for Errol, but he chickened out and never showed up. I figured it was probably for the best. The act of asking a question is sometimes more valuable than scrambling for an answer.

  I loved being in Wisconsin and went back later to film there. The scenes in Stroszek of Eva working at the truck stop were shot in the middle of the day at a real truck stop near Madison. I just went in there and asked if we could film. “Sure thing,” the owner said. “We love having you Krauts around!” We told the truckers to be themselves, and Eva went round pouring coffee. Ed Lachman, the second cameraman, became an especially important part of the production because he explained to the townsfolk and truckers precisely what was going on and what sort of things they should say. In the film we called the town Railroad Flats because Plainfield was still kind of Errol’s terrain. He even accused me of stealing his landscape, which for Errol was a serious crime indeed. In a pathetic attempt to appease him I thanked him at the start of the film. I think he’s forgiven me by now.

  There is an almost total absence of sex in your work.

  There are only a few kisses in all my films, and some of the sexual relationships – like Bruno and Eva in Stroszek – are implied but never seen. All I can say is that it’s better to experience sex in person, and that love between people never seemed too interesting a theme for me as a storyteller. As to the question of why there are so few women populating my work, I can offer only a vague response, which is that the characters in my films are somehow reflections of myself, so most are men. Let’s say no more on the matter, though let me add here, if it even needs to be said, that I’m very fond of women; from my earliest childhood they played an enormous part in my life. I moved to the United States in 1995 for one reason only: Lena, the Siberian-born woman who became my wife four years later, was there. When I left Vienna, where I was living at the time, I gave up every one of my earthly possessions, as well as my language. A customs official at San Francisco airport wondered why I had no luggage and only a one-way ticket. He looked at me suspiciously and asked, “Did you forget to pick up your bags from the carousel?” When I told him I had only a toothbrush, I was questioned for two hours. For the first few months in our little apartment, Lena and I had only two plates, two sets of cutlery and two wine glasses. Guests were requested to bring their own kitchenware when they came for dinner. Such was our domestic bliss.

  Allow me to vent here about the prevalent image of masculinity in mainstream Hollywood films, which seems to be post-pubescence, actors like Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt. Where are the manly men of times gone by? The last one standing is Clint Eastwood, who hails from the likes of Bogart, Brando, Bronson, John Wayne, Richard Widmark and Gary Cooper. Collective female dreams have shifted significantly over the years, and today this kind of hero seems to be out of fashion, but I have no interest in the boymen. Things will eventually revert to the manly men. Today hardly anyone has a beard, but I predict that within a few years most men will be wearing them.

  La Soufrière was filmed on a Caribbean island as you waited for an “unavoidable catastrophe.”

  There is a definite element of self-mockery in the film; everything that looks dangerous and doomed ultimately ends up in utter banality. In retrospect I thank God on my knees it wasn’t otherwise. Fortunately the film is missing its potentially violent climax. It would have been ridiculous to have been blown sky high with two colleagues while making a film.

  I was editing Stroszek when I heard about the impending volcanic eruption, and discovered that the island of Guadeloupe – population eighty thousand – had been evacuated, though one person refused to leave. I immediately knew I wanted to talk to him and find out what kind of relationship this man had with death. He is the reason I headed to the island and made the film; I assure you we didn’t go because we thought it would be fun to sit on an exploding volcano. I’m not in the business of suicide. I telephoned the television executive with whom I had worked on various films, including The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner. He was in a meeting at the time, so I asked his assistant to drag him out of there for only sixty seconds, no matter where he was, what he was doing or how important the people he was with. “Tell him Herzog has to talk to him for one minute.” Everything had to be put in place immediately because if we didn’t leave within hours, the whole thing might be over; the volcano would e
xplode and the film would be no more. In less than a minute I explained the situation to him. “Just get out of here and do it,” he said. “How do we do the contract?” I asked. “Come back alive,” he said, “and we’ll do the contract.” I love the man for his faith. Let me name the horse and rider: Manfred Konzelmann, a true believer.

  Ed Lachman came from New York, and I flew from Germany with Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein. We met up in Pointe-à-Pitre in Guadeloupe, which is a twin island with a narrow isthmus between the northern and southern part. The entire southern part was evacuated. The first thing you notice in the jungle is the sound of birds, but they had all fled from the island and the place was deadly silent. All the snakes had slithered down from the slopes of the volcano, then drowned in the ocean, and were being washed back on shore. The traffic lights were still working, switching from red to green and back again, but the streets in Basse-Terre were deserted. Even as we were driving past roadblocks up the side of the volcano I repeatedly asked Lachman and Schmidt-Reitwein if they wanted to continue, and made it clear that everyone had to make his own decision. There was no question I was going to walk to the top of the volcano. “I’m definitely going, but you have to make up your own mind,” I told them. “I need a single camera, and if necessary can shoot it all myself.” Schmidt-Reitwein immediately said yes; there was no doubt he was always going to come along. Ed was timid and had some initial hesitations, as any normal human being would. He thought about it for a few minutes, then meekly asked, “What will happen if the island blows up?” “Ed,” I said, “we’ll be airborne.” This encouraged him and he picked up his camera. I love a crew bold enough to step outside the norm. We left a camera in the far distance on time lapse, clicking single frames throughout the day, so if things had gone badly there would at least have been images of us shooting upwards.

  We approached the mountain from the leeward side and had a real fright when the wind changed; all of a sudden toxic fumes came wafting down towards us. We ended up standing on a deep fissure that had been ripped open right at the top of this steaming volcano. The next day Ed realised he had left his glasses up there, so we went back for them, but discovered there had been so many shockwaves that the whole landscape had been ripped apart and the mountaintop looked completely different. The glasses were now buried under thirty feet of rock and mud. Schmidt-Reitwein and I were actually rather disrespectful of the volcano. We went up to the edge and took a leak into it.

  All something of a risk, wouldn’t you say?

  I can’t deny that flying out to an island that might not exist the following morning to make La Soufrière was a blind gamble, as well as a transgression of normal family life. It’s not the sort of thing that should be done if you have a wife and young child at home. We made our decision to travel to Guadeloupe in the knowledge that shortly before there had been a series of unbelievably powerful earthquakes across the world. Many thousands were killed in Guatemala, a quarter of a million people died in China and a major quake hit the Philippines. Experts insisted that an explosion on Guadeloupe was guaranteed with almost 100 per cent certainty. The signals the volcano was emitting were identical to those of Mount Pelée on the neighbouring island of Martinique just before it erupted so violently in 1902, killing thirty thousand people. It was determined that La Soufrière wouldn’t erupt and just spew lava everywhere. It was going to blow with the force of several Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs, so if it had gone up and we had been within a five-mile radius, there would have been absolutely nothing we could have done. For me, the whole thing was compounded by the fact that I was unable to move as quickly as I wanted because a few weeks before I had injured my ankle playing football and had only recently cut off the cast myself. The film’s full title, La Soufrière: Waiting for an Unavoidable Catastrophe, suggests the absurd nature of our task.

  I can laugh about it now, but all we wanted to do was get out of there with a film. There was no element of bravado about the experience, though I knew if I could escape from this one alive I would be able to joke about it afterwards. I saw myself as the captain in the joke about Italian soldiers in the First World War trenches. For weeks they’re being bombarded, day after day, until their captain grabs a rifle and shouts, “Up, men! Attack!” Enemy fire cuts him down before he has gone two steps, and he falls back into the trench, stone dead. The soldiers, none of whom have followed and who are quietly sitting around smoking, immediately applaud and say, “Bravo, capitano!” Thankfully La Soufrière was one of those moments when we weren’t mowed down. There was a deep sense at the time that making the film was the right thing to do, though today, looking back, I’m not so sure, and admit that with La Soufrière we were playing the lottery. The second we shot our last roll of film we jumped in the car and fled. You never feel as afraid of things when there is a camera in your hand; somehow it acts as a protective shield. I remember thinking that the volcano didn’t feel real to me, that it was just a projection of light on a piece of celluloid.

  A few years after you made the film, you told an interviewer: “I hate the whole life-insurance thing. Keeping everything secure is destroying our civilisation.”

  Let’s face it, the world is impossibly risk-averse these days, and panics are almost always completely out of proportion to reality. Years ago, during the mad-cow crisis, it was obvious to me that more people would die crossing the road getting to the butcher than ever would from eating contaminated meat. These days six-year-old children have five different kinds of helmets: one for roller-skating, one for baseball, one for bicycling, one for walking in the garden, one for God knows what. Parents these days even send their children to the sandpit with a helmet. The whole thing is repulsive. I would never trust in a man who has had multiple helmets by the age of five. Wall-to-wall protection is devastating because children are conditioned not to be intrepid; they will never grow up to become scientists who jump across boundaries into the unknown. And every time I walk past a hand sanitiser – those bottles attached to walls everywhere across America these days – I want to tear it down. They are an abomination. I never use antibiotics and have taken maybe ten aspirin in my entire life. Such things will be the death of us all. A civilisation that uses pain relief at every turn is doomed; we can’t know what it is to be truly human without experiencing some level of discomfort and physical challenge. When you read in a travel book that the author has taken a snakebite kit on his journey into the jungle, you know the paperback in your hand is fit only for feeding the campfire. Life knows no security. The only certainty is that we all die despite helmets and life-insurance policies. These days people cut their finger or graze their knee and consider it a life experience.

  Your next film was a remake of Murnau’s Nosferatu.

  Although I have never truly functioned in terms of genres, I knew that making a film like Nosferatu meant understanding the basic principles of the vampire genre, then modifying and developing them. It was like my approach to adventure films when I made Aguirre. For me “genre” means an intensive, almost dream-like stylisation on screen, and I consider the vampire myth one of the richest and most fertile cinema has to offer. The images it contains have a quality beyond our usual experiences as film-goers; there is fantasy, hallucination, dreams and nightmares, visions and fear. Although my film is based on Murnau’s, I never thought of Nosferatu as being a remake. It goes its own way with its own spirit and stands on its own feet as a new version. I wasn’t trying to rewrite Hamlet. I like what Lotte Eisner said: that Murnau’s film was reborn, not remade. It’s like Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson, who both made films about Joan of Arc; one is hardly a remake of the other. My Nosferatu has a different context and a somewhat different story.

  I set out to connect the film to Germany’s genuine cultural heritage, to the best of German cinema, the silent films of the Weimar era, to filmmakers of the past whose vision was brought to an abrupt end by Nazism. A filmmaker can’t function without some connection to his culture. Continuity is vital. Although the Second
World War shattered Germany’s cultural identity, there wasn’t a complete void because important literature was being published after 1945, and other forms of expression picked up pace within the ruins and debris. But cinema remained a barren desert for a quarter of a century, and to speak about German film after the war is to dig into pathetically uninteresting work. When I finished Nosferatu I remember thinking, “Now I’m connected. At last I’ve reached the other side of the river.” The film acted almost as some kind of bridge for me; the ground under my feet felt much more solid. This might have all sounded incomprehensible to British, Italian and French filmmakers at the time – countries that kickstarted film production after the war with relative ease – but it was something that impacted on many young German filmmakers in the seventies. We all carried a certain weight that had to be cast off.

  Coming of age in the early and mid-sixties, we young Germans looked around for a point of reference. But our fathers’ generation either sided with the barbaric Nazi culture or had been chased from the country. With a few exceptions – directors like Wolfgang Staudte and Helmut Käutner – there had been no legitimate German cinema since 30 January 1933, the day Hitler came to power. As the first real post-war generation, we were orphans with no fathers to learn from; we had no active teachers or mentors, people in whose footsteps we wanted to follow. This meant it was the grandfathers – Lang, Murnau, Pabst and others – who became our points of reference. At the time I felt strongly about finding my roots as a filmmaker, and chose to concentrate on Murnau’s masterpiece, knowing full well it would be impossible to better the original. This wasn’t nostalgia or me trying to emulate a particular filmmaking tradition. I was just expressing my admiration for the heroic age of German cinema, one that gave birth to Nosferatu in 1922. Many of my generation shared a similar attitude to Murnau and his contemporaries: cinema as legitimate culture.