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

by Paul Cronin

  Lotte Eisner gave you the support you needed.

  Just as Charlemagne had to travel to Rome to ask the Pope to anoint him, we couldn’t just issue a self-empowering decree. In the case of German film, we were fortunate to have Lotte, who could give her blessing. She was the missing link, our collective conscience, a fugitive from Nazism and for years the single living person in the world who knew everyone in cinema from its first hour onwards. She was a veritable woolly mammoth, one of the most important film historians the world has ever seen and a personal friend of the great figures of early cinema: Eisenstein, Griffith, von Sternberg, Chaplin, Renoir, even the Lumière brothers and Méliès. She alone had the authority, insight and personality to declare us legitimate. It was an important moment when she insisted that what my generation was doing in Germany was as important as the film culture Murnau, Fritz Lang and the other Weimar filmmakers had created all those decades before. When Lang said there would never again be anything of substance in German cinema, Lotte told him to see Signs of Life, and even sent him a 35mm print. “You told me Germany would never have a film culture, not after Hitler,” she told him. “But look at this film by a young unknown who is only twenty-five.” Lang watched the film and said, “Yes, I have hope now.” I always found Lang’s work too geometrical, but appreciated what he said about Signs of Life.

  For ten years it was Lotte’s affirmation and support that gave me the strength to continue; she was the first person to recognise my work and offer whatever assistance she could. I met her because of her voice. Lotte gave a lecture at the Berlin Film Festival in the mid-sixties, the first time she had returned to Germany since 1933. I walked past the half-open door of this auditorium, heard her speaking, and was instantly drawn in; it was so magnetic I could do nothing but listen. She was an archaeologist by training, though she always had an interest in film and literature, and a sharp appreciation for things of substance. When Lotte was eighteen, a friend brought her a notebook that contained the draft of a play. “I met this young man and he claims to be a poet,” her friend said. “You understand poetry. Read it and tell me what you think. If it’s any good, I might have an affair with him.” Lotte read the drama and next day said to her friend, “Have the affair. He will be the greatest poet in Germany.” The drama was Baal and its author was Bertolt Brecht. Being outspoken and Jewish, Lotte was on the Nazi hit list. The rabid National Socialist newspaper Der Stürmer [The Attacker] insisted – even before Hitler was voted into power – that if heads were going to roll, Lotte’s would be one of the first. She left the country for France weeks after Hitler became chancellor, and a gap in German film culture of thirty years opened up. When I spent time with Lotte, at her home in Paris, we would usually speak German, but sometimes we lapsed into English because the sound of her original language had become too painful for her.

  A few years after I saw Lotte in Berlin, I discovered that she had seen Signs of Life and wanted to talk with me. “Lotte speaks so highly of you but doesn’t dare meet you,” a friend told me in 1969, “and you speak so highly of her and you don’t dare to meet her either, so I’ll get you together.” One of the most memorable things about the shooting of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser was that Lotte was there for some of the time.† For her to show up on the set of one of my films was a great honour, and very significant for me. She didn’t ask questions or talk to many people; she just sat there with a pleased look on her face. It gave me confidence, and a few years later she visited the set of Nosferatu. I vividly remember sitting with Lotte in her Paris apartment at a time when I was sure there were no audiences out there for my films. “I just can’t go on,” I told her. In between a sip of tea, munching on a biscuit, without even looking up, she said, quite calmly, “You aren’t going to quit. The history of cinema won’t permit you.” Then she went on about her noisy neighbours, or something like that. The casual nature of how she brushed off what I was saying has always been with me. It was one of the key moments of my life. Lotte encouraged me by making clear that I didn’t have the right to abandon my work.

  Was your script for Nosferatu based on Murnau’s film?

  I could probably have made a vampire film without the existence of Murnau’s film, but there’s a certain reverence I tried to pay to his Nosferatu – whom he called Count Orlok – and on one or two occasions even tried to quote him literally by matching the same shots he used in his version. In this respect certain elements of my film are clear homages to Murnau. I went to Lübeck – where he shot the vampire’s lair – and among the few houses there not destroyed during the war, I found the ones Murnau had put in his film. They were being used as salt warehouses. Where in 1922 there had been small bushes, I found tall trees.

  The reason Murnau’s film isn’t called Dracula is because Bram Stoker’s estate wanted so much money for the rights, so Murnau made a few unsubtle changes to his story and retitled it. By the time I made my film, Stoker’s book was in the public domain, so I changed some of the names, including turning Count Orlok back into Count Dracula. Although there are some interesting things in Stoker’s book, it’s a rather dull piece of writing. It was published in 1897 and is a compilation of all the vampire stories floating around from Romantic times. What I find intriguing is Stoker’s foresight in somehow anticipating our era of mass communication. His epistolary novel encompasses many of the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, and telegrams and voice recordings on Edison cylinders play an important part in the story. There may well be something similar taking place today, with the shift to the digital age and the explosive evolution of means of communication; in both cases an uneasiness exists in society. At their heart vampire stories are about solitude. They accumulate in popular culture during times of restlessness, which is perhaps why there has been a recent resurgence of interest.

  Kinski plays the vampire.

  In Murnau’s film the creature is frightening because he has no soul and looks like an insect, but Kinski’s vampire has a real existential anguish. I tried to humanise him by presenting the vampire as an agonised, sad and lonely creature, desperately thirsty for love, but terrifying at the same time. I wanted to endow him with human suffering, with a true longing for love and, importantly, the one essential capacity of human beings: mortality. “It’s cruel not to be able to die,” he says. He is deeply pained by his solitude and inability to join with the rest of humanity, by his profound terror of forever remaining undead. The vampire isn’t realistic, but he is human. Kinski was apprehensive about taking on the role, but once he agreed – two months before filming started – he immediately shaved his head. In the film he played brilliantly against his appendages: the long spider-like fingernails and snake-like fangs, his seven-inch heels and those pointed ears. After two minutes the audience sees beyond the horror of these things. Kinski was extraordinary at expressing utter satisfaction at drinking Lucy’s blood, like a baby that has just been fed, and there’s a clear sexual element when the vampire enters her bedroom. Lucy’s face takes on a new expression as he bites her neck, and she almost tenderly holds on to the vampire. Thanks to her, Kinski’s vampire becomes an erotic figure. Kinski wanted to shriek during his death scene, but I said, “Inhale! Suck the death and pain into you. Inhale the light that’s killing you.” Listen to his wheezing as the creature expires.

  The character of Lucy is an ambiguous figure, at the same time attracted to and repelled by the vampire. In Murnau’s version she gives herself to Dracula in the hope that her husband will be saved, but in mine Lucy’s sacrifice is in vain. The plague has already devastated the town, and though she is unaware, her husband has already transformed into a vampire. The creature is also some sort of prophet of change, with victims leaving behind their bourgeois lives and sensibilities. As the plague spreads, people gather in the main square, where there is a kind of great joy in the air. From historical testimonies of the fourteenth century we know that during the last stages of the plague, a town would experience moments
of jubilation in the midst of all the desolation and death; a strange freedom and euphoria – almost redemption – took over. There was dancing in the streets, wild drunken revelries, and all sense of ownership would fragment. Townsfolk happily burnt their furniture and threw money into the canal, almost in celebration.

  How was Kinski to work with?

  For almost the entire shoot he was happy and at ease with himself and the world, though he would throw a tantrum maybe every other day. He resisted using any make-up as the vampire, but eventually relented and would sit with Reiko Kruk, the make-up artist, for hours at a time, listening to Japanese music as she sculpted him every morning, putting his ears and fingernails on, fitting his teeth and ears, and shaving his head. Seeing him so patient was a fine sight. I would walk in and sit with him for fifteen minutes. We wouldn’t talk; we just looked at each other in the mirror and nodded. He was good with the project and with himself. Although the film is close to two hours and Kinski appears for maybe seventeen minutes in total, his vampire dominates every scene. The finest compliment I can give him for his performance is that there is a palpable sense of doom and terror and anxiety even when he isn’t on screen. Everything in the film works towards those seventeen minutes. We will never see a vampire like Kinski again.

  Roland Topor plays Renfield.

  I was at the Cannes Film Festival and heard maniacal laughter behind me, so turned around but there was nobody there, only a closed-circuit television broadcasting the press conference for the film La Planète sauvage. Topor – a filmmaker, actor, illustrator and novelist – was incapable of saying anything without laughing, and I kept him in mind. My original idea was to have Valeska Gert, a German cabaret artist and dancer of the grotesque, play Renfield, but she died three days after signing a contract, and I immediately remembered Topor. I showed up at his apartment in Paris with a case of German beer and persuaded him to be in the film. Topor and his family had survived the war by hiding out in the French countryside. Perhaps that was why he was unable to finish a sentence without this strange laughter, as if Creation – having required him to run for his life from the Nazis as a young boy – could be nothing other than a complete farce.

  You let loose ten thousand rats loose in Delft during filming.

  I was looking for a northern German or Baltic town with boats and canals. A Dutch friend of mine suggested Delft, which has remained unchanged for centuries, and as soon as I saw the town I was fascinated by it. Delft is so tranquil, bourgeois, self-assured and solid, so tidy and well ordered; it looks like a stylised film set, and I knew it would be the perfect place to shoot this story. The entire cast and crew – except Kinski, who always gravitated towards five-star hotels – lived communally in an abandoned convent. Filming in town wasn’t easy because our work involved a certain amount of disruption of daily life. The two scenes shot in the town square with the rats were done early in the morning, when we had less than three hours to set everything up and film. I asked for sympathy from the citizens of Delft, and some responded positively, like the local cinema enthusiasts who organised a retrospective of my films and circulated petitions to gather support. The sequence of the boat arriving, bringing Nosferatu to town, was filmed in Schiedam, a few miles away, because there are too many bridges in Delft and the canals are too narrow.

  I knew the horror and destruction of the vampire would show up most effectively in such an uncontaminated town. Nosferatu is about a community invaded by an anonymous terror, something signified very provocatively by rats. Our fear of the creatures probably stems from the fact that for every human being on the planet there are three rats. Before we started shooting I explained to the town council in Delft exactly what I had in mind. Many residents were nervous because the place is full of canals, and for decades there was a serious rat problem that had only recently been eradicated, so I showed them our detailed technical plans and precautionary measures to prevent a single animal from escaping. Before we released them in the town we sealed off every gully, side street and doorway. We fixed nets along the canals to prevent the rats from getting into the water, and even had people in boats down in the canal to collect any creatures that might escape. During filming in the town square we had a movable wooden wall just behind the camera and another in an alley at the end of the street. When the signal was given, both walls were pulled out of their hiding places and brought towards each other, trapping the rats in an ever narrower space so they could be caged. We never lost a single one, and I sold them once filming was over.

  We stored the rats in a farmhouse just outside of town. Money was sent to the owner, who was to feed and take care of the animals, but for some reason this payment never arrived. When I went over to pick up the rats, this man was absolutely enraged. I explained that of course he would be paid immediately, but he prevented us from gaining access. There was no arguing with him, so I picked the lock and opened the barn doors. When he saw this, he went wild, started his Caterpillar and drove directly towards one of our trucks, onto which we had loaded a couple of thousand rats. I lay down in front of this massive vehicle but quickly realised that was a stupid idea because the bastard would have run me over. He drove the massive shovel of this Caterpillar through the window of our truck, at which point I grabbed an iron bar and swung it at his seat, with the intention of just missing him. “The next blow will hit you,” I told him. “Give me the keys.” I still have them, a kind of souvenir of the film’s production.

  Where did you get the rats?

  From a laboratory in Hungary. Customs officials checked the medical certificates at every border, and somewhere en route one of them opened a box to check the contents and promptly fainted. When we bought the rats, they were snow white, so I decided to have them all dyed grey. There was a huge factory in Germany that produced shampoo and hair dye, and they always tested their products on rats because the texture of rat hair is similar to that of humans. I visited this place along with Henning von Gierke, a painter and art director who did the set design for the film, and Cornelius Siegel, a special-effects expert who taught at the University of Bremen. Cornelius was the one who set the glass factory on fire in Heart of Glass and single-handedly built the clock in Nosferatu, with all its moving parts. After talking to the people at this factory, Cornelius designed a massive conveyor belt. We put the rats into wire cages, dipped each cage into the dye for a second, washed every rat with lukewarm water, then dried them all using a system of hair dryers, otherwise they would have caught pneumonia. Even today there are claims floating around that the rats were mistreated and that some died while being transported to Delft, even resorting to cannibalism because they were so hungry. The fact is that we ended up with about five hundred more than when we started. There were also allegations that we submerged each rat into a bucket of boiling grey paint. I hereby offer the even wilder truth of the matter: we boiled the rats for such a long time that they volunteered to turn grey.

  What language was the film shot in?

  We had people of multiple nationalities on set, so English was the common language. As a filmmaker a choice has to be made, not just to ensure that communication between cast and crew is as easy as possible, but also for the sake of international distributors. As with Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, Nosferatu was originally shot in English, but after a number of preview screenings it was clear that audiences were confused because of all the different English accents. We decided to dub the film into German, which for me is the most convincing version. I wouldn’t dare to speak of the “better” version, but for me it’s the more culturally authentic one. Pre-production took four or five months, and we shot for about eight weeks. I had final cut, but after Twentieth Century Fox – the studio that had bought the distribution rights for the United States – saw the film they asked me to shorten a few things for the American version, and I made some other minor modifications. After several previews it was clear that for some audiences the film dragged a little, so I cut it by a couple of minutes, though no one at t
he studio insisted on this.

  Where did you shoot the sequences at the vampire’s castle?

  Whatever you see of Transylvania was shot in the former Czechoslovakia, much of it in Moravia at Pernštejn Castle and in the High Tatra mountains. I wanted to shoot in Transylvania proper, in Romania, but wasn’t allowed to because of restrictions imposed by the Ceauşescu regime. I never actually received a direct refusal from the authorities, but did get word from some Romanian filmmakers, who advised me not to wait for permission, as it would never come so long as Ceauşescu was around. At the time Dracula was a sensitive subject for Romanians because there was a campaign to rehabilitate the historical figure of Count Dracula as an esteemed leader in the history of their country. Not much is known about him, but in the fifteenth century he was an important force against the Turkish armies. After a battle, so the legend goes, he impaled twenty thousand prisoners, which is probably where the motif in every vampire film comes from, that you can kill a vampire only by driving a stake through his heart. Parliament had bestowed upon Ceauşescu the title of the new Vlad Dracul, the historical defender of Romania, which in contemporary terms meant he was protecting the country from the Soviet empire. He heaped all sorts of honours on himself; I think he had the world-record number of honorary doctorates – something like sixty or seventy – and every school hailed him as the Great Creator of Paradise. It turned out these local filmmakers were right, that to the authorities it was unthinkable that Vlad Dracul was a vampire, so I left the country, though not before I had a wonderful time searching for locations, methodically travelling every path of the Carpathian mountains.