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

by Paul Cronin

  Five days after you finished shooting Nosferatu work began on Woyzeck, with the same crew and lead actor.

  Today Woyzeck – which took seventeen days to film and five days to edit – seems like a little hiccup after Nosferatu. I would have started shooting the day after we finished Nosferatu, but we had to let Kinski’s hair grow for the role. It was mainly for bureaucratic reasons that we continued with the same crew on a new film, because at the time obtaining shooting permits in Czechoslovakia was an endless saga. We ended up filming the second half of Nosferatu in Moravia and other places in the eastern part of Slovakia, and I figured it was best to continue shooting Woyzeck but tell the authorities we were still working on Nosferatu. Actually, we started filming the day after Nosferatu was completed. I just shot around Kinski’s part.

  Kinski was never an actor who would merely play a part. After Nosferatu he remained deep in the world we had created together, something apparent from the first day he walked onto the set of Woyzeck. He loved playing Woyzeck and was very much in balance with himself during the shoot, but also exhausted and somehow broken and vulnerable, which was precisely the condition required of the role. It meant his performance had a rare and profound quality. He truly captured the spirit of the part; there’s a smouldering intensity to him, and from the opening scenes of the film he seems fragile. Look at the shot of him immediately after the title sequence, where he stares into the camera. Something isn’t quite right with his face. When he does his push-ups during the title sequence, the drill major kicks him to the ground. The person who did the kicking is Walter Saxer, my production manager on many films, who a couple of years later was screamed at by Kinski on the set of Fitzcarraldo, something you can see in My Best Fiend. “He’s not doing it right,” Klaus said to me. “He has to really kick me. He can’t pretend.” The two of them always had an antagonistic relationship, so Saxer had no problems giving Kinski what he was asking for. Kinski was pushed so hard into the cobblestones that his face started to swell. “Klaus, don’t move,” I said. “Just look at me.” He was panting, still exhausted from doing his push-ups, but looks into the camera with such power that it establishes the atmosphere for the rest of the film.

  This was clearly a project that had been on your mind for a while.

  The character had forever been burning inside me. I don’t believe there is a greater drama in the German language than Büchner’s Woyzeck; it’s a work of such stunning actuality, like an undefused bomb. The first time I read it I felt as if a lightning bolt had shot through me. The play is actually only a fragment, and there has long been a debate among scholars as to which order the loose, unpaginated sheets should go in. I used an arrangement of scenes that made the most sense as a continuous story, one that is used in the majority of theatrical productions. In my opinion there is no completely satisfying English translation of the play. The film is my most direct connection to the best of my own culture, even more so than Nosferatu.

  I structured it around a series of four-minute-long shots, the length of a roll of 35mm stock, which means there is a much greater reliance on the acting and text than on the camera. I will probably never achieve a film of such economy again. What made the whole approach exciting is that the cinematic space is created not by cuts and the camera’s movement, but by the actors within the frame, by the force of their performances. It was my way of giving due deference to Büchner’s words, though it wasn’t easy to maintain this style because no one was permitted any mistakes. Look at the scene where Woyzeck tries to flee from the drum major, where he moves directly into the lens of the camera and is pulled back at the last moment. In a shot like that Kinski creates a space far beyond that of the camera; he shows us there is a whole world behind, around and in front of the lens. You feel he is crawling desperately towards you, even into you. I like filmmakers willing to let their pants down, daring enough to show a whole sequence in a single shot lasting three or four minutes. Some directors move the camera about for no reason; they use flashy tricks and an excess of cuts because they know the material isn’t strong enough to sustain a passive camera. It’s a giveaway that I’m watching an empty film. If you want to use stylistic tricks and gimmicks, they can never be added as a whim. Embed them firmly in the storytelling.

  You once said that cinema comes from the “country fair and circus,” not from “art and academicism.”

  On the table in front of us is a pile of academic articles about my films that you brought over for me to look at. The minute you leave here today, it will all be thrown into the trash. The healthiest thing anyone can do is avoid that impenetrable nonsense. My response to it all is a blank stare, just as I respond to most philosophical writings. I can’t crack the code of Hegel and Heidegger; it isn’t the concepts that are alien to me, but I get my ideas from real life, not books. When I hear the kind of language used by zealots and film theorists, Venetian blinds start rattling down.

  You rarely find people in universities who truly appreciate literature. At school we sliced through Goethe’s Iphigenia and Faust, vivisecting and layering them with incomprehensible theoretical babbling, the kind of thing that goes on at universities today with ever more pathetic fury. It was so bad that I’m still unable to read Faust. My love of poetry was almost entirely eradicated when I was young, but thank God I managed to keep my genuine sense of wonder intact. The best example of agitation of the mind that literature can offer comes from my wife, who as a teenager living in Siberia wrote out in longhand a samizdat copy of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and secretly circulated it to her friends. As for film, the theoreticians have dedicated their lives to the very opposite of passion. Our feelings for cinema should be like those during an eclipse or when we see a close-up of the sun, with those protuberances – thousands of times larger than our own planet – shooting out, or the same fascination I felt as a child when I looked through a telescope and saw the mountains and craters of the moon, or those instances of special intensity in a piece of music, when suddenly you hear something so startling that it rails against the most basic rules you’re accustomed to. I remain in awe when I think back on those moments. Academia stifles cinema, encircling it like a liana vine wraps round a tree, smothering and draining away all life. Construct films, don’t deconstruct them. Create poetry, don’t destroy it. Whenever I encounter film theorists, I lower my head and charge. Thankfully cinema remains in robust shape. There has yet to be a lethal dose of intellectualism.

  Reading about cinema is of little use to aspiring filmmakers, and as for those people who write about film, rather than reading endless books on the subject they should study something like the deciphering of Assyrian cuneiform texts or the Jacobi constant, which dates back to the nineteenth century and is concerned with the movements of objects around planets. Horizons need to be broadened at all times. I’ve never read a single book about cinema. Actually, I did read some chapters of Lotte Eisner’s work, and when it first came out I looked at Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art, which contains hundreds of extraordinary images. But that’s it. I always felt that if you really love cinema, the healthiest thing to do is ignore books about it. I prefer the film magazines with their garish colour photos, snippets of celebrity news and nauseating gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. That kind of vulgarity is far healthier.

  * “The trees here are in misery and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing, they just screech in pain … It’s a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger. It’s the only land where Creation is unfinished. Taking a close look at what’s around us, there is some sort of harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. We in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel. And we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth and overwhe
lming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it. I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgement.”

  † See Eisner’s essay “Herzog in Dinkelsbühl,” Sight and Sound, autumn 1974.

  6

  Defying Gravity

  How did you end up in Berkeley, publicly munching through your footwear, as documented by Les Blank in Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe?

  In the seventies I spent time in Berkeley with Errol Morris, who was a graduate student, when we were both hanging out at the Pacific Film Archive. When you meet Errol, you immediately sense that everything around him is aflame, that he is absolutely original in his thinking, with his relentless questioning mind and extraordinarily lively spirit. He is an important comrade-in-arms, someone who has found his own unique way to explore the paths that lead as far as possible away from cinéma-vérité and fact-orientated film. As a young man Errol had great talent as a cellist, but he suddenly abandoned the instrument, and dropped his book project after collecting thousands of pages of conversations with serial killers. Then he said he wanted to make a film, but complained about how difficult it was to find money from producers and that all the subsidies had dried up. I made it clear that when it comes to filmmaking, money isn’t important, that the intensity of your wishes and faith alone are the deciding factors. “Stop complaining about the stupidity of producers. Just start with a roll of raw stock tomorrow,” I told him. “I’ll eat the shoes I’m wearing the day I see your film for the first time.” Eventually he made an extraordinary work called Gates of Heaven, about a pet cemetery in California. I’m a man of my word, so en route from pre-production of Fitzcarraldo in Peru I stopped off at Chez Panisse in Berkeley to pay my dues.

  I could have worn light track shoes, but cowards have never impressed me, so I made a point of bringing the same shoes I had worn when I made my vow to Errol: ankle-high Clarks desert boots, with a sole that melted away like cheese on a pizza. When I cooked them, that day Chez Panisse had duck as a main course. There was a huge pot of duck fat, which I reckoned would come to boiling point at about 140ºC, a much higher temperature than water, so I thought I would be better off cooking the shoes in that rather than water. I added a red onion, four heads of garlic and some rosemary. Unfortunately, the fat caused the leather to shrink, which made it even tougher. Friends of mine seriously debated whether I should be allowed to go ahead with it at all. There was no way to eat the leather unless I used a pair of poultry shears and cut it into tiny fragments, then swallowed it down with beer. I couldn’t tell you what it tasted like because I was already too drunk by the time I started eating. I do remember being up on the stage of the UC Theatre in Berkeley having consumed an entire six-pack, then staggering out of the place. But don’t worry, leather is easy to digest, and Tom Luddy, who was up there on the stage with me, distributed small pieces to the audience in solidarity.

  I had a tacit agreement with Les Blank that his footage of the event was something strictly for the family album. Maybe the events he documented are too personal for me to acknowledge that Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe should ever have been seen publicly, but Les is such a good filmmaker that I forgive him anything. Today I’m glad he captured it all on film. These days you hear about things like shoe-eating out of context and it sounds ridiculous, but to me it made perfect sense. I did it as an encouragement for anyone who doesn’t have the guts to make films. And anyway, a man should eat his shoes every once in a while. Errol recently suggested that next time I should eat my foot. At the New York Film Festival screening of Gates of Heaven someone asked him a question, the first ever thrown to him at a press conference. “Mr Morris, I think your film would be twice as good if it were cut in half.” “So would you, madam,” said Errol, without missing a beat.

  During pre-production on Fitzcarraldo you made two shorts in the United States.

  I first encountered televangelist Dr Gene Scott years before I made my film about him. Whenever I was in America I would always switch on his programmes, and quickly became addicted. As wild as he might have been as a public figure, there was something heartbreaking about him that moved me. He could never have been a friend of mine, but I still somehow liked him. His was basically a one-man show, on screen for up to eight hours every day. The way he raged at his audience was extraordinary, as he insisted that “God’s honour is at stake every night!” and that it was merely a case of “Six hundred miserable dollars, and you sit there glued to your chair!” He would threaten and intimidate the people at home watching him, saying things like, “I’m going to sit here in silence for the next ten minutes. If $20,000 isn’t pledged during that time, I’ll pull the plug!” On one day when we filmed with him, more than a quarter of a million dollars were pledged.

  Scott was a controversial figure; when I made the film, there were something like seventy active lawsuits against him. The charges ranged from embezzlement and blackmail to slander and tax evasion. The authorities had seized his assets, claiming he was running a television channel, not a church, and in protest Scott barricaded himself in the studio for two days. He was a polarising force, and his audience was anything but indifferent. People either loved or hated him. He was an intelligent man but also, I felt, deeply unhappy. There was a compulsion to him; he was all alone up there, talking to the camera, day after day, and would interrupt his flow only because he needed to go to the bathroom. His singers would perform some phoney religious tune while he was backstage. How can anyone keep something like that up for so many years? I saw nothing of him once the film was finished, but heard that before he died he went completely bonkers, abandoning many of his explicit Christian teachings, and on his show would sit in a glass pyramid talking about pyramid energies. Scott somehow appeals to the paranoia and craziness of our civilisation. He took issue with the way he came across in God’s Angry Man and asked me to change the original title, which was Creed and Currency.

  Huie’s Sermon was shot in Brooklyn, New York. I bumped into Bishop Huie Rogers and asked if I could make a film about him. The end result needs no discussion; it’s a pure work about the joys of life, faith and filmmaking. There is great joy in the image of Huie as he starts completely harmlessly, gradually whipping up his flock into an extraordinary elation. He would rail against the immorality of society and man’s corruption, but I always felt that with his wondrous ecstatic fervour he outdoes even Mick Jagger. I cut away from Huie to the surrounding streets a couple of times only because we had to change the magazine in the camera.

  Did you expect such intense media interest when you started work on Fitzcarraldo?

  What I didn’t expect was walking down the street in Munich a few months after the film was released, seeing a man running frantically towards me, then watching as he leapt up into the air, kicked me in the stomach, picked himself up from the ground and screamed into my face, “That’s what you deserve, you pig!”

  Many of the problems we experienced during Fitzcarraldo’s production stemmed from the fact that there were things going on in the area where I wanted to make the film that had nothing to do with us, including a border war that was steadily building between Peru and Ecuador. All around us was an enormous and increasingly threatening military presence, and at every second bend of the river there was a chaotic military camp swarming with drunken soldiers. Oil companies were busy exploiting natural resources in the area, and they had – with great brutality against the local population – constructed a pipeline across the Indians’ territory and the Andes all the way to the Pacific. When we showed up on location in the jungle, with full permission from the local Indians, all these unsolved problems somehow started to revolve around our presence. We had real media appeal because Mick Jagger was scheduled to be in the film alongside Claudia Cardinale, with Jason Rob
ards – who I had seen in The Ballad of Cable Hogue – as Fitzcarraldo. I had no interest in becoming the dancing bear of the media circus, but all of a sudden here was the exotic concoction of Claudia and Jagger, plus the mad Herzog, a bunch of Native Indians, a border war and a military dictatorship. Fortunately it was easy to rubbish the claims the press made, not least because a human-rights group sent a commission down to the area and concluded there hadn’t been a single violation. I was sure that the wilder and more bizarre the legends, the faster they would wither away, and after two years of being criminalised by the press that’s just what happened.

  Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald adores Caruso and wants to build an opera house in the middle of the jungle so he can invite the world-famous tenor to the opening night.

  Years before I thought of the story, while working on another film and searching for locations, I took a drive along the Brittany coast. At night I reached a place named Carnac and found myself in a field covered with menhirs – huge prehistoric stone slabs, up to thirty feet high and some weighing six hundred tonnes – stuck in the ground. There were thousands of them, parallel rows going on for miles inland across the hills. I thought I was dreaming. I bought a tourist brochure and read that science still has no clear explanation of how, eight or ten thousand years ago, these huge blocks were brought overland to this spot and set upright, using only Stone Age tools. The brochure suggested it was the work of ancient alien astronauts. This itched me, and I told myself I wasn’t going to leave until I had worked out how I, as a Stone Age man with the available tools – simple hemp ropes or leather thongs and levers and ramps – would have moved a menhir over a distance of a couple of miles.

  This is what I came up with. I would need a group of men to dig a series of trenches under the menhir. Then I would push hardened oak-tree trunks into the trenches and dig away the rest of the earth, so the menhir would be resting on the trunks. Once this is accomplished, the stone could be moved on these “wheels” with ropes and levers. The real task ahead would be to construct a ramp – a mile long, almost horizontal – on an almost imperceptible incline. For that, I would need two thousand disciplined men. The ramp would lead to an artificial mound twenty feet high, with a crater dug into it. To move the menhir up the ramp would take far fewer men and could be done in only a few days. They would use levers and a primitive pulley system with turnstiles, finally tipping the stone into the prefabricated hole. Once it tilts into the crater with its pointed end down, you basically have an upright menhir, and all that needs to be done is to remove the earth, the mound and the ramp. If Fitzcarraldo had a passport, Carnac would be listed as its place of birth.