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

by Paul Cronin

  The most important thing was recognising that oil and lumber firms had started to cast a greedy eye over the Indians’ land. Wholesale encroachment and plunder had to be prevented, so I sent in a surveyor to chart the territory, which had never been properly delineated, with a view to helping the locals secure their land rights. Overcoming the legal issues wasn’t easy. Even after engaging lawyers and bribing everyone I could find, I became lost in labyrinthine bureaucracy. I decided to take two elected representatives of the Indians to Lima, where we had an audience with the president of the republic, Fernando Belaúnde, who promised to co-operate and do whatever he could to help them gain the title to their land, but stated he didn’t accept the Indians’ argument that they had lived since time immemorial in this area. He told them that legally they had no case, though it was clear their grandfathers had lived on the land; it was all hearsay as far as Belaúnde was concerned. I told him the notion of hearsay had actually been accepted into English common law, in a case from 1916 in what is now Ghana. Some white settlers had told the jungle communities that Lima didn’t exist and that there was no ocean, so I took these two Indian representatives down to the beach. Mesmerised, they waded with their new blue jeans and T-shirts into the surf, tasted the water, filled an empty wine bottle with seawater, corked it and took it home as proof.

  By the time I went back to shoot My Best Fiend, the Indians had succeeded in gaining the legal title to their land. On the other side of the river – which wasn’t part of the Indians’ territory – there was a camp and an airfield that belonged to the oil companies. The area contains one of the largest deposits of gas in the world, but to this day there has been no drilling on Indian land. They really do have control over it, so I feel we assisted them in a small way, though their moral and historical right to the territory was unquestionable.

  Twenty years after you wrote them, you published your Fitzcarraldo diaries.

  A decade after I made Fitzcarraldo I looked at the diaries, but just couldn’t handle it. For a long time I was terrified to dig into those notebooks. I wrote the text in sub-miniaturised, microscopic handwriting that no one but me could read. It can’t get any smaller because no pens exist that give a finer stroke. I don’t know why I wrote it like that; my longhand is of normal size. I ignored the notebooks for so long because I was unable to read the tiny letters, but eventually my wife bought me a pair of magnifying glasses – the kind jewellers wear – and told me that if I didn’t edit and publish the text myself, someone would do it once I was gone. I no longer had an excuse.

  When I read the notebooks for the first time after so many years, I realised how much I had forgotten. I ended up cutting the text down from a thousand pages to three hundred, skipping over an entire year that was just too painful to revisit, and published it as Conquest of the Useless. There is a breathless urgency to the prose, and I’m convinced the book will outlive all my films. It’s a diary of the film’s production only in the broadest sense of the word; more than anything this is a piece of literature, a fierce and relentless look at what was going on around me at the time and my reactions to it all. At moments I run off into wild, invented fever dreams, and put down on paper the kinds of images that occurred to me in the midst of my experiences of filming in the jungle. The more duress I was under, the more frequently these types of visions appeared to me. I would invent bizarre accidents and fantasies, describing them in writing because by doing so would somehow prevent them from happening in real life. By naming the disaster I banish it, like the boat on the sleep slope that breaks loose. Like a torpedo it shoots down until it hits a crowded ocean beach, buries itself deep in the sand and flings an ice-cream stand up into the air.

  When things become difficult some people find solace in music and religion, but when I read my diaries so many years after I wrote them, what became evident was that in the turmoil of production I took refuge in language. It has forever been a powerful anchor for me, and I suspect that my true voice emerges more clearly through prose than cinema. I might be a better writer than I am a filmmaker.

  Why did Les Blank call his film Burden of Dreams?

  Cinema emboldens us. It helps us surmount everyday life and encourages us to take our hopes and desires seriously, to turn them into reality. When things were going badly I headed back to Germany in an attempt to hold together the film’s investors. They asked me if I was going to continue. “Do you really have the strength and will?” I said, “How can you ask this question? If I abandon this project, I will be a man without dreams. I live my life or I end my life with Fitzcarraldo.” It wasn’t possible for me to allow myself private feelings of doubt while making the film. I never had the privilege of despair; had I hesitated or panicked for a single second, the entire project would have come tumbling down around me. The final film ended up basically as I had always hoped it would, with the exception of the Mick Jagger character. Months later Claudia Cardinale said to me, “When you came to Rome four years ago you explained your ideas to me and all the difficulties we would have to overcome. Now I’ve seen the film, and it’s exactly as you first described it.”

  If you watch Fitzcarraldo and have the courage to push on with your own projects, then the film has accomplished something. If one person walks outside after watching one of my films and no longer feels so alone, I have achieved everything I set out to achieve. When you read a great poem you instantly know there is a profound truth to it. Sometimes there are similar moments of great insight in cinema, when you know you have been illuminated. Perhaps, occasionally, I have achieved such heights with my own films.

  Burden of Dreams includes scenes from the original version of Fitzcarraldo, with Robards and Jagger.

  People are always asking me if they can visit my sets and shoot footage of me at work; I tell them they will experience nothing but an endless chain of banalities. I didn’t invite Les to the jungle, but he was eager to come down and make a film. At first I was reluctant to have a camera around because there is something distasteful about making films about filmmakers. I don’t like being recorded while working. When you cook a meal at home and there is someone staring at your hands, suddenly you’re no longer a good cook. Everyone functions differently when being observed, and filmmakers are usually pathetic embarrassments when they appear on film. I include myself here.

  Tom Luddy had shown me some of Les’s films, and I loved them instantly, especially Spend It All, which has a scene where a man pulls his own tooth out with a pair of pliers, an image I borrowed for Stroszek. His films document the vanishing marginals of American life in the most vibrant ways. I also loved Les’s cooking and general attitude to life. He turned out to be a healthy presence in the jungle. Most of the time he was like a southern bullfrog brooding behind a beer, unobtrusive, always knowing when he should turn on the camera and when there were significant moments to capture on film. What I really liked about Les was that he wasn’t just monosyllabic; often he was zero-syllabic. He hardly ever spoke a word and somehow managed to blend into the environment. I was also persuaded by his argument that however confident I was about finishing the film, if everything fell apart then thanks to his footage there would at least be some record of this foolhardy quest.

  Les wasn’t some court jester who adulated everyone, no matter what they were doing. He had an extraordinarily good eye and brought a considered subjectivity to what he was filming. He was just as interested in watching how the Indians would ferment yucca as he was documenting the production of Fitzcarraldo, and most of the time could be found in the camp where the natives did their cooking. One time at breakfast I explained to him that later in the day there would be a real event: for the first time in months we planned to move the boat up the mountain. “I’m not here to film events,” said Les, and he didn’t show up. That evening he told me he had spent the day filming an ant carrying a parrot feather. I always liked his attitude, and can look back at the diaries I wrote during production and find a world of observations completely differen
t to what Les was documenting at the same moment.

  I like Burden of Dreams, though certain things in the film might not project a particularly favourable image of me, and even caused problems. Les screened a few minutes of footage at the Telluride Film Festival before he had finished the film, and out of context some of my comments made me look dangerously obsessed. In the voiceover of Burden of Dreams it’s stated that I could have shot the entire film outside Iquitos, which would have made things easier for everyone, but as explained I needed very specific terrain, and for a thousand miles in the vicinity of Iquitos there is no elevation more than ten feet; it’s as flat as the ocean. At one point in Burden of Dreams I talk of how people had died during production, but Les chose not to include my explanation of the circumstances, so it sounds as if I risked lives and drove people to their deaths just for the sake of a film. It was a stench that followed me for a decade. Les immediately wanted to re-edit the film once I pointed these things out to him, but I told him not to bother. I’ve got better things to do than correct everyone’s mistakes and misreadings. Les always had the final say; I never asked him to change things, even when I knew they might be damaging to me. It’s worth knowing that Les was filming over a period of only five weeks, but Fitzcarraldo took four years to make, so he captured only a fraction of what went on during production.

  I never kept any footage of Robards and Jagger; the only clips in existence are those from Les’s film, scraps of celluloid he grabbed before I junked everything I didn’t need for Fitzcarraldo. For that reason alone I’m glad Les’s film exists. Sometimes it’s better not to have all the facts, though Burden of Dreams remains the best “making of” film ever made.

  Ballad of the Little Soldier is about the struggle fought by the Nicaraguan Miskito Indians against the Sandinistas, their former allies in the revolution against Somoza.

  Allow me to correct you: it’s about children fighting a war. The film was made in Nicaragua, and the dogmatic Left – for whom the Sandinistas were still a sacred cow at the time – refused to believe I wasn’t in the pay of the CIA. But anyone can see that Ballad of the Little Soldier isn’t a political document, even though after making the film I felt I should face those who I was criticising, so I accepted an invitation to Managua a few months after it was released, where I was involved in a lengthy discussion after a screening. There was no real reconciliation in our viewpoints, though I was impressed how civilised and nuanced the debate was. In Argentina a few years earlier I would have disappeared within hours.

  I made Ballad of the Little Soldier because a friend of mine, Denis Reichle, was working on a film about child soldiers and asked for help. Reichle is a photographer, reporter and filmmaker who made a film in the Golden Triangle of Burma, Laos and Thailand about Khun Sa, the Burmese warlord and so-called “opium king.” I immediately saw he was the kind of person who worked with great care to compile reports from inaccessible places. For decades Reichle travelled extensively and reported on oppressed minorities. From the age of two he lived in an orphanage, and at the age of fifteen was drafted along with his entire school into the Volkssturm, the battalions made up of children and older men used in the defence of Berlin during the final months of the war. He was trained to lay mines and use anti-tank weaponry before being sent to the front, an experience he was lucky to survive. After the war Reichle was held prisoner by the Russians for a few weeks before escaping back to Alsace, where he was originally from. He became a French citizen and was sent to Indochina, where he spent a few months in French uniform. All this by the age of twenty. As a photojournalist working for Paris Match, Reichle arrived in East Timor in 1976, just as the mass murder was starting. Nobody dared land on shore, so he swam the last half mile from a small fishing boat, holding his camera above his head. He was eventually arrested by Indonesian soldiers and deported. He escaped the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, who captured him because they thought he was a Soviet spy, and was held hostage in the Philippines by Abu Sayyaf, an Islamic separatist group, before being exchanged for twenty-four Kalashnikovs. My favourite story of his took place in Angola, a country saturated with landmines. He was driving on a road outside of town and saw some boys sitting in the shade of a tree. As he advanced steadily towards them, he saw them plugging their ears with their fingers. Reichle slammed on the brakes and stopped ten feet from a landmine, preventing the boys from enjoying the moment of him being blown up.

  Reichle is the most fearless and methodical man I know, instantly able to read the signs correctly, equally daring and prudent, which is why he has survived so much. He’s one of the few people I have met in my life into whose hands I would entrust myself, so we decided to work together on a film about the Miskito Indians. From Honduras we took a small plane that brought us to the Atlantic coast, where we met up with the Miskitos in their training camp. To get into Nicaragua – where I spent nearly three months – we illegally crossed the border at Río Coco. At one point during filming we were planning to accompany some Miskito soldiers and film an attack on a convoy. Reichle asked whether a security team with a machine gun was being left in place to cover our retreat. It turned out there was no such plan, so he took me aside and flatly told me we wouldn’t be going with them, that they had no clue what they were doing. It just wasn’t safe.

  What is the political background to the film?

  Originally the Miskito Indians – who within their social structure traditionally lived a primitive form of socialism – had fought against Somoza as allies of the Sandinistas, but soon their alliance soured. A strip of Miskito land in Nicaragua, on the Honduran border, was categorically depopulated by the Sandinistas; sixty-five towns and villages were razed to the ground and violence was perpetrated against the native population. At Sandy Bay, on the eastern coast of the country, I watched six Sandinista soldiers arrive by boat, firing their Kalashnikovs into the air, acting as if they occupied the country. The entire Miskito population of the village fled into the jungle, screaming in fear. The soldiers shot the cows, then skinned them and loaded the meat onto their boat. When they left they fired a round into the air as a departing salute.

  The key to the film is the human element, so to talk about it in political or military terms isn’t useful. I wanted to focus on child soldiers and could have filmed in any number of countries, like Liberia, Cambodia or Iran. It doesn’t matter what ideologies are in play when there are nine-year-olds – barely strong enough to handle machine guns and grenade-throwers – fighting a war. Child soldiers are such a tragedy that details of the conflict in question are unnecessary. I spoke to some of the Miskito children for hours before rolling the camera. Every one of them had volunteered for the army after a personal and traumatising experience. Many were completely silent, others responded with only one-word answers; they never elaborated. I talked to a boy in a commando unit who was clearly in a state of shock. His two-year-old brother, six-year-old brother and father had all been killed. His mother was cut in pieces before his eyes. He was still in training but wanted to go out the next day and kill. I asked him to talk more about how his brother had died. “With an M16,” is all he said. Several of the children in Ballad of the Little Soldier were dead by the time the film was released.

  In The Dark Glow of the Mountains you speak with Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner about walking until the world ends.

  Messner talks of his desire to walk from one Himalayan valley to the next, without looking back. He says either his life or the world will stop. “Presumably it will be that as my life ends, so will the world.” I like the idea of having a group of huskies loaded up with leather saddlebags and just disappearing, turning down the path and walking until everything has been left behind, continuing until there’s no road left, or just floating downriver. It’s how I would like to end my life. Either that or being hit by an enemy’s bullet.

  In the seventies Messner was one of those young climbers who brought a new approach to the sport. He was determined to climb the Himalayas alpine-style, and
succeeded in reaching the peaks of all of the planet’s fourteen 8,000-metre-plus mountains without large-scale expeditions and hundreds of Sherpas. He was the first to climb the Himalayas with just a rucksack and no support camps, and the first to climb Mount Everest without oxygen – by what he called “fair means” – which was considered a great achievement in the mountain-climbing community. Cesare Maestri, a famous Italian climber of the fifties and sixties, used to scale peaks by hauling himself up inch by inch with powerful motorised sledgehammers, hooks and machine drills. It would take him weeks to get to the top. A ridiculous thing to do; I could climb the world’s tallest building if I had all that equipment and three months to spare. Maestri’s approach was another case of the perversion of adventurism; he shamed and embarrassed every mountain he climbed. It’s the opposite of the “free climbing” approach, which emerged from California, where ropes are used only to prevent accidents. Using as little technical equipment as possible meant that Messner became the father of modern mountaineering. He’s a man of great survival skills, endowed not only with extraordinary technical proficiency, but also a sense of exactly what is happening around him and a knowledge of when something isn’t right. I learnt a lot from him about evaluating danger. He attempted to scale Dhaulagiri twice; once he turned back five hundred feet shy of the summit because of avalanche conditions, and another time stared for days at the south face of the mountain through binoculars, watching a series of avalanches, then went home. Finally, in 1985 he and his climbing partner Hans Kammerlander reached the summit.