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

by Paul Cronin

  There is a scene in Harmony Korine’s film Gummo where a picture is taken down off a wall and a cluster of cockroaches crawl out from behind it. Harmony told me that apart from the cameraman, every single member of the crew was absolutely disgusted and showed up on set the next day in hermetically sealed toxicwaste outfits to protect themselves from the filth. They arrived as if they were filming in a nuclear wasteland. Harmony immediately stripped down to his Speedos. Jean-Yves Escoffier, the cameraman, was equally upset and said, “Harmony, let’s throw everyone out. It should just be me, you, the actors and one fucking light bulb.” That’s filmmaking to me. Nothing more than the essential. I can’t stand this kind of larmoyant behaviour. Don’t be such a wimp.

  In 1990 you made eight films for Austrian television called Film Lessons.

  They offer hints about how my film school might be run. Every day at a fixed hour during the Vienna Film Festival – which I programmed in 1990 and 1991 – I invited a guest, including American magician Jeff Sheridan. I was fascinated by how he presented his magic and sleight of hand to audiences through his silent performances. Sometimes I think about becoming a magician myself, in direct physical contact with people in the street, playing out these little dramas with my bare hands. The trick to magic is diversion and misdirection, which are also the secrets of cinema. As a director you need to be able to push and pull the audience’s attention in whatever direction the story demands, making sure everyone’s eyes are focused on specific things at specific times. It’s no coincidence that George Méliès, the great pioneer of early cinema, was a magician before he became a filmmaker. As Jeff said during his demonstration, the point of his job is to move beyond the logical and rational. Film might appear to be a representation of reality, but it’s actually a complex illusion.

  I recorded a discussion for Film Lessons with Kamal Saiful Islam, a cosmologist from Bangladesh who worked at the Max Planck Institute in Munich, entitled “Fantastic Landscapes and the Algebraisation of Unthinkable Curves and Spaces.” I projected details of landscapes in paintings by Segers, Grünewald, Rogier van der Weyden and da Vinci, with his Madonna in the Grotto, where we see a mesmerising, ideal landscape in the distance, a bizarre flight of fancy that connects directly to our dreams. In the background of Altdorfer’s Battle of Alexander is an invented landscape of the mind, an island inhabited with cities, fields, harbours, ships, all teeming with life. These men were given precise orders by their patrons to paint particular religious motifs, but chose to venture far beyond. Their landscapes might be as small as my hand, but they are fantastical windows onto new worlds. I would love to publish a book of these miniature worlds of ecstasy and trance.

  Kamal proved there are spaces unthinkable to our minds that can be conclusively proven algebraically; for example, a bottle with an interior but no exterior. We discussed the future directions cinema might move in, proving the existence of objects and images impossible for us to imagine today. It reminded me of what people must have thought during Columbus’s time, when they were scared to travel to the other side of the earth because they were convinced they would hurtle down into empty space. Today every schoolchild can tell you why this isn’t so, why the force of gravity keeps us grounded regardless of where we travel. One day a kind of cinema might be created that is as inconceivable to us today as basic gravitational physics was to contemporaries of Columbus.

  It didn’t matter that no more than a tiny handful of people in the audience in Vienna understood the imaginative and exotic mathematics being discussed. Kamal and I ranted and raved about questions that had intrigued me for a long time, like immovable positions within the universe. It isn’t difficult to relate this to three-dimensional spaces. If you hang yourself by the neck in your attic and somebody finds your body dangling, what would this person need to do to fix you in a completely immobile position? Answer: one rope from your ankles down to the floor to prevent you from swinging and one from your belt to a wall to prevent you from spinning around your axis. I know the question isn’t appropriate in a dynamic universe, but how many ropes are needed to fix yourself in a totally immovable position within the universe?

  Are there any “rules” when it comes to cinema and filmmaking?

  As a youngster, when I watched films I always asked myself questions. Why is Zorro dressed in black, which is normally the costume of the Bad Guy? Why do you never see chickens in westerns? In the final shoot-out, is the Good Guy shooting left to right or right to left? I quickly realised there is a certain grammar of filmmaking most directors adhere to. Imagine the hero of a western lying in bed, tucked under a thick eiderdown blanket. An impossibility! He sleeps next to the campfire under the open sky, with his saddle as a cushion and a crude blanket to keep warm. The only exception to this rule would be when he walks up the saloon staircase to the pretty singer’s room, where a perfectly made bed is waiting for him. He lies down on the cover – never under it – crosses his legs and props his spurred boots on the brass bedrail. When the hero shows up he always appears out of nowhere, riding on horseback, and when he leaves he disappears into the landscape, moving anonymously towards the horizon. There’s a vagueness about where he comes from and where he’s heading. All these things point to some deep-rooted, inherent principles that have to do with nomadic versus sedentary life.

  The big question is: what exactly does a cowboy eat? Whatever it is, he rarely consumes anything indoors. He is allowed a drink or two, but it absolutely must be a whisky that comes skidding along the saloon bar. Under no circumstances can it be orange juice, which is as much a no-no as eating noodles. Can you imagine a cowboy cooking spaghetti in a warm, comfortable kitchen? Forget it. It can only be beans and bacon, cooked in a pan on a crackling outdoor fire. Frying an egg would be a clear violation of the genre’s iron laws, and coffee never has milk or sugar; it’s always black and strong, swilled from a tin mug. These questions aren’t as ridiculous as they sound. Try to discover the hidden mechanics behind such things and you’ll discover countless other rules that apply to westerns and other genres.

  Your own lecture for Film Lessons was entitled “Orientation in Film.”

  For many families, when they sit down at the dinner table a natural seating arrangement automatically emerges. The same thing happens when going to the cinema; I feel comfortable only if I can seat myself slightly to the left of the centre of the screen, and if I’m sitting next to someone, they must be on my right. I feel cramped if I have to seat myself in a way that goes against my inner orientation.

  “Orientation in Film” dealt with my own needs and interests, but also the unspoken requirements of audiences. The most obvious example is the invisible optical axis between two actors that the camera must never cross, otherwise – when cutting from one to the other – both actors would be looking in the same direction, instead of opposing each other on screen. This gets trickier if you have three people involved. A shot of a barman serving two guests is easy since the bar can serve as the axis, but what if there is no bar? A film like Waterloo is a useful example to learn from, with its shots of three armies marching from three different directions towards the battlefield; we always know exactly who is who and from which direction they’re coming. Much of Aguirre deals with orientation; the small army moves with a clear purpose and sense of direction, but somewhere in the film it loses both, and by the end is going in circles. In the final shot all orientation is lost, and only a dizzying movement remains. The camera circles around the raft, which is more or less stationary, an image that reflects the story of a man who by this point has no hope of salvation. There were potential problems with Aguirre because several scenes took place on rafts that were spinning in the water. If we weren’t careful when shooting dialogue between characters – taking into account the invisible axis between them – the riverbank in the background would move from left to right in some shots and right to left in the reverse angle. To avoid confusion and keep audiences orientated, the camera pans from one character to the other
rather than cutting from one to the next.

  During the Second World War, Goebbels gave an order to all cameramen at the front: “The German soldier always attacks from left to right.” That was it, no further explanation. Sure enough, if you look at old newsreels, the Germans always advance from the left to the right of the screen. There was some logic to this when Germany attacked Russia in the east, but what about the war against France? Even in newsreels of the invasion westwards into Europe, German forces are seen to attack from left to right. The question we need to ask ourselves is: why does the direction of their movement make soldiers look so victorious and optimistic? There must be something within us, some hidden law. The same could be said about how to show vast distances covered on film. I might have imagined it, but I remember a scene in Luis Buñuel’s Nazarín where Nazarín crosses Mexico on foot, walking a thousand miles with a cross over his shoulder. Buñuel used a mere three shots – each one not more than five seconds long – to give the audience a sense of the immense distance being covered. How does he manage to economise in this way? How does he compress weeks of walking into fifteen seconds? The trick is using the same set-up three times. The camera starts almost on the ground, pointing up to the sky, while the frame remains empty for a fraction of a second. Then the character steps into the image, and the camera twists and pans after him, watching him walk away into the distance. Five seconds of walking will do just fine. The whole process is repeated twice elsewhere and the three shots are cut together. We suddenly get the impression of Nazarín having walked a thousand miles. A remarkable phenomenon, how vast distances can be compressed by using an odd, twisted camera movement. I have no idea why it works, though I used the technique in Heart of Glass for the scene at the start of the film where Hias descends from the mountain and walks into the valley below.

  When it comes to orientation in film, my favourite example is Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le deuxième souffle. There’s a scene where a gangster is summoned to meet his rivals, and beforehand he secretly checks out the room where the encounter is going to take place. He tests the possible seating arrangements and notes where he would be pushed if threatened with a gun. The only logical place is up against a cupboard, so he stands in front of it and raises his hands, then decides to leave his gun on top of the cupboard, inches away from where his raised hand would almost certainly be. When he leaves the building he is spotted by one of the rival gangsters, who then goes up to the room to check out what this guy might have been doing up there. He walks into the room, situates himself in various positions, and finds the gun. All of a sudden orientation – and the potential configurations within the space – becomes vitally important.

  You established your own film school in 2010.

  For years there has been a steady stream of young people who want to be my assistant or somehow learn from me; I seem to be a point of orientation for them. The number of people who send me things or ask for advice or a job is substantial, far more than those who get in touch with my much better known colleagues. A few years ago I spoke at a venue in London with a capacity of two and a half thousand. It sold out almost immediately, and there were still a thousand people waiting outside without tickets. There is clearly a hunger for an alternative way of doing things, of exploring avenues different from the brainless three-act structures of Hollywood storytelling. My Rogue Film School is an attempt to give a systematic response and deal with the amorphous avalanche coming at me. I have always been aware that making films is an enormous privilege, and feel I should pass on the knowledge acquired throughout my life.

  I get a never-ending stream of requests from film schools to bring my Rogue seminars; buildings and facilities are offered, but I would rather head into an abandoned quarry in the Mojave desert or an open field in Ireland than link myself to an existing institution. There is no committee at Rogue to judge applications; I read every submission statement, view every film sent as part of the process and issue all invitations. I run the seminars single-handedly, and they take place sporadically – perhaps averaging one a year – over a long weekend in relatively out-of-the-way places. I assemble everyone in hotel conference rooms near Gatwick, Newark or in Koreatown in Los Angeles, instead of central London, Manhattan and Santa Monica, which would be prohibitively expensive for participants. Besides, too many people would be knocking at the door. I need only a room, a projector and fifty chairs. I could do Rogue anywhere.

  What do you teach?

  Nothing in particular. I don’t hold myself up as Moses on the mountain, proclaiming the commandments. More than anything, my relationship to those who attend Rogue is like the late-mediaeval master carpenters or stone-cutters who surrounded themselves with apprentices. All I can usefully talk about is how I do my own work, and perhaps nudge participants in certain directions, helping them overcome their problems.

  What does it mean to “go Rogue”?

  The Rogue Film School is a provocation. It’s about a way of life, about being bold enough to have the endurance to seize hold of your vision and the excitement that makes film possible, about giving courage to your dreams. It isn’t about the technical things you need to know; for that, apply to your local film school. And it isn’t for the faint-hearted. Rogue is for those with a fire burning within. It appeals to those with a sense of poetry willing to learn about lock picking and forging shooting permits, and who can tell a story to a four-year-old child and hold their attention. At one session a participant revealed himself to have worked in the wrestling business and gave us a wonderful line from former wrestler and governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura, which serves as a perfect dictum for the Rogue Film School: “Win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat.” When the system doesn’t respond, when it doesn’t accept what you’re doing – and most of the time it won’t – you have to become self-reliant and create your own system. There will always be periods of solitude and loneliness, but you must have the courage to follow your own path. Cleverness on the terrain is the most important trait of a filmmaker.

  Always take the initiative. There is nothing wrong with spending a night in a jail cell if it means getting the shot you need. Send out all your dogs and one might return with prey. Beware of the cliché. Never wallow in your troubles; despair must be kept private and brief. Learn to live with your mistakes. Study the law and scrutinise contracts. Expand your knowledge and understanding of music and literature, old and modern. Keep your eyes open. That roll of unexposed celluloid you have in your hand might be the last in existence, so do something impressive with it. There is never an excuse not to finish a film. Carry bolt cutters everywhere. Thwart institutional cowardice. Ask for forgiveness, not permission. Take your fate into your own hands. Don’t preach on deaf ears. Learn to read the inner essence of a landscape. Ignite the fire within and explore unknown territory. Walk straight ahead, never detour. Learn on the job. Manoeuvre and mislead, but always deliver. Don’t be fearful of rejection. Develop your own voice. Day one is the point of no return. Know how to act alone and in a group. Guard your time carefully. A badge of honour is to fail a film-theory class. Chance is the lifeblood of cinema. Guerrilla tactics are best. Take revenge if need be. Get used to the bear behind you. Form clandestine Rogue cells everywhere.

  Revenge?

  Sometimes you need to respond creatively to the more obnoxious people who stand between you and your work. Although I would never encourage anyone, in a published book or elsewhere, to break the law, it must be acknowledged that a certain amount of criminal energy can be useful. My weapon of choice is butyric acid, which is unbelievably pungent. Spray it into the car of an enemy and he won’t want to drive it for two years. Ask a bold chemistry student to provide you with some.

  Why is forgery a skill useful to the film director?

  During production of Fitzcarraldo, soldiers were constantly denying us access to places, insisting we weren’t permitted to proceed. I went to Lima and bought some old-fashioned notary paper of exceptional quality, and with great
care set about piecing together an expert forgery, an extravagant four-page document full of wonderfully antiquated Spanish and covered in a series of beautiful watermarks and seals. It gave me permission to move about the country, to places I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to go, areas swarming with military installations. The document was signed by the secretary of state and even the president of the republic himself, the supreme commander of the armed forces Fernando Belaúnde. We needed an ornate stamp so that the whole thing looked authentic. I used an impressive one in German that said something like, “To acquire the reproduction rights of this photo contact the author,” something I knew nobody out there in the jungle would be able to decipher. This particular document, this fabrication, which did no harm to anyone, opened many doors for me. We constantly needed to navigate upriver through militarily controlled areas. When I showed the document en route to various officers and they saw El Presidente’s signature, everyone immediately saluted and stepped aside. Fitzcarraldo couldn’t have been made without it.

  Be prepared. Study how to forge a document. Carry a silver coin or medal with you at all times; if you put it under a piece of paper and make a rubbing, you can create a kind of “seal.” Top that with a bold signature and you have something that looks official. There are plenty of obstacles in filmmaking, but the worst is bureaucracy. Find your own way to battle that particular menace; you have to learn to neutralise and outsmart the rampant red tape and corruption of the world. Bureaucracy loves nothing more than paper, so keep feeding the machine. It will chew on those pages until it’s quiet. A grotesque forgery pleases bureaucrats like nothing else if it appears on impressive-looking paper.