by Paul Cronin
Is The Eccentric Private Theatre of the Maharaja of Udaipur another of your “utility” films?
Sort of. I made it after receiving an invitation from André Heller, an Austrian director and creator of events who had travelled across India and appears at the start of film. He talks about the incomparable nature of the country, its extraordinary cultural diversity and the hundreds of languages spoken, and about how the arts in India are what he calls a “life-sustaining” force. André – who once created what might have been the largest fireworks display ever in Europe – asked if I wanted to film the mammoth event he had organised at the City Palace of Udaipur, on the banks of Lake Pichola in India. At the behest of the Maharaja of Udaipur, who wanted in some way to document the rich heritage of the country before “McDonaldisation” triumphed over everything, André planned to bring together a vast range of Indian performers. He had a permit from the maharaja to stage what became the events of the film, and sent out people throughout India in search of magicians, singers, dancers, snake charmers and fire-eaters, ending up with something like two thousand performers who spoke a total of twenty-three languages. I get sent a lot of screenplays that people want me to make, but I don’t get many requests to make films like this, so I agreed because André’s ideas were unique. The actual event took place over just a single day, but I spent a few days shooting rehearsals. I made the film for a friend and enjoyed travelling to India, somewhere I had never been. It was good to capture things that would otherwise have been ephemeral. I flavoured the film by inventing a background story – influenced by Satyajit Ray’s The Music Room – about the palace of a fabulously wealthy maharaja which is crumbling underneath him.
Scream of Stone is reminiscent of pre-war German “mountain cinema.”
Throughout the twenties German directors like Luis Trenker and Arnold Fanck produced a number of Bergfilme [mountain films], but unfortunately the genre later fell in step with Nazi ideology, which is probably the reason it’s somewhat unexplored today. I liked the idea of creating a new, contemporary form of Bergfilm, like Peter Fleischmann did when he used the elements and rules of the Heimatfilm in his film Hunting Scenes from Bavaria, bringing new depth to the genre. But I would never push the idea of making a connection between Scream of Stone and those melodramas of the twenties – which I’ve never actually seen – including those featuring Leni Riefenstahl.
Scream of Stone had a problematic birth. Reinhold Messner – with whom I had worked on The Dark Glow of the Mountains – had an idea based on a true story about the first apparently successful attempt on Cerro Torre, a peak in Patagonia. Cesare Maestri, the Italian climber who would scale mountains with pneumatic drills, claimed to have reached the summit, but there had been instant doubt as to whether this was true, due to the fact that his climbing partner had never returned and his body never recovered. Walter Saxer, my production manager, picked up the story and developed it with a colleague. He wanted to go beyond the usual boundaries of German cinema, and from the start was the driving force behind the film. I immediately liked the ideas they came up with. There was something wonderfully physical about the story that I found interesting, but the script had many weak points, particularly the dialogue, and needed real work, so I hesitated about accepting the project because at first I didn’t know how I could improve it. Finally we came to an agreement and I stepped into the film, but immediately found myself up against a brick wall when it came to making substantive changes.
Saxer was bull-headed about everything, so I can’t even say that Scream of Stone is my film, though it does contain some impressive sequences, like the one where Stefan Glowacz climbs up a mountain vertically, then horizontally and then vertically again, all without a safety line, all in a single take, all with the most stunning landscape behind him and a gaping abyss below. It’s the most extraordinary thing you’ll ever see on screen, much more so than anything in a Hollywood blockbuster. At the time Glowacz was the “rock master,” the world-champion free-climber, and actually did three takes of this climb before calmly saying, “No more, Werner. My arms are boiling.” The character of Fingerless, played by Brad Dourif, who turns out to be one of the few climbers who actually makes it to the top of Cerro Torre, leaving a picture of Mae West there as proof, was the only character in the original script I was allowed to make changes to. He writes a hundred and sixty letters to Mae before finally getting a response: “Come back from your mountain, climber, and see me sometime. There’s a hell of a mountain waiting for you.” The original idea was to cast Messner in the film. After my experiences with him on The Dark Glow of the Mountains I felt he could handle the role, but then I met the Italian actor Vittorio Mezzogiorno and immediately knew he should play the part. I think Messner was almost relieved he had been passed over, though he would have been good in the film.
Did your previous experiences with Messner help you on Scream of Stone?
To a certain extent. Cerro Torre is the most dangerous, difficult and ecstatic peak on earth, a 4,000-feet-high needle of basalt sticking straight up into the sky. It’s more a symbolic image of deadly fear than a mere mountain. For many years it was considered unclimbable; the first verified ascent was sometime in the mid-seventies. More people have climbed Mount Everest than have ever made it to the top of Cerro Torre. You can only truly understand why it strikes so much fear into the hearts of climbers when you see the peak before you. There may be higher mountains to scale, but what makes Cerro Torre particularly treacherous are the sheer cliff faces and weather conditions. Most of the time there’s a pandemonium of storms that make the summit invisible. I call them storms, but we don’t really have an equivalent in our language to describe the phenomenon. The winds easily reach a hundred miles an hour at the top; our tripod was cemented down but still needed five men to hold it steady. Ice fragments and stones the size of my fist get torn away and come shooting by like bullets. One time a sudden storm hit, and two of our climbers, hanging onto the rock face, immediately dumped their rucksacks so they could get back to our encampment fast enough. These bags didn’t fall to the ground; they just sailed away horizontally, never to be seen again. On a mountain near Cerro Torre I saw the unforgettable sight of wind hitting a waterfall with such force that it literally flowed vertically upwards, dissipating into mist.
Were you ever on the summit of Cerro Torre yourself?
Twice, both times by helicopter, which took five minutes. The second time I landed on the summit I stepped out of the helicopter with Mezzogiorno, turned around and saw him lying as flat as he could on the ground, his nails dug as deep into the ice as he could get them. I asked what was wrong. “I want to get up but my body won’t co-operate,” he said meekly. “Give me a little more time.” I spoke to Hans Kammerlander – the climber who appears in The Dark Glow of the Mountains and has a small role in Scream of Stone – about the ice cave that had been built at the top of Cerro Torre and stocked with eight days’ worth of provisions, in case we needed to take refuge. When Kammerlander saw me walking towards it without holding on to the rope, he grabbed me and said, “If you start to slide, there’s nothing anyone can do for you. You will accelerate, then be airborne for a mile.” Kammerlander looked me right in the eye. “If that happens,” he said, “promise me one thing: enjoy the vista.”
At one point our helicopter took Stefan Glowacz, a cameraman and me up to a ridge not far from Cerro Torre’s peak to prepare a sequence. Normally a team of climbers would make extensive preparations, like building an emergency shelter and taking up provisions and equipment, after which the actors and technical crew would follow. A storm had been raging for ten days, but suddenly we had a calm, crystal-clear night, followed by a beautiful morning without wind. The conditions looked so good we made the mistake of flying up there without sending a vanguard. Once we were dropped at the ridge, the three of us started walking towards our location. All of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something absolutely outrageous, something I will surely never witness again
in my life. Below us, as far as the eye could see, were clouds; they looked like motionless balls of cotton. All of a sudden everything exploded like gigantic atomic bombs. I immediately radioed the helicopter, which was still in sight, and watched as it made a loop towards us. It came as close as 150 feet before the storm hit us like a bullet. The clouds were over us, there was a gust of more than a hundred miles an hour, and the temperature fell thirty degrees. After twenty seconds my moustache was a lump of ice. The helicopter was literally tossed away and we found ourselves alone with no sleeping bags, tents, food or ropes. Nothing except two ice picks. We had to dig ourselves into the snow immediately, otherwise we would have frozen to death within a few hours.
We spent just over two days and nights in the snow hole. All we had to eat was a small piece of chocolate I had in my pocket. You can get by with nothing to eat for fifty hours, but water is something else; you have to drink at least a gallon of water a day, otherwise your toes and fingers freeze away. Ninety-five per cent of all losses of digits are the result of dehydration. After twenty hours some of my toes were turning black, and the cameraman, a very tough man, was in bad shape. He was running a temperature and having cramps. We used our walkie-talkie only every two hours for a few seconds to save batteries, and radioed down that he wouldn’t survive another night. This stark message alarmed our team in the valley, and two teams of four climbers were sent out to reach us. The strongest of them became delirious, threw his gloves into the storm, then clicked his fingers, insisting on calling a waiter over so he could pay for his cappuccino. They had to guide him down back to the glacier, but an avalanche swept them down two hundred feet and they had no choice but to dig a snow cave themselves because one of them had lost his sunglasses and showed signs of snow blindness. After fifty hours, the clouds burst open for ten minutes, and with this lull in the storm the helicopter was able to pick us up. The pilot was in a panic and couldn’t wait until the last person – me – had scrambled inside, so I crouched in a basket outside the helicopter and held on to a metal bar. When we finally touched down, my hand had frozen to the bar. It thawed out after one of the Argentinian climbers urinated on it.
Talk about your approach to editing.
The most important thing to say about editing is that it isn’t a technical process. It comes from something much deeper, from an understanding of the vision behind the images and the story you need to tell. If you don’t have that, your work will be subject to whims and continual fumbling. The danger of digital non-linear editing is the ability to create twenty parallel versions of your film, which is a meaningless act. Those who produce such things are irretrievably lost in their material.
I have always been very specific about what I film, and never shoot endless amounts of footage. Every second of celluloid costs money, so the impetus when shooting on film is to expose as little raw stock as possible. Even today, when I make a film on video I never end up with a lot of footage. If you let the tape run and run, you’ll have three hundred hours of mediocrity. Some filmmakers wear the fact they have so much material as a badge of honour, but attempting to be encyclopaedic is a misguided strategy, practised only by accountants. Most filmmakers with that much footage don’t know what they’re doing; I know I’m talking to a spendthrift when I meet a director who tells me they worked for years editing a film.
The way I work is to look through everything I have – very quickly, over a couple of days – and make notes. For all my films over the past decade I have kept a logbook in which I briefly describe, in longhand, the details of every shot and what people are saying. I know there’s a particularly wonderful moment at minute 4:13 on tape eight because I have marked the description of the action with an exclamation point. These days my editor Joe Bini and I just move from one exclamation point to the next; anything unmarked is almost always bypassed. When it comes to those invaluable clips with three exclamation marks, I tell Joe, “If these moments don’t appear in the finished film, I have lived in vain.” With digital technology, anything mediocre or that detracts from the story is easily junked, and the remaining material melted down to the absolutely vital moments. I can edit almost as fast as I can think because I’m able to sink details of fifty hours of footage into my mind. This might have something to do with the fact that I started working on film, when there was so much celluloid about the place that you had to know where absolutely every frame was. But my memory of all this footage never lasts long, and within two days of finishing editing it becomes a blur in my mind.
I can identify the strongest material at great speed, and rarely change my mind once I make a decision. Usually we can piece together a first assembly of what the final film will be in less than a fortnight. We never look at what we edited the previous day; every morning we start from the point where we finished the day before. Once we have worked through the entire film, we move backwards; this keeps the material fresh and ensures that only footage of the highest calibre remains. It isn’t that I have a particularly slovenly attitude to the editing process; I’m just ruthless with the decisions I make. I feel safe in my skills of navigation and never try out twenty different versions of the same sequence. On the few occasions an editor has persuaded me to go back and look at something I decided against, or to cut a sequence in a new way, it almost always turns out not to have been worth the effort. Occasionally, however, it pays dividends. One recent instance stands out, when Joe Bini and I were working on Bad Lieutenant. There is a sequence in a moving car where Nicolas Cage pulls out his Magnum and threatens to shoot everyone. The drug dealer appeases him by giving him a bag of heroin. In one of the takes Nicolas went beyond the script. He grinned, waved his gun and said, “I’m going to kill you all to the break of dawn!” It didn’t feel right to me, but Joe thought it was great material and asked me to consider it in the context of this character’s evolution. After he put together the final thirty minutes of the film I was able to see exactly how the scene fit in the story as a whole, and realised that both Joe and Nicolas were right.
Let me say something here about how time and money is wasted during post-production, in particular when it comes to documentaries. I often meet people who make detailed transcripts of the conversations they have recorded, then prepare “paper edits” of their films. I’ve never seen the point of all this. If you focus only on the words on the page and don’t watch the actual images and listen to the people talking, you bypass the nuances, rhythms of speech and physical gestures. You’ll never understand the fundamental spirit of the person and, in turn, of the conversation. Editing a film from a transcript can be misleading. You might think it’s possible to cut a piece of dialogue very cleanly, when in reality the person you filmed was talking very quickly and ran one sentence into the next in the same breath. More importantly, you miss the sometimes extraordinarily powerful silences. I categorically forbid transcripts to be made until a film is finished, and only then for legal and archival reasons.
Have you ever reached the editing stage and found the footage an unworkable mess?
Never. If you have footage of real substance, it will always connect and cut together. The first version of Invincible was too long, so I put it aside for six weeks and tried to forget about it; I needed some distance between the film and me. After a day of condensing and tightening, I cut forty minutes. Sometimes an individual scene won’t work exactly as planned. I shot an intense seven-minute sequence for The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser with Kaspar and an impoverished peasant who, in despair, had killed his last surviving cow. The idea was to place the scene about two-thirds of the way into the film. It made sense in the context of the story but somehow disrupted the flow of the narrative, shifting the focus of the story away from Kaspar. The scene detoured the audience too much, and it would have taken several minutes to get back into the story once it was over. Although it was one of the two or three best sequences I have ever shot, I threw it out.
Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus joined you on the set of Stroszek.
I don’t particularly like confronting my footage alone, and prefer working closely with an editor. Having another pair of eyes that can help me discover qualities and elements I might have missed is always valuable. I like having collaborators around me, people with their own vision, though none of my editors over the years have had complete freedom; I’m present throughout the entire editing process. Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus edited for Alexander Kluge before working on several of my early films, including Aguirre and Land of Silence and Darkness, and was truly gifted at instantly sensing the quality of the footage in front of her, always able to identify what material worked and what didn’t.
Starting with Signs of Life, the first film we made together, Beate always complained about how bad my films were; she thought they were so embarrassingly terrible that she never went to the opening night of any of them, with the exception of Even Dwarfs Started Small. We checked the first reel of Signs of Life on the flatbed, a 2,000-foot roll. It had been coiled the wrong way from the end, so she put it on the machine and spun it backwards, about five times as fast as it would normally be viewed. Then she grabbed the whole reel and threw it into the garbage, saying, “This is so bad I’m not going to touch it again.” I was aghast, but after a couple of weeks looked at the reel again in the context of the film as a whole and realised she was right. Beate was able to spot good footage just as quickly. While some people have perfect pitch when it comes to music, she was able to express a sensibility for film material that corresponded to my own. Her grumbling about the terrible footage I was forever dumping on her doorstep was somehow a challenge; it pushed me to do the best I possibly could. I loved seeing her with those reels that she truly felt had such little value because I knew she would work harder than anyone to salvage whatever good might be in them.
