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

by Paul Cronin

  My own stylised contemplation of the reality of Bayreuth, and just how extraordinary and unique the place is, comes in The Transformation of the World into Music when I head into the bombproof vault with a small torch. I could have switched on the light, but entering this darkened, sacred, underground room guided by a custodian makes the whole trip down there more mysterious. The vault contains Wagner’s original manuscripts and partituras, which taken together are undoubtedly a monumental achievement of German culture.

  Why a desire to start staging opera in the eighties?

  I never had any such aspiration; I was literally dragged into it. Although I selected the music, the opera at the start of Fitzcarraldo – Verdi’s Ernani – was actually directed by Werner Schroeter, not me. When I made the film I had never been to the opera. A few years later, after I had already turned her down a few times, the intendante at the opera house in Bologna somehow persuaded me to come down and take a look at the place, and I was immediately fascinated by the logistics and mechanics. I was standing on the stage when all of a sudden I found myself surrounded by forty stagehands, electricians and other personnel who gently formed a solid circle of bodies. The circle tightened and they locked shoulder to shoulder, entrapping me. “I have been selected as spokesman,” one man said. “We have taken a collective decision that we are not going to let you leave until you sign a contract and agree to stage an opera here. We want you to be with us.” I looked around at all these nodding Italians with such determined looks on their faces, and said, “Where is this contract?” We went to the office as a group, and I signed. I love the Italians for their gift of physical enthusiasm. They liked the idea that when it came to music, I was untouched by certain ideas and tendencies, and that beholden as I was to no particular kind of staging, I would inevitably take a different approach to the work. Soon after this meeting I watched an opera at Bologna to get an idea of the space and its technical possibilities.

  I staged my first opera, Busoni’s Doktor Faust, in 1986. Busoni was born in Tuscany, but his mother was from Trieste. He lived most of his life in Germany and other German-speaking countries, so the Germans have never considered him German, and for Italians he was never a fellow countryman. He wrote Doktor Faust at a strange moment, when the world of music was somehow holding its breath, before it moved into twelve-tone. It’s an unfinished work, full of gaps and inconsistencies, but I instantly felt comfortable and confident in what I was doing. There are some composers whose music I have no access to, like Schönberg’s Moses und Aron or Berg’s Wozzeck, though I quickly realised I can cope with the wildest and messiest of stories, even something like Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco, which was originally about a shepherd girl who falls in love with a king, but then – apparently with only a few days’ notice – was rewritten as the story of Joan of Arc. The libretto really is irrapresentabile, as the Italians say. My opera work was appreciated with an immediacy by others, something I have rarely experienced with my films. Opera has brought me joy and inner balance, though I’m the first to admit that when I started I had little idea about what opera was supposed to look like and how it functions up there on the stage.

  I never do research and have never read any of Wagner’s books and essays. Before I started work on Lohengrin an assistant handed me a pile of literature and opera theory, none of which I looked at. The only thing I ever study – and I do it very carefully – is the libretto and the music. The truth is that apart from my own productions, I have watched maybe four or five operas in my entire life, though I have listened to lots of recordings. I know very little about the different stylistic approaches to opera or its trends and fashions; I just seize upon and work with what I see when I hear the music. I can construct the action, setting and entire architecture of an opera in my mind as I listen to it. Hardly anyone believes me when I tell them the first production I ever saw was at La Scala in Milan, two years after I made Fitzcarraldo. The key to my opera work is my love of music.

  What does it mean to transform a whole world into music?

  That’s what opera is about. The idea of staging an opera seemed a strange thing for me to do, until I realised that since my earliest days as a filmmaker I have sought to transform every action, every word into images, so I thought, “Why shouldn’t I try at least once in my life to do the same with music?”

  Opera is a universe all its own. On stage an opera represents a complete world, a cosmos transformed into music. I love the stylised performances and grandeur of human emotions – whether love, hate, jealousy or guilt – being acted out. Do humans really recognise these archetypes of emotional exaltation? Of course we do. The fantastical situations we see in opera are almost like mathematical axioms: condensed and concentrated, speaking to audiences without appeal to realism or psychology. It doesn’t matter that so many of the stories are implausible and most of the libretti are bad. Many plots aren’t even within the calculus of probability; it would be like winning the lottery jackpot five consecutive times. Yet when the music is playing, no explanations are required; primordial feelings suddenly reverberate within us. The stories make sense and audiences are shaken. Strong inner truths shine through, and the veracity of facts no longer matters. Everything is possible. Working within these artificial worlds, with no representation of reality as such, and with music always dictating what’s happening on stage, it’s more a case of “staging” than “directing.” An opera staging mustn’t be so elaborate or extreme that it detracts from the music. For too long German opera was dominated by the so-called Regietheater, the “director’s theatre,” where Lohengrin is set in Auschwitz, Rigoletto enters on a Harley-Davidson, and Fidelio frequents S&M parties with a martini in hand.

  Just as I don’t like to over-rehearse scenes before I shoot them, I dislike rehearsing opera too much, otherwise it gets stale. Four weeks is enough for everything; anything longer and people start getting bored. I try to be quick at the job, though the practicalities of the opera world mean this isn’t always possible, and it can be a fragmented and disjointed process. The great singers are booked years in advance, and sometimes I have to rehearse a scene involving half a dozen characters with only one singer because the other five aren’t around; then, two weeks later, I might get a chance to rehearse the same scene without that one singer but with the other five. Much of the time we’ll have only a pianist, not an entire orchestra, and a chorus that can work only on specific days. It means we have to rehearse with a chorus as if the lead singers are on stage, even if at the time they are performing on another continent. Frequently there aren’t even stand-ins. The whole thing is like making a series of prints where you first produce everything in red, then green, then blue, and only then is it pieced together and a single image created. Things are different at Bayreuth because everyone arrives more than a month before performances start. In less than a week I work with the singers and move through the entire opera, locating the big questions and problems, establishing the flow of things.

  People surrender themselves to music and film in similar ways, which means cinema is closer to music than it ever will be to literature or theatre. The fact that so many filmmakers have gravitated towards opera over the years is some kind of proof of this. When I rehearse an opera I forget everything, including that I’m a filmmaker. Film and opera are like cats and dogs; they will never be truly married together. For one thing their concepts of narrative are completely different. In opera, characters take five minutes to answer a simple question, then sing the same thing three times over. That could never work on film. With opera there are two thousand different perspectives, but with a camera there is only one position at a time. The opera director has to be aware of what the stage looks like from every possible angle, from the corner of every last balcony in the auditorium. If a singer takes a step too far to the right, one whole side of the house is unable to see them. When I first started out I would move around the auditorium, trying out every seat, but these days can tell, while still standing on the stage
with the singers, with my back to the auditorium, exactly what an audience will and won’t be able to see.

  How do you find working with opera singers?

  Opera singing is a merciless profession. A film actor can make a dozen mistakes and continuously shoot a scene, while a theatre actor who gets lost can somehow improvise until he finds his way back into the text. But opera singers can do neither of those things. They remind me of gladiators thrown into an arena packed with thousands of people all screaming for blood. I’m amazed by the boldness needed to step out in front of so many people, all of whom will notice within a millisecond if the voices they are listening to are off-key. When you see singers taking their bows at the end of a performance and the curtain comes down for good, it truly is something to behold. The men are several pounds lighter; they literally lose that much weight during the performance. When I stand on the sidelines, hidden from the audience, watching the singers in profile as they sing, with the lights on them, I can see the power in their voices because of the spitting they do. They literally give themselves away to the audience during a performance. There is something awesome about them, and I have total and absolute respect for these artists. I also salute the prompters, who are always one step ahead of the music. Never before have I seen such precision and concentration.

  I rarely feel truly comfortable in opera houses. If I’m sitting in the front row of the auditorium, I admire everything in front of me – from the orchestra pit through to the darkest corners backstage – but everything behind me isn’t the kind of world I belong to. Many opera houses need the threat of catastrophe and intrigue to get sufficiently energised. I was directing Plácido Domingo in a production of Il Guarany in Washington D.C. and the atmosphere was a little flat, so to create a little spark I casually mentioned to my assistant that Domingo wouldn’t be singing on the opening night. Within twenty minutes there was a conflagration at every corner of the opera house; even the chefs were arguing about it. Suddenly everyone was alert and wide awake. It can sometimes be healthy to set the roof on fire at these places. What I really like is literally being in the middle of the music. There is a wedding march in Lohengrin. Walking with the choir – one of the best in the world – being right there amidst a hundred and twenty people singing, most of whom could be soloists in other opera houses, was absolutely stunning, and a great privilege.

  Many scenes in Death for Five Voices, your film about Carlo Gesualdo, are subtly stylised.

  Subtly stylised? No, in this case some of them are complete fabrications. The film runs amok, and most of the stories it tells are invented and staged, yet they contain the most profound truths possible about Gesualdo. No book or other film gives as much insight into the man.

  Gesualdo was a sixteenth-century musical visionary, the composer who has astonished me more than anyone else, though I wanted to make a film about him because his life is as intriguing as his music. He was never financially dependent on anyone, so could pay for his voyages into the musical unknown. While his previous work is more within the context of his epoch, with the Sixth Book of Madrigals Gesualdo all of a sudden seemed to step four hundred years ahead of his time, composing music we hear only from Stravinsky onwards. It’s no coincidence that Stravinsky made two pilgrimages to Gesualdo’s castle near Naples and wrote an orchestra piece with the title Monumentum pro Gesualdo. There are moments in Death for Five Voices where we hear the five separate voices of a madrigal. Each voice sounds normal, but in combination the music is fantastically ahead of its time, even of our own time. I always liked those kinds of visionaries. Gesualdo, Turner – predecessor of the Impressionists – the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, Hercules Segers: those four have long been my favourites. Akhenaten, who ruled in the fourteenth century BC, was the first monotheist and a thousand years ahead of his time. He abandoned polytheism, making Aten the sole god of Egypt and forbidding the worship of any other deity. After his death the capital city he built was abandoned and his name systematically erased from all monuments; the new style of art he created disappeared with him. Akhenaten was also monogamous, loyal to his wife Nefertiti, in an era when pharaohs were expected to have harems packed with hundreds of women.

  As for stylisations in Death for Five Voices, there is a sequence of a boy being prepared for horseback riding where we meet the director of a mental institution in Venosa. He talks about how we aren’t allowed to film certain things because he has to protect the privacy of his patients, including two who both believe themselves to be Gesualdo. The problem, he explains, is how to keep them away from each other. This is all invented; the man playing the director is actually my opera agent. In the scene filmed inside the museum in the castle of Venosa, we see a glass showcase that contains a clay disc with an array of enigmatic script-like symbols and ideograms on it. When I first saw this thing I was fascinated by it and immediately wanted to include it in the film. I wrote a monologue about this disc for the director of the museum, which he speaks while standing next to the showcase. He presents a letter from Gesualdo to his alchemist, enlisting his aid in deciphering the mysterious signs on the disc. “The prince spent sleepless nights trying to unravel the secret of these strange symbols,” the professor says. “In the course of this activity he became lost in a labyrinth of conjectures and hypotheses. He almost lost his reason in the process.” The letter he reads from is a real handwritten letter from Gesualdo, but is actually nothing more than an invitation to a party at his castle. The spoken text is entirely invented, and the professor is played by the dean of the law school in Milan. The scene reflects the fact that Gesualdo became demented in the final years of his life. He single-handedly chopped down the entire forest around his castle because he was convinced it was closing in on him, and hired young men to flog him daily, something that gave him festering wounds and apparently led to his death. There is a scene in Death for Five Voices where we meet a woman running around the prince’s ruined castle, singing his music and insisting she is the spirit of Gesualdo’s dead wife. Her character emphasises the profound impact Gesualdo’s music has had on people over the centuries. We hired Milva, a famous Italian actress and singer, to play the part.

  What about the story of Gesualdo killing his child?

  I invented the scenario of Gesualdo placing his two-and-a-half-year-old son – who he had reasons to doubt was his child – on a swing and having his servants push him for two days and nights until the child was dead. In some of the existing documents there is an allusion to him killing his infant son, but no absolute proof. Having a choir on either side of the boy on the swing singing about the beauty of death is also invented, though in one of Gesualdo’s compositions there is a text about such things. Historical documents make absolutely clear that he murdered his wife and her lover in flagrante.

  The last scene of the film was shot at a mediaeval tournament in Arezzo. I wanted to have the musical director talk about boldness and adventure in music, and as I was speaking with him I noticed a young man who was playing a footman to one of the knights. The whole scene with him on his cellphone to his mother was staged. He was actually talking to my brother, who was standing ten feet away and knew exactly when to make the call. I told the young man to act as if it were his mother calling him and that she wanted him to come home for lunch. I already knew it would be the last scene in the film. “Don’t worry,” he says, “I’ll be there soon. The film about Gesualdo is almost over.” I asked him to look straight into the camera after speaking the line and be deadly serious, no matter what. I was right next to the camera, joking around. There is a strange expression on his face because he didn’t know whether to laugh or look into the lens with great intent. He stares directly to camera, and the film ends.

  Little Dieter Needs to Fly is a moving story told powerfully by Dieter Dengler.

  I was invited by a German television station to contribute to their series Voyages to Hell and immediately sensed it was my kind of thing. The television executive wanted me to make a film about myself, abo
ut being imprisoned in Africa and the problems on Fitzcarraldo. “That was difficult work,” I told him, “but it wasn’t a voyage into hell.” I had read about Dieter in the sixties – though by now he was very much a forgotten figure – and tracked him down. Although his accent hinted at his Swabian background, Dieter’s English was fluent, and he was the greatest rapper I ever met. He died some years ago of Lou Gehrig’s disease, and the first thing the illness took was his power of speech. How scandalous that in his final days he was bereft of words. Being with Dieter was a constant joy; the man had such an intense enjoyment of life, something you sense throughout Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Even when he was no longer able to talk, we still managed to have long conversations together. He could tell dirty jokes and stories without a word, just using his face and hands. I remember looking at his feet and having no trouble believing he had run barefoot in the jungle for weeks, and that by the end maggots were crawling out of them.

  Dieter’s story is an extraordinary one. Born in Germany just before the Second World War, his earliest memory is of Allied aeroplanes diving down from the sky and bombing his village of Wildberg, in the Black Forest. One bomber came so close to the house where Dieter lived – firing as it flew – that when it whipped past the window where he was standing, Dieter’s eyes locked with the pilot’s for a split second. Rather than being afraid, he was mesmerised by these almighty beings swooping down from the clouds, and from that moment Little Dieter Needed to Fly. After his apprenticeship as a blacksmith and clockmaker, at the age of eighteen he emigrated to America. In New York he survived on pizza crusts until he enlisted in the army. After more than two years of peeling potatoes and another two years of changing tyres, and three years of college, Dieter eventually became a pilot. He was excited to head to Vietnam because he wanted to hang out with the go-go girls in Saigon. In 1966, during the early stages of the war, he was shot down over Laos forty minutes into his first mission. He started preparing to eject once he was hit by enemy fire; fragments of the engine were flying about his head. But then, because of an updraught, his aeroplane picked up altitude as he flew over a dense jungle ridge and he decided not to jump out. Dieter told me he didn’t eject because he didn’t want to abandon his first-ever aeroplane, so he ended up going down with it. He immediately buried his emergency radio because he knew the North Vietnamese might use it to lure rescue helicopters into an ambush. He was wearing civilian clothes under his flight suit and had his German passport with him, as well as his old certificate of apprenticeship as a clockmaker; the idea was that he could pretend to be a journalist from Germany. Pathet Lao guerrillas found him quick enough. Two days later he escaped, but was recaptured after almost dying of thirst, then subjected to a forced three-week march through the jungle, and eventually transferred to a prison camp run by the North Vietnamese, where two other Americans and three Thais were being held.