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

by Paul Cronin

  12

  The Song of Life

  Have you ever doubted your abilities?

  Never, which is probably why I have achieved certain things. I’m aware that I possess an almost absurd self-confidence, but why should I doubt my abilities when I see all these films so clearly before my eyes? My destiny was somehow made clear to me at an early age, and I have shouldered it ever since. There was never any question as to what I should do with my life. None of this is anything to brag about. Anyone who raises children has at least as much courage as someone who follows his “destiny,” whatever that means. It’s an utterly pretentious word.

  Most film-production companies have a half-life, normally not beyond six or seven years, but mine still exists fifty years after I established it. I have persevered, having learnt from the struggles and defeats and humiliations. My hunger as a child helped define me, as did seeing my mother desperate and furious while struggling to feed us. Something terrifying I will never forget is playing basketball at school one day and having a violent collision with another player. An hour later I began seeing black spots and was blind for nearly an hour. There is nothing wrong with hardships and obstacles, but everything wrong with not trying. I think about the original trip I made down several Amazon tributaries before I filmed Aguirre, not having the faintest idea what might be around the next corner. It’s some kind of metaphor for my life, which has been lived on a tightrope, even a slalom. I couldn’t tell you what has prevented me from slamming head first into a brick wall at a hundred miles an hour. I count myself lucky to have avoided the trapdoors.

  I don’t do anything on anyone else’s terms and have never felt the need to prove anything. I don’t have the kind of career where, once a project is finished, I check the New York Times bestseller list to see about buying the next big thing, or wait for my agent to send me scripts. I have never relied on anyone to find me work. The problem isn’t coming up with ideas, it is how to contain the invasion. My ideas are like uninvited guests. They don’t knock on the door; they climb in through the windows like burglars who show up in the middle of the night and make a racket in the kitchen as they raid the fridge. I don’t sit and ponder which one I should deal with first. The one to be wrestled to the floor before all others is the one coming at me with the most vehemence. I have, over the years, developed methods to deal with the invaders as quickly and efficiently as possible, though the burglars never stop coming. You invite a handful of friends for dinner, but the door bursts open and a hundred people are pushing in. You might manage to get rid of them, but from around the corner another fifty appear almost immediately.

  As we sit here today there are half a dozen projects lined up waiting to be ejected from my home. I would like to be able to make films as quickly as I can think of them, and if I had an unlimited amount of money could shoot five feature films every two years. I have never had much choice about what comes next; I just attend to the biggest pressure. I basically have tunnel vision, and when working on a project think of little else. It’s been like this since I was fourteen years old. Today, finishing a film is like having a great weight lifted from my shoulders. It’s relief, not necessarily happiness.

  But you relish dealing with these “burglars.”

  I am glad to be rid of them after making a film or writing a book. The ideas are uninvited guests, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t welcome. As a soldier who holds a position others have long since abandoned, I have always accepted the challenges and am prepared for the worst. Rest assured I will never beat a cowardly retreat. I shall continue as long as there is breath in me.

  You have never started a film you didn’t finish. One also gets the feeling there are very few unproduced scripts in the drawers of your desk.

  No sleep has been lost over the fact that I have written a small handful of screenplays that I haven’t yet made. There are too many new ideas to spend time with for me to feel sorry for myself. One unproduced script of mine is the story of the conquest of Mexico, from the arrival of Cortés in Veracruz to fall of the city of Tenochtitlan, seen through the eyes of the Aztecs, for whom it must have felt like aliens landing on their shores. There are only three or four narratives in the history of mankind that have the same depth, calibre, enormity and tragedy. Joan of Arc, Genghis Khan, Akhenaten and Jesus Christ are the obvious examples. When I first started work on the project, my idea was to reconstruct Tenochtitlan, which would have meant sets five times bigger than those built for Cleopatra. Even with computerised digital effects, those pyramids, palaces and twenty thousand extras would cost a fortune. The rules of the game are simple: if one of my films is a box-office hit that brings in at least $250 million, the Aztec project might conceivably be financed. While researching I studied the primary sources, including lawsuits filed against Cortés after the conquest. I wanted to make the film in Spanish and Classical Nahuatl – which I even started to learn – though at the time it was unthinkable to make a film like this in anything other than English.

  Have you ever taken a holiday?

  It would never occur to me. Perhaps I should disappear for a while, though at this point I don’t feel under any stress. I work steadily and methodically, with great focus. There is never anything frantic about how I do my job; I’m no workaholic. A holiday is a necessity for someone whose work is an unchanged daily routine, but for me everything is constantly fresh and always new. I love what I do, and my life feels like one long vacation.

  It isn’t easy to survive in this business. After my first ten years of making films – during which I made something of an impact, but only with small audiences – I was exhausted. This is when Lotte Eisner helped me by pointing out my duties, giving me courage for the next decade. Not long ago I watched The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser for the first time in years and was thrown back to those early years in Germany. I saw Hombre from Even Dwarfs Started Small and Bruno and Walter Steiner, and remembered that when making the film I was convinced it would be my last. It wasn’t that I was discouraged or knew I wouldn’t be able to continue, but that I was sure I wasn’t going to live much beyond the age of thirty-two. I thought a metaphorical stray bullet would hit me, that my life wouldn’t be a long one. I remember being convinced of this at the age of twenty-four, and feeling that each film would be my last. I knew I had to be careful about how I used my time, that I couldn’t waste a single second or allow myself to be afraid of anything or anyone. Fear no longer exists for me. The man who frightens me has yet to be born.

  Nothing frightens you?

  A few years ago I was on an aeroplane that had to make an emergency landing. We were ordered to crouch down and push our faces into our knees. I outright refused, so the co-pilot came out from his cabin and ordered me to assume that undignified position. “If we’re all going to perish,” I told him, “I want to see what’s coming at me. If we survive, I also want to see it. I’m posing no danger to anyone by sitting upright.” In the end, the landing gear deployed correctly and we had a safe landing, but I was banned from the airline for life, which I’m happy to tell you went out of business a couple of years later. Being scared or not is only a question of the way you choose to deal with your own mortality. Once you’re reconciled with that, it isn’t an issue. When I made Fitzcarraldo I was a captain ready to go down with his ship. Death has never impressed me.

  Strangely enough, one thing that does worry me – and has done for years – is the first hours of shooting a new film. It’s the same every time: I arrive on set and look around, see myself surrounded by a group of exceptionally competent people, and desperately hope one of them is going to take charge. I wonder who is actually going to be making this film, then quickly realise there’s no escape. That person is me. It’s like a kid who steps into the classroom when he and his friends all know that the teacher is going to shout at him. Over the years I have tackled this feeling with a primitive ritual. As some kind of protection, the assistant cameraman places a piece of bright yellow gaffer tape over my heart and
across my back, as if I am now plainly visible as the person in charge. This protective shield helps me settle in and get through the first hour.

  Do you feel pain?

  That’s a ridiculous question. Of course I feel pain. I just don’t make a fuss about it.

  Your next project was a four-minute film based on a duet from a Puccini opera.

  It was one of three films commissioned by the English National Opera; they had a new season starting and wanted to promote English-language opera. I was approached late in the day and was required to deliver the film – which had to be exactly the length of “O soave fanciulla,” from La Bohème – in two weeks. I told them I wanted to go to the remotest corner of Africa and immediately left for Ethiopia, on the southern border near Sudan, a volatile area where the Mursi tribe lives and every six-year-old boy has a Kalashnikov. André Singer, the film’s producer, was trained as an anthropologist and twenty-five years earlier had spent time in Ethiopia working on his thesis. The structure of the film is simple. I placed four sets of couples in front of the camera. They both stare at us, turn and face each other, then walk away in different directions. Between each couple I cut a shot of a group of armed men. The result is a series of stylised images, each of a man and a woman. This is an archetypal situation: boy meets girl. All you need feel is that each couple will never see each other again.

  You wrote My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done with Herb Golder.

  Herb stumbled across a real criminal case in San Diego about a young man named Mark Yavorsky. He was a published poet, award-winning actor, outstanding athlete and basketball player with a near-genius IQ, and had performed in a theatrical production of the Oresteia as Orestes, the character who murders his mother. At one point Yavorsky converted to Islam and travelled to Pakistan, where he was arrested as a lunatic and thrown in prison. On his return home his behaviour became increasingly erratic, and he murdered his mother with a prop sword. Yavorsky was locked away in a maximum-security facility for the criminally insane, and was released after nine years. Herb was fascinated by this case of matricide; he became entangled in the story and collected thousands of pages of courtroom transcripts and material relating to the investigation. I could instantly tell there was something intriguing here, but Herb never got around to writing the screenplay, so I proposed that he and I hide out in the Austrian countryside. “You aren’t leaving until the script is finished,” I told him, “and you aren’t staying more than a week.”

  The hard core of My Son, My Son is based on reality. Some of the strangest dialogue in the film is taken verbatim from Yavorsky’s real statements and other sources, including his psychiatric evaluations, police forensic reports and Herb’s interviews, though the hostagetaking of the flamingos and God as a box of Quaker Oats are my inventions. For the rehearsal scenes in the theatre, Herb pieced together dialogue by cherry-picking from Sophocles, Euripides and different choruses of the Oresteia. He offered up many profound lines from the original Greek texts, but we had to brush most of it aside. When you encounter abstract ideas on the page you can stop and ponder their meaning at leisure, but in a film they can overtake you and reverberate too loudly, and I felt the audience would be overloaded.

  Yavorsky believed that by sacrificing his mother, he could save the planet.

  He had obsessive ideas about being crucified live on national television, and ten minutes into his trial the prosecutor, defence attorney and judge all agreed that Yavorsky was unfit to stand trial by reason of insanity. He was locked away, but because his crime was directed towards his own mother and no one else, he was eventually deemed to be no threat to society and released. Herb spent time with Yavorsky while he was researching the case and introduced me to him one time in the decrepit trailer park where he lived near Riverside, California. I walked into his place, which was full of strange memorabilia; the walls were covered with religious quotes and pornographic images. One of the first things that caught my eye was a poster for Aguirre, in the corner surrounded by burning candles. I looked at this makeshift shrine and the crazed expression on Kinski’s face, and immediately wanted to get out of there. The whole encounter was a big mistake; sometimes it’s best to keep a distance from your sources. The screenplay had already been written by that point, so my trip was made more out of curiosity than anything else. You won’t be surprised to hear that I chose not to maintain contact with Yavorsky.

  There aren’t many actors around of the calibre required to play the lead role in My Son, My Son. Although I only watched him for less than sixty seconds in a film, Michael Shannon was immediately at the top of my list. The moment I saw him, I trusted in him. Michael wanted to listen to the tape recordings we had of Yavorsky and even imitate his voice and the way he rambled when he spoke, but I discouraged this. Before we made Rescue Dawn, I advised Christian Bale not to get too caught up in imitating Dieter Dengler; I wanted Dieter’s spirit to emerge through Christian’s own particular way of talking and moving. The end result was so powerful that even Dieter’s two sons, who showed up in Thailand during production, kept calling Christian “Dad.” I took the same approach with Michael Shannon and Yavorsky; I wanted him to invent and shape the character himself. Generally it’s bad enough that a screenwriter is overloaded with material, but even worse if an actor is too. The only legitimate reason to study a real person before playing them in a film is if that person is Muhammad Ali. Learning to move and rap like him would be imperative.

  David Lynch helped produce the film.

  David and I have a close affinity, and respect each other deeply. I appreciate his work, and though our films are very different, at times they touch each other. I first met him when I was working with Twentieth Century Fox on Nosferatu. I was in Hollywood when I ran into Mel Brooks and starting talking about David’s extraordinary film Eraserhead, which I had just seen. I was in Mel’s office, raving and ranting about the director’s obvious talent. I didn’t even know his name. Mel kept grinning, and after letting me exhaust myself said, “Do you want to meet him?” Three doors down David was working on The Elephant Man.

  My Son, My Son fell dormant for several years because we couldn’t find any money, then one day I went to meet a producer who had worked with David for years, and all of sudden he walked in. We spoke about the state of cinema in general, about spiralling production and marketing budgets, about the fact that the average Hollywood feature costs tens of millions of dollars. “We should make films with a maximum budget of $2 million,” I said. “Real stories, and the best actors. Not superstars.” He asked if I had an idea for a film and when could I start. “Tomorrow,” I said. David was immediately enthusiastic, but he didn’t produce My Son, My Son as such. He left us alone during shooting and only saw the film once it was completed, so though he was involved, what he really did was throw a match onto a powder keg, giving the project the spark it needed.

  My Son, My Son is one of the most concise pieces of filmmaking I have ever produced. The storytelling is disciplined from start to finish, with one scene blending into the next. A good part of the narrative is told in flashbacks, but audiences don’t even notice because the transitions from past to present and back again are woven in so seamlessly. It all involved the kind of high-precision filmmaking I usually avoid. The story takes place somewhere with the appearance of absolute serenity, a well-ordered American suburb with a beautiful ocean, clean beaches, quiet parks and palm trees blowing in the wind, but also some kind of slowly advancing fear and horror. We filmed in San Diego. Nothing is as it seems or fully explained; we never see Yavorsky actually killing his mother, only the aftermath of the act. He makes a strange theatrical gesture with a sword, but the final horror of his crime lies only in the audience’s imagination. What I like about the story is that it’s a horror film, but without chainsaws and axes flying at you. There is a menace that creeps up on the audience anonymously; you never know from which direction it will appear. Sometimes the things you can’t quite put your finger on are the scariest. The lea
ding character is extremely dangerous, and there is some kind of existential terror about him, though this is revealed only through almost imperceptible signals here and there. He finds a basketball in a park and places it up in the branches of a tree, saying he wants to keep it there for a future basketball player. You sense he’s either suicidal or homicidal. It isn’t easy to nail down what makes him so frightening.

  Why did you make Cave of Forgotten Dreams?

  The film is about the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave in the south of France, which was discovered in 1994 and contains what is the earliest-known human cave art, from thirty-two thousand years ago. My first intellectual awakening, my first real cultural fascination, independent of peers and family, came at a bookstore in Munich when I was twelve years old. On the cover of one of the books in the window was a painting of a horse from the prehistoric Lascaux cave. It shook me to my core; I felt a deep turmoil in my heart, an indescribable excitement that remains to this day. I had to have the book, and would walk past the store every week, heart pounding, to make sure no one had bought it. It seems I thought there was only a single copy in existence. I worked as a ball boy in a tennis club for more than half a year before I had enough money to pay for it. I still remember a shudder of awe when I first looked through its pages. Early fascinations rarely leave us. I still have the book, which turned out to be quite superficial.

  When I was first allowed into the cave, some time before I made the film, I was struck by the freshness of everything. Cave bears became extinct twenty thousand years ago, but there are clearly bear tracks on the cave floor. In a recess is a footprint of a boy, next to one of a wolf. Did a hungry wolf stalk the child? Did they walk together as friends, or were their tracks made thousands of years apart? There are images of reindeer painted by someone and left incomplete, then finished by someone else. The stunning fact is that radiocarbon dating shows us that these additions came five thousand years later. Can we ever truly understand what was going on in the minds of these artists across such an unfathomable abyss of time? With the gorge of the Ardèche river, bridged by the Pont d’Arc, a two-hundred-foot-high natural rock arc, the landscape in the vicinity of the cave is equally extraordinary. The fact that it reminds us so much of Wagner and Caspar David Friedrich connects us to the artists who worked at Chauvet thirty thousand years ago; the landscape doesn’t belong only to the Romantics. Stone Age man might have had a similar sense of its power, and it’s no surprise that Chauvet is surrounded by a cluster of other Palaeolithic caves. I spoke to one of the primary scientists involved in the project, who suggested that Pont d’Arc wasn’t just a physical landmark for the inhabitants of thirty thousand years ago, but most likely also played an imaginative part in their mythology.