by Paul Cronin
Werner Herzog
A Guide for the Perplexed
Conversations with
Paul Cronin
Contents
Title Page
Foreword
by Harmony Korine
Visionary Vehemence
by Paul Cronin
Epigraph
1
The Shower Curtain
A Lost Western, Herakles, Game in the Sand, The Unprecedented Defence of the Fortress Deutschkreuz
2
Blasphemy and Mirages
Signs of Life, Last Words, Precautions Against Fanatics, The Flying Doctors of East Africa, Fata Morgana, Even Dwarfs Started Small
3
Adequate Imagery
Handicapped Future, Land of Silence and Darkness, Aguirre, the Wrath of God
4
Athletics and Aesthetics
The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, No One Will Play with Me, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Heart of Glass
5
Legitimacy
How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck …, Stroszek, La Soufrière, Nosferatu the Vampyre, Woyzeck
6
Defying Gravity
God’s Angry Man, Huie’s Sermon, Fitzcarraldo, Ballad of the Little Soldier, The Dark Glow of the Mountains
7
Going Rogue
8
Reveries and Imagination
Where the Green Ants Dream, Cobra Verde, Les Français vus par … Les Gauloises, Wodaabe: Herdsmen of the Sun, Echoes from a Sombre Empire, The Eccentric Private Theatre of the Maharaja of Udaipur, Scream of Stone
9
Fact and Truth
Lessons of Darkness, Bells from the Deep: Faith and Superstition in Russia, The Transformation of the World into Music, Death for Five Voices, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Wings of Hope
10
Fervour and Woe
My Best Fiend, The Lord and the Laden, Pilgrimage, Invincible, Ten Thousand Years Older, Wheel of Time, The White Diamond
11
Blowing the Fuses
Grizzly Man, The Wild Blue Yonder, Rescue Dawn, Encounters at the End of the World, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
12
The Song of Life
La Bohème, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, Ode to the Dawn of Man, Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life, On Death Row, From One Second to the Next
Ten Poems
by Werner Herzog
Thinking about Germany
by Werner Herzog
The Minnesota Declaration
by Werner Herzog
Shooting on the Lam
by Herbert Golder
Afterword
by Lawrence Krauss
Bibliographic Essay
Filmography and Opera Stagings
Index
Photographs
Acknowledgements
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
Foreword
by Harmony Korine
werner herzog hates chickens. this is a fact. this is a consistent theme throughout his films. it is clear to me that he hates chickens, and this is one of the reasons why he has always been my favorite film director. i too hate chickens. the first time i saw even dwarfs started small i knew i wanted to make films. i had only experienced this once before, when as a boy i watched a w. c. fields movie marathon next to a man dying of emphysema. i could not imagine what type of human being could come up with such insane ideas. i could not understand how these dwarfs could laugh so intensely throughout the film. after getting to know the great man it is obvious where he gets his ideas. he gets them from a deep place where formal logic and academic thinking need not exist. he is a pure artist and maniac and there will never be another one like herzog. he has invented his own cinematic universe where out of chaos and detritus come moments of pure poetry and the deepest enlightenment. herzog’s influence cannot be denied. he is a true icon of cinema. he is a foot soldier. he is not a chicken.
Visionary Vehemence
Ten Thoughts about Werner Herzog
“Life is about oneself against the world.”
Paul Bowles
“Assiduity is the sin against the holy spirit.
Only ideas won by walking have any value.”
Nietzsche
“An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why.”
William Faulkner
“The only way to stop smoking is to stop smoking.”
Werner Herzog
I met Werner Herzog for the first time in the plush sitting room of a stylish central London hotel. We spent a couple of hours circling each other, in discussion about collaboration on an interview book. I returned the following morning, to continue our chat over breakfast. Would Herzog go for the idea? “All things considered,” he said slowly but firmly, before carefully placing his buttered toast onto his plate, pausing for half a minute, taking an unhurried mouthful of coffee, and looking me squarely in the eye, “it’s best I co-operate with you.” A sigh of relief. “But there is one thing I want to do while I’m in town this week.”
“Anything.”
“I want to see Arsenal play.”
The next day I enter new territory, wander down some dark alley, and scalp a handful of tickets. A week later I am in a pub in Upton Park drinking Guinness with Werner and Lena, his wife, having just seen West Ham play the Gunners (I don’t remember who won). “Number 26 is a very intelligent player,” says Werner. “Who is he?” This is not a question I am able to answer, so Werner turns to the portly, slightly inebriated gentleman and his mates standing next to us, and asks again. “That’s Joe Cole,” we are told. “One of the best there is. Only eighteen years old.” “Yes,” says Werner. “He really knows how to use the space around him, even when he doesn’t have the ball. He’ll be playing for England soon.” Which goes to show that Werner’s understanding of football runs just as deep as that of all things cinematic: not long after this match Joe Cole was, indeed, playing for the national team.* A few weeks later, one bright early morning, Werner and I are sitting in the living room of his modest, airy Los Angeles home, tucked away in the Hollywood Hills, watching Bayern Munich play AC Milan on television. It’s a crucial match for both. Tension is high. Werner chain-smokes nervously and we snack on Doritos. Munich equalise with the last touch of the game. It bodes well for the first of our conversations that will become this book.
It isn’t easy to say if the following – the closest we’ll get to a Herzog autobiography – does Werner’s life and work justice. I have often thought about how this book might read if I had interviewed him every couple of years from the start of his career (practically speaking, not possible, since I wasn’t born until about a decade in). How differently would Werner appear on paper? Memory being what it is, would these pages be filled exclusively with anecdotes about filming amidst this or that landscape rather than, as many usefully do, focusing on perennial ideas and principles? Does the distance that time has given Herzog from much of his work (it’s more than fifty years, sixty films and a handful of books since A Lost Western) make for a more contemplative overview?
I can definitively say two things. First, Werner’s memory is a good one. His most conspicuous acting job, and one of his most recent, was in the 2012 Tom Cruise shoot-’em-up Jack Reacher, filmed in Pittsburgh. One afternoon during production, Werner rented a c
ar and took the time to drive several miles out into the nearby countryside where, fifty years earlier, he spent a few months. Despite not having been in the city since the early sixties, and though it involved a complicated route from downtown, he immediately found the house he was looking for. “I recognised it all,” says Werner, “to the point where I was struck by a new configuration of concrete stairs that curved down to the garage.” Herb Golder, professor of classics at Boston University and trusted confidant on several Herzog films, recalls a production meeting for Wings of Hope at a hotel in Lima. “Werner drew from memory a map of the territory that pertained to the story, an area of the densest jungle imaginable, which he hadn’t seen in twenty-seven years, including the crash site and the Pachitea tributary, snaking off to the Sungaro and Shebonya, feeding the Yuyapichis. When we compared Werner’s map with an actual map the next day, we discovered that his reconstruction of the topography was almost perfect. I still have that sketched map of his, and look at it now and again, as I consider it a blueprint of the feeling for landscape and sense of space necessary for great filmmaking.”
Second, a complete understanding of the irrepressible Werner Herzog is only possible if one has (a) regularly climbed inside his head to see exactly where his ideas come from, then observed him at close quarters as he makes a number of consecutive films (fiction and non-fiction); and (b) stood in his garden, Weissbier in hand, watching him, aproned-up, frying a lamb chop on the barbecue, or supping with him and his wife Lena on her Siberian mushroom soup as Fats Domino, their corpulent cat, roams. Regret to inform I have done only one of these things, and have yet to meet anyone who has experienced both, which leads to my own verdict on A Guide for the Perplexed: it’s the best we’ve got.
Whenever Werner Herzog deploys his abilities, we can expect the unexpected, a matchless, coruscating take, those lapidary turns of phrase. The interview presented here attempts to capture his exaltation of the landscapes, objects, books, art, poetry, music, literature, cinema, ideas and people that surround us, alongside his own pastimes, convictions and judgements, with “agitation of mind” as shorthand for what this book hopefully delivers. While Hölderlin transmuted the world around him into words, Herzog has consistently transformed his experiences into sounds and images. It is, however, incidental that the subject of this book is an indispensable man of cinema. More important for our purposes is that he is an edifying and transformative conversationalist.
1 INTUITION
Over the years this book – the first iteration of which appeared in 2002, as Herzog on Herzog – seems to have contributed in a small way to the construction of Werner’s public persona, and has become something of an eccentric self-help volume. People tell me how weighty, invigorating and (Herzog dislikes the word, feeling it makes him sound “too much like a preacher”) inspirational they find it. One fellow called the book “scripture,” while Newsweek raved, calling it “a required text for every film school in the country.” We do, of course, have plenty to learn from Werner about cinema. A lifetime of filmmaking means that when it comes to the logistical battles of production, he is able to point out in which directions lie the paths of least resistance, to show us how best to minimise our weaknesses and play to our strengths. But you won’t learn much about focal lengths, lighting and story structure from these pages. Werner’s explication of film grammar, for example, doesn’t involve details of film stock, shot size and editing techniques, rather a pithy commentary on why cowboys never eat pasta. Nor does what follows include intricate theoretical analysis that might inspire the ever-increasing number of academics aiming their eyes and brains at Herzog’s work. Werner has always resisted interpretation (Hölderlin: “Man is a god when he dreams, a beggar when he reflects”), and from the start I knew better than to ask. Instead, with clarity and elegance, he describes his process, making clear that any competent investigation of his films has to be rooted in an understanding of how and where they were made, under what conditions, and by whom.
During one of our final sessions together when preparing this book, Werner called my attention to several paragraphs, all of which were comprised of material where (presumably during moments of weakness) he offered up vague explanations of his films. As we worked through the manuscript, Werner intuitively zeroed in on these lines and – as if they threatened to contaminate the entire book – trimmed. So uninvolved is he in what his films and the characters that populate them might “mean” that when Herb Golder once showed him a full-length published study of his work, Werner quickly deposited the book into the nearest dustbin, announcing, “This has nothing to do with me.” On his shelves sit a host of art books (Hieronymus Bosch, John Martin, Albrecht Altdorfer), alongside select texts by the small number of authors important to him (Hölderlin, Kleist, Kuhlmann, Montaigne, Thucydides, Virgil), plus twenty volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary and Anderson/Dibble’s multi-volume edition of the Codex Florentino. He has copies of some of his own books. He has none of the books about his work.
Werner told me he once met a champion ski jumper from Norway who one season beat all his adversaries. “He was also an architecture student and the following year wrote his thesis on the construction of ski ramps. He thought so much about those damned things that during the next season he lost every competition he entered.” For Herzog, the moment such meditation enters the equation, when he delves too deep and starts explaining himself, imbalance sets in and creativity is forced aside, or at least clouds over. As far as he is concerned, cinema – like music – is more deeply connected to imagination than pure reason, and though indubitably respectful of the rationalists of the world, unadulterated intuition is a brighter guiding light for Werner than analysis will ever be. In other words, the new film always takes precedence over talking about old work. “Interviews make very little sense,” he said in 1979. “They are not helpful, either to the audience or to myself. I prefer audiences that take a very straight, clear, open look at what they see on the screen.” I am sometimes asked by colloquium organisers if Werner would attend were they to assemble a round table to discuss his films and praise him for past glories. There’s a slim chance, I say, so long as he isn’t working that day.
2 PERSEVERANCE
Although his place in film history is assured, Werner’s work has always been a by-product of his furious “extra-cinematic” inquisitiveness and infatuations. He has forever been nourished by a wondrously eclectic range of interests that might have propelled him equally in the direction of mathematics, philology, archaeology, history, cookery, ant wrangling (see page 260), football or (as the Afterword by Lawrence Krauss suggests) science. The fact that it’s cinema the multifarious Herzog has involved himself with is, to a certain extent, irrelevant to our tale, one of dedication, passion and determination. This book is the story of one man’s constant and (almost) always triumphant confrontation with a profound sense of duty to unburden himself, and for that reason alone it’s worth our attention.
Werner’s work ethic and drive, impressive decades ago, remain formidable, and his ability to maintain creative integrity and generate new ideas is exhilarating. There is a wonderful moment in Conquest of the Useless, the published version of his journal, written – Walser-like – in microscopic script during production on Fitzcarraldo. While playing in an imaginary football match in Lima, Werner struggles to distinguish between players on his team and his competitors. When the referee refuses to halt play so one side can exchange its jerseys for those of a less confusing colour, Werner concludes that “the only hope of winning the game would be if I did it all by myself … I would have to take on the entire field myself, including my own team.” When it comes to his films, this energy is perpetually generated by, as he calls them, “home invaders,” those ideas that steal inside his head, to be wrestled to the ground in the form of a screenplay, film or book. Herzog’s filmmaking has never given him consolation as such. It’s a blessing and a burden. He never has to worry about whether a good idea for the next film wi
ll reveal itself because, like it or not, the throb is there long before the one at hand is complete. When Herzog writes that the image of a steamship moving up the side of a mountain seized hold of him with such power it was like “the demented fury of a hound that has sunk its teeth into the leg of a deer carcass,” we presume there isn’t a project he has involved himself with over the past fifty years that has taken hold with any less urgency. As David Mamet has written, “Those with ‘something to fall back on’ invariably fall back on it. They intended to all along. That is why they provided themselves with it. But those with no alternative see the world differently.”
Nearly fifteen years ago, when I started work on this project, Werner hadn’t attained the godlike status the world now accords him. For the past twenty years he has lived on the West Coast of the United States, most recently a few miles from Hollywood, where he is his own master. While some folks wait bleary-eyed for calls from their agent, Werner rarely picks up for his own (“For decades I didn’t even have an agent and even today don’t really need one”), and has forever preferred the company of farmers, mechanics, carpenters and vintners to filmmakers. In California he is free from European rigidity, even if he still feels a powerful intellectual and emotive connection to his homeland. In 1982, a year before her death, Herzog’s mentor Lotte Eisner wrote that Werner is
German in the best sense of the word. German as Walther von der Vogelweide and his love poem “Under the Lime Tree.” German as the austere, fine statues of the Naumburg cathedral, as the Bamberg horseman. German as Heine’s poem of longing “In a Foreign Land.” As Brecht’s “Ballad of the Drowned Young Girl.” As Barlach’s audacious wood statues, which the Third Reich sought to destroy. And as Lehmbruck’s “Kneeling Woman.”
Today, studio executives adventurous enough to try and entice Werner into more conventional enterprises show up at his door, though the issue, as Anthony Lane has written, “is one not of Herzog selling out but of Hollywood wanting to buy in.” Werner’s comrade Tom Luddy, co-founder of the Telluride Film Festival (where the Werner Herzog Theater opened in 2013), describes him as a “pop icon.” Having outlived countless trends, Herzog has moved into the primary currents and is celebrated worldwide, as he suggested would happen. “I think people will get acquainted to my kind of films,” he said in 1982. Werner feels no shame in admitting that the respect of those he respects somehow keeps him going, or, at least, temporarily lessens the burden. But his belief in his abilities has never seriously wavered, which means details of the peaks and troughs of his career – which essentially speak to his treatment at the hands of professional reviewers and the ticket-buying public – are barely touched on throughout the pages of this book. Herzog pays little attention to the chorus. And why should he? It isn’t antagonism he feels towards such folk so much as indifference. His ferocious need to make films and write books will forever trump everything, regardless of the obstacles.