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

by Paul Cronin

  Later I watched Zorro, Tarzan and American B-movies. A Fu Manchu film I saw was a revelation for me. A man was shot and fell sixty feet from a rock, did a somersault in mid-air, then a little kick with his leg. Ten minutes later, because of this little kick I recognised the same shot when it appeared in another gun battle; they had recycled it and thought they could get away with it. I spoke to friends about this and asked how it was possible the same shot had been used twice, but none of them had even noticed. Before this I thought it was some kind of reality I had been watching, that the film was something like a documentary. All of a sudden I saw how it had been narrated and edited, how tension and suspense were established, how a logical sequence of scenes had been pieced together to create a story. At that moment I became fascinated by cinema. In Munich I would steal empty milk bottles from schoolyards and use the deposits to see as many films as possible.

  When I was about twenty-one, a young American named P. Adams Sitney came to Germany and brought with him a selection of experimental films, things like Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger.‡ That there was a group of young filmmakers using this vocabulary and grammar of cinema was exciting to me. I respected these fascinating films, so different from what I was already used to, even though I knew they weren’t the kinds of images I wanted to work with myself. Just seeing there were people out there doing such bold and unexpected things, making films that ran counter to the standard textbook accounts of cinema history, intrigued me so much that I wrote about them and asked a film magazine to publish the article.§ What particularly excited me was that the range and depth of their work came not necessarily from an understanding of film and art, but from a lifetime of reading. The first time I met Stan Brakhage, years later at the Telluride Film Festival, he had a copy of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene in the original archaic English. He explained how important a text it was for him and asked if I wanted to hear some lines from it. “Of course,” I said, at which point he closed the book and recited five minutes of beautiful poetry from memory.

  Have you written poetry yourself?

  As a youngster I entered a competition in Munich for young authors where there were ten awards available for the ten best poems. I submitted five under five different names, all posing as poets who lived together in a commune, and four of them won. What caused a stink was me outing myself by showing up and reading all four winning entries. I remember a couple of names I used; one was “Wenzel Stroszek,” the other was the very Scandinavian “Erika Holmehave.” Years later I published a small number of poems in a German magazine.¶ I did once start a novel when I was on the island of Kos for the first time, at the age of fifteen. I rediscovered the manuscript not long ago when I was clearing things out and realised how similar it is to Signs of Life, which I made a few years later. I might still have a couple of novels in me, but great focus is needed for such a project and these days I don’t have the time. A screenplay can be written quickly and a detective story can be knocked out in three weeks, while no one should spend more than a month on a doctoral dissertation. A novel, however, takes longer. For a while I have contemplated writing a book about battles that never took place because the armies missed each other. I might get around to that one day.

  It’s surprising how few films you have heard of, let alone seen.

  I love cinema, but unlike some filmmakers who spend their lives watching other people’s films – Martin Scorsese, for example, who has his own library of film prints, and for whom cinema is the joy of his life and constant point of reference – I don’t feel the necessity to see three films a day. Three good ones a year are enough for me. I average maybe one film a month, and that’s usually at a festival, where I see them all at once. I’m not a compulsive film-goer, and compared to most directors am hardly what you would call cinematically literate. I can’t imagine my work would be any better or worse if I crawled into a darkened room and spent days watching other people’s efforts.

  Cinema is the strongest fascination in my life. I feel overwhelmed when I see a great film. I might recall something I saw years ago and ache with pain about its beauty, though such things have forever remained a mystery to me. I don’t think I could ever put my finger on what constitutes true poetry, depth and illumination in cinema. I have always wondered how Kurosawa made something as good as Rashomon; the equilibrium and flow are perfect, and he uses space in such a well-balanced way. It’s one of the small handful of truly great films ever made. The sins, on the other hand, are easy to name. The bad films have taught me most about filmmaking. Seek out the negative definition. Sit in front of a film and ask yourself, “Given the chance, is this how I would do it?” It’s a never-ending educational experience, a way of discovering in which direction you need to take your own work and ideas. Herakles, my first blunder, taught me certain important lessons, and from then on I had a much stronger sense as to how I should go about my business. It was good to have made that small film first, rather than jump into something more meaningful.

  You set up your own production company at an early age.

  I was seventeen when I received a call from some film producers who were interested in a proposal I submitted to them. I had avoided meeting with any of these people because I was so young and felt I wouldn’t be taken seriously. The reactions I usually got from producers were probably because my puberty was late; I looked like a child until I was sixteen. I would write letters or speak to them on the phone instead – some of the first calls I ever made – until finally, after a series of conversations, two producers seemed willing to accept me as a first-time director.

  When I walked into their office, I saw the two of them sitting behind a huge oak desk. I remember it second by second. I stood there as they looked beyond me, waiting, as if the father had come into town with his child. The first one shouted something so abusive I immediately wiped it from my memory, while the other slapped his thigh and laughed, shouting, “Aha! The kindergarten is trying to make films nowadays!” The entire encounter lasted fifteen seconds, after which I turned and left the office, knowing full well I would have to become my own producer. The meeting was the culmination of many setbacks and humiliations, and proved to be a pivotal moment for me. “What makes these idiots producers?” I thought to myself, realising then and there that until the end of my days I would be confronted by this kind of attitude if I wanted other people to produce my films. Not long after this meeting, my mother took me to see the husband of a friend of hers, a wealthy industrialist, who she said would explain to me how to set up a production company. He started talking in a ridiculously loud voice and ended up shouting at me for nearly an hour. “This is completely foolish! You idiot! You’ve never been in business before! You don’t know what you’re doing!” Two days later I filled out the necessary paperwork, paid the few dollars to register the company, and founded Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

  Establishing my own company when I so young meant I didn’t really have a proper childhood. I skipped over everything expected of someone my age, like finishing school and becoming an apprentice or attending university. Instead – not even twenty years old – I assumed certain responsibilities that most people confront only at the age of thirty. I probably didn’t live my teenage years in any kind of traditional way either. A few years later, when I made Signs of Life, my first feature, I was still only about twenty-five and looked even younger, but had a certain authority about me. I was always very firm about my ideas and knew exactly what I wanted, which meant the actors – many of whom were older than me – never doubted who was in charge. When the film was released, people who saw it thought I was in my forties or fifties. They were convinced it was the work of an older, more mature director, and found it inconceivable I was so young.

  You are hardly a typical Hollywood mogul.

  My company was formed as an emergency measure because no one else would organise and finance my films, and to this day it has only ever produced my own work. For years I lived with my mother in her Munich a
partment on Neureutherstrasse, which is where I edited many of the early films, though when my eldest son was born my wife and I moved to our own small apartment. Up until the time of Nosferatu I worked out of this place with a telephone and typewriter. There was no clear division between private and professional life; my son was raised amidst a film-production office. Instead of a living room we had an editing room, where my wife and I would sleep. I had no secretary and only family to help with paperwork, bookkeeping and contracts. I did as much as possible myself; it was an article of faith, a matter of simple human decency to do the dirty work as long as I could. Inevitably, by the late seventies, as my work reached larger international audiences and there were more retrospectives being organised and too many people to stay in touch with, as well as more formidable productions being planned, it became difficult to operate that home office on my own, so for years I had a small office in Munich run by my brother and a full-time assistant. Three things – a phone, computer and car – are all you need to produce films. Even today I still do most things myself. Although at times it would be good if I had more support, I would rather put the money up on the screen instead of adding people to the payroll.

  Years ago Twentieth Century Fox was interested in working with me on Nosferatu. The studio executives asked me to travel to Hollywood for a meeting and offered me the use of a mansion so I could sit and write the script. I didn’t particularly want to go, so I invited them to Munich instead. It was almost a test to see how serious they were about the project. One freezing winter morning I met four men – all wearing suits and ties and carrying fancy briefcases – at the airport, and after squeezing them into my Volkswagen drove into the Bavarian countryside. They talked about “financing” a number of screenplays. I didn’t understand what they were talking about. “How much do you need?” they asked. “It will take me a week and cost $1.50 for a hundred sheets of paper,” I said. “Perhaps another dollar for a few pencils.” They looked at each other in bewilderment.

  You paid for your early films yourself.

  During my final two years at high school I worked the night shift as a welder in a steel factory. I did Punktschweissen, the kind of electrical welding that doesn’t require the precise skills of a welder, which is much trickier and takes years to master. Much of what I did was menial assembly work, though occasionally I operated a high-pressure hydraulic machine to shape pieces of metal. I can scarcely remember my last two years at school; I was so tired, working every night until six in the morning, saving every penny. They threatened to throw me out because occasionally I would sleep through class. “It would be justified if you kick me out because I can’t translate a phrase from Latin,” I told my teachers, “but it would be a scandal if you did so because I’m working harder than anyone else.”

  The best advice I can offer to those heading into the world of film is not to wait for the system to finance your projects and for others to decide your fate. If you can’t afford to make a million-dollar film, raise $10,000 and produce it yourself. That’s all you need to make a feature film these days. Beware of useless, bottom-rung secretarial jobs in film-production companies. Instead, so long as you are able-bodied, head out to where the real world is. Roll up your sleeves and work as a bouncer in a sex club or a warden in a lunatic asylum or a machine operator in a slaughterhouse. Drive a taxi for six months and you’ll have enough money to make a film. Walk on foot, learn languages and a craft or trade that has nothing to do with cinema. Filmmaking – like great literature – must have experience of life at its foundation. Read Conrad or Hemingway and you can tell how much real life is in those books. A lot of what you see in my films isn’t invention; it’s very much life itself, my own life. If you have an image in your head, hold on to it because – as remote as it might seem – at some point you might be able to use it in a film. I have always sought to transform my own experiences and fantasies into cinema.

  The owl carved out of a walnut in Signs of Life, the one with a live fly inside, and the mummies at the start of Nosferatu I first saw fifteen years before I filmed them, when I lived for a few months near Guanajuato in Mexico. Around the turn of the century there was no more space to bury anyone, so the authorities excavated the bodies in the local cemetery. It turned out that many had become mummified. There was a nearby underground tunnel where these mummies were placed in long rows, leaning on opposite walls with their mouths open, giving the impression of screaming or singing, which is why I chose choral music to accompany the images. It was an image that kept on coming back to haunt me and I knew it would fit perfectly in Nosferatu. By the time I went back to make the film, the mummies had been placed inside glass cases. I bribed the nightwatchman, who removed them from their transparent coffins so I could shoot them exactly as I remembered them all those years before.

  For Herakles, my first real film, I needed a good amount of cash, relatively speaking, because I wanted to shoot on 35mm, not 16mm. For me, filmmaking could only ever be 35mm; everything else was amateurish. It was also a format that had the capacity to reveal – more than any other – whether or not I had anything of substance to offer. “If I fail,” I said to myself before starting production, “I will fail so hard I can never recover.” At the time I was peripherally involved with a group of filmmakers; there were eight of us, most of whom were slightly older than me. Of the films we planned, four never went into production because the most basic hurdles couldn’t be overcome. Another three were shot but never finished because of sound problems. Mine was the only completed project. It was instantly clear to me what the key to filmmaking was. They have a beautiful expression in Peru: “Perseverance is where the gods dwell.”

  Money has nothing to do with it?

  It was faith, not money, that pulled the boat over the mountain in Fitzcarraldo. I was once asked about what an interviewer called the “disastrous” production of that film. I stopped him in mid-sentence and said, “It was not disastrous. It was glorious, a genuine achievement.” I never made the mistake of thinking that the problems I encountered in the jungle could be resolved with dollar bills. When I went to the Cannes Film Festival and first spoke to producers about Fitzcarraldo, one of them – a friend of mine who would open a fresh bottle of champagne if the one we were drinking from wasn’t cold enough – became excited and asked how much money I needed for pre-production. “A million dollars,” I told him. With a grand gesture he handed over a cheque for that amount, which I pinned to the wall of my office because I knew that was all it was good for. My encounter with this man was a sign that money wasn’t necessarily going to help me get the project off the ground.

  You ended up producing Fitzcarraldo independently.

  “Independent cinema” is a meaningless term. It’s a myth. Real independence is a state of mind, nothing more. To call someone “independent” is to give Hollywood too much credit; studios aren’t the navel of filmmaking or the baseline of anything. There has always been a dependent relationship between financiers, directors and distributors, which means there’s no such thing as true “independent” cinema, with the exception of home movies made for the family album or footage shot with a cellphone at a spring-break beach party in Florida. No one makes films completely alone; audiences and filmmakers have always been reliant on each other, though some – and I include myself here – have perhaps forged a greater degree of self-reliance than most. I have always been ready to roll up my sleeves and take care of whatever needs to be done. From the start I had a strong urge to do things for myself.

  Years ago I was shooting in New York and showed up with a van at an equipment-rental place. “You aren’t allowed to pick up anything yourself,” the man who worked there told me. “A union truck has to deliver it.” We had an endless debate until I grabbed what I needed, put it in my van – which was ten feet from the door of this place – and drove off. I once even considered setting up my own actors’ union. A friend recently asked if I would record a couple of lines for a film he made, but the Screen
Actors Guild told me it wasn’t allowed unless I was paid the standard rate and his company was registered with the union, which my friend couldn’t afford. I found it all completely ridiculous; it’s the kind of mentality that stops emerging filmmakers dead in their tracks. At the time I contemplated establishing a competing labour union for actors. For me the questions were simple. Could I, a German, form a union in America, and how many Founding Fathers would I need? Four, forty or four thousand? There are too many rituals and hierarchies in Hollywood; to be independent means to be free of such things. The union caught up with us during production on Stroszek and announced they were going to send a representative to the set. I told them to meet us in Death Valley, a couple of thousand miles away from where we were shooting. I never heard from them again.

  You have a reputation as someone who goes to extremes.

  If you give a piece of an unknown metal alloy to a chemist, he will examine its structure by putting it under great pressure and exposing it to great heat; this gives him a better understanding of what that metal is composed of. The same can be said of human beings, who often give insight into their innermost being when under duress. We are defined in battle. The Greeks had a saying: “A captain only shows during a storm.” Shooting under a certain amount of pressure and insecurity injects real life and vibrancy that wouldn’t otherwise be there into a film. But I wouldn’t be sitting here if I had ever risked anyone’s life while making a film. I’m a professional who never looks for difficulties; my hope is always to avoid problems.

  During filming on Mount Erebus in Antarctica, I wanted to be lowered down into the live volcano with a camera, but quickly realised how stupidly dangerous it was. However curious I was personally, I knew there wasn’t any good reason to get those shots when it came to the film I was making. I don’t believe in fate and destiny, but I have great faith in probability; I make sure that whatever I do puts me firmly on the side of safety. Perhaps mountaineers are motivated to seek out the most difficult routes, but not me. As a filmmaker, such an attitude would be wholly unprofessional and irresponsible, and being my own producer means it’s especially in my interests to work as efficiently as possible. When it came to Fitzcarraldo, I knew there would be certain inevitable problems to overcome, which meant it was inevitable I wasn’t going to shy away from them. Some challenges can’t be shirked. But in heading directly into such things, I’m only doing my duty. I have never gone out seeking inhospitable terrain to film in, nor have I ever taken idiotic risks, as a blind, stupid daredevil would do. I’m aware of my reputation of being a ruthless madman, but when I look at Hollywood – which is a completely crazed place – it’s clear to me that I’m the only clinically sane person there. As my wife will convincingly testify, I am a fluffy husband.