by Paul Cronin
Surely you’ve taken a few risks as a filmmaker.
Perhaps, but only in a calculated and professional way. Generally it’s me who tests the waters before everyone jumps in. As the leader of a platoon, the obligation to walk out front, with everyone following, is yours. I’m the one ultimately responsible for everyone’s safety, and I would never ask anything of an actor or technician I wouldn’t do myself. A director has to be on an equal footing with those around him, and by doing so establish a sense of solidarity. There is a scene in Signs of Life where the soldiers are playing with fireworks; that’s my hand in the close-up as the rocket – which really was full of gunpowder – is being lit. I tested the rapids of the raging river during production on Aguirre before anyone else went down there, and walked ahead of the cameraman into a minefield in Kuwait during production on Lessons of Darkness. It was cold while we were filming the sequences of Nosferatu with the rats, so when we released thousands of them onto the streets of Delft they all clustered together to keep warm. I ran in to try and disperse them, and was bitten at least twenty times. When you see rats crawling over naked feet in the film, that’s also me; no one else wanted to do it. Years ago, when I was staging an opera, I thought about having a stuntman crashing down from the rigging about fifty feet above the stage, as if a mountain climber had fallen from a rock face and disappeared into the clouds below. He had to hit a narrow space – an opening in the floor with a large air cushion underneath – and it wasn’t easy to achieve this from such a height. We couldn’t afford a stuntman, so I decided to test the fall myself. I was hoisted up incrementally, trying it from various different heights, beginning at ten feet. Eventually, at a height of about thirty-five feet, I jumped down and got severe whiplash in my neck. I realised it was ridiculous to try from fifty feet, and immediately scrapped the whole idea.
In the jungles of Guyana, making The White Diamond, I wanted footage from above the jungle canopy, but knew that the test flight of the electrically powered dirigible might be the only time it ever flew. I couldn’t ask our cameraman to go up because a few years earlier a cameraman had died while filming something similar on the maiden flight of a prototype airship, so I insisted on shooting it myself, though the aerospace engineer Graham Dorrington – who designed and built the dirigible – was resistant. For a shot in Rescue Dawn I wanted the actors to run across an old rope-and-plant bridge that spanned a stretch of flowing water. Christian Bale rightly insisted the bridge be checked before he made his move, which I did myself. When we filmed the scene of Christian and Steve Zahn moving downstream on the raft, I was in the water with them for hours. During the scene where Dieter eats a plate of wriggling maggots, I told Christian I would also eat some, but he let me off the hook. “Just roll the camera,” he said. My first question to him when we met to discuss the film was: “How do you feel about sleeping in the jungle at night and waking up covered in leeches? Are you prepared to bite a live snake in half and eat it?” When he said, “Yes,” it was clear we would be able to work together. I also told Christian – who spent months losing nearly sixty pounds under medical supervision – that I would lose half as much weight as he had to for the role, and ended up something like thirty pounds lighter. It would have been counterproductive if I showed up on set as emaciated as him.
How did you lose the weight?
It had nothing to do with dieting. Just eat less and move more. Let me add something about risk by mentioning two individuals who fascinate me. Quirinus Kuhlmann was a virtually unknown baroque poet, deeply, dangerously into the essence of life. He staged the last crusade by criss-crossing Europe on foot while preaching – he called it a divine mission – and eventually set off with two hysterical women, a mother and daughter, for Constantinople, where he attempted to set up a Jesus Kingdom. The women abandoned him in Venice, absconding with some sailors, and the ship left without him, so he jumped into the water and almost drowned. He was hoisted aboard and taken to Constantinople, where he was imprisoned after trying to convert the Sultan. He eventually arrived in Moscow, where he incited some sort of religious riot – which was misunderstood by the authorities as a political one – was imprisoned again and then, together with his books, burnt at the stake. For a time I had a vague idea about making a film with Kinski about Kuhlmann’s life and ecstasies. Joseph Plateau was a Belgian physicist, the first person to study the principle of persistence of vision, the afterglow of light on the retina, which is the fundamental principle of moving images in cinema. I consider Plateau to be one of the most significant explorers who ever lived. His tests rendered him blind because he stared directly into the sun for too long. He’s a hero; the man sacrificed his eyes for cinema. Was it worth it? Perhaps, because he helped give meaning to our existence. There is nothing wrong with perishing in the travails and tribulations of life.
You recently uncovered your first effort as a filmmaker, made in 1957, when you were fifteen.
One of my friends, Tony Fischer, was a tall, handsome guy who kept telling me he was better looking than Gary Cooper and could act him off the screen, so one day I decided to put him to the test. My older brother was working in a trading company that had a cafeteria, and we got permission to film there one weekend. That was our western saloon. We put in swing doors, then nailed up a “WHISKY” sign and a “WANTED” poster. The result was a primitive silent, about six minutes long, on 8mm. There isn’t much to it; it was the joy of kids making a film. We wore the most basic cowboy costumes we could get our hands on, played cards, swigged from a whisky bottle and got into a bar fight. Today I call it A Lost Western. It turned out that Tony did look as good as Gary Cooper, but was abysmally bad as an actor. A few years ago I was at the film museum in Turin and saw one of the first films ever made, Nain et géant, by Georges Méliès, from 1901. At the time there was a retrospective of my work in town and I was able to watch, back-to-back, A Lost Western and this early piece of cinema. What struck me was how similar my first film is to the Méliès short. It’s as if, like those pioneers, I too was inventing cinema in my own way.
You have said Herakles was more an experiment in editing than anything else.
Looking at the film today I find it rather pointless, though at the time Herakles was an important test for me. It was some kind of an apprenticeship; I felt it would be better to make a film than go to film school. I was friendly with the boss of a company who gave me several shots from the newsreels he produced, all for free. I took various pieces of this material and intercut it with footage I filmed myself of bodybuilders, including Mr Germany 1962. It was fascinating to edit such seemingly disconnected and diverse material, all these images and sounds that wouldn’t normally fit comfortably together. A special spirit invades cinema when you marry together elements usually kept apart. One of the most interesting things in the film is a shot of a policeman at the Le Mans racetrack in 1955, immediately after a horrific accident that killed more than eighty people, when burning fragments of a car flew into the spectators’ stand. He is so stunned by what has happened that he has no idea what to do, and just stares into the camera. There is a beautiful saying: “The best description of hunger is a description of bread.” In the same way, the best description of a catastrophe is the blank stare of this policeman.
The film focuses on the strongman, a figure that resonates throughout your work.
I have always felt a close affinity to strongmen. “Strongman” is a word that reverberates beyond mere physical abilities; it encompasses intellectual strength, independence of mind, confidence and perhaps some kind of innocence. I make a distinction between strongmen and bodybuilders. I don’t like the quasi-beauty ideal that has emerged from bodybuilding; the complete opposite is actually more compelling. Many years ago the author Herbert Achternbusch and I talked about establishing a publishing company. Nothing came of it except our name, Fehler-Pferd, which literally means “All-Malady-Horse,” and the logo we designed, which was adapted from an image issued by a major American pharmaceutical compa
ny that produced various drugs for horses. It was of a horse suffering from every conceivable illness and visible disease, just to show what can go wrong: a drooping lip, multiple hernias, a sagging, broken back, malnutrition, splintered hoofs. A truly wretched sight, the negative definition of beauty. We never published a single book, though the idea remains alive in my mind.
My fascination with strongmen probably stems from my childhood heroes when I lived in Sachrang. One of them was an old farmhand called Sturm Sepp [“Stormin’ Joe”]. He must have been about eighty years old and was more than six feet tall, though you couldn’t tell because he was always bent over. He was a strange, almost biblical figure with a full beard and long pipe, and was always silent; we never got him to say so much as a word about himself, or utter a single sound. We would taunt him when he was out mowing in the field, and he would go after us, swinging his scythe. I vividly remember watching Sturm Sepp, stark naked, washing himself with a bunch of roots, underneath the freezing, thundering waterfall in the ravine behind the house where I grew up. The story told to us children was that at one time he had been so strong that when his mule collapsed as it was pulling some tree trunks, Sepp loaded several enormous logs onto his shoulders and carried them down the mountain. Because of this feat of strength, he had been bent over at the waist ever since. There was also a legend that during the First World War Sepp single-handedly took an entire squad of French soldiers prisoner, twenty-four men in all. He was so quick at running across the hills, popping up again and again in different places, that the French – encamped in a small hollow down in the valley – thought they were surrounded by a massive detachment of Germans. I can still picture the scene in my mind.
My other childhood hero was Siegel Hans. He was a lumberjack, a brave, daring young chap with rippling Mr Universe muscles, and the first person in the village to own a motorcycle. We truly revered and admired him. Once, when the milk truck broke through a wooden bridge, Siegel Hans was fetched to help. He climbed down into the stream, took off his shirt, revealing his bulging muscles for all to see, and tried to heave the truck back up again with his bare hands. He didn’t succeed, but the fact that he even attempted it was enough to inspire in us an awe that I am unable to comprehend today. It’s an image I used decades later in Invincible. Siegel Hans was involved in a local smuggling operation, where a load of coffee was brought across the border with the collusion of customs officers. When the police came for Siegel Hans, he leapt out of a window and fled straight up the nearest mountain, the Geigelstein. At the summit he blew on his trumpet and the police set off in pursuit. When they arrived at the peak they suddenly heard Siegel Hans’s trumpet from the opposite mountaintop. And so it went on, to and fro, for days. The whole village revered him for this; we went into positively religious ecstasies over him. In the end he gave himself up. I remember thinking that to evade the police in the valley for so long he had actually run around the entire German border. It’s like shooting a bullet from a powerful rifle that will ultimately hit you in your own back because it orbits the entire planet.
When I was growing up, these kinds of tales – of mythological heroes and lumberjacks getting into bar-room brawls, which you see in Heart of Glass – were ever present. The farmer next to our little house was another very strong guy called Beni, and for a couple of years Siegel Hans was always challenging him to a fight. These two bull-headed men would sit in the pub, beer steins in hand, staring at each other, then all of a sudden do something violent. To this day I can look at two Bavarians enjoying themselves at the Oktoberfest and know whether in the next ninety seconds they are going to start fighting. The signs are subtle, but I can read them. There is actually a law in Bavaria stating there must be two grooves on either side of a stein handle so it breaks off easily, otherwise too many skulls would be fractured. One day a fight erupted while I was in the pub. Siegel Hans eventually got Beni’s head down into the urinal as the entire village cheered them on, shouting, “We have to know who is the strongest in the village!”
Soon after finishing Herakles, you won the Carl Mayer Award for your screenplay Signs of Life.
My behaviour at the time was ridiculous, but I was so convinced of my abilities that I arrogantly told my brothers I didn’t need to read the other scripts I was competing against; I knew mine was the best. The jury held its session in Munich, and when one of its members rang at my door late one night with great excitement to tell me I had won the award – worth about $7,000 – I looked at him and said, “You don’t have to wake me past midnight to tell me that. I already knew.” Although the film wasn’t made for a few years, the award was a step forward. At the time I felt it gave me real momentum and would carry me for a decade.
My next film was The Unprecedented Defence of the Fortress Deutschkreuz, financed by money I got from the screenplay award. The basic expenses were for raw stock, lab fees and something for the four actors. It’s a short film about a group of men protecting an abandoned castle from imaginary attackers, the same story I worked with a few years later in Signs of Life. They barricade themselves inside a fortress and wait aimlessly for an enemy they know will never show up, then leave and take a wheat field by storm. At the start of the film the voiceover sounds like a commentary on the action, then emerges as deranged chatter that does nothing to clarify the situation, completely disconnected from what is happening on screen. This unreliable narrative gives the film a hallucinatory feeling. It isn’t even clear whether these four men inside the fortress are playing a game or if they really are at war.
You made a film between Herakles and The Unprecedented Defence of the Fortress Deutschkreuz.
Game in the Sand, which was more of a proper film than Herakles, but actually only a few people have seen it. I was careful to take it out of circulation almost immediately after finishing it, though at the time I did show it to friends. It’s the one film I will never publicise in my lifetime; I might even destroy the negative before I die. It was filmed in the Burgenland province, in southeast Austria, and when Volker Schlöndorff saw the footage he decided to shoot his first film, Young Törless, in the same village. Game in the Sand is about four children and a rooster. During shooting I had the feeling things were moving out of control; the boys involved in the filming became violent, and I did nothing to stop them. When I look back, the film should probably not have been made at all, though I did incorporate elements of it into Signs of Life, when Meinhard walks along the beach and comes across a heap of sand out of which is sticking the head of a rooster. Fortunately, something useful came out of my experiences, which is that I was able to establish – firmly and with absolute certainty – my own personal ethical boundaries. I learnt how important it was to set the parameters within which I would work as a filmmaker and ensure I had control over every situation. I learnt this by accident, by making a mistake.
You visited the United States for the first time.
There were offers from producers who wanted to buy the screenplay for Signs of Life and make the film, but I turned them all down; I knew I had to direct it myself. I couldn’t find anyone to finance the film, even after shooting those early shorts and winning the screenplay award, so in 1964 I applied for and was awarded a scholarship to study in the United States. It gave me free choice about where to go, but I didn’t want to head to a fancy city like New York or Los Angeles, so I chose Pittsburgh, a place populated by real working people, by welders. It was a world I understood. I took the boat from Bremerhaven, not long before transatlantic flying became the norm, and remember sailing for ten days, enjoying the anticipation of arrival. What I didn’t know was that by the early sixties Pittsburgh was in heavy decline; the steel mills were shutting down and life for many people was falling apart. My plan was to study at Duquesne University, but I had no idea there was such a difference in quality between American universities, and quickly felt Duquesne wasn’t the right place for me. Three days after I arrived I returned my scholarship and ended up penniless, with no host family and
no passage home.
I was a drifter in Pittsburgh for a few weeks before being picked up from the side of the road by the Franklin family. Evelyn, the widowed mother, had six children between the ages of seventeen and twenty-seven, as well as her own ninety-three-year-old mother. I owe them so much, this wonderful, crazy family who let me stay in the attic of their house near Fox Chapel, where I lived for almost six months. The youngest children were twin seventeen-year-old girls. Billy, the eldest son, was a failed rock star who would spend his nights playing gigs in bars. Grandma, hoping he would one day lead a virtuous life, tried to wake him every morning at seven, banging on his door and reciting Bible verses. Billy would eventually emerge, stark naked, at around four in the afternoon, talking wildly to his cocker spaniel in an invented language and theatrically pounding his chest, bemoaning his sinful life to Grandma. The twin girls would come home from school at around the same time, with a couple of friends in tow, who would screech and flee at the site of the naked Billy. Another brother had fallen from a moving car as a child; his speech had been slow and slightly slurred ever since. He had served part of his military service at Ramstein Air Base, not far from Frankfurt, and from him I took the line “Was ist los? Der Hund ist los” and used it in Stroszek. It was the only German phrase he picked up in two years. The father – an alcoholic – had died a couple of years before I showed up. It was extraordinary how Evelyn ran this wild bunch, having added “The Kraut” into the family mix; I gave the mayhem added colour. That’s mostly what they called me, though it changed depending on Grandma, because every second day she would ask me what my name was. “Werner,” I said. “Ah, Wiener,” she would say. Her hearing wasn’t good and she was rather gaga. Actually, the name stuck, and even today, when he writes to me, my brother Lucki addresses his emails to Wiener. My son Rudolph calls me Wiener and to my granddaughter Alexandra I am Pappous Wiener. A few days later Grandma would call me something like “Urfan” or “Urban,” so the twin girls sometimes called me “Urban Wiener, the Kraut.” At the time I was good at high-jumping and the only one who could reach the ceiling of the living room with my head, which occasionally made me “The Leaping Kraut.”