by Paul Cronin
Light and darkness play an important role in Nosferatu.
That film is probably the one major exception to my lack of interest in aesthetics. I felt a certain respect had to be paid to the classical formulae of cinematic genres, in this case the vampire film. The opening shot of the bat was filmed with a camera running at several hundred frames a second, and the final image of the film is two combined shots: one of a beach in Holland, with strong winds and sand flying everywhere; the other of clouds filmed separately, in single exposures, which is why they move so fast. In post-production I flipped the shot of the clouds upside down and superimposed it on the top half of the screen so that they bulge down from a dark sky into the landscape. It gives the sequence a heavy sense of doom, as if evil were spreading out into the world from this one single point. Underneath we see Jonathan Harker – now a vampire himself – riding towards the horizon, ready to infect the landscape around him. It’s a profoundly pessimistic image, and by doing it like this I can hardly deny I was attempting to create a specific stylised look for the shot. The landscapes of Nosferatu, especially this one, are more mythical than geographically exact. There are no credits at the end of the film because, in some way, the story continues inside of all of us. The music is Gounod’s St Cecilia Mass, which gives an almost religious feeling to the whole thing. The cameraman Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein and I spent time discussing the placement of lights for various shots in Nosferatu, but that was mainly because in the film the vampire has no reflection in mirrors, which meant we needed to create a number of carefully planned lighting effects, such as when the creature enters Lucy’s attic bedroom while she is sitting in front of a mirror. The first shadow that appears on the back wall was cast not by Kinski, but by someone else wearing a cape, pointy ears and claws. Kinski was standing next to the camera, and only when it pans slightly to the right do we see his true shadow on the wall, then Kinski himself. It was a complex moment to orchestrate, done without technical tricks.
I worked with Schmidt-Reitwein on Fata Morgana, Land of Silence and Darkness, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Heart of Glass. He has a strong feeling for darkness and contrast, threatening shadows and gloom, I suspect in part because he experienced prison and darkened dungeons himself. Just after the Berlin Wall went up he was caught smuggling his girlfriend out of the East and placed in solitary confinement for several months. At the time the East German regime insisted that the wall had been built as a protective barrier against the fascist intruders, though trading was still going on between the two countries. The East Germans sometimes took hostages under a petty pretext and would imprison people for years, waiting until some kind of exchange could take place. Schmidt-Reitwein had worked for a single week at the television station RIAS [Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor] in Berlin, which was partially financed through the United States, so the East Germans insisted he was a CIA agent. He was swapped for a wagon full of butter after three years of imprisonment. I think this experience formed much of what the man is today; once these people emerge from under ground they see the world with different eyes.
For a while Schmidt-Reitwein and I shared an apartment in Munich and planned to establish something like a late-mediaeval guild, with workshops and apprentices. When one of the small film laboratories in Munich went bankrupt, we even contemplated buying it so we could strike our own prints. Thomas Mauch, who shot Signs of Life, Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, is the cameraman I would go to when I needed something more physical and spontaneous, images with more innocent vitality to them. He has a phenomenal sense for the rhythm of what is unfolding before him. Sometimes there were difficult choices about which of these two fine cameramen to work with on particular films, but I think I made the right decisions over the years. If I had taken Schmidt-Reitwein to the jungle for Fitzcarraldo, the camera would probably have been more static, and certain scenes would have been stylised, with more elaborate lighting.
Do you ever plan shots before arriving on set?
Some shots are formulated and blocked beforehand: for example, in Invincible, when the strongman is dying in hospital and rises out of bed because he hears piano music. “My ears are ringing,” he says. “Somebody must be thinking of me.” The camera follows his gaze as he looks towards the window at his little brother, who gets out of his chair and pushes the curtain aside. Outside, through the window, we see his five-year-old sister looking at us. There is a shot near the end of Signs of Life where the camera moves forward towards a window, and through it we see fireworks exploding in the sky. The whole thing was carefully planned.
But generally I function best in the unknown, and have an intuitive sense about where to put the camera and when to turn it on. Apart from what I see in my head, I usually plan nothing visually and have no advance plan of the specific shots required that day. I don’t even touch the screenplay until the first day of shooting. I might go through it quickly to establish how many locations are needed, but constantly re-reading a script suffocates the life out of it. I prefer to keep things dormant, which means that when I pick up the screenplay on set – sometimes months after last looking at it – the material is as fresh for me as it is for everyone else, and I can rediscover the story again. It’s like being thrown onto a distant island that no one has ever seen before and stepping onto the shore alongside a small group of survivors. I might be disorientated for a few moments, but I quickly set about exploring my surroundings with fresh eyes, determining exactly what needs to be done.
I work closely with the cameraman to determine where the camera should be, but usually only when we’re on set. When it comes to these kinds of decisions, as I said, the important thing is to know your story and what the scene is about. In Invincible there’s a scene in the circus in which Zishe challenges the famous strongman. The person doing continuity kept asking, “How many shots are we going to do for this scene?” Eventually I looked at her and said, “At least one.” I told her just to watch along with everyone else. “Let it develop. Let’s see what they do and if it holds its suspense and substance.” We ended up shooting four and a half minutes in a single shot; it was so good we needed only a couple of cutaways to trim it down. I explained what I wanted from the two actors, who were friends and knew each other from strongman competitions. At every moment they knew where each was leading the other and what the next move was going to be, so I let things develop naturally.
When I direct, I feel like a football coach who has given tactics to his team but knows how vital it is for the players to react to unexpected situations. Too much planning means things become stale. If a footballer worked out his every move in advance, he wouldn’t be a very effective player. My approach to filming is that from the start I have a general sense of what I want, but allow the action to develop naturally without knowing precisely what camera angles and how many shots will be needed. If a scene develops differently from my original idea because of the actors or vagaries of the location, but does so without major deviation from the original story, I generally try to encompass those new elements. As a filmmaker you have to be open to opportunities, even actively encourage them. My cinema is killed stone dead without the outside world to react to. It’s the same thing when I stage opera. As any theatre actor or singer will tell you, each individual performance has a life to it, and room has to be given to allow certain characteristics to emerge and develop, otherwise the vitality of the live performance dies.
There was a scene in Aguirre I wanted to film near the rapids, but that day I was awoken at four in the morning to discover the river was about to flood. In a matter of hours the water had risen by ten or twelve feet. Our rafts were damaged and the set was under water. A location already established during shooting no longer existed. There was no more shore; it had disappeared. If Aguirre had been a Hollywood production, this would all have been a major catastrophe, because it meant filming would grind to a halt. The crew would have stayed put, generating a massive bill, but nothing would be shot. I decided to find a more direct solution
and immediately made the flood an integral part of the story by incorporating the high water into the script. I rewrote a scene where the conquistadors realise there is no way back for them, something that precipitates a row between Aguirre and Ursúa. There was no other way to overcome this obstacle to production. It had to be embraced and turned to our advantage, even acting as an accelerator on the film’s narrative.
Filmmaking is a more vulnerable journey than other creative ventures. A sculptor has only a lump of rock to chisel away at, but filmmaking involves complex organisation, money, people, expensive equipment. There are so many intermediaries between an idea and its realisation, so many things that can go wrong. Problems will befall you at every turn. You can build a ship, cast five thousand extras, then plan a scene with your leading actors, but in the morning one of them might be ill and can’t make it to the set. You might get the best shot of your life, but if the lab mixes the developing solution incorrectly or your hard drive crashes, the images are lost for ever. Your producers might insist there is enough money in the budget for something, but at the last minute an entire sequence has to be dropped. Everything is interwoven and interlinked, and if one element doesn’t function properly, the whole venture is prone to damage or collapse. There is always the potential for a million catastrophes, even failure. People who moan about these kinds of things aren’t suited to this line of business. It’s the very nature of the medium. Your job is to overcome these problems, to cope with the mischievous realities that do everything they can to prevent you from completing your work, to think around corners and respond to unforeseen circumstances. You have to learn how to turn the forces of catastrophe in your favour. Filmmakers should be taught how to talk to a crew that’s getting out of hand, how to negotiate with a bureaucrat so the right paperwork is signed, how to handle a producing partner who won’t pay up or a distributor who won’t advertise properly. Flexibility is the lifeblood of a filmmaker, and anyone unable to respond to whatever is being thrown won’t get through their first day on the job. The film director has to be a lion tamer of the unexpected.
Do you rehearse with actors?
Only on set, never weeks beforehand in some bright, air-conditioned office in Santa Monica. The best dialogue is sometimes written on location to fit each actor’s unique mannerisms and personal style of speech, as well as the physical conditions of the film set. After I hear the lines spoken, I might decide to alter them or ask how the actors would speak a particular sentence in their own words. If during this process the exact dialogue as written is modified, but the feel and spirit of the scene remains the same, I discard the original script pages. An actor might say his assigned lines and everyone cringes. In the Rescue Dawn screenplay, when Dieter crawls out of the hut, Duane originally said something like, “God be with you, Dieter.” I looked at Steve Zahn, who had turned purple. “I know what you’re thinking, Steve,” I said. “What would you say?” The line became “Good luck, Dieter.” Actors should always have the liberty to bring real life into a scene. When writing a screenplay I’m conscious that things might change once we start shooting, and when I make a film I always keep things open, ready for an invasion of the unexpected.
Altering dialogue is always possible, but it has to be done within a clear framework; for me improvisation isn’t an open door for the actor. Spontaneity can reveal things about characters – for example, when I worked with Bruno S. – but it’s not as if I set up the camera, bring in the actors and say, “Let’s improvise something.” Sometimes I gave Kinski more space to manoeuvre than I would other actors, and on several occasions I figured it was better just to let him step out in front of the camera without any direction. The only thing I told him about the bell-tower sequence of Fitzcarraldo before we shot it was that he had to be in complete ecstasy and fury, and shout down into the town that the church would be closed until he had constructed an opera house. Kinski himself didn’t know exactly what he was going to say until the camera was rolling. At other times he needed precise guidance and restrictions, so I would physically block through the actions, reining him in where necessary. If anyone asked him about such things, of course, he would vehemently deny it, insisting he made every decision himself.
I knew I had to allow Nicolas Cage a certain freedom to add something extra to Bad Lieutenant and let him be an architect of his own character. He has the keen sense of a member of a jazz quintet who takes off and improvises with great fluidity, but keeps within the melody and rhythm of the overall piece. In the scene where he intimidates the couple outside the bar, it was Nicolas’s idea to fire a shot into the air. Much of the scene in which he interrogates the two women in the nursing home was ad-libbed; the old ladies were genuinely terrified. I threw out an old Bavarian saying to Nicolas – “Turn the hog loose!” – and stood there in amazement. We actually shot two versions, one with him harassing them with the gun and one without. I rarely want a second version of a scene, but had a feeling it was over the top. During editing it was immediately clear the first version with the gun was best. It became a truly extraordinary moment, establishing some kind of secret conspiracy between audiences and the film, as if we’re being given the opportunity to laugh at things we have never before been allowed to enjoy. Nicolas and I had great confidence in each other; he knew I wanted him to go to unexplored limits. Sometimes he would start a scene with something in mind, but I don’t think even he knew precisely what he was going to say until the moment the words came out.
Do you ever talk to actors about “character motivation”?
Jeremy Davies is a hugely gifted and dedicated actor who insisted on half starving himself in preparation for his role in Rescue Dawn. He was already very skinny, but decided he wanted to lose even more weight and seemed to eat nothing during filming; he only drank water. If he had half a line to say, he would ambush me in the hotel the night before with twenty-five pages of ideas and arguments about his character’s motivations. “Jeremy,” I said, “I’m too tired to read all this, and even if I weren’t, I still wouldn’t look at it. Just read the script and you will know everything you need to know. Tomorrow we do the scene. Tomorrow you will stand and deliver.” He’s deeply involved in all things cerebral and psychological, always wanting to discuss his character endlessly. If he had entered into this labyrinthine way of playing the part, we would never have finished the film. Occasionally I would show up on the set and frighten him by suggesting we shoot a totally different scene to the one he had prepared for. Thankfully, however, he’s nothing like the conceited, vacuous actors that often emerge from certain theatrical traditions. Let it be said here that Lee Strasberg was a skunk. Marlon Brando would have done his best work regardless of time spent with him. Any kind of methodology when it comes to acting is an embarrassment.
There are no general rules about working with actors; everyone needs to be handled differently. I don’t, as a rule, have precise instructions for performers and generally avoid showing them what I want by acting things out myself, but when I do it’s usually to help set the tone. I listen to the rehearsal and might say, “It has to be softer, slower. Take your time.” On Aguirre I took Daniel Ades aside; he played Aguirre’s henchman Perucho, who sings softly to himself just before he blows up the raft on the other side of the river, hangs Ursúa from a tree and cuts off the head of the soldier who is talking of deserting. Ades would put a melody into it, something like “La-la-LA-la-la,” instead of “La-la-la-la-la.” I told him not to sing. “Speak it, in only one level of pitch,” I said. “It has to be dangerous and well timed. Do it in a single tone, like a telex machine rattling on in exactly the same monotone, and it will be much more menacing.”
Your early screenplays are written differently from the average script.
I don’t usually slavishly fill page after page with dialogue; in my early scripts some key speeches are there, but no more than that. Rather than having dialogue on the page word for word, the script will describe in general terms what characters are saying. S
ome of my screenplays – like Signs of Life and Where the Green Ants Dream – have more dialogue than others, but my first few were written in prose form, full of detailed descriptions of action that include scene titles, like “Descent into the Urubamba Valley.” I put down on paper only things seen and heard; rarely do you read about what these characters are thinking, something best left to a novel. Over the years I have been forced to write certain scripts because I was working with producers who wouldn’t sign a contract unless I presented them with something in the form of a screenplay. I felt that if I had to write things down, then I should at least attempt something new with the form, so I’ve always tried to give my scripts a life independent from the resulting films. This is why my published screenplays appear without photos incorporated into the text, because I don’t want to reference the films themselves. I have forever been trying to create a new genre of literature. Look at the opening lines of the Cobra Verde script: “The light murderous, glaring, searing; the heavens birdless; the dogs lie dazed by the heat. Demented from anger, metallic insects sting glowing stones.” These aren’t literal images; they offer a certain mood to the reader. More than anything else it’s about atmosphere, rhythm and conjuring up images in the mind. In no other professional screenplay will you find prose as you do in mine.
Small film crews are best.
On Rescue Dawn there were times when Christian Bale, Steve Zahn, Peter Zeitlinger, the sound man and I would escape the rest of the crew and shoot a couple of scenes on our own. We had fourteen trucks full of personnel and equipment, constantly travelling down narrow jungle roads. It took them at least an hour to load everything and another half an hour just to turn around and drive to the next location, which meant I was sometimes able to grab a skeleton crew, jump into a van and rush over there before everyone else had even finished packing up. I wanted to work with this nucleus that I knew could take care of the essentials efficiently. By the time the trucks had arrived, we already had the scene in the can. I’ve never particularly enjoyed dealing with a clumsy apparatus like a big film crew. I can’t stand having too many people on set; I find myself having to work around them. Sometimes you have to bypass certain things to stay dynamic, quick and lively, and get your work done.