by Paul Cronin
Lock picking?
Definitely a crucial skill, requiring sensitivity and patience, as Philippe Petit revealed during his Film Lessons presentation, when he showed how to pick a pin tumbler lock and escape from handcuffs. Imagine you need to get a shot of a street but a truck is blocking your view. During the filming of Stroszek in Wisconsin a truck stopped right in front of the camera, so I asked the driver if he would move it. “No way!” he said, and went for lunch. Without him noticing I moved the truck a couple of hundred feet away, got the shots we needed, then drove it back to the exact same spot an hour later. Perhaps one day you’ll be forced to break into your home or office because your production manager is on the other side of the world with the keys in his pocket.
Filmmaking requires a certain attitude. Liberties have to be taken now and then, and occasionally we have to step beyond the strictures of the law. Philippe Petit is the only person ever to walk on a tightrope between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, a distance of two hundred feet, more than four hundred metres up. In Vienna we spoke of the years of planning and organisation required, about how he carried a ton of equipment to the top of the towers, of the documents and ID cards he forged in order to complete his task, about how he played the role of a homeless man, then a French journalist who was writing an article about the construction of the World Trade Center, and how to deflect suspicion and ensure that the authorities are looking the other way when you need them to. He talked about evading security guards when he was setting up the equipment he needed to make the walk from one tower to the other. He and a co-conspirator were about to be busted, so he started pushing his colleague aggressively, shouting things like, “You’re doing a lousy job! What’s the matter with you? I told you Tuesday, not Wednesday!” The two of them stormed off and the guard didn’t dare say anything. No one wants to interfere with a man in the middle of a fight. Philippe pointed out that the opposite also works, that people won’t bother you when you’re laughing your heart out.
A participant at one Rogue session was a former hostage negotiator; he’ll surely make a fine filmmaker. Another told us the story of a film he was making in Portugal about street kids. He had been filming for weeks with a group and got release forms signed by every child and parent but one. Once the film had been edited, he spent months tracking down this last kid whose signature was missing; the production company and television station insisted on it. The filmmaker never found the boy and had to cut him from the film. I assure you that if I had been involved, I would have grabbed a pen myself and solved this particular problem in no more than ten seconds. Release forms are a subtle form of censorship, which has shifted away from governments, production companies and television stations towards issues of insurance, risk aversion and fear of being sued. Errors and Omissions is the high priest at the altar of bureaucracy. That said, it can never be permissible to forge a signature if it incriminates anyone or puts them in jeopardy.
The original plan for My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done was to film the flashback sequences in northern Pakistan, but it was too dangerous to take an American production there. We decided on Kashgar in western China instead, which had been an important intersection on the ancient Silk Road. The cattle market, where we filmed, is a vast, open space full of hundreds of people who look exactly as they did a thousand years ago. Obtaining a shooting permit was next to impossible, so actor Michael Shannon and I pretended to be tourists. The place was volatile, swarming with police and Chinese military; a few weeks later the Uighur uprising took place and several hundred people lost their lives. We were particularly conspicuous because Michael – who is six foot three inches tall – had a small video camera mounted on a protruding wooden arm strapped to his chest, which pointed directly at his face. I moved ahead of him, leading us into the densest crowds I could find, where the throng was thickest; everyone who saw us stared directly into the lens. We ended up near a line of twenty policemen. I had no idea if they were going to challenge us, so to pre-empt any trouble I walked directly towards them. In such situations a single policeman will stop you, but a crowd hardly ever does; everyone thinks someone else will take charge. Not making eye contact and mumbling to myself, I said, “Hast du Harty gesehen?” [“Have you seen Harty?”], and we walked straight past them. With airport customs officials I use another technique. I stride towards them with my gaze fixed in the distance, as if I’ve spotted a friend waiting for me. Very occasionally it works.
About halfway through shooting Aguirre, it looked as though everything we filmed had been lost in transit to the laboratory in Mexico, where the exposed negative was to be processed. The plan was for everything to be transported to Lima, and from there to Mexico City. Our only form of communication with the lab was a telex machine, but they insisted no negative had been received. Only my brother Lucki and I knew that everything might be irretrievably lost; we told none of the actors or crew because they would have instantly freaked out. We knew it was an absurdity to continue shooting because we had no insurance, so there was no choice but to muster our nerve and carry on with our work. I thought perhaps the lab had accidentally destroyed everything, but had a hunch there was a problem with the shipping company in Lima. They insisted the material had been sent to Mexico, so I asked Lucki to head down there and told him to enter their offices, if necessary by force. He eventually scaled a high fence and found all the footage thrown away, scattered inside the sealed-off customs area at Lima airport, baking in the scorching sun. The shipping agency had bribed various airport employees to stamp the documents, which “proved” our negative had left the country. Apparently it was too much trouble to actually send the material. Lucki grabbed everything and took it to Mexico City himself. So I tell you all now: whenever you have to, Jump the Fence. And if you can’t do that, barbed wire is easy enough to get through; just set about it with wire cutters. Razor wire is something else. Find a mattress to cover it before making the leap.
What films do you screen at Rogue?
Who said anything about watching films? I tell the Rogues to read, read, read, read, read. Those who read own the world; those who immerse themselves in the Internet or watch too much television lose it. If you don’t read, you will never be a filmmaker. Our civilisation is suffering profound wounds because of the wholesale abandonment of reading by contemporary society.
I give the Rogues a mandatory reading list that has nothing to do with cinema. I tell them to read Virgil, Hemingway, the Codex Regius and Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, which is wonderfully debased, wild storytelling. I recommend the Warren Commission Report, the official government account of President Kennedy’s assassination, an extraordinary crime story with tremendous narrative power and phenomenal, conclusive logic, one of those books that make you rush back home just so you can continue reading. I also suggest a book I discovered fairly recently: J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine, first published in 1967, at a time when peregrine falcons were on the brink of extinction in Britain because of the prevalence of pesticides. There were very few pairs of healthy breeding peregrines left because so many had been poisoned. The intensity and precision of observation in Baker’s book is startling; it’s a text of great beauty. Humans hardly feature at all. Instead, he writes with delirium about the magnificence of the falcon and how it hunts, filling the book with ecstatic descriptions of the peregrine swooping down from the sky. Baker almost becomes a bird himself; it’s like a religious transubstantiation. His fervent fascination, inner involvement and enthusiasm with the natural world, and the way he sees things around him so intensely – truly capturing the essence of a single brief event in such minute detail – are wondrous. It’s the same attitude required of filmmakers, who need to discover and seize upon the intensity within.
There are a few films I ask Rogue participants to watch before they arrive, including Casablanca, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and America, America, all examples of great Hollywood storytelling. I also recommend Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, w
hich I admire because of the acting, and Elia Kazan’s impeccable Viva Zapata!. In no other film have I seen such a powerful introduction of the leading character, played by Marlon Brando. At Rogue I talk about how the ending of a story is just as important as the beginning. Consider how – after sitting for two hours in the darkness staring at the screen – your audience is catapulted back out into a world full of sunshine, noise and traffic. How do you create something that will linger in their souls and not immediately dissipate? Think about the dancing chicken in Stroszek, which people never forget, even if they have no memory of anything else in the film.
You discuss things at Rogue that have nothing to do with cinema per se.
I encourage the Rogues to study languages, including Latin, which means to understand the genesis of our culture and the Western world. I read them “The Catalogue of Dwarfs” from the Icelandic Poetic Edda, an extraordinary collection of Old Norse poems compiled in the fourteenth century and probably handed down, in the oral tradition, a thousand years earlier. Rogue is about making clear the significance of the word just as much as the image.
Out of idle curiosity I have explored things like the mathematical proposition known as Zorn’s lemma. I’m fascinated by the rules, paradoxes and structures that exist in numbers, but which few people can see. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about things like the Riemann hypothesis, the greatest unsolved question in mathematics, which deals with the distribution of prime numbers. At Rogue I talk about the work of the brilliant polyglot British architect Michael Ventris, who in the early fifties deciphered Linear B, a script dating back to something like 1450 BC that was found on hundreds of clay tablets. The intellectual ingenuity, experimentation and guesswork that Ventris exercised in determining that Linear B must be an archaic form of Greek was astonishing. He created a series of complex logical grids, similar to those used to encrypt codes during the war, and assigned each of the eighty-seven signs found on the tablets with a phonetic value, making clear that the script is syllabic, not composed of ideograms. An entire culture and civilisation opened up to us thanks to Ventris – only in his late twenties at the time – though unfortunately the tablets deal with tedious bureaucracy and bookkeeping; none of them contain poetry, history or anything particularly interesting. We have inventories of who owed how much to whom; there are mentions of wool, livestock, spices, perfumes and weapons, the kind of work slaves did and how the Mycenaean military was organised, including chariot formations. Regardless, Ventris’s work remains a phenomenal achievement of the human intellect. It’s the kind of exploration I have always enjoyed engaging with. I wonder if he would have been able to decipher the example of Angelyne, who thirty years ago put photos of herself – with her endless facelifts and breast enhancements – on billboards across Los Angeles. Little is known about this woman because she had no profession as such. She wasn’t a singer or a model or a film star; she was just Angelyne. In most cases fame and popularity stem from actually having done something – like being a mass murderer or a television chef or a footballer or a politician – but in Angelyne’s case her prominence came from the fact that her image suddenly appeared around the city. It’s unlikely any Rogue Film School participants would ever want to find out more about Michael Ventris, but that’s not the point. He understood how to read the signs, something every filmmaker has to be able to do. If you don’t keep yourself open to these kinds of fascinations, you will never be a filmmaker.
The only criterion I use when selecting books for the mandatory reading list of Rogue is that they are titles I like to read myself. Everyone ultimately has to create their own list and discover their own intellectual curiosities to dig into, their own Linear B. What distinguishes us from the cows in the field is an inherent human desire to understand the world around us. It doesn’t matter that many of my interests have never been translated directly into my film work. Everything that simmers inside of me eventually finds its expression somehow, somewhere.
You have spoken about being able to establish an instant rapport.
Filmmaking is about creating immediate and profound connections with people. I have a rather biblical-sounding axiom for you: to be a filmmaker you need to know the heart of men.
In Bodhgaya, when we were making Wheel of Time, I saw a monk sitting by himself, surrounded by four hundred thousand pillows, in an enclosed area where not long before had been that many people. It was a beautiful image, something like a metaphor for the concept of nothingness. I was astounded by the seriousness of this one person still praying after so many hundreds of thousands had moved on. My instinct was to leave him in peace. I caught his eye from a hundred feet away and glanced down at our camera; it was a silent way of asking him if we could film. He nodded his permission with a slight, almost imperceptible gesture. He had such a glow that I wouldn’t have done any filming around him had he not agreed to it. Ultimately his dignity was untouched by the camera, and the image of him sitting alone, sunk in prayer, is one of the most significant I have ever captured.
I filmed with Dr Franc Fallico, Alaska’s chief medical examiner, for Grizzly Man. He was the coroner who performed autopsies on Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard. I could tell he was a thoughtful man, so I said, “Today, in front of this camera, you aren’t Dr Franc Fallico. We aren’t in court now and I don’t want you to be matter-of-fact about this. I want to know how you felt when you saw their remains. Twenty-eight pounds of Treadwell, twenty-two of Huguenard found out there in the field, and the rest of both in the stomach of a bear. I want to talk to a human being, not a coroner.” He looked at me, said, “I understand what you mean,” and proceeded to give a remarkable and touching performance, which is in the film.
One of the first things I did when I set about making The Wild Blue Yonder was meet with astronauts from the 1989 spaceshuttle mission. We found ourselves in a large, empty room at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, them in a semicircle of chairs and me sitting opposite. For a minute I didn’t know what to say, and an embarrassed silence hung in the air. Spontaneously I turned to Michael McCulley and said, “As a child in the mountains of Bavaria I learnt to milk cows with my hands. Ever since then I have been able to recognise someone who knows how to milk a cow.” I looked him in the eye, pointed to him and said, “You, sir!” He slapped his thigh, made the gesture of milking a cow and exclaimed, “Yes! I grew up on a farm in Tennessee!” The ice was broken. I can tell from fifty feet away whether someone knows how to tug on an udder.
In Antarctica, during the filming of Encounters at the End of the World, I spoke with David Ainley, who had been studying penguins for twenty years. By the time I met him he didn’t care much for conversations with human beings and wasn’t giving anything away. I set up the camera and microphone very meticulously, procrastinating as much as possible, because I wanted to take time to warm him up and establish a rapport before we started filming. I needed more than just a muffled grunt in response to my questions, so I asked if there were any documented cases of homosexuality in penguins. That got him going. He spoke about seeing a triangular penguin relationship, a case of prostitution involving one female and two males. Then I asked if there was such a thing as derangement among penguins. He told me he had never seen one of the animals banging its head against a rock, though sometimes the creatures become disorientated and end up a long way from the ocean. Who else had ever asked him such questions? He could see there was somebody sitting opposite with an imagination. I hadn’t read a single book about penguins, but I had done some unusual thinking on the subject.
A few years later, during production on Into the Abyss, I had only a few minutes with Reverend Richard Lopez, the death-house chaplain, whose job is to be with prisoners in the moments before and during their execution. He immediately tapped his wristwatch, saying, “I have to be in the death house in forty minutes to assist with an execution.” I had ten seconds to introduce myself before placing him in front of the camera and filming him. He immediately started speaking like a
phoney, superficial television preacher, about a merciful and forgiving God, about redemption for everyone and paradise awaiting us all, about the beauty of Creation. Then he mentioned how much he loves being alone on the golf course in the morning, and how he switches off his cellphone so he can listen to the sounds of nature. He wanted to experience the dew-covered early-morning grass and watch the squirrels and deer running about and a horse looking at him with big eyes. I sensed our conversation was moving in the wrong direction, that I had to put an end to these platitudes, so I stopped him and asked something that nobody else on God’s wide earth would have. From behind the camera, with a cheerful voice, I said, quite spontaneously, “Tell me about an encounter with a squirrel.” Immediately, within twenty seconds, he began to unravel and completely came apart. He was so shaken to his core that he started to weep, talking about the bad choices and mistakes of the many people with whom he had been during the last moments of their life. Although he was able to stop his golf cart before it ran over a squirrel, he couldn’t halt the inexorable procedures of an execution. I don’t know why I asked him about the squirrel; I only knew I had to crack him open. In such situations the film director has to put aside everything that is explicitly professional and rally every ounce of humanity from within.
My job as a filmmaker is to look into the deepest recesses of the soul. When it comes to such things, I have acquired the required vision thanks to certain essential experiences. What is it like to be imprisoned? To go hungry? To raise children? To be stranded alone in the desert? To face genuine danger? To walk a thousand miles? To handle a Kalashnikov? To keep a group of youngsters entertained? To be astounded by poetry? Much of what we do as filmmakers is inexplicable, but the groundwork is done without a camera and the barrier it creates. Give me the name of the film school that teaches such things.