by Paul Cronin
There is a strong emphasis in Hollywood on story structure.
Things like “story structure” and “character development” all sound so stale to my ears. I know some writers stick postcards over their walls, but that’s all foreign to me. I get hundreds of scripts sent to me every year, many of which are exactly 116 pages, presumably because some bloated “guru” once insisted that a script should be 116 pages, not a line longer. These screenplays are the work of writers in thrall to certain recipes; for example, that by page thirty the hero has to “know his mission” and emerge from the story a changed man. It’s a misguided way of doing things. The result is a series of thoroughly unappetising dishes, the efforts of legions of industry writers who follow the pathetic postulates. I turn my back on such people. They are bedwetters, every one of them.
I am a storyteller who writes so fast he can’t afford to think about the structure of the writing. There is such an urgency to tell the tale that it inevitably creates its own structure. Hollywood scripts are designed to push certain buttons at certain times, which is filmmaking by numbers. There are solid production and distribution systems in Hollywood, and very skilled technicians and craftspeople, but you hardly ever find a good story there any more. The way they do things is deranged, built around the endless rewriting of a script, bringing in one writer after another to produce a screenplay. It would be unimaginable for me to write something five times over. Too much screenwriting today is dictated by boardroom decision-making. Real storytelling will always prevail, just as it has for thousands of years. It’s so much a part of our collective existence, our dreams and nightmares, that it will never be easily brushed aside. I see the role of the film director as being that of the storyteller in a busy, noisy market in Marrakech, surrounded by an excited crowd. He knows he has to hold his audience’s attention at all times. Eventually, when he is finished, if the people are satisfied, he walks away with coins in his hand.
8
Reveries and Imagination
Do you still not own a cellphone?
I’m the only thinking person I know without one. I don’t want to be available at all times. Permanent connectivity isn’t my thing; I have always needed moments of quiet solitude for myself. There’s a Chinese poem from the Tang dynasty about someone describing a boat journey along the Yellow River and leaving his friend behind, a monk on a mountain, in the knowledge that they probably won’t see each other or have any contact for years. This man’s return, decades later, has an indescribable substance and depth. Compare this to standing in line at the airport, chatting on your cellphone to your loved one, who is waiting in the car park. There is too much shallow contact in our lives. I prefer to be face to face; I want the person I’m communicating with to be so close I can put my hand on their shoulder. Text messaging is the bastard child handed to us by the absence of reading.
It is my firm belief that solitude will increase in proportion to the new tools at our disposal, the explosive evolution of electronic and digital communication. Technology might remove us from our isolation, but we are entering an era of solitude. When you are caught in a snowdrift in South Dakota, fifty miles from the nearest town, your isolation can be overcome with a mere cellphone, but your solitude never will be. As for “social networks,” mine has forever been my kitchen table, where I cook for no more than four or five friends.
You use the Internet.
Of course. Who can avoid it? But I do so with hesitation. It has, after all, opened up a gigantic field of indiscretion, arrogance, narcissism and self-aggrandisement. Humility is scarce and mediocrity flows from every direction, with attention-seekers unleashing their innermost thoughts. I seem to be one of the few left who consider discretion a virtue, though we have to be cautious about such things because our sense of what is virtuous is forever shifting. A virtue can become obsolete – for example, chastity – and these days young men, their honour besmirched, would never challenge each other to a pistol duel. They would phone their attorneys instead. One time after Les Blank had been given a haircut he wasn’t happy with, I suggested he do what any American would: “Give your lawyer a call and sue.”
One morning in 1984 you left Sachrang, the village where you lived as a child, and proceeded to walk around the border of West and East Germany. Was this a political act?
Not explicitly. At the time, German reunification looked like a lost cause. The nation was in fragments, with no true centre, without a real metropolis or beating heart at its core. While the real capital city – Berlin – was a divided enclave deep in a separate country, we had to make do with Bonn, a provincial town, as our seat of government. It would be like having Ann Arbor, Michigan, as the capital of the United States. The Berlin Wall stood there, an edifice that was going nowhere without a decisive change occurring in the planet’s balance of power. It was a lingering and painful wound of the Second World War, located in the spot where two political continents rubbed up against each other. Germany had become homeless within its own territory. There is, I believe, a geographical fate to nations, not only a cultural or political one. In many cases there exists an unequivocal necessity of reunification, and today we await change in Ireland and Korea; these are quests that can never be abandoned. Prominent figures like Günter Grass insisted that the two Germanys should never be brought together,* but for years the country’s unification was close to my heart. I was convinced of its inevitability and felt unhappy with politicians like Willy Brandt, who, in an official statement as chancellor, declared the matter closed. Of all the German politicians I have been aware of as an adult, Brandt is the only one I ever really liked, but I found his public declarations on reunification scandalous. As far as I was concerned, there was an inevitable and irrepressible desire of the German people to reunite, so for me the question was always very much open, though I didn’t think it would be solved in my lifetime, or even my children’s.
The division of the country never affected me personally because I had no relatives behind the Iron Curtain, but for those who did the situation was catastrophic. I was at a train station in East Berlin about ten years after the Berlin Wall had gone up. East Germany had allowed West Berliners to cross the border on certain days, but they had to return home before midnight. There were at least five thousand people, maybe a quarter of whom were going back to West Berlin, saying goodbye to their mothers and fathers, their sisters and brothers. Every once in a while we are witness to a truly unforgettable drama, a catastrophic tragedy. At that moment, watching all these people who didn’t know if they would ever see each other again, a great chasm opened up between Brandt and me.
I vividly remember the deep feeling of joy and jubilation when the Berlin Wall came down. My hope was that in an explosion of freedom everyone in East Germany would crawl out of their holes and display to the world their creative energies, though after only a week almost everyone had lapsed into a climate of complaint and self-pity. “The politicians aren’t doing enough for us.” “Why aren’t they creating more jobs?” “Why aren’t we as rich as the West?” In the early nineties there was an incessant debate about relocating the government to Berlin. How could Parliament, we were told, move and start its sessions in the new Reichstag without having offices ready for the parliamentarians? It was all so small-minded to me. A parliament can hold its session in an open field, if need be.
Back in 1982 I felt that Germany was a godforsaken country, and wondered who was capable of holding it together until re unification. I had the increasingly strong sense that the most robust connections between Germans were cultural and linguistic. If the politicians had abandoned the nation, it was the poets who remained. With a clear understanding of the historical necessity to move beyond politics, I set out from my home village of Sachrang one morning and walked west around the border. I was careful to travel clockwise, so Germany would always be on my right. My idea was to hold the country together as if with a belt. Unfortunately, after nearly a thousand miles, I fell ill and had to return,
so I jumped on a train home, where I was hospitalised for a week because of an old football injury. To this day my journey – which never had any explicitly nationalistic element to it – remains unfinished business, though of course the need to complete the walk no longer exists. I later gave a public talk at the Munich Kammerspiele theatre, where I read from texts I wrote during my travels.†
Has travelling on foot always been important to you?
For too long we have been estranged from essential nomadic life. Humans aren’t made to sit in front of computer screens or travel by aeroplane; nature intended something different for us. Walking great distances has never been extreme behaviour to me. It has forever helped me regain my equilibrium, and I would always rather do the existentially important things in my life on foot. If you want to propose marriage to your girlfriend and you live in England and she is in Sicily, do the decent thing and walk down there. Travelling by car or aeroplane wouldn’t be right at such a moment. Making a journey like that on foot has nothing to do with being a tourist; you won’t find many of them carrying binoculars, a canteen, a compass and a penknife but no camera on their travels. In fact, the dignity and identity of cultures around the world are being stripped to the bone by tourism. I have a dictum that connected me instantly with Bruce Chatwin: “Tourism is sin and travel by foot is virtue.”
Travelling on foot isn’t about testing your limits or exercising or hiking with a tent on your back. It’s about moving through a landscape, embarking on a process of discovery, with no shelter at hand. My voyages on foot – wandering out into the world unprotected – have always been essential experiences for me. For hours during my walk around Germany, sometimes even for a day or two at a time, there was no well or creek to drink from. I would knock on the door of a farmhouse and ask if I could use their faucet to fill my canteen. “Where have you come from?” the farmer would ask. “Sachrang,” I would say. “How far is that?” “About eight hundred miles.” “How did you get here?” he would ask. The moment I told him I had walked, there was no more small talk, only an immediate reflex of grandiose hospitality as he invited me into his home. When people take note of how far you have come on foot, they tell you stories that have been bottled up for years. One evening in a mountain hut I spoke with a retired teacher who told me a story about the final day of the Second World War in Holland. Canadian forces were advancing on him with their tanks. He had been given orders to take a group of soldiers prisoner at a farm behind the advancing line of enemy tanks. He told me that only by turning his gun on his superior officer did he manage to prevent the execution of these prisoners. Then, together with his Dutch captives, he had to overtake the advancing enemy and was eventually intercepted by Canadian tanks and taken prisoner himself.
When you come on foot you bring a certain intensity. Although I never dream at night, when walking I experience exciting voyages into my own imagination, and fall into deep reveries. Rhymes seize hold of me and I’m unable to shake them out of my mind. While on my walk around Germany I was consumed with a phrase about a Bavarian mountain: “Der Watzmann rennt, der Watzmann rennt, holldrioh mein Holzbein brennt” [“The Watzmann’s racing, the Watzmann’s racing, hey-de-ho, my wooden leg is blazing”]. I float through fantasies and find myself inside unbelievable stories while walking. I move through entire novels and films, as well as extraordinary football games, always with the best players, most wondrous action and perfect goals you can imagine. When I emerge from a story, or once I hear the whistle blow, I find myself ten miles from where I started. Exactly how I got there I don’t know. The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.
When Lotte Eisner fell ill, you refused to let her die.
We German filmmakers were still a fragile group in 1974, so when a friend called me from Paris to say that Lotte had suffered a massive stroke and I should get on the next aeroplane, I started looking for flights, before realising it wasn’t the correct way to proceed. I was unable to accept that Lotte might die, and though it was the start of the onslaught of an early winter, I decided to walk from Munich to Paris. My pilgrimage was a million steps in rebellion against her death.
I stuffed a bundle of clothes and a map into a duffel bag, then set off in the straightest line possible, sleeping under bridges, in farms and abandoned houses. I made only one detour – to the town of Troyes, where I marvelled at the cathedral – and ended up walking across the Vosges mountains for about twenty miles, following the same route Büchner describes in Lenz. I’m not superstitious, but did feel that coming by foot would prevent Lotte’s death. The Catholic Church has a wonderful term for this: Heilsgewissheit, the certainty of salvation. I moved with the faith of a pilgrim, convinced that Lotte would be alive when I got to Paris four weeks later. When I arrived in town I stopped at a friend’s place to take shelter from the rain and sat in his office, steam coming off my clothes, utterly exhausted after having walked the last fifty miles without a break. I gave him my compass, which I no longer needed, and walked to Lotte’s home. She was very surprised, but happy to see me. Years later, bedridden and nearly blind, unable to read or see films, Lotte wrote to me, asking if I would visit her. I went to Paris, where she told me, “Werner, there is still some spell cast that prevents me from dying. But I can barely walk. I am saturated with life [lebenssatt]. It would be a good time for me now.” Jokingly, I said, “Lotte, I hereby lift the spell.” Two weeks later she died. It was the right moment for her.
When you travel on foot it isn’t a matter of covering actual territory, rather a question of moving through your own inner landscapes. I wrote a diary of my walk to Lotte – the story of a journey on foot – which is like a road movie that never lingers on physical landscapes. After some initial hesitation, then after excising the most private passages, I released it as a short book. Of Walking in Ice is literature created more by my feet than my head, and remains closer to my heart than any of my films.
You were friends with British novelist and travel writer Bruce Chatwin.
Bruce and I had an instantaneous connection because we both knew that travelling on foot is an essential part of being human. We shared the conviction that mankind’s problems started the moment humans abandoned a nomadic existence, became sedentary, and began building permanent settlements.
I first met Bruce in 1984, when I was in Melbourne working on Where the Green Ants Dream. I read in the paper that he was in the country, so I immediately contacted his publishing company and tried to locate him. They told me he was somewhere in the desert in central Australia. Two days later they phoned back and said, “If you phone this number in Adelaide within the next twenty minutes, you can reach him before he goes to the airport.” I called. “You’re the one with the films!” Bruce said. I asked what his plans were. He was about to fly to Sydney and then London, but after a short conversation decided to head to Melbourne instead. How would I recognise him? “Look for a man with a leather rucksack,” he said. Apparently Bruce knew some of my films and had read Of Walking in Ice, which he liked and said was one of the few books he always carried with him. We spent two days together, talking. For every story I told him, he would tell me three. We would sleep for a couple of hours, then wake up and carry on.
Years later, when he was ill, Bruce asked me to come and show him my film about the Wodaabe. Before I arrived I had no idea he was dying. He had the strength only to watch ten minutes at a time, but insisted on seeing the film anyway. He was lucid, but eventually became delirious, and would exclaim, “I have to be on the road again.” “Yes,” I said. “That’s where you belong.” He wanted me to come with him, so I explained we would walk together when he was strong enough. “My rucksack is heavy,” he said. “I will carry it, Bruce,” I told him. His bones were aching, and he asked me to shift him in his bed. He called his legs “the boys.” One time he asked me, “Can you move the left boy to the other side?” He looked down and saw that his legs were so weak they were almost spindles. Then he looked at me and said, with great luci
dity, “I will never walk again. I’m busy dying now.” For years Bruce used a leather rucksack made by an old saddler in Cirencester. He carried it for five thousand miles on his back before giving it to me. “It’s you who has to carry it now,” he told me. It has always been much more than just something in which to carry things. If my house were on fire, I would first grab my children. Of all my belongings, it would be the rucksack I would throw from the window first.
Where did you get the idea for the Aboriginal drama Where the Green Ants Dream?
I first went to Australia in 1973, as a guest of the Perth Film Festival, where I saw a film by Michael Edols called Lalai Dreamtime, featuring Sam Woolagoodja, a saint-like, charismatic old Aborigine. I’m fascinated by the dignity and intensity of individuals and groups who have to defend themselves and their communities against the destruction of ancient traditions. I immediately decided I wanted to make a film with Sam, but he died before I got the chance. Nonetheless, the idea of setting a story in Australia, one that could feature some of the Aborigines I had met, stayed with me.