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

by Paul Cronin

  I had read several newspaper articles about a trial involving Nabalco, a Swiss bauxite-mining company in the northwest of the country, where various Aboriginal clans had lived since time immemorial, and whose sacred sites had been destroyed.‡ It was the first time the Aborigines had sued a mining company; they lost the case because they were unable to prove they had title to the land before 1788. At the end of the trial the judge acknowledged that the Aborigines had inhabited the territory for many thousands of years, and expressed genuine regret that Anglo-Saxon common law forced him to make a judgement in favour of the mining company. The ruling turned out to be a political victory because it raised public consciousness of the Aborigines; the case touched upon fundamental questions of identity and history, and how white Australians deal with Aboriginal culture. Several other cases eventually came to court that were mostly won by Aborigines. I was inspired to write the story of a group of Aborigines struggling to defend their sacred site – the place where the green ants dream – against the bulldozers of a mining company. The trial scenes in the film are based on genuine courtroom transcripts.

  It was a pleasure working with the local Aborigines, although they raised a couple of objections. There was a deceased member of their community with the same name as one of the characters in the screenplay. Once someone dies their name mustn’t be spoken out loud for at least ten years; the locals would talk instead of “the man who died.” It meant I had to make some minor changes to the script. The other issue had to do with the sacred objects in the courtroom scene. During a case heard before the Supreme Court of the Northern Territories, the Aborigines brought with them objects that had been buried for about two hundred years, asking that all spectators in the courtroom be removed so they could show them only to the judge. They were carved wooden artefacts, completely beyond the comprehension of an Anglo-Saxon judge, though for the Aborigines they were irrevocable proof of why and how they had special connections to this territory. They asked me not to show any representations of these objects during the film’s courtroom scene, and refused my offer to fabricate duplicates. These moments of the film have greater depth because audiences are forced to push their imaginations beyond what can actually be seen.

  The Aborigines in Where the Green Ants Dream lived far from where we were filming, in a place called Yirrkala, near the Gulf of Carpentaria, in the north of the country. Most of the social structures of the Aboriginal communities throughout Australia had disintegrated, and in many parts of the country there were serious problems with alcoholism. People would get their social-security cheque on Friday morning, and by the afternoon most had already visited the liquor store. By the evening they were so drunk they had to be picked up off the streets. You see a similar phenomenon in any group of tribal people that has been abruptly thrown into a civilisation technically thousands of years ahead of its own. Many are unable to cope, like the Inuit in Alaska and the bushmen of the Kalahari. Wherever you go the problems – alcoholism, disintegration of society and criminality – are almost identical. But the group from Yirrkala was largely intact, handling the modern world with their traditional ways of doing things. I spent a lot of time talking with the lucid and dignified elders – who were able to exercise a level of control over the younger men – and explained my ideas about the story I had written.

  At the time we made the film there wasn’t a single Aboriginal community in the country that hadn’t been in close contact with white civilisation for the past half-century. Aborigines are curious people and actively seek out the modern world; their culture might appear to be primitive, but is actually highly complex. These days very little is new to them. To say we’re intruders into their society is a simplification.

  What are green ants?

  I respect the Aborigines in their struggle to keep their visions alive, but because my understanding of them was limited I wanted to develop my own mythology and create my own totem animal by inventing a legend that came close to their thinking and way of life. I made up the story of the green ants. It was never my intention to be anything like an anthropologist, strictly following the facts.

  There’s a character in the film who lives on a mountaintop because he believes there is nowhere else in Australia where the earth’s magnetic field is so abnormally distorted. He explains that the green ant is the only living creature with a sensory organ attuned to magnetic fields, like a compass. They line up and all face north when a storm approaches, which is why it’s said they dream about the origins of the world. In less than a day they can build six-foot termite hills hard as rock, with immense and intricate tunnel systems beneath. Once a year the ants grow wings and fly in gigantic swarms eastwards, across the mountains. There is actually a real species of ant with green tails, and we tried shooting a scene with four hundred thousand of them. I wanted them to face in the same direction, like soldiers aligned in a magnetic field, but they wouldn’t behave. We came closest when they were placed in a storeroom that was at a temperature barely above freezing. They were immobilised by the cold, but as soon as the light was switched on they started to stir and move and bite; within fifteen seconds they were all over the place. If the storeroom had been half a degree colder, they would have died, so I called a halt to the whole thing. I won’t be unhappy if readers come away from this book with nothing other than the fact that ants cannot be wrangled.

  My understanding is that Aboriginal Dreamtime stories and myths – which were especially important to pre-colonial Aborigines – explain the origins of everything on the planet. Where the Green Ants Dream isn’t their “dreaming”; it is, respectfully, my own, though it does come fairly close to a number of their myths. At the same time, I could never claim to make their cause my own. One of the tribesmen told me, “We don’t understand you either, but we see you have your own dreaming.” There are some beautiful things about the Aborigines I don’t think we can ever truly comprehend; for example, how Australia is somehow covered with a network of dreams, or “songlines.” The Aborigines sing songs when travelling, and through the words and rhythms are able to identify the landscapes, rocks and mountains around them. In his book about Australia, Bruce Chatwin writes about being in a car with some Aborigines who are singing in fast motion – as if you were running a tape at ten times the normal speed – because they were moving so fast. The rhythm of the song had to keep up with the landscape. Aborigines see themselves as part of the earth, so when we destroy the planet we also destroy them. “We don’t own the land, the land owns us,” Sam Woolagoodja told me. “We act as caretakers for our brothers. When you cut the land, you also cut me.” In Where the Green Ants Dream the Aborigines sit in front of bulldozers that are tearing up the land, but this is no traditional sit-in; they are literally part of the rocks being removed. During the trial scene, a tribal elder asks the judge, “What would you do if bulldozers and pneumatic drills knocked down St Peter’s Basilica in Rome or St Paul’s Cathedral in London?”

  I have to be careful when discussing these ideas because I’m no expert. I can’t bear people – missionaries, anthropologists, politicians – who claim to understand Aboriginal society and culture. The Aborigines evolved during the Stone Age, something that profoundly influenced their way of life until maybe only two or three generations ago. Twenty thousand years of history separate us from them. Even if we spent fifty years living with the Aborigines and spoke their language, we would still only comprehend them marginally. Our backgrounds are different indeed; we are limited to our own thinking and culture, just as they are. People come back from a weekend trip to the outback and exclaim how magical it is, claiming an ability to feel in unison with the spirit of the native people. But no outsider – including white Australians – can ever truly understand such things.

  You seem ambivalent about the film.

  Where the Green Ants Dream isn’t that bad, it just has a climate that these days I’m resistant to. For me the story is about protecting the spirit, traditions and mythology of the Aborigines, but t
he film has a slightly self-righteous tone to it, even if it does represent my thoughts and disquiet about contemporary society. It will always be important for me because the film is, in some sense, a requiem for my mother, who died just before we started shooting, and to whom I dedicated the film. I wrote the script when she was still alive, though from the start the spirit of the story had something of a requiem about it. I still appreciate the idea of the aeroplane – piloted by a mechanic who sings “My Baby Does the Hanky Panky” – that may or may not have crashed. Perhaps the Aborigines really have flown over the mountains and escaped into their dreamland, even if there are reports of an aeroplane wing having been found. I also like the shots at the beginning and end, those blurred, strange images that somehow represent the collapse of the world, even if they have nothing directly to do with the story. Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein spent weeks in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas with scientists from a meteorological laboratory who were researching storms and chasing tornadoes. It’s how I envision the collapse of the planet: a tornado wipes everything away, sucking it into the clouds. Years later I witnessed the destruction caused by Cyclone Tracy, which swept across Darwin in northwestern Australia. Among the debris I saw a water tower with a vast rectangular imprint on it. A huge refrigerator had flown through the air for a few miles and smashed into the tank a hundred feet above the ground.

  You joined up with Kinski again to make Cobra Verde, based on Chatwin’s novel The Viceroy of Ouidah.

  The production was one of the worst I have ever experienced, and once filming was over it was clear I would never again work with Kinski. At the time I thought to myself, “Will somebody please step in and carry on the work with this man? Enough is enough.” Making Cobra Verde with him was like tracking a wild animal. If we wanted to catch the beast on film, we had to hide in the bushes for days at a time. Suddenly he would come and drink at the water-hole, but by the time we turned the camera on he had disappeared into the night. He was prone to bursts of fury, interspersed with moments of grace. It was no longer a case of rehearsing a scene or checking he was on his mark, but just rolling the camera as quickly as possible.

  There was also something about Kinski’s presence in the film that meant a foreign stink pervaded, and Cobra Verde suffers because of this. In some scenes there is a stylisation that Kinski forced on the production, one vaguely reminiscent of bad spaghetti westerns. It was a real problem holding him together during filming. He had recently married some Italian beauty queen and whenever he could find a phone line would talk for hours with her. From day one I struggled to harness his insanity, rage and demonic intensity. He was like a hybrid racehorse that would run a single mile and then collapse, but on Cobra Verde I was forced to carry him for five miles. At the time he was involved in an all-consuming project and had written a confused screenplay of the only film he was to direct: the life story of Paganini, with himself in the title role. For years he implored me to make the film, but I always said no; I knew this was something he had to do himself. I urge everyone to see Kinski/Paganini for no other reason than for years he claimed that I was a talentless imbecile and it was him who actually directed the films we made together. It will take you a long time to find a film as bad as his. See it and make up your own mind.

  Every day I wondered if we would ever finish Cobra Verde. Kinski directed his abuse in the direction of cameraman Thomas Mauch, and terrorised him so badly I had to replace him within the first week. He wanted to stay, but unfortunately caught the brunt of Kinski early in the battle. I chose his replacement – the Czech Viktor Růžička – because I heard he was physically strong, built like a peasant and very patient. Anyone else would probably have quit within two hours. Nothing really changed once Mauch was gone, and it remains a very bitter moment for me. Abandoning my loyalty to him was one of the most difficult things I have ever done.

  How was production in Africa?

  Sometimes it was so hot you couldn’t step outside. To find a working telephone was a major chore, there was hardly any gasoline for our vehicles and I struggled to find sufficient accommodation, transport and food for cast and crew. In northern Ghana, near Tamale, two hundred people worked around the clock for ten weeks constructing a palace out of clay and making several thousand plaster skulls. There wasn’t a single kilo of plaster to be found in the entire country when we began. Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the president of neighbouring Côte d’Ivoire, had one ambition: to build the largest church on the planet, which he eventually did in his home town of Yamoussoukro. We knew there must be a lot of plaster over there, so we bribed some construction workers and drove several vans of the stuff across the border, which meant we could fabricate the skulls we needed. The entire palace collapsed about a week after filming had finished because of a particularly fierce rainstorm. All the costumes and props for the film had to be produced in a very short period of time, which caused endless headaches because everything in Africa takes much longer than it should. It isn’t a question of money; even with $25 million I would have had as many problems. You have to deviate from your normal way of doing things and try to understand the tempo of the continent. A strict Prussian military type would buckle in a matter of days. In the midst of all this was Kinski, in a ferocious rage, holding up shooting because one of the buttons on his costume was loose.

  We spent several weeks working with an army of a thousand young Amazon women. They were gathered together at a football stadium in Accra, where Benito Stefanelli – an Italian stunt co-ordinator who had worked on Sergio Leone’s films – trained them in the use of swords and shields. They were a truly frightening bunch of ferocious, eloquent, proud, strong women. On pay day we lined them up in the inner yard of the slave fortress and opened a small gate through the main door, with the idea that they would walk through one after the other. From inside, eight hundred of them pushed against the door at the same time and squashed the ones at the front almost to death. Some of the women were already fainting, and after narrowly avoiding being torn to pieces I was able to calm the potentially fatal situation by grabbing a nearby policeman, dragging him over to the gate and having him fire three shots into the air.

  When did you first read Chatwin’s novel?

  Around the time of Fitzcarraldo I read his book In Patagonia, the story of a long walk, and was so impressed I immediately read On the Black Hill and The Viceroy of Ouidah, the nineteenth-century story of the bandit Francisco Manoel da Silva, who is cheated of his wages as a gold miner, then travels from drought-ridden Brazil to the kingdom of Dahomey in Africa and becomes a viceroy and slave trader. It was full of fascinating characters and showed a great sensitivity for Africa, as well as being centred around the slave trade, so I immediately thought it would make a magnificent film. I’m a great admirer of Joseph Conrad – especially his The Nigger of the “Narcissus”, Typhoon and Heart of Darkness – and feel that Bruce is somehow in the same league. He has the touch you rarely see in literature. I let him know about my interest in the book, but added I couldn’t undertake such a monstrous project right after Fitzcarraldo. I had to lick my wounds for a while and work on projects like Where the Green Ants Dream, some operas, some smaller films. I asked Bruce to let me know if someone else wanted to buy the rights to his book, and a few years later he got in touch to say David Bowie’s agents had expressed an interest. Apparently Bowie was more interested in buying the rights so he could play the lead character than in directing the film, so I told Bruce to sell the book to Bowie on the condition that I direct. I felt attached to the project like a dog to a bone, and eventually bought the rights myself because I was convinced Bowie wasn’t right for the role of Francisco Manoel. He lacks the mystery and savagery of the character, and has no real depth. The man is a neon light bulb.

  I felt there wasn’t a single Hollywood actor – dead or alive – capable of playing the part. Although he immediately came to mind, and though I tried to ignore him, the only person I could think of for the role was Kinski. If you read the published script,
you’ll notice that every character except Francisco Manoel is described in precise physical terms. This was because I wanted to avoid describing Kinski on the page; I didn’t want to allow him to penetrate my imagination and insert himself into the film. But while I was writing the script, throughout that long week when I was working away at my typewriter, he appeared between the lines, worming his way onto the pages. The script was like a boat taking on water, with Kinski slipping in through every crack. By the time I had finished, no other possibility existed. Some facts have to be faced whether you want to or not, so I immediately called Kinski, and though he was really too old for the part, I told him, “If you don’t take this role, I won’t make the film.”

  The novel doesn’t have a linear narrative.

  Rather than having the structure of a cinematic work, The Viceroy of Ouidah captures the inner world of this character, as well as offering a rich understanding of Africa and the slave trade. The first thing I did was explain to Bruce that his book’s narrative wasn’t a cinematic one, which meant there would be certain technical issues in adapting it for the screen. The novel is narrated in a series of concentric circles, but I knew a film would have to proceed in a more linear way, so I told Bruce my plan was to invent things and make some changes. I let the story move through the action at its own speed and turned it into a fable, a ballad, which is made clear by the opening scene of the blind fiddler. Bruce never wanted to get mixed up with the screenplay or involve himself in the production, though he was on location with us for a few days§ and before I wrote the screenplay recommended I read an obscure book from 1874 called Dahomey as It Is, which provided details for The Viceroy of Ouidah. It was written by a British biologist named J. A. Skertchly, who was studying beetles in a coastal region of Dahomey, which is now Benin. Skertchly was asked if he would travel to the king’s residence and stay for a few days to instruct the palace guards in the use of their new rifles. The king began to enjoy his conversations with Skertchly so much that a week became eight months. In his book he describes in almost scientific detail time spent at the king’s court – where he was treated as a prisoner – and his testimony constitutes a unique and exceptional document.