by Paul Cronin
I always knew I would make Wings of Hope one day, but it took a while to locate Juliane, who today is an expert on Amazonian bats. There had been an unprecedented media frenzy following her rescue and return to Germany, with journalists even showing up at her hospital room dressed as priests or cleaning personnel and taking photographs. After this intense harassment she successfully covered her tracks, got married and changed her name. I managed to find her father, who immediately ranted at me, saying he would never give the name and address of his daughter to anyone. I had a suspicion Juliane would be in Peru because that was where she had grown up; I knew she loved the jungle and thought she might be working as a biologist in one of the ecological stations down there. I eventually found her through some old newspaper clippings about her mother’s burial in a small Bavarian town. The local priest told me that one of Juliane’s aunts lived in a nearby village. I went straight over there, but she wouldn’t tell me anything, so I asked her to give Juliane my phone number. Not too long after that Juliane called me, and it turned out she lived in Munich, not Peru. I said it would be enough to talk for thirty minutes, not a minute longer, and that five minutes into our conversation I would offer to withdraw. When we met, I put my wristwatch on the table. Exactly 300 seconds into the meeting I stood up, picked up my watch and bowed. “That’s the deal,” I said, “unless you would like to continue for the next twenty-five minutes.” Juliane took my arm. “Sit down and stay,” she said. “We haven’t finished yet.”
Juliane had seen a couple of my films and liked them, which was helpful, but all those years later she was still somewhat traumatised by the media’s treatment of her – something I touch on in Wings of Hope when mentioning the trashy feature film made about her experiences† – and it took a year for her to decide that she would co-operate. There were some personal things Juliane didn’t want to talk about, and she knew I would respect her wishes, but once she finally agreed to make the film she really went for it. When we flew into the jungle from Lima, I asked her to sit in window seat F, row 19, the seat she had been in when the aeroplane fell apart over the Amazon.
Is anything stylised in Wings of Hope?
The beginning and end of the film, with the broken and disfigured faces of the mannequins, and my voiceover of Juliane wanting to reassemble and somehow resurrect the plane, then seeing herself, strapped to her seat, sailing through the dark abyss. This is all poetry. My decision not to introduce too many stylised elements probably has something to do with the fact that Juliane is rather straight-talking and clear-headed. The only reason she survived her ordeal was because of her ability to act methodically in the face of such dire circumstances, and I wanted these qualities to shine through in the film. Look at how much the mosquitoes bother her husband, while Juliane isn’t in the least troubled by them. There is real grief in the film, but it’s handled with tenderness and discretion. Not dwelling on the pain that Juliane went through back then means her story is more haunting for audiences. As usual, the television executives wanted re-enactments of her experiences and never expected me to take Juliane herself back to the jungle, but by doing this – just as by tying up Dieter Dengler and walking him through the trails where he almost perished thirty years before – we dug into a deeper reality. Once the executives saw the footage of Juliane in the jungle they immediately complained. “Why doesn’t she break down when confronted with fragments of the aeroplane?” Some people don’t understand that discretion is a virtue.
In recent years you have spoken about our shifting perception of reality.
There has, in the recent past, been a momentous and ferocious onslaught of new media, tools and instruments that have radically challenged our sense of reality. Think back to the mediaeval knights who for centuries, from ancient times on, fought on horseback with sword and shield, then all of a sudden found themselves confronted with gunpowder, firearms and cannons. Overnight the most fundamental notions of warfare were irrevocably altered. The entire world of chivalry was made obsolete; centuries-old rules fell away and, amidst such radical change, certain values and virtues cataclysmically collapsed. Apparently a group of seventeenth-century Samurai in Japan decided to forgo firearms and use only swords, but they didn’t last long. Then the plague decimated a third of Europe’s population within only a few years. History became porous and the first signs of a new world came into view. Fresh horizons were being explored and new inventions predominated. Europe was in crisis; it was a period of absolute insecurity involving the exploration of the unknown and a wholesale re-evaluation of moral codes. What I find fascinating is the emergence of writers like Philippe de Commynes, whose memoirs of the late mediaeval period in France are invaluable. Historiography in his time perpetuated the glory of chivalresque behaviour, though it had long since been uprooted. He was the single clairvoyant who watched everything with an uncompromising, relentless gaze.
There are signs that our own times are full of equally great insecurities and upheavals, of tremendous cruelty and violence, of enormous changes, of astonishing achievements. One of the most powerful forces in society today is the unprecedented explosion of tools that have given us the ability to alter reality and create some kind of pseudo-reality, including digital special effects – such as credibly rendered cinematic dinosaurs, as compared to the model animation of the fifties and sixties – virtual reality, video games and the Internet. You can’t trust a photo these days because of Photoshop, which can all too easily be used to modify and falsify an image. These things have arrived almost at once, in a single torrent. Our sense of the real world today is massively challenged; I include here reality television, breast enhancement and the carefully choreographed, fake drama of WrestleMania, populated by larger-than-life characters with muscles that nature doesn’t normally provide us with and who take pleasure in telling everyone how unbelievably evil they are. Wrestling matches are continually interrupted by commercials, but never those moments when the owner of the franchise comes out into the ring with two buxom, bikini-clad blondes on his arms, or when his long-suffering wife – allegedly paraplegic and blind – is wheeled out into the ring. His son then steps out into the ring and confronts his father, but not because of how his mother is being treated; he vents because his percentage of the franchise revenue isn’t big enough. I love people like Jesse Ventura, who in his wrestling days played the real badass, the California surfer with long blond hair, sunglasses and a bronze tan. He would climb into the ring and shout to the audience, “You assholes, working day in, day out for a few bucks!” A young boy sheepishly walks up to him to ask for an autograph. Jesse rips the notebook into shreds and tramples on it, at which point ten thousand people howl gloriously in unison against him. This is all a new form of spectacle, of mythology and storytelling, like the crude beginnings of ancient Greek drama, work that preceded Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides, eventually flowering into something extraordinary. It’s fascinating to see how these archetypes function in modern-day culture.
These tectonic shifts require similarly radical changes in the way we handle reality on screen. The more technical tricks filmmakers bring to the screen, the louder the question of truthfulness will become. A new kind of cinema is needed that can help us readjust and once again trust our eyes. This is a heavy burden for filmmakers, but there is one thing we can be sure of: cinéma-vérité, which was a coherent response in the sixties, is no longer valid today, when everything can be so easily manipulated. Cinema has to find a new position from which to tackle these issues. I want to take audiences back to the earliest days of cinema, when the Lumière brothers screened their film of a train pulling into a station. Apparently some people fled in panic because they were convinced they were about to be run over. I can’t confirm this; it might be a legend, but I like the story. At screenings of Fitzcarraldo I heard gasps from audiences at the moment the steamship is dragged upwards. They pointed at the screen after realising this was no trick, that it was a real boat and a real mountain. If I had ploughed on w
ith the plastic solution and filmed it in a studio with a model ship, six-year-olds everywhere today would have immediately known it was a special effect. I’ve seen people in a small open-air cinema in Mexico talking back to the bad guy; one of them even pulled out a gun and opened fire at the screen.
When Grizzly Man came out, children – drowning in the manipulated digital images that surround them and invade their every moment – insisted there was no way that Timothy Treadwell’s footage was real. Science-fiction films make it perfectly clear that what you are looking at has been artificially created in a studio with digital effects, but young people, attuned to the changes taking place around them, couldn’t believe this man really walked up to a thousand-pound grizzly and stretched out his hand to touch the beast. By insisting that this kind of imagery must be the result of digital trickery, they reveal themselves to be disconnected from the real world. A few years ago my wife Lena took a series of photos of me standing next to a bear in rural Utah, one of which was used to publicise Grizzly Man. People immediately assume this image was pieced together with Photoshop. No one believes me when I tell them that’s a real grizzly.
At a film festival one year I was witness to a “pitching session,” a grotesque gladiatorial contest run by thoroughly debased people in which documentary filmmakers line up in public and attempt to raise money for their projects. The entire thing is detestable, a revolting circus. One of the organisers – an obese man who snorted about the place – waddled onto the stage wearing a cape and carrying a stick. There were beads of sweat dripping down his forehead from underneath the top hat he was wearing as he pranced. I wanted to vomit. I was on a panel discussion with other filmmakers who were talking about “reality” and how to capture it on film, how cinéma-vérité was the only way forward, that manipulation and staging in non-fiction cinema was a no-no. A young woman next to me kept raving about her own particular style, how she wanted to be as unobtrusive as possible, like a fly on the wall. It was just the kind of thin, trivial ideology I look upon with deep suspicion. Even if some of the most disturbing footage I have ever seen – the abduction of a toddler by two young boys from a shopping mall in England in 1993 – was unstaged, captured by a surveillance camera, I have no interest in blindly recording hours of nothing, waiting for a bank robber to show up once every ten years.
I say here to adherents of cinéma-vérité: I am no bookkeeper; my mandate is poetry. I want to be involved. I want to shape and sculpt, to stage things, to intrude and invent. I want to be a film director. I was the only person at the festival arguing against these morons. The subject was being so hashed to death that I couldn’t take it any longer. I grabbed a microphone and said, “I’m no fly on the wall. I am the hornet that stings.” There was an immediate uproar, so not having anything more to say, I shouted out, “Happy New Year, losers.” And that was that.
* See p. 476 for the Minnesota Declaration.
† The Story of Juliane Koepcke (aka Miracles Still Happen) (1974), directed by Giuseppe Maria Scotese.
10
Fervour and Woe
You have acted in several films over the years.
I enjoy working with Zak Penn, who contributed to the script of Rescue Dawn. His film Incident at Loch Ness is very intelligent; it’s a hoax built upon a hoax upon a hoax, and its marketing campaign was yet another hoax. Press reports were circulated saying that I was going to make a film about the Loch Ness monster and that at the same time cameraman John Bailey was making a documentary about me called Herzog in Wonderland. Both were diversions. The film we actually made is a complex ruse that seamlessly blends digital effects with a group of people – most of whom are playing themselves – improvising. The result is clever and funny, subtly incorporating the strangest and silliest stories and rumours about me. I enjoyed the element of self-mockery my part involved, like having the audience watch me buying razor blades in the local supermarket and packing my bags before I leave for Scotland. I had a feeling that a dose of self-irony would do me good. Even the DVD commentary Zak and I recorded is one big joke, with me storming off halfway, completely miffed.
References to my films and me are hiding under every rock; look carefully and you’ll see them throughout. Some are subtler than others; for example, I have never cooked yucca – which needs to be carefully processed to rid it of all toxins – for dinner guests, and “my” house in the film was actually Zak’s home at the time. But you can hardly miss the moment when Zak has me at the point of an unloaded flare gun because I refuse to film the styrofoam Loch Ness monster bobbing in the water; it’s some kind of homage to the tales of Kinski and me during the production of Aguirre. There are some amusing moments that didn’t make it into the film, like Zak’s assistant thinking I’m a vegetarian. I assure you that’s the last thing I would ever be. Maybe people took no notice of the ideas behind Loch Ness because it’s a comedy, which is unfortunate because it raises what I consider to be important and serious questions. What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? Like sleep without dreams. How is it that three million Americans claim to have had encounters with aliens, and three hundred thousand American women maintain they have been gang-raped by extraterrestrials? Why do almost all these women weigh over 350 pounds? Why have we never heard about such things happening in Ethiopia?
A couple of years later Zak directed The Grand, in which I play “The German,” who always needs extra hand lotion in his hotel room, believes coffee to be the beverage of cowards and has to kill something every day in order to feel alive. It doesn’t need to be big; squashing an ant is sufficient. He shows up at the hotel with a luggage cart full of caged animals, only to be told they aren’t allowed in his room. “Don’t worry,” he tells the receptionist. “They won’t be here for long.”
Harmony Korine.
A few years ago he wanted me to play the father in julien donkey-boy. Originally he was going to act as my son in the film, but felt uncomfortable being behind and in front of the camera at the same time. Actually he just chickened out. Harmony didn’t want me for the role just because I was the right age and looked the part; it was more significant for him than that. The deeper meaning to my being cast was that I have been something of an influence on his filmmaking over the years, and he wanted his “cinematic father” to be in the film. There was no real screenplay; much of julien was improvised, like my lines from Dirty Harry. I was sitting at the dinner table, surrounded by a crazed grandmother, a son who is a failed wrestler, a daughter who has been impregnated by her own insane brother Julien, and Julien himself, who has just committed murder. All I knew was that Julien was going to read a poem, and my job was to insult him. The red light on the camera started blinking, so I turned to Harmony and said, “Are we rolling?” He nodded, saying nothing. I asked him what the dialogue was. “Speak!” he said. It was all born out of the pressure of having to say something; everything I did was improvised on the spot. The character I play is completely dysfunctional and hostile. Let’s face it, my scope as an actor is limited, though I love playing these vile and debased characters. Whenever it comes to these kinds of people I’m the first person they call. After julien donkey-boy opened in France my wife received a call from a friend. “Is that monster really your husband? We can offer you immediate shelter.”
I played a missionary in Harmony’s Mister Lonely. Originally I had a bigger part but was editing Rescue Dawn at the time, so couldn’t spare the time. We were filming on an island off the coast of Panama, at the airport. I strolled over to a man who was muttering to himself and had a bunch of half-wilted flowers in his hand. I starting talking to him, and though he was quite incoherent I figured out that he was waiting for an aeroplane to arrive. His wife and three kids had bolted three years ago, and ever since then he had been hoping she would come home to him, so there he was, waiting patiently. I was wearing a priest’s costume and told Harmony we should improvise a scene where this man could confess. “I can look into your heart!” I said out of the blue.
“I know your wife left you because you fornicated with other women! Repent now!” He insisted it wasn’t true. I looked him square in the eye and said, “I know what happened! It wasn’t just one woman, it was at least five! You sinned! Down on your knees and repent!”
As for my role in the Tom Cruise blockbuster Jack Reacher, I was paid to be scary. As chief ideologue of the baddies, my particular method of intimidation is forcing my adversaries to chew their own thumbs off. I wasn’t hired just because I have a funny accent; apparently they were having difficulties in casting a real bad-ass bad guy. Some actors look dangerous only when they come at you with a gun or when they scream and shout, but apparently the only person they could think of who is threatening even before he opens his mouth is Herzog. It isn’t the first time this has happened. I’m always being stopped by customs officials at airports, and many years ago I played a deranged murderer in Edgar Reitz’s film Geschichten vom Kübelkind.