by Paul Cronin
Zishe reminds me of Mike Tyson, who I have met a few times. Tyson appears to be a person of absolute violence and madness, an almost prehistoric type from the underbelly of society, but there is another side to him. He read a lot of books in prison; the man has the soul of Mozart and carries with him great intelligence and tenderness. You couldn’t imagine talking to Mike Tyson about Machiavelli, the Roman Republic and early Frankish kings like Clovis, Pepin the Short and Charles Martel, but that’s what happened to me. He’s a genuinely fascinating character.
Did you consider not casting a real strongman in the part?
Never. When I look around at actors with rippling muscles, they seem totally inauthentic and pumped up with steroids. The genuine strongest of the strong look very different, and I knew there would be a serious credibility gap with the film unless I found a real strongman. If audiences see Zishe in that early circus scene and don’t absolutely believe his strength, Invincible instantly fails. When we shot the film, Jouko Ahola – who played the part and is a carpenter by trade – was in fact officially the strongest man in the world, an absolute colossus, able to drag a fire truck behind him. When he lifts nine hundred pounds in the film, that really is him lifting nine hundred pounds. Actually, it’s slightly under nine hundred because Jouko knew that an injury would put him out of commission for months. He always stood out when compared to other strongmen, not least because he has such a boyish innocence about him, something made clear the second you see him on screen. What I liked was that he was so soft-spoken but had such charisma. He’s the kind of person you want as your big brother, someone to look out for you. His good-heartedness was also something I saw women respond to immediately, which is another reason I cast him. Jouko was resistant to accepting the role, but I told him, “I know my job, and I know how to make you into a good actor.”
This question of authenticity and attention to detail was important to me not just in the casting, but also when filming on location. At the time I was finishing up another film and staging an opera, so I asked my production designer Ulrich Bergfelder to go to eastern Poland and take photos of various landscapes and towns. He came back with a useful set of images, though I immediately sensed it wasn’t the right place to film because so much had been destroyed during the Second World War and many of the beautiful wooden buildings had been replaced with concrete eyesores. I decided we had to film elsewhere, so on the advice of Volker Schlöndorff, who suggested I go to Latvia and Lithuania, a decision was taken rather quickly. For the market sequence, which was shot in Vilnius, we made a real effort to create as historically authentic an environment as possible. All of a sudden, in the middle of the shot, after having blocked off several streets and stopped traffic, an elderly lady walked by carrying a big yellow shopping bag. She refused to believe we were making a film and just wanted to do her shopping. At that moment I had the feeling we were doing a good job. It took us weeks to negotiate with the Jewish community in Vilnius because we wanted to film in the local synagogue, the only one out of more than a hundred that had survived the Nazi onslaught. The locals were initially resistant to the idea. Could a German filmmaker really depict Jewish life and rituals in a dignified way? Eventually we were permitted to shoot there, and many of the extras in Invincible are genuine congregants of the synagogue.
The father of Jacob Wein, who played Benjamin, gave me a book of Jewish legends in which I found the story of the “unknown just.” In every generation, so the legend goes, there are born among the Jews thirty-six men who God has chosen to bear the burden of the world’s suffering, and to whom he has granted the privilege of martyrdom. These men are indistinguishable from mere mortals, and they themselves often don’t know they are one of the thirty-six. I realised the story embodied the soul of the film, that of an ordinary man with an extraordinary gift who finds the courage to accept and fulfil his destiny. I knew it had to be included in Invincible, as spoken by the character of Rabbi Edelmann, and once the script was written I asked Herb Golder, my assistant director, to read it to Gary Bart. I instantly knew Herb had to play the part. We had searched everywhere for a real rabbi – including Tel Aviv and London – but with deadlines approaching I realised no one was as convincing as Herb. I told him he would be playing the rabbi and insisted he not shave for a few weeks.
The character of Hanussen figures prominently in the story.
While Zishe influences people by the strength of his body, Hanussen manipulates audiences through the power of imagination, and the collision of these two makes for a strong dramatic clash. Hanussen’s character in the film is actually based more on historical reality than Zishe’s is; a fair amount is known about him because he published his own newspaper and wrote a book entitled Mind Reading and Telepathy, as well as an autobiography. Hanussen was an expert hypnotist and illusionist who claimed to be a genuine psychic, and stepped into the role of a clairvoyant because the climate of the early thirties demanded a seer, someone able to offer some perspective amidst the political chaos and turmoil of the times, with its bank collapses, unemployment and attempted coups. He reinvented himself as a Danish aristocrat with the stage name Erik Jan Hanussen, though he was actually a Czech Jew called Hermann Steinschneider. Hanussen said he predicted the burning of the Reichstag in 1933 and Hitler’s electoral victory the year before; in the film he talks about “the figure of light that has come among us.” In reality he did something all cheats and con men do: he bet on every horse, predicting the victories of Von Schleicher, Brüning and Von Papen as well. After the election he pointed only to the paragraph he had written about Hitler, who he knew personally. In the film the courtroom scenes between Zishe and Hanussen become more than just a legal battle, because Hanussen’s true identity is revealed. He had compromised too many high-ranking Nazi party members, which seems to be why he was abducted and later found riddled with bullets in a forest outside Berlin, half eaten by wild boar.
Hans Zimmer wrote the music.
I like Zimmer because he is talented, self-made, has a true understanding of cinema and is unable to read music. It turns out he was inspired to become a film composer after seeing Fitzcarraldo, and immediately quit his band, moved into a sleazy hotel in Los Angeles and started a new career. I asked if he would write something for Invincible but made clear the budget wouldn’t stretch to his normal fee, so he offered to write something for free and also pay for the choir and orchestra out of his own pocket. His attorneys advised him that this would have resulted in certain tax implications, so we agreed on a fee of $1. The transfer of music rights was originally to be in perpetuity, which is an unnerving concept for me, so I changed it to “perpetuity minus one day.” When Hans saw that he insisted on having one day subtracted as well, so the contract we both signed read “in perpetuity minus two days.”
You contributed to the compilation project Ten Minutes Older.
I was invited to make a film of exactly ten minutes on the subject of time. It was a challenge, an exercise in narrative discipline, like writing a Japanese haiku; everything not absolutely essential was put aside. I tell the story of a native Stone Age Indian tribe that lived deep in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil, the Uru Eu. They were the last significant group to come into contact with the rest of humanity and technological civilisation, though there are probably several tribes – perhaps some on the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean and tiny groups in the Amazon and New Guinea – that remain untouched. The tribe had shot arrows at anyone who approached, so in 1981 the Brazilian government decided to make controlled contact with this group because it was inevitably going to happen eventually, especially with the increasing encroachment of gold, lumber and petroleum companies. The encounter between these two cultures took only ten minutes, but in that time the Uru Eu society was dragged into modernity, thrust forward ten thousand years, from a Neolithic Stone Age existence into the twentieth century. Within days some of them were being flown to cities, driven in cars and exposed to television and prostitutes. The story of the Ur
u Eu is a profound tragedy because, with no immunity to chickenpox and the common cold, diseases the rest of humanity had developed resistance to, 75 per cent of the tribe died within a year. I found the only competent speaker of their language who also spoke Portuguese and, alongside the Brazilian cameraman who in 1981 had recorded the first contact, filmed with some of the few surviving members of the tribe. The film is called Ten Thousand Years Older.
Not many filmmakers have been invited by the Dalai Lama to film a Buddhist rite.
Which is one reason why I made Wheel of Time, though I could never claim to be very connected to Buddhist culture. At the time my understanding of the religion was rudimentary. A group of Buddhists in Graz, Austria, were planning to hold the Kalachakra initiation ceremony there. Every few years the Dalai Lama settles on one place where he invites the Buddhist world to celebrate this event with him. I was initially hesitant because I can’t stand crowds of Western Buddhists crammed together in one place; there’s something about seeing them in multitudes that looks wrong to me. Besides, I had no desire to be a cultural tourist, slipping into a religion I knew little about. Then I watched an amateur video from an earlier Kalachakra ceremony in Ladakh, in the Himalayas, and was impressed. The plan was also to hold the ceremony in Bodhgaya, a small village in India, where – after years of wandering as an itinerant – the historical Buddha had experienced his enlightenment under a tree.
I was still undecided about the project, but the Dalai Lama sent an envoy who asked me to reconsider and make the film, starting in Bodhgaya. Apparently he’s a big fan of cinema, especially vampire films, and enjoyed Nosferatu. It isn’t easy to say no when the Dalai Lama summons you; the man is charismatic, warm-hearted and deeply philosophical, with an astoundingly clear worldview, able to articulate complex ideas, and one of the best laughers I have ever met. I decided to move forward with the project and read as much as I could about Buddhism, though made the film very much as an outsider, keeping to my own culture, an approach to the subject that I feel comes through in the film. The Dalai Lama has spoken of the importance of studying religions other than our own, but at the same time staying within our own faith. Explore Buddhism, but don’t leave your own religion behind.
In Bodhgaya we were confronted by the vast makeshift tent-city constructed on the outskirts of town to cater for the half a million pilgrims expected for the Kalachakra event, an eagerly awaited ceremony for the faithful. Some people arrived hanging on to battered, overflowing trucks, some by train from Delhi, others travelled thousands of miles on foot. One had even come nearly two thousand miles, prostrating himself at each step by lowering his body, arms outstretched, touching the ground with his forehead, then standing up and moving to where his head was. The journey had taken him three and a half years. Although he had protected them with wooden clogs, the bones in his hands had grown nodules, and there was a permanent wound on his forehead that came from touching the ground a couple of million times. Yet this man radiated the placidity of a statue. It’s the kind of devotion that one can’t help but be respectful of, regardless of what religion – or otherwise – is being honoured.
You seem comfortable representing spirituality on film.
I felt the best way to represent the beliefs, intensity and dignity of Buddhists was simply to show what we found in India, Tibet and Austria, the wonderful physical side to the spirituality there. In Bodhgaya we participated in the frenzy by jumping into the crowd and immersing ourselves in the mayhem. The pilgrims piled themselves up as they scrambled for little symbolic gifts, and more than once I was nearly trampled underfoot.
Strictly speaking, the sequence of the circumambulation of Mount Kailash in Tibet by the faithful doesn’t belong in the film because Kailash isn’t part of the Kalachakra ceremony. What connects the mountain to the rest of Wheel of Time is that Kailash is considered the spiritual and physical centre of the universe, which is exactly what the sand mandala of the ceremony symbolically depicts. Kailash is a mountain of the highest significance not only for Buddhists, but also Hindus, Jains and the shamanistic Tibetan Bon-Po religion, which dates back to pre-Buddhist times. It’s a sacred landscape for them, as well as being a barren and solitary place with no trees and vegetation. When a nomad walks away in the morning, you can see him at midday; the next day, through binoculars, he’s still a dot in the distance. I did most of the shooting there myself. The Chinese authorities wouldn’t issue us with a shooting permit, but at the last minute I managed to get a tourist visa. I was in Bangkok, which is at sea level, then flew from Thailand to Kathmandu in Nepal, and from there by truck into Tibet. Within a short time I was at an altitude of 16,000 feet. Not having had time to acclimatise myself made the whole thing difficult; I was panting and puffing. Truckloads of people were showing up daily at the encampment at the base of the mountain. In an average year you would find only a handful of pilgrims, but this was a particularly auspicious moment and more than a hundred thousand people arrived. The trek around the base of the mountain takes three days to complete. The path rises so high that while I was there a handful of people from the lowlands of India died because of altitude sickness.
I used a small, hand-held digital camera and looked like a tourist. Wheel of Time is the first occasion I’ve ever given myself a cameraman credit. I always find it embarrassing to take credit for too many things, so with several films in the past I asked a cameraman friend of mine to put his name in the credits, even though I had done all the filming myself. “Is it good work?” he would ask. “Of course,” I said. “You won’t be ashamed.” It meant the television stations producing these films paid this man’s salary, which was money I could use for other things directly related to the production. There are phantoms populating the credits of some of my films going back decades.
Did you feel a divine presence at Mount Kailash?
No, but I could tell everyone else did.
What is the wheel of time?
The centrepiece of the Kalachakra ceremony is an initiation rite comprised of teachings and prayers, with the aim of activating the seed of enlightenment dormant in all of us. The central ritual revolves around the creation of a highly symbolic sand mandala, the wheel of time, a complex vision of a sacred cosmography. As far as I know, five books of instruction are required to complete it and there are more than two hundred volumes of commentary and exegesis. The symbolic image of the mandala is deeply embedded in the eidetic memory of the Buddhist world. The artist monks come from the Dalai Lama’s monastery in Dharamsala; they sit on the four sides of the platform and work with the utmost concentration, trickling extremely fine sand of different colours with pinpoint precision to create the mandala, all while wearing face masks, because to breathe or sneeze on their work would spell disaster. It’s all extremely physical work, yet stunningly placid at the same time. Once the monks have finished, thousands of devout people move around the platform in prayer. Eventually the Dalai Lama disperses the image with a few strokes of a broom, then throws the sand into a nearby river, which symbolises the impermanence of things.
In The White Diamond Graham Dorrington tests a prototype airship in the jungles of Guyana.
The project was brought to me by my son Rudolph, who had the feeling I should do it because – with its themes of flight and hovering in the air – the story has such an intense connection to my feelings about flying. The film is the tale of aeronautical engineer Graham Dorrington, who once pedalled an airship from Southampton to the Isle of Wight, a distance of about a hundred miles. He was about to embark on a trip to the giant Kaieteur Falls – more than four times the height of Niagara Falls – in the heart of Guyana, hoping to float his helium-filled airship above the treetops. The purpose of the journey was to study the biosphere and wildlife high up in the canopy of the jungle, terrain which remains mostly unexplored; even the bottom of the ocean is better understood than the biodiversity you find up there. A helicopter would create an enormous amount of noise and wind, while a balloon would just float aw
ay wherever the wind takes it. A dirigible airship, the kind of subdued and contemplative form of flight that has always fascinated me, was the solution for this kind of exploration.
It was always a risky venture, something made clear by the fact that in 1993 a similar expedition in Sumatra had ended in disaster when German cameraman Dieter Plage perished on the maiden flight of a one-man airship that Dorrington had designed and built. He fell two hundred feet to his death, landing at Dorrington’s feet. Plage appears in archival footage in The White Diamond only briefly, but his presence somehow casts a shadow over the entire film. Dorrington’s story reminds me of a Greek tragedy about a man who dreams of flying. Until today, he hasn’t fully redeemed himself; he will have to cope with his friend’s death until the end of his days. Dorrington shied away from telling Plage’s story on camera for weeks, but I kept pushing him. One day I cornered him. “This is the moment,” I said, “otherwise it will never happen.” He reluctantly agreed, acknowledging it would be a key sequence in the film. I told him the only witnesses would be a cameraman, me recording the sound, and my fourteen-year-old son. I sensed that the key to Dorrington opening up was having him speak not to a camera or a crew, but a young boy.