by Paul Cronin
Behind the waterfall is a gigantic cave.
It’s home to one and a half million nesting swifts. After diving down vertically at more than a hundred miles an hour, faster than a small aeroplane, they fly past – and some even through – this curtain of water. I stood on the edge of the cliff as they swept right past me like bullets but wasn’t hit once; even at that speed they somehow avoid everything in their way. I spoke to one of the tribal leaders and asked him what was inside this dark cave. He said that according to ancient beliefs, great monsters and gigantic snakes are back there, guarding treasure. We lowered one of the crew – an expert mountain climber who was carrying a camera – on a rope to shoot behind the waterfall, but the tribal leader implored me not to show the footage to anyone, which is why I didn’t include it in the film.
What I like about The White Diamond is that the heart of the film imperceptibly shifts, midway, from Dorrington to Marc Anthony Yhap, one of the local Rastafarians, then again to Yhap’s magnificent and beloved rooster Red Man. Moving from protagonist to protagonist wasn’t my original plan, but as I looked at the cast of characters around me during filming, the storyline and centre of attention naturally drifted. By the end of The White Diamond we are following Red Man, who has become the film’s new leading character. Kleist does something similar in Michael Kohlhaas, with the narrative moving from Kohlhaas to Martin Luther, then finally to a gypsy woman.
Do you ever think back on all the people you have filmed with over the years?
Of course. You would never say being the head of a family is a man’s profession. For me it’s the same thing. Making films isn’t my profession, it’s my life. The films and people in them aren’t just characters; they are a vitally important part of me as a human being. Many are part of the family inside me, even if they probably mean something different to me today than when I made those particular films.
Fini died a few years after we made Land of Silence and Darkness, and I haven’t had any contact with Steiner for several decades. I was last in touch with him when he was the trainer of the American ski-flying team in Colorado. Bruno S. died in 2010. Years before he had made his full name known to the public, so for the record and in his honour let me state it here: Bruno Schleinstein. He was a genuinely inventive man, and was proud of being a self-taught pianist. He would squeeze my fingertips when we watched The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser together and he heard music. “This is feeling strong in Der Bruno’s heart,” he would say. I ended up writing some scenes for him in Stroszek where he could play the piano. He painted what I suppose would be called “naive” art, and one day showed me a great discovery he insisted was worth submitting to the Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften [German Academy of Sciences]. His apartment was full of found objects because he was always rummaging around city garbage cans. He collected dilapidated ventilators, a couple of which still worked, and painted one blade yellow, one blue, one red, and so on. Bruno was convinced he was the first person to discover that when they spun around, all of a sudden the colours would vanish and appear white. In his later years he published a book of aphorisms, had an exhibition of his art and released a CD of his music. For many people my hiring a man like Bruno was too far out of the ordinary. There was a very weak film about him a few years ago that suggests I used, abused, then dropped this innocent and defenceless man. It was directed by such a puny dimwit that I have nothing to say in response, other than: I know I did the right thing. I prefer my opponents to be more formidable. Although years passed between our meetings, I always kept one eye on Bruno from afar, and would have immediately done something had I discovered he was in trouble.
The short-range commitment of filmmaking means there’s a deficit of deep personal connections in this job. If I made a film every five years, it would be easier to maintain contact with people, but that’s never been the case. I lead a rather nomadic existence, and in any given year might travel to a dozen countries. I’m like a late-mediaeval mercenary; once a battle is fought, I move on. I can’t feel guilty about not staying in touch with all the people I have worked with over the decades. However intense it might be, time spent with someone on a film is inevitably a fleeting alliance. These relationships always come to a natural end, and sustained contact rarely develops once our work together is completed. Everyone moves on to the next project, often thousands of miles away. I count myself lucky, however, because my oldest and dearest friends are those I met while making my early films; for a time it was the only way I made contact with people. Fortunately, over the decades I have been able to call upon many of the same trusted collaborators whenever I make a film. This includes my wife, who is a photographer and travels as widely and as intensively as I do. She sometimes works as the set photographer on my films, which means we move about the world together.
Many of my collaborators over the years haven’t strictly been people of cinema, though they have all brought much to the filmmaking process with their wildly divergent approaches. Tenacious men and women, singular, imaginative, dedicated and trustworthy, with great faith, all as agitated as I am. Ulrich Bergfelder, the set designer on several of my films, is a specialist in old Provençal languages and troubadour literature. Claude Chiarini, who died a few years ago, was a doctor and neurologist in a Parisian lunatic asylum, once of the French Foreign Legion and formerly a dentist. He joined us on the set of Heart of Glass in case one of the hypnotised actors didn’t wake up, and also to take production photos. Cornelius Siegel, a mathematician and master carpenter, is an ingenious man who can build anything. If a battery fails in the middle of the jungle, he could take some bark and resin from a tree and make it work again. Herb Golder, the assistant director on several productions, is a professor of Classics at Boston University and a martial artist. It’s important for the people working on a film to know they aren’t just employees, rather an invaluable component part of a team, with a vested interest in doing the best work possible. On Fitzcarraldo one of the technicians at the processing lab had read the screenplay and looked at the footage we were sending him just as a filmmaker would, to the point where one time I got a message from him asking, “Where are the close-ups?”
You had a moustache for many years. Is the tattoo still there?
The moustache was a good one, some kind of defensive barrier to hide behind. Amidst the travails of life I got rid of it. It was actually the victim of a lost bet. Anyway, life has been good to me and perhaps I no longer need it. As for the tattoo, I don’t think about it any more. It’s there, on my arm, the image of Death, wearing a tuxedo and a bow tie, singing into an old-fashioned ZDF [Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen] microphone. I haven’t noticed the thing for years. I was thirty-six, in San Francisco, accompanying my friend Paul Getty, who was getting a tattoo. The tattoo artist fascinated me, and while I was waiting I got one myself.
You once gave a talk at the New York Public Library entitled “Was the Twentieth Century a Mistake?”
The Polish author Ryszard Kapuściński and I worked on a sciencefiction project together. Kapuściński was one of the few people who had survived the chaos of the eastern Congo in the early sixties; within a year and a half he had been arrested forty times and condemned to death four times. I asked him what his worst experience had been, and in his soft-spoken voice he told me it was when they threw dozens of poisonous snakes into his tiny cell with him. “My hair turned white in five days.” He was a tremendously forceful personality, full of serenity and insight. The idea behind our proposed collaboration was simple: technology is something we all rely on, yet will be the first casualty. For Kapuściński and me, science fiction doesn’t mean the projection of our technological possibilities into the future, rather the loss of such things. There will come a time when we lose our grasp on technology and will never be able to recover it.
Both of us would regularly encounter computers in airports with jungle weeds growing out of the keyboards; one look at those and you knew you weren’t flying anywhere. We often found ourselves stan
ding in front of terminally inoperative elevators, which meant taking the stairs. We encountered soldiers who would cut the water supplies of cities, then return a week later with huge water trucks and sell their cargo to the thirsty population. We stayed in hotels where the bellboy would show you to your room and produce a lightbulb from his pocket. The moment you left – even for an hour – the bulb would be unscrewed from the socket and taken away. A bicycle is easily repaired with basic tools, but a car without gasoline is useless. Imagine a worldwide electricity outage for a full fortnight; the chaos and distress it would cause is unfathomable. Having fundamental skills – starting a fire without a match, constructing a primitive shelter, knowing which berries are poisonous and which aren’t – would become life or death. That was our science fiction.
The hubris that human beings display fascinates me. Look at certain forms of architecture, those grandiose follies that represent the point at which our attempts to construct vast objects alongside nature became too delirious; they touch dangerously upon taboos. The dam at Vajont in northern Italy, in the Dolomite Alps, is a fantastical structure, something like five hundred feet high, the largest in Europe when it was built. The lake that the dam created had steep slopes on either side, and a small number of dissident geologists spoke of the potential for catastrophe. In 1963 came the largest landslide since Neolithic times. In one cataclysmic event, nearly a billion cubic feet of rock crashed into the lake at incredible speed, creating a tsunami almost eight hundred feet high. It swept down over several villages, killing nearly two thousand people. The dam withstood this monumental onslaught completely intact; at its base the wall is nearly ninety feet thick, made of the finest steel and concrete, which is why it will probably still be around in five hundred thousand years. Vajont is one of the follies that will outlive the human race.
While the fundamental analysis of environmentalists is correct, the whole thing took a turn for the worse when tree-huggers entered into the equation. They are so blindly concerned with the wellbeing of tree frogs, panda bears and salad leaves, yet while we have been sitting here it’s entirely possible a human language has died out. We can’t overlook those kinds of irreversible losses to human culture, which are taking place at a staggering speed. The extinction of a language is beyond tragic. Imagine if the last Italian vanished and took with him Dante and Virgil, or if the Russian language disappeared and we no longer had Tolstoy or Pasternak. Ninety per cent of the languages spoken today will likely be dead within a hundred years. There is a new moral and cultural imperative out there, one we unfortunately haven’t absorbed into our common thinking yet. Two centuries ago in Australia there were something like six hundred languages. Today there are less than one-tenth that number. When I made Where the Green Ants Dream I met an old Aborigine, the last surviving speaker of his language, living in a retirement home in Port Augusta, southern Australia. They called him “The Mute,” but the only reason he didn’t talk was that there was no one left on earth with whom he could communicate. I watched him walk up and down the corridors, lonely to the world, dropping change into an empty soda machine and putting his ear up to it so he could listen to the rattle of the coins as they settled at the bottom. He would do this all afternoon. At night, while he slept, the employees of the retirement home would take the money out of the machine and put it back in his pocket. With this man’s death we lost part of our collective human knowledge.
We can actually identify the moment when things started to go awry. It was Petrarch who committed a “sin” by being the first to climb a mountain just for the sake of climbing. In a letter written in Latin, he speaks of a shudder he experienced; it was probably a premonition of the mass tourism that would soon strip the mountain of its dignity. An earlier arch sin, from prehistoric times, one which we can’t date quite so exactly, was the breeding of the first pig. In the Palaeolithic era there were only hunter-gatherers. Breeding the first dog helped maintain that way of life because dogs would travel as companions with nomadic hunters. The same applies to horses, which were a means of transport. But the breeding of the first pig in Neolithic times was a true act of original sin. With agriculture came settlements and eventually cities, making humanity sedentary. This is where our real problems began. It’s too late to turn the clock back.
Be under no illusions. Try to subdue this planet at your peril. Humanity is unsustainable. Trilobites and ammonites disappeared from this planet after hundreds of millions of years of existence, and later the dinosaurs became extinct. It never bothered me that the universe doesn’t care about us, that we will all eventually disappear from the face of the earth. Crabs, urchins and sponges have a better chance of survival; they have been around for millions of years, and probably have millions more to go. We on land are more vulnerable than the cockroaches. Nature has always regulated mankind’s existence. The microbes will get us in the end. Martin Luther was asked what he would do if the world were coming to an end that same day. There is a wondrous serenity to his response. “I would plant an apple tree,” he said. Me, I would make a film.
* See Bibliography, p. 500.
† “I hate that killer’s guts. I shriek to his face that I want to see him croak like the llama that he executed. He should be thrown alive to the crocodiles! An anaconda should strangle him slowly! The sting of a poisonous spider should sting him and paralyze his lungs! The most venomous serpent should bite him and make his brain explode! No panther claws should rip open his throat – that would be much too good for him! No! The huge red ants should piss into his lying eyes and gobble up his balls and his guts! He should catch the plague! Syphilis! Malaria! Yellow fever! Leprosy!” See Bibliography, p. 499.
11
Blowing the Fuses
During an interview a few years ago someone shot you. You told the world: “It was not a significant bullet.”
Winston Churchill said that being shot at unsuccessfully is an exhilarating moment in a man’s life. I was at the top of the Hollywood Hills near my home, recording an interview, when I heard a loud bang. I assumed the camera had exploded because it felt as if I had been hit in the stomach by a chunk of glowing metal, but it was intact. Then, some distance away, I saw a man with a gun, ducking out of sight on a veranda. We had already heard him shouting obscenities about the fact that yet another film star was being interviewed in public. In that respect, it was something on a par with road rage. Although the bullet – small calibre, probably 22mm, or a high-powered airgun – went through my leather jacket and a folded-up catalogue, it didn’t perforate my abdomen, which would have been unpleasant. For this reason, the entire incident is nothing to speak of. I would have continued with the interview, but the cameraman had already hit the dirt. The miserable, cowardly BBC crew were terrified and wanted to call the cops, but I had no interest in spending the next five hours filling out police reports. When you dial 911 because of a burglary, the police take hours to check in on you, but when you report someone shooting, the helicopters start circling within five minutes, and soon after that a SWAT team moves in. The entire incident was more a piece of American folklore than anything else, though I’m glad it was caught on tape. No one would have believed me otherwise.
You live in Los Angeles, home of sun, surf and vitamins.
I leave such things – including gyms, exercising in public and tanning salons, all the idiocies of modern urban life – to Californians. I have been down to Venice Beach, where the musclemen congregate, only a couple of times, and that was to show it to some curious friends. What I like about Los Angeles is that it allows everyone to live his or her own lifestyle. Drive around the hills and you find a Moorish castle next to a Swiss chalet sitting beside a house shaped like a UFO. There is a lot of creative energy in Los Angeles not channelled into the film business. Florence and Venice have great surface beauty, but as cities they feel like museums, whereas for me Los Angeles is the city in America with the most substance, even if it’s raw, uncouth and sometimes quite bizarre. Wherever you look is an i
mmense depth, a tumult that resonates with me. New York is more concerned with finance than anything else. It doesn’t create culture, only consumes it; most of what you find in New York comes from elsewhere. Things actually get done in Los Angeles. Look beyond the glitz and glamour of Hollywood and a wild excitement of intense dreams opens up; it has more horizons than any other place. There is a great deal of industry in the city and a real working class; I also appreciate the vibrant presence of the Mexicans. In the last half century every significant cultural and technical trend has emerged from California, including the Free Speech Movement and the acceptance of gays and lesbians as an integral part of a dignified society, computers and the Internet, and – thanks to Hollywood – the collective dreams of the entire world. A fascinating density of things exists there like nowhere else in the world. Muslim fundamentalism is probably the only contemporary mass movement that wasn’t born there. One reason I’m so comfortable in Los Angeles is that Hollywood doesn’t need me and I don’t need Hollywood. I rarely involve myself with industry rituals and am rarely on the red carpet.
Of course, California is also where some of humanity’s most astonishing stupidities started, like the hippie movement, New Age babble, stretch limos, pyramid energy, plastic surgery, yoga classes for children, vitamins and marijuana smoking. Whenever someone wants to pass on “good vibes” to me, I look for the nearest empty elevator shaft. There are a lot of well-educated people doing very silly things in Los Angeles, like a man in my neighbourhood who one day casually mentioned his cat was in some sort of a frenzy, so he called the cat psychic. He put the receiver to his pet’s ear and for $200 the animal’s problems were solved. I would rather jump off the Golden Gate Bridge than visit a psychiatrist. Self-scrutiny is a strong taboo for me, and if I had to stop and analyse myself, there’s no doubt I would end up wrapped around the next tree. Psychoanalysis is no more scientific than the cranial surgery practised under the middle-period pharaohs, and by jerking the deepest secrets out into the open, it denies and destroys the great mysteries of our souls. Human beings illuminated to the last corner of their darkest soul are unbearable, the same way an apartment is uninhabitable if every corner is flooded with light. The Spanish Inquisition was a similar mistake in human history, forcing people to disclose the innermost nature of their religious faith. It did no good to anyone.