by Paul Cronin
The other starting point for the film was when I saw some otherworldly footage that Henry Kaiser – who produced the music for Grizzly Man – had shot under the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. Throughout the austral summer the sun penetrates the ice and illuminates everything, making it look as though there are frozen clouds up above. During the Grizzly Man recording sessions with Richard Thompson I looked, out of the corner of my eye, through the soundproof glass into the control booth and saw Henry and my editor Joe Bini, thirty feet away, staring at a laptop. I caught a two-second glance of something extraordinary on the screen. “Stop everything!” I said, and immediately rushed over to Henry, who insisted it was uninteresting amateur footage, shot with a singlechip digital camera. But to my eyes it contained some of the most profoundly beautiful images I had ever seen. With underwater shots of air bubbles pushing against the ceiling of ice and endless ice crystals floating towards the camera, it was as if a poet had descended deep below the surface of the planet. The divers are exploring and retrieving monocellular creatures under the ice, but taken out of context these images are unique. To me, they looked like astronauts floating in space, and I immediately knew they should be part of a bigger film. It was pure science fiction without a technical trick, as if shot on a foreign planet, something not from this earth, the kind of fantasy landscape we usually see only in our dreams. Suddenly here it was for real. “Believe it or not,” I say when asked where the scenes were shot, “those really are images from the Andromeda Nebula.” They remind me of the late-mediaeval painter Albrecht Dürer, who dreamt of columns of fire raining down from the sky. I asked Henry to let me use the material and to go back to Antarctica and do more filming, because I needed a series of long, flowing shots.
The film is a poetic mix of science fiction and documentary reality.
Which means it has a strong connection to Fata Morgana and Lessons of Darkness. More than ever with The Wild Blue Yonder I ignored the “rules” of cinema. This is where I blew all the fuses.
I wanted to explore certain ideas that had long fascinated me, like the fact that there are no friendly, inhabitable planets out there that we could ever colonise, and even if there were, we would never reach them. Jupiter is out of the question because it’s gaseous, and other planets are either too hot or their gravitational pull is too strong. The Earth’s moon and Mars are too barren, and even if some of Jupiter’s moons contain frozen water, how would human beings survive any significant length of time out there? What would happen if we left our solar system and set out for some of the stars within the Milky Way? Insurmountable problems would immediately arise; for example, the maximum speed at which we could travel. Even if we could accelerate to velocities close to half the speed of light, we would need thousands of years to reach our destination, and centuries just to slow down upon arrival. The stark reality is that if twenty thousand years ago astronauts had set out travelling at the highest speed ever reached by a rocket, hoping to reach Earth’s nearest neighbour outside our solar system, as of today they would have covered barely 15 per cent of the distance. To achieve only 10 per cent of the speed of light would mean lift-off with an amount of fuel on board equivalent not only to the mass of all the gasoline on Earth, but equivalent to the mass of everything in the entire visible universe, including the Sun and every star in every galaxy. Other exotic theoretical ideas – like entering a black hole and accessing a separate reality – have to be discarded; it would take us millions of years just to reach the nearest black hole. And how would you even survive one? They exert such unbelievable force that an entire galaxy would be squeezed into the size of an orange. Life on board the cramped spacecraft wouldn’t be easy. After extended periods in space our bones develop osteoporosis, and exposure to radiation would eventually cause leukaemia or other forms of cancer. The number of coups, rebellions and insurrections, and the inbreeding and general discontent, that would have to be averted – over hundreds of generations – if a fleet of craft full of human beings set off from Earth means the whole idea is completely fanciful. Just getting to bed every night in a wallmounted sleeping bag would be difficult enough.
In The Wild Blue Yonder I used anything I could find from whatever source that looked strange or seemed to come from outer space, including footage of two astronauts emerging from a water tank, which I filmed at the Johnson Space Center in Houston and immediately wove into the story of aliens arriving on Earth. I jumped at some spectacular footage from the National Archives of early aviators and material I found in the NASA archive of scientists and engineers piecing together the Galileo probe. I ignored shots of the actual assembly of the craft, using only instances of standstill, when they study the machinery and seem perplexed, even frightened. All these bizarre images were tied into a story of deadly microbes having polluted Earth and a group of astronauts being sent out to find a hospitable place for human habitation. I filmed several lengthy conversations with NASA scientists but didn’t use most of this material because it pulled things too much in the direction of a traditional documentary, though I did include Ted Sweetser and his colleague Roger Diehl in the film. Roger works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and is an expert in ballistic-trajectory designs for the delivery of spacecraft to the outer solar system. The plan was originally to send the Galileo probe directly towards Jupiter, but shortly before the launch the Challenger space shuttle disaster occurred, so the project was delayed for a few years. The probe was supposed to be transported into orbit on the shuttle, but the problem was finding a way to supply it with enough kinetic energy to propel it all the way to Jupiter. Roger came up with the idea of launching the probe in the opposite direction to Earth’s motion around the Sun so it would fall in towards the Sun and fly by Venus. This provided a gravity assist that pumped energy into the probe’s path so it could come back to Earth and fly by it, which in turn gave another gravity assist, putting it into an even bigger orbit around the Sun and setting up a second Earth gravity assist two years later that finally pumped the heliocentric orbit up big enough so the probe could reach Jupiter. I love those mathematicians and their imaginations.
The soundtrack is as important as the images.
The music was created by Ernst Reijseger, an astonishingly talented Dutch cellist who also worked on The White Diamond. I always asked him to be barefoot when recording; he plays even better without shoes. I can show him a film sequence he has never seen, or recite him a text he has never heard, and he can play along beautifully, never failing to create amazing music and truly capture the right mood, though neither of us knows exactly in which direction we are moving. Over two evenings in 2012 he and I put on a show at the Volksbühne in Berlin entitled Eroberung des Nutzlosen [Conquest of the Useless], with me reading from my Fitzcarraldo journals and him playing on his cello, alongside other musicians. There was a hammock on stage to which I would retire, in full view of the audience, when the music took over.
As with The White Diamond, where cameraman Henning Brümmer listened to the music before we left for Guyana, I anchored The Wild Blue Yonder in music that was recorded months earlier, then played the recordings to everyone involved before we started filming. It meant the music really did dictate the rhythm and flow of the narrative. Ernst brought to the The Wild Blue Yonder recording session the unlikely combination of a group from the mountains of Sardinia who sing prehistoric-sounding shepherd chants, and Mola Sylla, a Senegalese singer who sings in Wolof, his native language. When we put it all together, over a two-day period, the result was extraordinarily strange and beautiful. The musicians had never played in this combination before; every piece was unrehearsed and recorded in a single take. We ended up with two and a half hours of music. I was with them in the studio as they were performing, and would sometimes stretch out my arms and perform gentle floating movements, to mimic the images of astronauts in my mind, so the musicians would get a sense of the rhythms I wanted. It was similar to how I worked with Richard Thompson. At one point, when he was recording the piece
that opens Grizzly Man, I asked him to stop. “This doesn’t sound like the statement it needs to be,” I said. “It has to start very strongly. Set your foot down! Your music establishes the law of the land.”
The alien in The Wild Blue Yonder is incompetent.
His people have to escape their dying planet, deep in the outer reaches of Andromeda, in a galaxy far beyond our own, so they send out a huge armada of spacecraft, a few of which make it to Earth. It’s a long and tedious journey for them, and though their ancestors were great thinkers and scientists, the group that finally arrives many generations later are a bunch of homesick and neurotic deadbeats. They have big plans and want to make an impression, but the capital city they construct to rival Washington D.C. is a grand failure. Nobody shows up either to live there or visit the Great Andromeda Memorial or shop in the enormous mall, which is full of unsold merchandise. The aliens might have wanted to destroy New York City in two minutes – as technically advanced superbeings from other planets usually do – but in this film they suck. I couldn’t have picked a more credible alien than Brad Dourif to play the part. He’s especially wonderful when explaining why everyone from his planet is such an abject failure and when he complains that the CIA won’t listen to what he knows about the UFO that crashed near Roswell, which was actually a probe sent by his planet ahead of the armada.
There was no budget for The Wild Blue Yonder; I used money earned from Grizzly Man to produce the film. One project fed another, just as they always have done. Brad learnt his part in not much more than a day, and we spent a few hours filming him. I wrote an ad hoc text, a long monologue which he wanted to perfect down to the last comma. “I’m more interested in your train of thought,” I told him. “It doesn’t matter if you forget a few words. What’s important is that you get the context right.” The mall sequence was shot at Niland, California, close to Slab City, a rather bizarre place, what they call an “unincorporated community.” Although federal law applies, there is no mayor, no tax board or anything like that, no sewerage system, water supply or electricity. This is a small corner of anarchy, a semi-lawless zone, a focal point for renegades and drop-outs, the kind of people who forever talk about arming themselves, marching to Washington and taking over the government. While we were filming, an intimidating fellow with a big fuzzy beard, dark glasses and a rather large belly gave us a threatening “time-out” sign, suggesting we should immediately stop what we were doing, pack up and get the hell out of there.
Rescue Dawn is a fictional version of Dieter Dengler’s escape from a prison camp.
It was always clear to me that Dieter’s story should become a feature film, but for various logistical reasons – not least because it took so long to find the money and actors – I made Little Dieter Needs to Fly before Rescue Dawn. There were also things Dieter didn’t want to talk about when we made Little Dieter, like the fact that there was real animosity between him and some of the other prisoners, to the point where they would have strangled each other if they hadn’t been cross-handcuffed and chained together. With everyone bound together for two years in mediaeval foot blocks, in the humidity and suffering from diarrhoea, it’s completely understandable. “We’ll make so much noise the guards will notice you,” everyone said to Dieter when he told them about his escape plans. “We have to stay here. The war will be over in a few weeks anyway.” Dieter was also embarrassed about the vicious beatings he had received at the hands of the blacksmith he apprenticed for as a child. “The old man is still around,” he would say. Little Dieter is the version of the story I was bound to at the time for practical reasons. When I watched the film for the first time with Dieter, the lights went up and he turned to me. “Werner,” he said without missing a beat, “this is unfinished business.” The story of Dieter and Duane was always one I wanted to tell in a feature film, a tale of friendship and survival. Although Rescue Dawn came second, in spirit it really was the first film. Little Dieter was strongly influenced by a feature film that hadn’t been made yet.
Is Rescue Dawn based on Dieter’s autobiography?
Not really, though the hard core of his story is intact and the principal figures are the cast of characters Dieter encountered in the jungle. The published version of his story – Escape from Laos – was rewritten and issued by a military press, which streamlined the text and removed many interesting details, leaving only the bare-bones tale of the prisoners. Everything inspiring about Dieter’s original, rambling manuscript was simplified in the book, which is devoid of all imagination. He never learnt to read and write English properly, so articulated himself in what is essentially phonetic English. The misspelling and creation of new words are wild; he spells “machete” as “muchetty.” I have always compared Dieter’s prose to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a book I don’t much care for and which I feel drove English literature into a cul-de-sac from which – to this day – it has struggled to emerge. The learned poet Joyce attempted to push language to a certain limit in a rather calculated way, but the resulting book is an artificial and cerebral calculation, an experiment with language, a detour from true storytelling. Dieter plays with language in the same kind of way, but with genuine innocence, believing this actually is English. I can already feel the whacks from Joyce scholars for saying such sacrilegious things, but I’m convinced that Dieter’s original manuscript – which truly brims with life – is an authentic Finnegans Wake.
The production of Rescue Dawn was difficult.
For four and a half years nobody wanted to invest in the project, until all of a sudden two producers came along willing to finance the film. The first was a hugely overweight man who had fulfilled his dream of becoming a foosball world champion, and who years before had made his money in the trucking business. He moved into the nightclub business, and from there to film production. Unfortunately I didn’t look into his background; it turned out he had an extensive rap sheet. The second producer was a basketball star with no experience in filmmaking, which in a way was a blessing because he more or less left us alone. However, there were perpetual financial troubles and no money in place when it was most badly needed. The transportation department had no money for gas, one day more than thirty Thai crew quit because they hadn’t been paid, and I was paid with cheques that bounced. I fought hard to make something out of this disaster, and even managed to finish the film two days ahead of schedule. The crew – most of whom I had never worked with before – were a group of technicians from Hollywood, Europe and Thailand. They needed time to get used to the situation and each other, which eventually they did, but at the start it wasn’t easy co-ordinating so many cultures of filmmaking into a single unit. The Americans were always nervous, telling me I wasn’t shooting sufficient coverage. I took my assistant aside and asked, “What do they mean by coverage? I have insurance coverage for my car, but coverage when making a film?” They wanted me to get a range of intermediate shots, close-ups and reverse angles, all for safety’s sake. But I have always filmed only what I need for the screen, and nothing else. When you do open heart surgery you don’t go for the appendix or toenails, you go straight for the beating heart.
Once shooting was completed we had to wait six months to edit because there was no money for post-production. Some of the film’s other producers ended up in prison, and a couple of years after Rescue Dawn was released I was arrested at the airport in Bangkok and handcuffed to a chair because the authorities thought I was one of the producers who had fled the country leaving a bundle of unpaid bills. It took some persuading to convince them I was only the director. But, as usual, this is all inconsequential. I have experienced these kinds of roadblocks on almost every one of my films; it’s the nature of the business, and when I speak of these two producers I do so without complaint. I merely state the facts. They were, after all, the only people who took on the challenge of making Rescue Dawn. It didn’t bother me that one was a nightclub owner; don’t forget that Sam Goldwyn started out as a glove salesman, and Jon Peters was a hairdresser.
The real question is whether I was forced to compromise, and the answer is no. One achievement of Rescue Dawn is that it is exactly the film I set out to make, especially the look and feel of the jungle.
Encounters at the End of the World was filmed in Antarctica.
I was drawn to the area when I saw the footage Henry Kaiser shot under the Ross Ice Shelf, which appears in The Wild Blue Yonder. After seeing the images I told him I wanted to go diving in Antarctica myself, and he proceeded to explain how dangerous it is. The water temperature is below freezing, compasses are useless because, being so close to the magnetic pole, needles always point straight up or down, and the divers – who explore under a twenty-foot ceiling of ice – are at constant risk of being swept away by tidal currents. Regardless, they swim untethered without safety lines, as such things might impede their work, which means they have nothing to assist them in finding the exit holes at the surface. It’s fatal if they aren’t able to orientate themselves quickly enough. You can’t expect valuable resources to be spent rescuing some amateur trapped under the ice, so it was clear I would never have a chance to dive down there myself.
Henry told me about the Antarctic Artists and Writers Program of the National Science Foundation, to which anybody can apply. This was fortunate, as not being a pilot, scientist, mechanic or chef I had little to contribute to the community in Antarctica. I made a strange, wild application, explaining that though I was curious about insanity among mammals and, specifically, derangement in penguins, I wasn’t going to make a film about the animals. My application made no secret of the fact that I was interested in certain species of ants that keep flocks of plant lice as slaves, milking them for droplets of glucose, and wondered why a sophisticated animal like a chimpanzee doesn’t utilise inferior creatures, for example straddling a goat and riding off into the sunset. To my surprise, the National Science Foundation invited me down. There are Nobel Prize winners lined up hoping to go to Antarctica, so I have no idea why my application was successful. Once I finished the film, but before I screened it to anyone, the Foundation told me they hoped it could be used as an educational tool. I told them perhaps in a poetry class, but probably not a science one. I later learnt that James Cameron applied to make a film about Antarctica, though we’ll probably never know what his plans were because his application was turned down. It seems that the minimum number of people in his crew would have been something like thirty.