by Paul Cronin
It turns out that Bad Lieutenant took the temperature of the time, of the imminent financial crisis. In the months leading up to the making of the film I sensed a breakdown was coming. When attempting to lease a car for my wife I was confronted with the news that I had no credit score, and so had to pay a much higher monthly rate. I questioned why this was, seeing that I have always paid my bills and have never owed money to anyone. But this was exactly my problem. I had never borrowed money, hardly ever used a credit card, and my bank account was in the black. The system penalises good housekeeping and encourages us to spend money we don’t have. My immediate reaction was to withdraw my savings from Lehman Brothers, even while my bank manager frantically tried to persuade me to put even more money in. A few months later came Lehman’s bankruptcy and the ensuing financial collapse.
We had almost finished shooting in New Orleans when Hurricane Gustav began to approach and whole areas of the city were evacuated. Nicolas Cage, cameraman Peter Zeitlinger and I decided we were going to stay behind. Once the storm hit, our plan was to crawl out and get some shots of a real hurricane, but we wrapped production a week before it arrived and left town. Gustav eventually ended up daintily hitting the city, like an old spinster’s fart.
What contribution did you make to the screenplay?
The script is Finkelstein’s, but as usual it kept shifting, demanding its own life, and I invented several new scenes full of what we might call “Herzogian” moments. The opening sequence was originally a man jumping in front of a New York subway train and the lieutenant saving him, but New Orleans has no subway. I wanted the story to start in the most debased way possible, and came up with the new beginning of the two detectives placing bets on how long it will take for the prisoner to drown. In that scene – for which Finkelstein wrote the dialogue – we initially used fresh water, but it looked too clean, so the set designer added dye, but that turned the water toxic. Someone had the idea of using instant coffee, but that would have been dangerous for the actors because caffeine seeps through skin and would probably have induced cardiac arrest. In the end we dumped two and a half thousand pounds of decaffeinated coffee powder into the water.
I added other moments, like the dancing soul and the alligator lying, run over, in the middle of the road with a nylon fish line attached to its leg, which I tugged on from off screen, so it looks as if the creature is still twitching. The iguanas, which the bad lieutenant sees thanks to the drug haze he is under, were my idea. There is nothing more wondrous than seeing Nicolas Cage and a lizard together in one shot. I was walking through the city and saw one of these creatures sitting up in a tree. “I need two of them,” I told one of the producers. I filmed them myself in a thoroughly demented way, using a tiny lens at the end of a fibre-optic cable. Everyone on set asked me what the meaning of the shot was. “I have no idea,” I said, “but it’s going to be big.” One of these little monsters bit into my thumb; its jaws were a steel vice. I struggled to shake it off as the entire crew laughed hysterically.
In the original script the relationship between the Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendes characters was based purely on sex and drugs, but I wanted a love story with some depth, so I invented the sequence with the silver spoon. He talks about how as a child he thought that pirates travelled up the Mississippi river and buried their treasure under a tree near his home. Towards the end of the film he finds this spoon – which is actually a rusty little thing – and gives it to her, as if handing over his childhood dreams. The relationship between the two of them immediately becomes more profound. I cut several scenes of drug-taking involving the two of them because I have no connection to drug culture. This isn’t moralising; I’m just telling you how things are. My most serious vice is fiendishly strong espresso. I’ve never taken drugs, though was accidentally stoned once, when Florian Fricke served me a pancake with some home-made marmalade. It was very tasty, but I had no idea it was laced with hashish. In the car, later that evening, I circled for half an hour around the block where I lived because I couldn’t find my apartment. On Bad Lieutenant we had a prop man who would dish out harmless white powder, and when Nicolas sniffed this prop cocaine he instantly transformed into someone else. For a moment I thought it was the real stuff.
Cage gives a wonderful performance.
I first met him when he was an adolescent, at his uncle Francis Coppola’s winery in the Napa Valley, during production on Fitzcarraldo. Then, soon after he won an Academy Award, we spoke about him playing Cortés in the conquistador film I was planning. By the time of Bad Lieutenant we had been eyeing each other’s work for decades and wondered how we had managed to elude each other for so long. Once I brought Nicolas the script and told him I thought we could do something completely wild and hilarious with this story, it was clear this was the project we had to work on together. He called me from Australia, and within sixty seconds we were in business. Neither of us was prepared to sign a contract unless the other was on board, which put the film on solid ground from the start.
Bad Lieutenant isn’t a film noir where an oppressive climate permeates; the whole thing is full of menacing humour. There’s a light touch throughout, with a leading character who isn’t in the least bit guilty about being so ferociously evil. On the second day of shooting Nicolas timidly said, “I hate to ask about ‘motivations,’ but why is this man so bad? Is it the drugs? Is it the destruction of the city? Police corruption? The hurricane?” My answer was, simply, “There is such a thing as the bliss of evil.” Nicolas liked the physical comportment I wanted him to have throughout the film, with a slanted shoulder and his head sticking slightly out. “Your shoulder line should be slightly slanted,” I said, “preceded by your gaze.” He knew that sometimes, after we finished shooting a scene, I wouldn’t turn the camera off because I sensed there was more to it. At the end of the film, after having committed innumerable evil deeds, the bad lieutenant takes refuge in a cheap hotel room, where he has an unexpected encounter with the former prisoner he rescued from drowning at the start of the film. The young man sees there is something wrong and offers to get him out of there. Both actors spoke their lines, but I kept the camera rolling, and after a full sixty seconds of silence Nicolas said to me, “What more should I add?” Without missing a beat I told him, “Do fish have dreams?” We shot the scene again with that line, and I added the final shot of them leaning up against the glass of a huge aquarium, where sharks and fish move as if caught in the dreams of a distant and incomprehensible world. I love the mysterious chuckle the lieutenant gives at the end. Who knows where such things come from? It reminds me of those final self-portraits by Rembrandt and Goya, of toothless old men laughing at who knows what.
Do you consider yourself to be politically engaged?
I’m certainly not apolitical. I have always been keenly aware of the forces that control the world, and am probably more informed than most people. Although I have never been a member of a political party, I have no problem with organised political movements, though prefer to formulate my own opinions, which means I often find myself on the other side of commonly embraced arguments. I appreciate Brutus, for example, who defended the Roman Republic against an emerging empire but is remembered primarily as the vile assassin of Julius Caesar. Caesar overextended the reach of Rome when he crossed over into Britain, and by doing so weakened the foundations of the Republic. Brutus had plenty of valid reasons to murder Caesar, and I can appreciate his farsightedness. He didn’t want the cult of the emperor to dominate, which came to pass after Caesar, with figures like Nero and Caligula.
I made Even Dwarfs Started Small at the height of the student protests, amidst the infighting on the Left, when the Maoists were attacking the Trotskyists, and vice versa, with more vitriol than they ever heaped on the Establishment. When it comes to a successful rebellion, timing, patience and clearly defined goals are the most important things, but the dwarfs in the film – a bunch of unprofessional revolutionaries – have none of those things. It isn’t real d
amage they cause; these are more gestures of provocation and anarchy. A revolution for its own sake, without the necessary momentum behind it, is pathetic. Sometimes you have to wait fifty years for the right moment. The result was that the simpletons accused me of ridiculing worldwide protest rather than embracing it, which is probably the one thing they were right about. They were yearning to change the world, and insisted that whenever a filmmaker portrays a revolution, it has to be a successful one. There were very few reviewers of the period who didn’t use wild revolutionary jargon and put ridiculous political demands on filmmakers. They were the kinds of people who felt that cinema has only one purpose: to serve the movement and contribute to the struggle of replacing the democratic order with socialism.
I told the agitators they were blinded by zealousness, that if they looked at Even Dwarfs Started Small in forty years they might see a more truthful representation of what happened in 1968 than in most other films. Let’s face it, the hippie movement had a certain charm, but it was part of the gross stupidity that pervaded the era. No one ever prevented anything – let alone a war – by putting a flower in the barrel of a gun. Nightmares and dreams have never followed the rules of political correctness. I’ve outlasted more trends than I can remember. The radical ideologies of 1968 weren’t for me because, contrary to most of my peers, I had already been much further out into the world. The analysis of West Germany as a repressive and fascist police state that needed to be overpowered by a socialist utopian revolution, and those in charge quelled, never looked right to me. Young men and women from well-to-do families insisted we had to take up arms on behalf of the working class and liberate the impoverished and exploited peoples of the Third World from the yoke of imperialism. I asked if any of them had been to Africa or worked in a factory. None of them had. I had done both those things, but still I was anathema for these people.
Ten years after Even Dwarfs Started Small I made my version of Nosferatu. Murnau’s version seemed to sense what was going to happen in Germany a few years later; the film is the work of a visionary artist who felt the encroachment of real terror, even if he couldn’t define it precisely. It’s a kind of premonition, with the plague of rats as a prefiguration of the Nazi pestilence that soon swarmed over Germany. The legend of the vampire blossoms more freely in the face of external menace, so it’s no surprise that the genre has never gone away. But though it might somehow have reflected the emotional and political temperature of the time, Nosferatu can’t be simplified down to a sociological level because there was no looming political cataclysm in West Germany. The country was marked instead by stagnation; we were moving slowly but steadily towards boredom and obesity.
Twenty years after Nosferatu, with Little Dieter Needs to Fly, I was criticised for not denouncing American aggression in Vietnam and asked repeatedly why the film made no political statement about the war. But I never saw either Little Dieter or Rescue Dawn as films about Vietnam; the war takes place in the margins of both films. These are tales in the tradition of Conrad, about the trials and tests of man, about loyalty, survival and friendship. It was never Dieter’s aim to go to war; he just wanted to fly, and as a German the only chance to do this was to go and live in the United States. Once on the ground – before the war had found its true magnitude and horror, before napalm was dropped on civilians – Vietnam suddenly wasn’t an abstract grid on a map. Dieter’s attitude changed; he came to understand that there was great suffering taking place in this country he knew so little about. His story cuts across all ideological lines, taking audiences to a more profound level than mere politics or sloganeering. In the course of a single week I received a call from the United States Naval Academy wanting to know if they could show Little Dieter to a class of naval cadets, and a fax from the Fajr International Film Festival in Tehran asking for permission to screen it as “an international film of special distinction.” The mullahs must have approved the film otherwise it would never have passed the censors.
Does political cinema make a difference?
Film is capable of shifting our perception and understanding of things, and mobilising our fantasies. But though cinema and politics do occasionally meet, film isn’t the right soil for political activity. Someone with a microphone or a rifle has always been a more powerful way of effecting change, though we shouldn’t dismiss a handful of great films with a solid political core, like The Battle of Algiers, Dr Strangelove and Salt of the Earth. I’m not on any kind of mission. If I had one, I would be a missionary.
After watching eight minutes of unedited footage, I knew that Joshua Oppenheimer’s surreal The Act of Killing, about the genocide in Indonesia that started in 1965, was an unprecedented work, more than just a piece of political agitation. I encouraged him during editing, insisting he not be a coward and leave anything out, including the final scene, which he was thinking of shortening or cutting completely. “Your life is worth nothing if you remove that ending,” I told him. Outside Indonesia, The Act of Killing became an important catalyst; the historic, legal and philosophical issues were taken up and debated at length throughout the world. Within the country, the film – in which various individuals happily confess to their role in many instances of torture, rape and murder – made something of an impact; a number of long-overdue newspaper and magazine articles were published that described the regime of corruption and fear, one built on the basis of the genocide, thus exposing generations of young Indonesians to the truth for the first time. But several perpetrators of crimes committed fifty years ago still wield power today – people viewed by many as heroes – and the far-reaching changes that the film might have instigated have yet to materialise. Compare this to Marcel Ophüls’s The Sorrow and the Pity, which became a wake-up call for French society, creating a ripple across the entire country, opening eyes to the fact that not everyone had been in resistance against the Nazis, that collaboration wasn’t uncommon. To answer your question, art doesn’t make a difference until it does.
You planned a contribution to the 1978 collective film project Germany in Autumn.
I became involved with a group – including Kluge, Reitz and Schlöndorff – who were making a spontaneous film. It was an interesting idea, and I was actually in Fassbinder’s apartment in Munich when he shot some of his sequence. The idea was to create a feature-length project comprised of various short films that would each comment on the activities of the Red Army Faction, including its kidnapping and murder of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, a German business leader, and the hijacking of a Lufthansa flight by a group wanting the release of various imprisoned RAF members, both in 1977. I had no sympathy for the RAF because I knew their analysis of the political landscape was wrong and I also disapprove of murder; it was clear I could never find anything worthwhile in their means and ends. My idea for Germany in Autumn was to film with Rolf Pohle, one of my few school friends, who had been politically active as a youth and was leader of the student council of Munich University. He became a member of the Baader-Meinhof Group and was sentenced to six years in prison, then along with other RAF members exchanged for a kidnapped politician and flew to South Yemen. Pohle ended up in Greece, where he went into hiding. He was eventually arrested, extradited to Germany and imprisoned in Straubing, the most severe of all Bavarian prisons, where he served out his sentence.
I visited Pohle there and found him in bad shape because he had been in isolation for a year and a half, unable to receive regular visitors. As a gift I brought him one of those small rubber balls that bounce wildly. They shoot with incredible speed in all directions; like a goalkeeper, you need quick reactions in response. I knew Pohle would want something to occupy his mind and remembered how fond he had been of these toys, but almost immediately it was confiscated by guards under the pretext of safety. What was so disquieting was that for the first twenty minutes Pohle spoke very loudly across the table. We had two guards sitting right there with us, listening to everything we were saying, but at arm’s length he spoke as if he were talking t
o someone a hundred feet away. He had no feeling for intimacy because it had been so long since he had interacted with anyone. Pohle was eventually released and returned to Greece, where he died a few years later.
Was it around this time you tried to establish a utopian state in Guatemala?
No, that was long before, probably around 1964. By naming it a utopian state, you already name the stupidity of it. I wanted to go down to the Petén area and assist the locals because they clearly had a natural right to their own nation. They had their own language, culture and history, and lived in a special district that would have been perfect for a separate, independent country. I even wrote a constitution. The idea was to create a sovereign state, an independent republic, not just a makeshift community. The whole idea was a figment of my fantasies and is too embarrassing to talk about in detail. I had no right of belonging; I was an outsider to these people, and you can’t build a state if you don’t have the historical and cultural right. No viable nation can be constructed so abstractly. I never even made it to Guatemala because at the time there was a military regime in power and I couldn’t get a visa. I reached the border with Mexico and discovered that the only way to get into the country was by swimming across the border river. Using a football as a floating device, I drifted towards the riverbank on the Guatemalan side. Suddenly I saw two sets of eyes on me, those of a couple of soldiers brandishing assault rifles. They clearly didn’t have a clue what to do. I waved cautiously at them, then slowly, rather forlornly, paddled back to Mexico. My utopian community failed – rightly so – even before I crossed the border.
Around that same time I found myself in a small village in Mexico called Xichú. I was walking when the road disappeared underneath my feet, and I descended on solid rock, eventually encountering a remote community. An old man was sitting outside on a big chair that resembled a throne, surrounded by people. Someone explained to me that he was the father of 111 children, that the youngsters and women all around us were either his offspring or their mothers. This patriarch had created his own civilisation. It’s a wild enough idea to have eleven children and form your own football team, but this man had created an entire league.