It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive

by Mark Kermode

  What was required was a polite but well-argued defence of my line about The Queen being an essentially televisual enterprise (it did start life as a TV movie) mingled with a willingness to accept that the tide of public opinion was against me, and topped off with a fulsome appreciation of Dame Helen’s flawless performance and a fence-building complaint about Michael Sheen being overlooked in the Oscar nominations. Flattering, then, but also firm on the issue of small-screen versus big-screen on which point I would remain immovable. Claiming that I ‘hadn’t really meant it’ was out of the question, because clearly if I was going to say that The Queen ‘wasn’t a real movie’ on the radio and in the newspapers then I damn well ought to be able to say it to Dame Helen’s face. And the fact remained that I wasn’t having a go at her, but at the film – or rather the ‘not film’, as the case may be.

  Whatever happened, I knew that this was an ‘important’ moment and if I wasn’t up to the challenge then frankly I should get out of film criticism forthwith. As I had discovered with the Broomfield episode, you can’t lie about your opinions just to avoid a potentially awkward encounter, although that’s exactly what every atom of my being wanted to do right there and then.

  But I didn’t. Instead I took a deep breath, gathered myself (think Kate Winslet, minus the posh head-girl charm), tried to expel all thoughts of Caligula from my mind, failed, tried again, failed again, tried a third time, did rather better, took another deep breath, and began to speak – slowly, calmly, clearly.

  If you’d been there with a tape recorder, you would have been proud of me. Because despite the temple-crushing pressures of the moment I did not deny having said that The Queen was not ‘a real film’, but rather offered an explanation of my opinion which was at once firm but fair, critical yet kind. I conceded that other opinions were available, and that my complaint was clearly a minority view. I praised the cast of The Queen for their sterling work, and congratulated Dame Helen for the awards which she had already won and for those which were undoubtedly to follow. I finished by conceding that ‘not all films need look like Pan’s Labyrinth’ (a phrase which Dame Helen had whipped out of thin air – she’d clearly done her homework) but that many very fine screen stories were perhaps best enjoyed from the comfort of one’s armchair. I even suggested that this might be a blessing, and that ‘televisuality’ may simply be another word for the ‘intimacy’ we share with films which we would wish to invite into our homes, like old friends.

  Like I said, if you’d brought a tape recorder you would have been impressed.

  A video camera, however, would have told a very different story. Because even as my mouth said one thing (‘these are my opinions and I am proud to stand by them’) my body – traitor that is – began to say something altogether different. As I concentrated all my energies on making my lips move (harder than it sounds) my knees took the opportunity to mount a royalist revolt and, without telling my head, started to buckle and bend beneath me. Like the mutinous crew of a ship, the rest of my body swiftly followed suit – my neck bent, my head started to droop, and I began to sink in slow motion toward the floor, virtually genuflecting as I went. By the time I’d finished saying whatever it was I had to say I was pretty much down on bended knee, head bowed in supplicant reverence, presumably awaiting prompt separation from my body.

  If I’d had a forelock, I would surely have tugged it. I think I may have tried doffing my quiff. I’m really not sure – I was looking at the floor at the time.

  It was pathetic.

  After a few moments, I regained my composure and struggled to my feet just in time to hear Linda leaping to my defence by telling Dame Helen, ‘Well I’m a film professor and I really loved The Queen!’

  Oh great. Thanks for that.

  ‘Really?’ said Dame Helen, wryly.’I’d love to be party to the arguments that must go on in your house.’

  ‘Ha ha ha,’ said Linda, sounding a bit mental.

  ‘Ha ha ha,’ said I, wondering how much more of this I could manage without descending into screaming panic.’Please God,’ I thought, ‘please make this end. Please let me crawl away with at least some of my dignity still intact.’

  In the end I pulled the conversational equivalent of a handbrake turn by shaking Dame Helen firmly by the hand and announcing incoherently that ‘I’m sure you have much more famous matters to attend to …’ before grabbing Linda by the arm and heading straight for the nearest door.

  I didn’t get very far. Roger Alton, then editor of the Observer, bounded up to me and said excitedly, ‘Hey Mark, did you just get handbagged by Helen Mirren?’

  Oh great. So everyone saw it, and everyone knew. Now it would probably be in the papers. I was going to go down in history as the man who went down on one knee to beg forgiveness for his critical indulgences from Dame Helen Mirren. Terrific.

  I decided not to say anything.

  ‘Yes he did,’ chirruped Linda breezily.’She asked him what he meant by saying that The Queen wasn’t a “real movie”.’

  Thanks again.

  ‘God,’ said Roger.’Was it scary?’

  ‘Oh yes!’ declared Linda again.’Yes, he was definitely scared. He pretty much went down on one knee. It was funny.’

  ‘It wasn’t that funny,’ I mumbled, disgruntledly.

  ‘Oh yes it was,’ retorted Linda, clearly enjoying the moment.’It really was quite funny …’

  And from somewhere in the back of my mind I heard the spectre of every film-maker whose work I have ever insulted cackling heartily, enjoying the joke, delighting in my public comeuppance, smirking at my humiliation.

  Ha bloody ha.

  Chapter 8

  I SHOT WERNER HERZOG

  So there we were, up by Lookout Mountain, on the outskirts of LA, when Werner Herzog’s trousers exploded.

  It was, as I mentioned before, a small explosion, as if a firecracker had gone off in his pocket – a phrase which would later come back to haunt me thanks to the sinister miracle of the internet. But it was an explosion nonetheless, followed by silence broken only by Herzog’s morosely Bavarian observation that ‘Someone is shooting at us. We should leave …’.

  Exactly what happened next is something of a blur – although unflattering video footage of myself hanging off a wire fence whilst attempting to scramble ungainly round a precipitous overhang suggests that I did not proceed in an orderly fashion toward the nearest exit whilst taking care to remove any sharp objects or high heels. I do remember experiencing a profound sense of urgency which seemed strangely absent from Herzog’s own response. I put this down to deeply ingrained cultural differences: Herzog grew up in exciting Germany, whereas I grew up in Barnet – a place so dull that a decapitated chicken once made the front page of the local press. In short, I had no frame of reference for the seriousness (or otherwise) of the drama now unfolding less than a mile from the site of that infamous eighties drugs-and-porn bloodbath the ‘Wonderland Massacre’. All that was clear was that Herzog had been shot (in the pantular region) and befuddled panic was top of my list of possible responses.

  For Herzog, however, this was business as usual. As the maker of such rugged classics as Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre: Wrath of God, Herzog had long held a reputation as modern cinema’s most fearless foot soldier. Popular folklore had it that working on Herzog’s movies was all but indistinguishable from being in them, an idea crystallised in Les Blank’s brilliant documentary Burden of Dreams which found Herzog literally dragging a steamboat over a mountain in pursuit of his elusive cinematic vision. Whereas Lucas or Spielberg would have used models or blue-screen special effects, Herzog simply went upriver into Peru where he introduced a real boat to a real mountain and filmed the resulting grudge match for real.

  ‘It was a necessity because of the story,’ he told me by way of explanation.’I have to accept it and I subject myself to the story. I had no one to learn from because never had an object of that magnitude – never in technical history – been moved over a mountain. Now,
I was aware that with a pulley system it was theoretically possible to move a ship over a mountain. And yes, the pyramids have been built. But if you give me 300,000 disciplined men and give me thirty years, I could build a bigger one!’

  Go Werner!

  A central motif of Herzog’s movies is the image of an obsessed (and often deranged) anti-hero going to extremes to achieve an impossible goal, and it doesn’t take a critical genius to find a powerful autobiographical bond between the man and his work. Time and again the madness of Herzog’s on-screen adventures has been matched by perilous off-screen antics as the director searches for those rare moments of ‘ecstatic truth’ which have become his signature.’I live my life, I end my life with this project,’ he famously said of Fitzcarraldo¸ and he wasn’t kidding. Among the life-threatening on-set adventures which haunted the movie is the story of the extra who got hit in the neck by an arrow which Herzog had to help remove on a kitchen table. Other key Herzog legends involve a crew member hacking his own foot off with a chainsaw after being bitten by a poisonous Peruvian snake.’It was very wise,’ Herzog dead-panned.’The man survived …’

  Nor has Herzog himself escaped the wrath of the movie gods. In Africa he was thrown into jail after being suspected of organising a military coup (‘it was another man they wanted whose name was Hertz – like the hire car’) and more recently he was handcuffed at an airport after the producers of Rescue Dawn pissed off the famously inflexible Thailand authorities.’Two of the producers are actually in jail right now,’ Herzog admitted.’But that’s fine; what was wrestled away from that situation was a film. And the film is good!’

  The zenith of Herzog’s life-or-death approach to film-making came when he legendarily used a gun to prevent leading man and ‘best fiend’ Klaus Kinski from walking out on the odd couple’s greatest movie. According to Herzog, the story (which has entered the annals of extreme moviemaking history) has been blown out of all proportion because ‘the gun wasn’t ever actually pointing at Kinski. I just explained to him, very quietly, as he was packing his things, that if he tried to leave he would have eight bullets through his head before he reached the next bend of the river. Which was probably an exaggeration – I would have missed at least three or four.’

  Was he joking? Would he really have shot Kinski?

  ‘I said it very quietly so he understood that it was not a joke. But the story then took on a life of its own, until today you can read that I directed him only at gunpoint from behind the camera! That’s baloney. It never happened like that. When I talked to him, I did not have a gun in my hands. However, I did have a gun …’

  All of which puts a rather more intense spin on every actor’s favourite question: ‘What’s my motivation?’

  Despite such wild tales, Herzog insists that ‘I’m cautious about taking risks – I prefer to be alive. And contrary to what rumours say and what the media report about me, I’m a very circumspect and prudent person. I eliminate danger as far as it can be done. And as proof, I can say that in fifty-eight films, not one of my actors got injured! Not one!’ Yet when I suggested to Herzog on stage at the BFI Southbank that ‘Most film-makers would not go to the lengths you went to make Fitzcarraldo’ he replied assertively, ‘That’s not correct. It’s not “most”. It’s “no one”!’

  Most moviemakers are indeed boringly well behaved, but Herzog is one of those rare few who seem to treat cinema as a genuinely spiritual art form, and he is more than willing to suffer for his art if his celluloid vision demands it. Like the wounded heroes of his epic movies, he is a man on a mission which draws him ever closer to the abyss. At the time of our meeting in LA, he had just completed work on Grizzly Man, a documentary about gung-ho animal lover Timothy Treadwell who went native with the bears up in Alaska’s remote ‘grizzly maze’. Treadwell spent thirteen summers communing with these bears, living, sleeping and eating with them until (inevitably?) one of them ate him. Treadwell was amiably nuts, giving these mammoth beasts cuddly names like ‘Rowdy’ and ‘Mister Chocolate’ which suggested a wild underestimation of their capacity for casual slaughter. Tellingly, Herzog described Treadwell as having ‘something missing’ before embracing him as ‘definitely one of the family. He had something volatile. Something broken, something dark, something inexplicably wild in him. He had something in his nature which reminds me of some of my leading characters, like Kinski.’

  In his commentary for Grizzly Man (which recalls the writings of Joseph Conrad) Herzog talks of Treadwell’s misjudgement of nature as essentially benign in contrast to the quiet dark-hearted horror which underwrites his own cosmic philosophy.’Once in a while Treadwell came face to face with the harsh reality of nature,’ he intones over footage of Timothy examining the severed paw of a young bear – torn off not by hunters, but by an adult male bear seeking food, fighting, and sex, and with no time for kids.’This did not fit into his sentimentalised view that everything out there was good, and the universe in balance and in harmony.’ Where Treadwell saw growing friendship in the faces of the bears, Herzog found only ‘a bored interest in food’, culminating in his deadpan declaration that ‘I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.’ Considering the fact that Treadwell’s blindingly naïve optimism led to the violent death of not only him but also his long-suffering girlfriend Amie Huguenard it’s hard not to conclude that Herzog was probably right. No wonder he viewed getting shot at as so utterly unremarkable – something to be expected in a uniformly hostile and chaotic world.

  In fact, the reason we were up on that wretched promontory by Lookout Mountain in the first place was Herzog’s declared expectation that he would probably get shot at if we stayed at his house. Upon our arrival chez Werner, our BBC director David Shulman had asked if we could get an establishing shot of me arriving at the house and meeting Herzog in his front garden – the fearless Bavarian legend now ensconced on the leafy borders of Hollywood. Herzog shook his head gravely and explained, ‘This is not a good idea. I do not want the outside of my house to be shown on television because I attract crazy people.’ By way of example, Herzog recounted being in his office back in Munich when a woman arrived demanding to see him. The woman had rung several times insisting that she was close to Herzog and forcefully requesting his assistance in her current (non-specific) travails. Somehow she had managed to inveigle her way into Herzog’s office where she declared that the director was in league with 20th Century Fox to destroy her life.’She had a bag with her,’ Herzog remembered, ‘and she began to reach inside it. I don’t know what it was, some kind of intuition – but as she reached into her bag I lunged across the table and grabbed it, and in the bag was a gun. Loaded. It was somewhat upsetting.’

  And that’s not all. Other attacks upon Werner’s person included someone ‘diving through my kitchen window at night, flying through it like Batman, a car jack in their hand’, the context and gravity of which I was frankly unable to comprehend. What was clear was that we probably didn’t want to be advertising Werner’s home address to any wandering whackos. Instead we decided to take a drive uphill, up toward Lookout Mountain Avenue where the road arches majestically along the edge of the hill and the entire vista of smog-bound LA is laid out below. The sun was hanging low in the late-afternoon sky, and the light as ‘magic hour’ approaches always looks good on camera. David had earned a reputation as one of The Culture Show’s most visually ambitious directors, and it was no secret that he took little pleasure in simply filming two people in a room talking to each other, so the possibility of getting something that actually looked vaguely cinematic was an attractive one.

  So off we went, two cars pootling quietly up into the hills, cicadas buzzing gently in the hedgerow – an idyllic evening. When we reached the appointed place it was impressive indeed, although annoyingly someone had fenced off the particular slice of roadside headland from which the best view of the city was available. Herzog insisted that the fence wasn’t there a couple of days ag
o, and since it didn’t seem to be doing anything we decided to just scoot round it; after all, who was going to object to us walking on a bit of old scrubland? As it turned out, a resident up the hill started barking at our cameraman that this particular bit of scrubland was ‘about to be developed’. We asked if he owned it, or if indeed he knew who owned it. He didn’t. So, what the hell. We thought: ‘We’ll get the shot, it’ll only take a couple of minutes, and we’ll be gone.’ We were very polite; we said please and thank you. The neighbour wasn’t, and didn’t. He just muttered something about us having inappropriate relations with our mothers and stormed back inside his house across the street. We all got on with the job in hand – after all, what’s the worst that could happen?

  ‘In Germany,’ intoned Werner sombrely as the cameras started to roll, ‘I’ve somehow left a paved road. Nobody cares about my films.’ It was a bleak assessment of his legacy in Europe, the continent from which Herzog had effectively fled seeking artistic sanctuary in America. Having spent a lifetime refusing to play the mainstream movie game, it seemed both poignant and bizarre to find him here in the very heart of the beast, lurking on the outskirts of Hollywood, an industry town in which art is endlessly (and unashamedly – even proudly) devoured and regurgitated by commerce. A land of agents, percentages and power lunches. Hardly a place where you’d expect to find ‘ecstatic truth’.

  Yet Herzog, ever the contrarian, had seen something here that fitted his fractured world view. A few months later he would amaze interviewer Henry Rollins by telling him that Los Angeles was the most ‘substantial’ city in America. Certainly it made sense for anyone attempting to finance their films to make occasional forays into the wilds of Hollywood like military platoons performing operational raids into hostile enemy territory – get in, take what you need, and get out, hopefully unscathed. But Herzog seemed to actually like it here, or at least to like it more than Europe, which is perhaps not quite the same thing.