by Roger Ebert
He was looking into the middle distance, seeing possibilities that had perhaps occurred to him more than once.
“I almost had a secret hope that maybe this would change my life in a way I didn’t have the nerve to do. They’d say I could never make a film again. And I could wake up in the morning and think, ‘Oh, great, that option is closed to me. I don’t have to think about it. I don’t have to feel guilty that I’m not making films.’ And I could write for the theater, which is something I like, or even stay home and write a novel.
“But I never thought I was in the position of Fatty Arbuckle. I mean, he was a tremendous star. When you’re a writer, you have control over your own fate. I mean, it would not bother me in the slightest if I’d awakened this morning and stayed in my apartment and was working on my typewriter or lying on the bed writing a book.”
In 1998, Barbara Kopple made the documentary Wild Man Blues, about Allen touring Europe with his jazz group. Soon-Yi was always at his side. The movie wasn’t about their relationship, but it helped me to understand it. In life, Woody played his usual role of the dubious neurotic, and Soon-Yi was calm and authoritative, a combination of wife, mother, and manager. She seemed to be good for him. She seemed more like the adult in the partnership. At one point, she advised him to be more animated when he appeared onstage with his band. “I’m not gonna bob my head or tap my feet,” he says. “They want to see you bob a little,” she says, and he gets defensive: “I’m appropriately animated for a human being in the context in which I appear.” But at the next concert, he bobs a little.
In 2000, he came to speak at the University of Chicago. They were by then married. He said: “Soon-Yi bought me this sweater. This marriage has been great for me. If anyone had told me I would wind up married to a much younger Asian woman, with no interest in show business, I’d have told them they were crazy. All I would go out with were little blond actresses, or women who did something in show business. Suddenly I find myself with a woman whose interest in life is teaching learning-disabled children, who is not interested in show business, who is much my junior and doesn’t know many of the references from my life experience. She’s a wonderful person and makes me very very happy. It’s interesting how little you know about yourself as you go through life. I think, my God, why didn’t I meet her sooner, I would have had so many more years of happiness.”
There was something poignant in that. It reminded me of a time years earlier when we had met in his apartment on the Upper East Side, overlooking Central Park. We talked and drank tea. When we were finished he said he wanted to show me something. He took me into a room with books on the walls and a simple desk and chair facing the window. On the desk was an old portable typewriter.
“My parents bought me that,” he said. “It’s the only typewriter I’ve ever had. I’m used to it. I sit down there and write every movie. I could never use an electric typewriter. The thought makes me shudder.”
Personal computers were unknown in those days. I don’t really want to know if Woody Allen uses one now. When I think of him and his typewriter, I remember a story McHugh told me once about an old Irishman who bought new shoes. He wore them down to the pub and his friends asked him what he was sporting on his feet. “A fine new pair,” he said. “These will see me out.”
38 WERNER HERZOG
ONE NIGHT IN October 1968, at my first New York Film Festival, I was invited to a party at the Washington Square apartment of Bob Shaye, who had purchased the distribution rights to a new German film named Signs of Life, by Werner Herzog. Shaye was to build that first film into New Line Cinema, but all he had that night was a first feature by an unknown twenty-six-year-old. There weren’t many people at the party; Herzog and Shaye together didn’t add up to a hot invitation. Maybe it wasn’t even actually a party and we’d simply all ended up there. I’d seen the film. I was attracted to its strange intensity. It was about a wounded German soldier sent to an island with his new wife to convalesce and pretend to guard a fortress. At one point, going mad from lack of purpose, he shot at windmills, which I suppose is as good a way as any for Herzog to have started out.
All of this was long ago. Herzog and I were the same age. He had a bushy haircut in the 1960s style, but he was not then, and probably never had been, a “kid.” I can’t remember what we talked about. I keenly remember how I felt, sitting on the floor next to his chair. Here was a young man unlike any I had ever met. He spoke clearly and directly of unusual ideas. I didn’t get the impression of an enlarged ego. There was no boasting. He wasn’t pitching or promoting. It was clear to him what his mission was. It was to film the world through the personalities of exalted eccentrics who defied all ordinary categories and sought a transcendent vision. Every one of his films has followed that same mission. Every one, I believe, is autobiographical—reflecting not the facts of his life, but his spirit. He is in the medieval sense a mystic.
Herzog took residence in my mind. I had met an important person. I felt a spiritual connection. I didn’t know what to make of his Fata Morgana in 1971, with its endlessly repeated images of a jet plane landing in the desert through air simmering with heat. He made Aguirre, the Wrath of God in 1972, but it was not until 1977 that it came to America and Milos Stehlik showed it to me in the desanctified Lutheran church where he opened the first Facets Cinematheque. “Bring a pillow,” he said. “The pews are hard.”
By then I’d seen The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser in the Chicago International Film Festival, and I felt a connection with Herzog’s work that went beyond critic and film. We shared an obsession. He engaged with the infuriating relationship between the human will and the intractable universe. Each film, in a new way, dealt with the fundamental dilemma of consciousness: We know we are here, we know what we see, we learn what we can, we try to do more than is possible, we fail, but we have glimpsed a vision of the infinite. That sounds goofy and New Age, but there is no more grounded filmmaker than Herzog. He founds his work on the everyday realities of people who, crazy or sane, real or fictional, are all equally alive to him.
Later in the 1970s, Milos asked me to do a Q & A with Herzog at Facets, and that night Herzog said that modern man was starving for images. “Television and advertising have pounded us into insensate passivity.” His work is alive with images. A man on a raft with chattering monkeys. A man on a mountaintop swept by rivers of clouds. An endlessly circling mechanical chicken. A crypt of negligible human artifacts buried in the Antarctic ice. A boat hauled across land. A ski jumper who flies too far. A man who must be sure he is not locked in. Figures creeping on ice to glimpse a city at the bottom of a lake. A human chain reaching across African hillsides. A boy’s palm print left from the distant past. A man and an iguana staring sideways at each other. A man listening to the sound of another man being killed by a grizzly bear. A man from nowhere who appears one day to stand in a village square. Herzog’s characters are almost always men; his women characters have supporting roles. One reason for this, perhaps, is that his men are all Man, and represent everyone.
I’ve seen pretty much every film Herzog has made, and there’s not a single one made for simply commercial reasons. Each film has proceeded from an idea of a unique character approaching reality at an oblique angle. Each film has embedded somewhere the idea that we are mortal, that death is our destination, but we can stave off that certainty with divine madness. I instinctively identify with his work. I don’t expect it to conform to any popular norm or commercial formula. When he uses movie stars, it is for their oddness, not for their fame. But he doesn’t make freak shows. His characters are more human than the grotesque fabrications I see in many romantic comedies or violent action movies.
Herzog seems unable to make an easy film. Does he seek dangerous and difficult locations? The stories told from his shoots are harrowing. He mentioned once the “voodoo of location.” His films have plunged beneath the ice caps and floated over the rain forest in a teardrop-shaped balloon. He has filmed in the jungles of three contin
ents, the deserts of four, the mountains of five. Curiously, the director he reminds me of in this respect is Russ Meyer. What I understand about both of them is a single-minded focus on the work of filmmaking. For Meyer, a new production was like a military mission, an evocation of his teenage years in the Signal Corps. For Herzog, it is more complex: a physical and mental challenge containing the possibility of destruction. When he dies, it will not be in bed, I expect, but in a plunge from an experimental aircraft into a volcano.
I believe it’s unwise for a film critic to become friendly with those he writes about. I’m not concerned with a “conflict of interest” so much as with my own ability to see a film at arm’s length. I don’t want to read a screenplay. I don’t want to see a rough cut. I don’t want to get involved. That was a flaw of Pauline Kael’s: She issued instructions to those she adopted. Perhaps it wasn’t a flaw but only a fact, to be taken into account. Certainly she didn’t conceal her partisanship. Nor did the auteur critics. Every writer must go at things in his own way.
But I have made friends. These friendships weren’t sought, but they happened. Russ Meyer became a friend for a lifetime. Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas became good friends after I met them in the 1970s at the Chicago festival. With others, like Martin Scorsese, Paul Cox, Robert Altman, Ramin Bahrani, Errol Morris, Norman Jewison, and Atom Egoyan, I’d say we’ve been friendly for a long time but not in a close personal sense. And then there is Herzog. With him I sense a bond. I’d call it “spiritual,” but the word has confusing theological undertones. I learn from the way he sees things and I admire how he leads his life. I feel an instinctive sympathy for how he regards the subjects of his films. His physical and moral courage inspire me. When I see one of his films, I feel we’re walking through it together.
In 1999, the Walker Art Center screened a month of Herzog’s films and then scheduled a Q & A for the final night. I think we were onstage two and a half hours. He’s a spellbinding speaker. He speaks with a naked sincerity that is sort of entrancing. He says extraordinary things in a matter-of-fact way. That night he read out his “Minnesota Declaration,” which he had written for the occasion. Subtitled “Lessons of Darkness” after one of his films, it consisted of twelve points, some of which were funny. (“The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn’t call, doesn’t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don’t you listen to the Song of Life.”) Some were bleak. (“We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.”) The last one remorseless. (“Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species—including man—crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.”)
He said the point of the declaration was to define “ecstatic truth,” by which he meant a truth above the mundane. Cinema verité, he said, “confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones.” He explained: “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” This was consistent with his lifelong practice of ignoring the boundaries between his fiction films and documentaries.
He goes to the Telluride Film Festival every year, and one year he invited me to his room in the Sheridan Hotel to see tapes of his two new documentaries. One was about men in Russia who walk about in sandals proclaiming they are Jesus Christ. Some have followers who believe them. The other film involved a village in Russia on the shore of a deep lake. Some of the townspeople believe there is a city of angels on the bottom of the lake, and it can be seen through the ice before the ice grows too thick. They creep out on it, the ice sometimes cracking alarmingly beneath them, and Herzog, of course, creeps out with them.
After we discussed these films for a while, he confessed they were both complete fictions. But they were ecstatically true. It was the same with his fiction film Where the Green Ants Dream, about Aboriginal peoples in Australia. When he was asked at the Cannes 1984 press conference for the source of his knowledge about Aboriginal beliefs and green ants, he said, “I made it all up. I’m not even certain if green ants exist.” He would have made the film during a period I was told about by our friend Paul Cox, when Herzog washed up broke in Melbourne and lived for a time in a tent in Paul’s backyard. How he found the financing to make a film like Where the Green Ants Dream is a good question, but Herzog has found the financing for one of the most prolific careers of modern directors, always for films with questionable commercial prospects, perhaps because of the singular intensity of his vision.
He came to Ebertfest twice, the second time after my illness. That would have been the festival in 2007, when he explained he had started his journey to Urbana from the top of a South American plateau, had himself lowered by rope to its foot, trekked through the rain forest and then floated down a river, found a steamer to the coast, and then come the rest of the way by air. I suspect there was something about the sheer impracticality of this journey that compelled Herzog to make it.
In 2009, Ramin Bahrani joined me in Boulder to go through his Chop Shop in the Interruptus session at the Conference on World Affairs. “I would give anything to meet Herzog,” he told me. I introduced them by e-mail and Werner ended up being recruited as the voice of the bag in Ramin’s celebrated short film Plastic Bag. We persuaded Werner to come to Boulder in 2010 to join Ramin in a shot-by-shot examination of Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Although I couldn’t speak, it was an inspiring experience for me, bringing these two men together in the act of watching a great film.
I walked around the campus, I sat on panels, I was deeply satisfied every afternoon by the Interruptus sessions, and at some point that week I realized it would be my last trip to Boulder. I had come the first time forty years earlier. As I watched a great director whose career I’d admired from 1968, and another who had emerged in the last few years, I thought that was symbolism enough. I gave Interruptus a push and knew it could sail on its own. I felt good that Herzog had been in my life close to the beginning and now probably close to the end and had never made an unworthy film. I don’t think Bahrani will make one, either. Artists like them bring meaning to my life, which has been devoted in such large part to films of worthlessness.
39 BILL NACK
SOMETIMES IN LIFE you meet someone whose soul seems in tune with your own. Almost from the moment I met Bill Nack at Illinois, we were leaning over our coffee cups in the basement of the student union and exchanging earnest opinions about life and literature. Fifty years have passed since that day and there have been many more conversations, but at this moment I have no idea of his politics and couldn’t tell you if he believes in God. When we get together we’re like two old stamp collectors, but instead of discussing the Penny Black we discuss Nabokov.
Bill loves good writing with a voluptuous intensity. He commits great chunks of it to memory and isn’t shy about reciting it. His own prose is elegant and pure, some of the best sportswriting ever created. Like all great sportswriters, he isn’t really writing about sports but about athletes—which is to say, men and women, and horses. He has a mesmerizing effect on his listeners. He doesn’t monopolize a conversation; he listens well, but when he speaks people want to listen. Mike Royko was like that. You always wanted a tape recorder.
Nack was sports editor of the Daily Illini the year I was editor. He was the editor the next year. He married Mary Scott, an Urbana girl I dated in high school. I’d never made it to first base. By the time we met, I think he may have been able to slide into second and was taking a risky lead and keeping an eye on the pitcher. We had a lot of fun on the Daily Illini. It was in the days before ripping stuff off the Web. He insisted on running stories about every major horse race. We had only one photo of a horse, and used it for every winner. If it was a filly, we flipped it. Of this as his editor I approved.
After college, Nack went to Vietnam and ended up writi
ng news releases for Westmoreland’s staff. Then he got a job at Newsday. On Long Island, he and Mary raised three girls and a boy. One year at the paper’s holiday party he stood up on a desk and recited the names and years of every single winner of the Kentucky Derby. Dave Laventhol, the editor, asked him, “Why do you know that?” Bill said he’d been studying it since he was a kid and loved the racetrack. Laventhol said if he wanted to be the paper’s turf writer, he should write a memo. Nack wrote to him: “After covering politicians for four years, I would like the chance to cover the whole horse.”
From Newsday Bill moved to Sports Illustrated and came into full flower. He wasn’t the kind of writer who covered a particular beat. He was a great prose stylist. At a signing for his book My Turf, he read a story and made a woman cry. Then he read another story and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. One was about the death of Secretariat. The other was about a filly breaking down and being destroyed on the track. He wrote long articles I could only envy, because I’ve spent my career writing shorter pieces on deadline.
Bill was part of the story of Secretariat from before the great horse was born, or maybe a few days later, I forget the details. Discovering the greatest horse in history became the central event in his professional life, as seeing Scorsese’s first film became mine. Bill saw the stallion for the last time very shortly before his death. “After the autopsy, the vet said he had a heart twice as big as the average horse,” Bill told me. “There was nothing wrong with it. It was simply a great heart.” He wrote about this in the best seller Secretariat: The Making of a Champion, which was made into a movie.