Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin

by Paul Cronin

It might all have something to do with the exquisite Herzog line recorded by Alan Greenberg on the set of Heart of Glass: “There is work to be done, and we will do it well. Outside we will look like gangsters. On the inside we will wear the gowns of priests.”

I do look into the mirror in order to shave without cutting myself, but I do not know the color of my eyes.

Facing the stark alternative to see a book on me compiled from dusty interviews with all the wild distortions and lies, or collaborating – I choose the much worse option: to collaborate. Werner Herzog Los Angeles February 2002

They were often full of excellent wines, and I would sometimes finish a crossword puzzle.

The fantasia of On Walking in Ice.

I don’t take myself too seriously, and at my age should probably find more dignified work than filmmaking.

I should note here my admiration for the early Christian Stylites, who would perch atop a pillar, stubbornly refusing to come down for years. It’s the ultimate form of exile and solitude. There were cases of two of them screaming from pillar to pillar, each accusing the other of being a heretic. Sometimes I envy people able to find consolation in religion.

My parents divorced when I was five or six, at which point my legal name became Stipetić, which was my mother’s maiden name. I always felt much closer to my mother but chose to work under the name Herzog in part because it means “duke” in German. I thought there should be someone like Count Basie or Duke Ellington making films. It’s hostile and murderous out there in the universe; what looks friendly to us is actually two hundred thousand atomic explosions every second. The sun is a tiny grain of sand and there are many even nastier suns out there. Down here, we humans are living proof that things have gone warped. Perhaps changing my name has somehow protected me from the overwhelming evil of the universe.

The best advice I can offer to those heading into the world of film is not to wait for the system to finance your projects and for others to decide your fate. If you can’t afford to make a million-dollar film, raise $10,000 and produce it yourself. That’s all you need to make a feature film these days. Beware of useless, bottom-rung secretarial jobs in film-production companies. Instead, so long as you are able-bodied, head out to where the real world is.

The twins introduced me to the Rolling Stones, and sometime in 1964 we all went to a concert in Pittsburgh. When it had finished, I noticed that rows of plastic seats were steaming; many of the screaming teenage girls had peed themselves. That’s when I knew this was something big.

Being Bavarian means as much as it is to be Scottish in the United Kingdom. Like the Scots, Bavarians are hard-drinking, hard-fighting, warmhearted and imaginative.

What do you miss about Bavaria? An interviewer once asked me what my favourite season is. “Autumn,” I told him. For years I have lived in southern California, where there are no seasons to speak of. I yearn for them. And I could murder someone for a steaming pretzel fresh from the oven, covered with butter, and a beer. That’s what being Bavarian is all about.

I try to give meaning to my existence through my work. That’s a simplified answer, but whether I’m happy or not really doesn’t count for much.

The opening sequence was filmed at Munich airport one hot summer’s day and is comprised of eight shots of eight different aeroplanes landing one after the other, starting early in the morning. The hotter the air became, the more the heat shimmered and distorted the images. Eventually something visionary sets in – like fever dreams – and it remains for the rest of the film. The more aeroplanes that land, the stronger the sense of unreality. I had the feeling that audiences who were still watching by the sixth or seventh landing would stay to the end of the film; the opening sequence lays out the challenge of what is to come.

To this day I find the man who reads the letter he takes from his pocket very moving. He was a German who lived in great poverty in Algeria, a former foreign legionnaire who fought on the side of the French against the Algerian revolutionaries, but at one point during the war he had deserted and switched sides. I liked the attitude of the villagers who took care of him; the Muslim world deals with people like this with great dignity. By the time we met him he had basically lost his mind and was carrying a letter that had been written by his mother probably fifteen years before. You can see it’s in tatters; he had kept it under his shirt all this time. He proudly read the letter to us on camera, but I always felt that he wasn’t actually reading it, just inventing something. I think he had forgotten how to read and write. There is great sadness here; it’s obvious he’ll never get home again.

In Popol Vuh we learn that the initial creation of the earth was such a failure that the gods started again – I think it was four times – and by the end they had entirely wiped out the people they had originally created. I found all this particularly interesting because I never felt connected to the Christian concept of Creation I had grown up with, one that culminates in a planet of equilibrium and beauty.

We all have something dwarfish, inadequate, impotent and insignificant inside us, as if there is an essence or concentrated form of each of us screaming to escape,

Maybe undercuts the previous stuff about the dwarves not being "freaks" a bit.

As I have already explained, being on equal terms with the crew and actors is vital. A director should never be safe behind the camera while everyone else is alone out there.

In no way would I compare myself to the man, but allow me to cite his name to make a point. I once went to the Vatican to see Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. I was overwhelmed by the feeling that before he started painting, no one had articulated and depicted human pathos with such clarity. Pathos had always existed, but Michelangelo was the first to really express it. Since then we

The opinion of the public, however different from my own, is sacred. Whenever anyone asks me if Stroszek kills himself at the end of Stroszek, I tell them they’re free to choose the ending that best works for them. If anyone is expecting a statement from me on such matters, it would be best if they put this book down right now and poured themselves a glass of wine.

Does investigation of these individuals tell us anything about their surroundings? We learn more about the buildings, streets and structures of an unknown city by climbing to the top of an overlooking hill than by standing in its central square. Looking in from the outskirts, we come to understand the environments in which these characters live.

something we have been doing since Neanderthal times. We should cherish this flame we all have inside of us and get on our knees to thank the Creator for having endowed us with the gift of storytelling, something cavemen huddled around campfires understood and appreciated. Instead, today, with television and its incessant commercials, our consumer culture has destroyed any semblance of dignity we might have once had.

Golden Calf. It has nothing to do with me or my films. Our culture today, especially television, infantilises us. The indignity of it kills our imagination. May I propose a Herzog dictum? Those who read own the world. Those who watch television lose it.

Our inability and lack of desire to seek fresh imagery means we are surrounded by worn-out, banal, useless and exhausted images, limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution. When I look at postcards in tourist shops and the images and advertisements in magazines, or turn on the television, or walk into a travel agency and see huge posters with those same tedious images of the Grand Canyon, I sense that something dangerous is emerging.

I would never travel without a book that requires great attention; it becomes my home into which I immerse myself.

I have a strong memory of the cobalt-blue butterflies, attracted by the sugar-cane brandy we would drink at night. I would be awoken by the screeching monkeys on the other side of the river and find five butterflies had settled on my hand, slowly opening and closing their wings. It was an inexplicably beautiful moment.

When it actually came to shooting the sequence, the monkeys had some kind of panic attack and bit me all over. I couldn’t cry out because we were shooting live sound at that point. Another jumped onto the shoulder of the cameraman Thomas Mauch and started viciously biting his ear. His mouth was wide open but no scream came out. He just kept on filming, endearing himself to me beyond description.

I can’t say I ever truly understood the Indians, but we were all aware of something we had in common: a mutual respect for work. They were part of a socialist co-operative at Lauramarca, with a real knowledge both of their own history and the current political situation, and understood that their time on the film wasn’t useful only for themselves, but for the Indians’ cause as a whole.

I don’t need to hole myself up in a monastery or retire to a quiet spot for months on end to write. Most of the screenplay was written on a bus going to Italy with the football team from Munich I played for. By the time we reached Salzburg, only a few hours into the trip, everyone was drunk and singing obscene songs because the team had drunk most of the beer we were bringing as a gift for our opponents. I was sitting with my typewriter on my lap. In fact, I typed the whole thing almost entirely with my left hand because with my right I was trying to fend off our goalie sprawled on the seat next to me. Eventually he vomited over the typewriter. Some of the pages were beyond repair and I had to throw them out of the window. There were some fine scenes lost because I couldn’t recall what I had just written. They’re long gone. That’s life on the road for you.

Kinski had seen Even Dwarfs Started Small, so to him I was the “dwarf director.” He screamed in a high-pitched voice in front of everyone, saying it was an insult I would even think about talking to him, the great actor. He insisted he could do everything himself, that being directed by me was like working with a housewife, and shrieked that David Lean and Brecht had left him alone to do his job, so why shouldn’t I? “Brecht and Lean?” I said. “Never heard of them.” That upset him even more.

The man was a complete pestilence and a nightmare, and working with him became about maintaining my dignity under the worst conditions.

I originally planned a scene on a glacier, 17,000 feet up, which started with a long procession of four hundred altitude-sick pigs tottering and staggering towards the camera.

I tried things out with various pigs during pre-production, but none of them became altitude sick.

The camera I used was actually stolen from the predecessor to the Munich Film School. They had a lot of equipment – including editing tables and a row of cameras sitting on a shelf – but never let young filmmakers use any of it. I wanted them to lend me a camera but had to endure an arrogant refusal. One day I found myself alone in this room next to the unlocked cabinet, saw a couple of cameras smiling down at me, and decided to liberate one of these lazy machines for an indefinite period. It was lying there looking up at me, a basic 35mm silent Arriflex, the camera I ended up using to make my first dozen or so films. I never considered it theft. For me, it was truly a necessity. I wanted to make films and needed a camera, so I had some kind of natural right to this tool. It was expropriation. If you are locked in a room and need air to breathe, take a chisel and hammer and break down the wall. When you have a good story to tell, by dint of destiny or God knows what, you gain the right to do such things. I helped this camera fulfil its destiny.

Chickens in some forms – roasted, for example – are perfectly acceptable to me, but look into their eyes while they are alive and bear witness to genuine, bottomless stupidity. They are the most horrifying and nightmarish creatures in this world. During production on Even Dwarfs Started Small I watched a group of chickens trying to cannibalise a one-legged comrade, and in Signs of Life and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser I show audiences how to hypnotise them, which is ridiculously easy. Hold the bird to the ground and using a piece of chalk draw a straight line away from its head. Do that and they don’t budge an inch. You can also draw a circle around the animal and it will run in a loop until it drops from exhaustion.

Physically rearranging objects in a room provides the knowledge necessary to operate within that space. With all this taken care of, I quickly work out where to place the actors in front of the camera. No time is wasted. Any aesthetic pattern that emerges within a shot always comes from a physical understanding of the environment in which the filming is taking place. I could never work competently in a space – interior or exterior – that I hadn’t experienced with my body.

I don’t particularly care for gravity, so I suppose it’s no coincidence that several of my films – Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Wings of Hope and The White Diamond – are about people who dream of flying, are punished for it and crash to earth. I always saw Steiner as a brother of Fitzcarraldo. Both defy the laws of gravity in their own way.

Enjoy Herzog repeatedly drawing out the themes of his work immediately after saying it was all in the gut.

People might think it strange that music could make such an impact on a filmmaker, but it’s quite natural to me. I like the early composers, like Monteverdi, Gesualdo, Heinrich Schütz and Orlando di Lasso. Or let’s go back even further, to Johannes Ciconia, the troubadour Martim Codax, Francesco Landini and Pierre Abelard, before we arrive at Bach’s Musikalisches Opfer.

Equally suspicious to me is the concept of “genius,” which has no place in contemporary society. It belongs to centuries gone by, the eras of pistol duels at dawn and damsels in distress fainting onto chaises longues.

There are four thousand film festivals out there and in a good year four films worth seeing. The imbalance is stunning; it’s a vicious discrepancy. Don’t trust in festivals and agents or reviewers, only in your own abilities. Be wary of praise offered on someone else’s terms.

In Berlin I used to sleep on my son’s floor rather than stay in a hotel. It had nothing to do with money or physical comfort; I lived on a raft for weeks while shooting Aguirre. Today, ever older, I have reconciled with hotel rooms, though the little chocolates they leave on my pillow every evening exude an aura of despair, the same feeling that overwhelms me during the presentation of the official mascot of the Olympic Games, or when a film star becomes a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN.

From historical testimonies of the fourteenth century we know that during the last stages of the plague, a town would experience moments of jubilation in the midst of all the desolation and death; a strange freedom and euphoria – almost redemption – took over. There was dancing in the streets, wild drunken revelries, and all sense of ownership would fragment.

I did it as an encouragement for anyone who doesn’t have the guts to make films. And anyway, a man should eat his shoes every once in a while.