More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Sometimes I try to imagine a world without women. It would be unbearable, impoverished, a tumbling from one void to the next. But I was lucky in love, presumably luckier than I deserved to be.
The truth is that my father was more interested in finding a significance for us that we didn’t possess.
But to return to myself as a child. There was something grim in me. I don’t remember it, but I’m told I hit people with a stone in my hand more than once; my mother was worried about me.
My brother, sitting beside me, put his arm around me as I studied the menu. Something began to smoke; I felt a light prick at my back, and suddenly I realized that with his cigarette lighter he had set my shirt on fire. I tore it off, and everyone was aghast, but the pair of us laughed loudly at the joke that didn’t seem funny to anyone else. Someone lent me a T-shirt for the rest of the evening, and the little sore patch of skin on my back was cooled with a splash of prosecco.
In Strasbourg Cathedral, silent motorcyclists walked down the silent nave, only their leathers creaking. They carried their helmets under their arms like medieval knights. At night, the cows I shared my field with moaned in their dreams.
Families are strange creatures, and mine is no exception. In addition, there is the circumstance that I knew my grandfather only when he was already insane.
“All the time he was at school, Werner never learned anything. He never read the books he was supposed to read; he never studied. It seemed he never knew the things he was meant to know. But then, in fact, Werner always knew everything. His senses were extraordinary. He could pick out some note or sound and ten years later remember it exactly. He would talk about it and use it in some way. He’s completely incapable of explaining anything. He knows, he sees, he understands, but he can’t explain. That’s not in his nature. With him, everything goes in. And if it comes out again, then it will be
...more
As far as I’m concerned, the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake.
I was deeply convinced that I wouldn’t live to my eighteenth birthday. Once I had safely passed it, it seemed out of the question that I would ever be older than twenty-five. The result was that I began making films of which I could assume they would be all that was left of me. Why not dare to find forms that had never existed?
To this day, I can learn only from bad films.
I needed another source of income. I started importing stereos and TV sets across the border for a few well-off rancheros I had met at the charreadas. Those things were much more expensive in Mexico because of the duty. I was able to do that because there was a gap in the border from Reynosa to McAllen. Day laborers crossed into McAllen in the morning and went home at night to Mexico. Three lanes of the widened highway were set aside for them, and their cars were identified by stickers on the windshields. Mexicans were given such stickers only after security checks by the US authorities. I
...more
I moved inland to San Miguel de Allende, a beautiful little colonial town now completely spoiled. Around the time I was there, the first wave of artists had begun to settle there, who over the decades were to draw vast numbers of confused and prosperous Americans after them, all wanting to get in touch with their creativity. I find it hard to set foot there now.
I wasn’t given a visa for Guatemala, but I was obsessed with the vague idea that I would help form an independent Mayan state in Petén.
What isn’t doable I won’t do.
In my unease with what is practiced in film schools all over the world, I started a thing called the Rogue Film School, a countermethod, a guerrilla school or hedge school where the only two things I actually teach are the forging of documents and the cracking of Yale locks. Everything else is instructions to dodge prevailing systems and make films out of yourself.
Let me stress that I’m just as lazy as the next person; I walked at moments that were existentially important for me.
At the end of a day of walking, the wealth of a single day is past counting.
but I was on my way to propose to my wife, and that was something best done on foot.
Michael was fully in agreement with this improvised scene in the exotic location provided I stayed with him at all times. Since we had neither a work permit nor permission to film, which, given the political situation there, we would have stood zero chance of getting, Michael didn’t want to be arrested on his own, but if it had to be, then he wanted to be arrested with me. It seemed a reasonable wish to me.
Would I not be interested as an artist? I said that I didn’t think of myself as an artist and that this term was better applied to pop singers and circus performers.
I always wanted to direct a Hamlet and have all the parts played by ex-champion livestock auctioneers; I wanted the performance to come in at under fourteen minutes. Shakespeare’s text is widely known anyway, and to prepare for the production, an audience would only have had to refresh their memories of it briefly.
As I nevertheless readied myself to make more death row films, I was woken in the middle of the night by a scream. Lena beside me was instantly wide awake; she too had heard the scream. It was my own scream. At that moment, I knew that I had to end the series and leave the subject there and then. There is such a thing as one’s own household of emotions.
I always thought of myself as making mainstream films, but that I was a sort of secret mainstream. But it’s just as likely that I was telling myself that to keep my spirits up.
I want to make a film with Mike Tyson about the early Frankish kings.
In the labyrinth of memories, I often ask myself how much are they in flux, what mattered when, and how much has evaporated or changed tonality. How true are our memories?
making purely factual films has never interested me. Truth does not necessarily have to agree with facts.
Cinema verité was an idea from the 1960s; its representatives nowadays I call the “bookkeepers of the truth.” That got me furious attacks. My answer was “Happy New Year, losers.”
I never see the truth as a fixed star on the horizon but always as an activity, a search, an approximation.
In kissing scenes in big Hollywood productions, they make you have an “intimacy consultant” onsite while a mob of seventy people, mostly just standing around, are talking on their walkie-talkies.
At the dress rehearsal of Wagner’s Tannhäuser in Palermo, there was a bomb threat, and the theater had to be vacated. (This time, it wasn’t my doing.)
Sometimes, when I wake up, I feel bad that I didn’t dream, and maybe that’s why I compensate by making films.
Occasionally, I watch trash TV because I think the poet shouldn’t avert his eyes. I want to know what others aspire to.
Yoga classes for five-year-olds—which in California are a thing—are suspicious to me.
How could one depict the absence of images? Not just their removal, the final irrevocable turning away from images, but their nonexistence? I imagine two mirrors set up in exact opposition reflecting nothing but each other into infinity. But with nothing for them to mirror. If the mirrors were one-way mirrors, like the kind the detectives use for interrogations, then you would see a void reflected in the mirror opposite.
Thanks also and above all to my wife, Lena. She inspired me to write this account, for which, one-sided as it is, I alone take responsibility.
