Books
Herzog on Herzog
Introduction
'Those with "something to fall back on" invariably fall back on it. They intended
to all along. That is why they provided themselves with it. But those with no
alternative see the world differently.'
David Mamet
'Ich möchte als Reiter fliegen, in einer blutigen Schlacht.'
['I want to fly like a rider midst the bloody tussle of war.']
The Enigma of Kasper Hauser
Most of what you’ve heard about Werner Herzog is untrue. More than any other director, living or dead, the number of false rumours and downright lies disseminated about the man and his films is truly astonishing. In researching Herzog’ s life and work, a process that involved trawling through endless sources, it soon became clear how frequently some would contradict others. And while recently spending time with the man I confess to having deviously longed to trip him up, find holes in his arguments, uncover a mass of contradictory statements. But to no avail, and I now conclude that either he’s a master liar, or more probably, he’s been telling me the truth.
Fortunately there are some basic facts that are indisputable. He was born in Munich, Germany in 1942, and as a child lived in Sachrang, a remote mountain village near the Austrian border. He started travelling on foot at the age of 14 and made his first phone call when he was 17. To finance his early films he worked the nightshift as a welder in a steel factory during school, resulting in Heracles, made in 1961. He directed five features starring Klaus Kinski, and François Truffaut once called him the most important film director alive. But nota bene: he didn’t direct Kinski from behind the camera with a rifle. He didn’t put anyone’s life at risk when making Fitzcarraldo. He is not insane, nor is he eccentric. His work is not in the tradition of the German romanticists. And he is not a megalomaniac. Rather, he’s an extremely pleasant, generous and modest man who happens to be blessed with extraordinary vision and intuitive intelligence. A fierce sense of humour too that can leave you reeling, and as such written interviews with the man can be seriously inadequate. For example, how to transcribe the following with the playfully sardonic tone with which it was told? “I remember having a public discussion with the diminutive Agnès Varda who seemed to take offence at my postulation that a filmmaker, rather than having this or that quality, should be able to clear his or her own height. She didn’t like that very much.”
Yet Herzog’s body of work of forty-five films (eleven features, the rest ‘documentaries’) is no joke, one of the most important in post-war European cinema and perhaps the key to what is known as the New German Cinema. Signs of Life (1968) is a wonderfully assured first feature which introduced to us the classic Herzog anti-hero: maniacal, isolated and dangerous. In 1970 the Left accused him of fascism when, he explains, “instead of promoting the inevitable world revolution I ridiculed it” in Even Dwarfs Started Small, the bizarre tale of rebellious dwarfs taking over the asylum. His 1971 film Land of Silence and Darkness tells the story of the deaf and blind Fini Straubinger and remains one of the finest ‘documentaries’ ever made, while his international breakthrough came in 1972 with Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Herzog’s first collaboration with actor Klaus Kinski who plays a crazed Conquistador leading his men down river on a raft to their doom in search of El Dorado.
In 1974 Herzog cast Bruno S., a forty-year old shell of man who had spent most of his life institutionalised as the sixteen-year old Kaspar Hauser in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and hypnotised his entire cast during the shooting of Heart of Glass two years later. He rushed to a volcanic Caribbean island about to explode to film La Soufrière, paid homage to F W Murnau in his version of Nosferatu (1979) and in 1982 dragged a boat over a mountain in the middle of the Amazon for Fitzcarraldo. More recently Herzog has developed an extraordinary body of ‘documentary’ work by showing us the burning oil-wells of Kuwait in Lessons of Darkness, telling the story of Carlo Gesualdo (Prince of Venosa, sixteenth century musical genius and multiple murderer) in Death for Five Voices, and exploring the life of jungle- survivor Dieter Dengler in Little Dieter Needs to Fly. In the past ten years he has also directed over a dozen operas across Europe and the Americas, and has appeared in several films as an actor.
As a film director his place in cinema history is assured. And when it comes to the man himself, I could find nothing more incisive than this comment from Herzog’s own mother: “When he was in school, Werner never learned anything there. He never read the books he was supposed to read, he never studied, he never knew what he was supposed to know, it seemed. But in reality, Werner always knew everything. His senses were remarkable. If he heard the slightest sound, ten years later he would remember it precisely, he would talk about it, and maybe use it some way. But he is absolutely unable to explain anything. He knows, he sees, he understands, but he cannot explain. That is not his nature. Everything goes into him. If it comes out, it comes out transformed.”
Werner Herzog is a figure sorely under-appreciated in his native Germany and has been somewhat ignored in English language film scholarship. As such, this is a book that has been screaming to be written for years, the primary obstacle having been Herzog himself. Two years ago, when I first contacted him about the possibility of this book, I received a hand-written fax. It read: “I do not like to do self-scrutiny. I do look into the mirror in order to shave without cutting myself, but I do not know the color of my eyes. I do not want to assist in a book on me.” So Herzog on Herzog could never have been edited by an academic or aesthetician, for this is a film director who does not respond well to deep ideological and critical investigations into his work. “When you question someone about his child, you don’t wonder about the way it was born”, he wrote to me last year. “So why do this with a film?”
The conversations in this book take a chronological approach as each film – from Herakles in 1961 to Invincible in 2001 – is discussed in turn. The text also provides a forum for Herzog's well-honed takes on the things, ideas and people that have preoccupied him for so many years. An overtly analytical approach has been forgone in favour of what is a very practically-orientated text and one I hope gives new meaning to that oft-cited Nietzsche quote, ‘All writing is useless that is not a stimulus to activity.’ I am also conscious of the fact that there are very few people out there who have seen every single Herzog film, and as such I have attempted to edit our conversations so that even if the reader hasn’t seen the film under discussion, there will still be something immediate and tangible to appreciate. A story or anecdote maybe, which in turn might lead to a theme or – to use Herzog’s own language – something more ‘ecstatic’ even than that.
Most of our time was spent together in January and February 2001 in London where Herzog was doing post-production on Invincible. In January 2002 we sat down together in Munich, and then a month later in Los Angeles. The resulting text presented here has been cut down from a much longer manuscript, as Herzog wanted some of the more ‘confessional’ elements excised. Herzog has always been careful to make a distinction between what is 'private' and what is 'personal,' and anything that was not directly related to the films was sliced away. Much of what he said that seemed acceptable and useful over a glass of beer or during a stroll in the park just didn’t fit into the book. What’s more, over the course of our lengthy talks we would often repeatedly touch on the same subjects from different angles, and so Herzog's answers have been compiled into single responses which has sometimes resulted in lengthy responses to very short questions. “You should let the readers know this,” Herzog told me. “I sound so talkative in the book, but I’m really not that garrulous.”
Several months ago, as I was in the thick of editing the transcripts, I spoke to Herzog on the phone. “When will the book be ready?” he asked. “You must do the five-day version. It doesn’t need structure, it needs life! Leave the gaps in it, leave it porous. Shake the structure out and just write the book.” Well, I (kind of) did this, but still feel the text has structure – and much life – to it. And though it's impossible to capture a man's life in three hundred pages, though there remain so many things left unsaid (or at least unpublished) about Herzog's life and work, though the man is, for me, only slightly more discernible now than he was when I first met him, I do feel Herzog on Herzog fairly successfully captures the ideas, insights and sensibilities of this vitally important film director.
Fortunately there are some basic facts that are indisputable. He was born in Munich, Germany in 1942, and as a child lived in Sachrang, a remote mountain village near the Austrian border. He started travelling on foot at the age of 14 and made his first phone call when he was 17. To finance his early films he worked the nightshift as a welder in a steel factory during school, resulting in Heracles, made in 1961. He directed five features starring Klaus Kinski, and François Truffaut once called him the most important film director alive. But nota bene: he didn’t direct Kinski from behind the camera with a rifle. He didn’t put anyone’s life at risk when making Fitzcarraldo. He is not insane, nor is he eccentric. His work is not in the tradition of the German romanticists. And he is not a megalomaniac. Rather, he’s an extremely pleasant, generous and modest man who happens to be blessed with extraordinary vision and intuitive intelligence. A fierce sense of humour too that can leave you reeling, and as such written interviews with the man can be seriously inadequate. For example, how to transcribe the following with the playfully sardonic tone with which it was told? “I remember having a public discussion with the diminutive Agnès Varda who seemed to take offence at my postulation that a filmmaker, rather than having this or that quality, should be able to clear his or her own height. She didn’t like that very much.”
Yet Herzog’s body of work of forty-five films (eleven features, the rest ‘documentaries’) is no joke, one of the most important in post-war European cinema and perhaps the key to what is known as the New German Cinema. Signs of Life (1968) is a wonderfully assured first feature which introduced to us the classic Herzog anti-hero: maniacal, isolated and dangerous. In 1970 the Left accused him of fascism when, he explains, “instead of promoting the inevitable world revolution I ridiculed it” in Even Dwarfs Started Small, the bizarre tale of rebellious dwarfs taking over the asylum. His 1971 film Land of Silence and Darkness tells the story of the deaf and blind Fini Straubinger and remains one of the finest ‘documentaries’ ever made, while his international breakthrough came in 1972 with Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Herzog’s first collaboration with actor Klaus Kinski who plays a crazed Conquistador leading his men down river on a raft to their doom in search of El Dorado.
In 1974 Herzog cast Bruno S., a forty-year old shell of man who had spent most of his life institutionalised as the sixteen-year old Kaspar Hauser in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and hypnotised his entire cast during the shooting of Heart of Glass two years later. He rushed to a volcanic Caribbean island about to explode to film La Soufrière, paid homage to F W Murnau in his version of Nosferatu (1979) and in 1982 dragged a boat over a mountain in the middle of the Amazon for Fitzcarraldo. More recently Herzog has developed an extraordinary body of ‘documentary’ work by showing us the burning oil-wells of Kuwait in Lessons of Darkness, telling the story of Carlo Gesualdo (Prince of Venosa, sixteenth century musical genius and multiple murderer) in Death for Five Voices, and exploring the life of jungle- survivor Dieter Dengler in Little Dieter Needs to Fly. In the past ten years he has also directed over a dozen operas across Europe and the Americas, and has appeared in several films as an actor.
As a film director his place in cinema history is assured. And when it comes to the man himself, I could find nothing more incisive than this comment from Herzog’s own mother: “When he was in school, Werner never learned anything there. He never read the books he was supposed to read, he never studied, he never knew what he was supposed to know, it seemed. But in reality, Werner always knew everything. His senses were remarkable. If he heard the slightest sound, ten years later he would remember it precisely, he would talk about it, and maybe use it some way. But he is absolutely unable to explain anything. He knows, he sees, he understands, but he cannot explain. That is not his nature. Everything goes into him. If it comes out, it comes out transformed.”
Werner Herzog is a figure sorely under-appreciated in his native Germany and has been somewhat ignored in English language film scholarship. As such, this is a book that has been screaming to be written for years, the primary obstacle having been Herzog himself. Two years ago, when I first contacted him about the possibility of this book, I received a hand-written fax. It read: “I do not like to do self-scrutiny. I do look into the mirror in order to shave without cutting myself, but I do not know the color of my eyes. I do not want to assist in a book on me.” So Herzog on Herzog could never have been edited by an academic or aesthetician, for this is a film director who does not respond well to deep ideological and critical investigations into his work. “When you question someone about his child, you don’t wonder about the way it was born”, he wrote to me last year. “So why do this with a film?”
The conversations in this book take a chronological approach as each film – from Herakles in 1961 to Invincible in 2001 – is discussed in turn. The text also provides a forum for Herzog's well-honed takes on the things, ideas and people that have preoccupied him for so many years. An overtly analytical approach has been forgone in favour of what is a very practically-orientated text and one I hope gives new meaning to that oft-cited Nietzsche quote, ‘All writing is useless that is not a stimulus to activity.’ I am also conscious of the fact that there are very few people out there who have seen every single Herzog film, and as such I have attempted to edit our conversations so that even if the reader hasn’t seen the film under discussion, there will still be something immediate and tangible to appreciate. A story or anecdote maybe, which in turn might lead to a theme or – to use Herzog’s own language – something more ‘ecstatic’ even than that.
Most of our time was spent together in January and February 2001 in London where Herzog was doing post-production on Invincible. In January 2002 we sat down together in Munich, and then a month later in Los Angeles. The resulting text presented here has been cut down from a much longer manuscript, as Herzog wanted some of the more ‘confessional’ elements excised. Herzog has always been careful to make a distinction between what is 'private' and what is 'personal,' and anything that was not directly related to the films was sliced away. Much of what he said that seemed acceptable and useful over a glass of beer or during a stroll in the park just didn’t fit into the book. What’s more, over the course of our lengthy talks we would often repeatedly touch on the same subjects from different angles, and so Herzog's answers have been compiled into single responses which has sometimes resulted in lengthy responses to very short questions. “You should let the readers know this,” Herzog told me. “I sound so talkative in the book, but I’m really not that garrulous.”
Several months ago, as I was in the thick of editing the transcripts, I spoke to Herzog on the phone. “When will the book be ready?” he asked. “You must do the five-day version. It doesn’t need structure, it needs life! Leave the gaps in it, leave it porous. Shake the structure out and just write the book.” Well, I (kind of) did this, but still feel the text has structure – and much life – to it. And though it's impossible to capture a man's life in three hundred pages, though there remain so many things left unsaid (or at least unpublished) about Herzog's life and work, though the man is, for me, only slightly more discernible now than he was when I first met him, I do feel Herzog on Herzog fairly successfully captures the ideas, insights and sensibilities of this vitally important film director.
Paul Cronin
London
March 2002