Books
Herzog on Herzog
Werner Herzog on establishing his production company
I must have been around 17 when I got a call from some producers who liked a proposal I had submitted to them. Previously I had avoided actually meeting with any of these kinds of people because I was so young and felt I wouldn't be taken seriously. What caused the reactions I usually got from film producers was probably the fact that my puberty was late and I looked like a tiny school child until I was 16 or 17. Instead I would write letters or would speak to them on the phone, some of the first phone calls I ever made. But finally after these telephone conversations these producers seemed to be kind of willing to accept me as a first time director.
When I finally walked into their office I saw two men sitting behind this huge oak desk. I vividly remember the moments second by second. I stood there, totally humiliated as they looked beyond me, waiting, as if the father had come into town with the son. The first one shouted something so abusive that I wiped it from my memory while the other slapped his thigh and laughed, shouting "Aha! The kindergarten is trying to make films nowadays!" The whole encounter lasted 15 seconds after which I simply turned around and left the office knowing full well that I would have to be my own producer. The meeting was the culmination of many setbacks and humiliations and proved to be a pivotal point for me. I knew there and then that until the end of my days I would always be confronted by this kind of attitude if I went to others to produce my films.
It was obvious to me that I had to found my own production company and become my own producer which I did immediately. One of my mother's best friends was married to a big and wealthy industrialist who had a huge mansion, and my mother took me to see him so he could explain to me how to set up a production company. He started with this ridiculous loud voice he had and just shouted at me for nearly an hour: "This is completely foolish! You idiot! You have never been in business! You don't know what you are doing!" Two days later I founded Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.
My company was really only an emergency measure simply because no-one else would finance my films and to this I have only ever produced my own films. Right up to around the time of Nosferatu I worked out of my small apartment in Munich with a telephone and a typewriter. There was no clear division between private life and work. Instead of a living room we had an editing room, and I would sleep there too. I had no secretary, no-one to help me with taxes, bookkeeping, contracts, screenplay writing, organisation. I did absolutely everything myself, it was an article of faith, a matter of simple human decency to do the dirty work as long as I could. Three things - a phone, typewriter and car - are really all you need to produce films. Inevitably, as my work reached larger international audiences and there were more and more retrospectives being planned and too many people to stay in touch with, it just became too difficult to operate the office on my own.
For my first film Herakles I needed a good amount of cash relatively speaking because I wanted to start shooting in 35mm and not 16mm. For me filmmaking was only 35mm, everything else seemed amateurish. 35mm had the capacity to reveal much more drastically than anything else whether or not I had anything to offer. When I started out I thought to myself, "If I fail, I'll fail so hard that I'll never recover." I found myself part of a group of young filmmakers, there were about eight of us, most of them were slightly older than me. Out of the eight planned films, four never went into production, and other three were shot but were never finished because of sound problems. The failure of the others was very significant: it dawned on me that organisation and commitment were the only things that started and finished films, not money. When it came to Fitzcarraldo years later, it wasn't money that pulled the boat over the mountain, it was faith.
A pianist is made in childhood, a filmmaker at any age. I say this only because physically, in order to play the piano well, the body needs to be conditioned from a very early age. Real musicians have an innate feel for all music and all instruments, something that can be instilled only at an early age. Of course it's possible to learn to play the piano as an adult, but the intuitive qualities needed just won't be there. As a young filmmaker I just read in an encyclopedia the fifteen or so pages on filmmaking. Everything I needed to get myself started came from this book. It has always seemed to me that almost everything you are forced to learn at school you forget in a couple of years. But the things you set out to learn yourself in order to quench a thirst, these are things you never forget. It was a vital early lesson for me, realising that the knowledge gleaned from a book will suffice for the first week on the set, which is all the time needed to learn everything you need to know as a filmmaker. To this very day the technical knowledge I have is relatively rudimentary. But if there are things that seem too complicated, experiment; if you still can't master them, hire a technician.
Filmmaking is a more vulnerable journey than most other creative ventures. When you are a sculptor you have only one obstacle - a lump of rock - which you chisel away on. But filmmaking involves organisation and money and technology, things like that. You might get the best shot of your life but if the lab mixes the developing solution wrongly then your shot is gone forever. You can build a ship, cast 5000 extras and plan a scene with your leading actors, and in the morning one of them has a stomach ache and can't go on set. These things happen, everything is interwoven and interlinked, and if one element doesn't function properly then the whole venture is prone to collapse. Filmmakers should be taught about how things will go wrong, about how to deal with these problems, how to handle a crew that is getting out of hand, how to handle a producing partner who won't pay up or a distributor who won't advertise properly, things like this. People who keep moaning about these kinds of problems aren't really suited for this line of business.
And, vitally, aspiring filmmakers have to be taught that sometimes the only way of overcoming problems involves real physicality. Many great filmmakers have been astonishingly physical, athletic people. A much higher percentage than writers or musicians. Actually, for some time now I have given some thought to opening a film school. But if I did start one up you would only be allowed to fill out an application form after you have walked alone on foot, let's say from Madrid to Kiev, a distance of about five thousand kilometres. While walking, write. Write about your experiences and give me your notebooks. I would be able to tell who had really walked the distance and who had not. While you are walking you would learn much more about filmmaking and what it truly involves than you ever would sitting in a classroom. During your voyage you will learn more about what your future holds than in five years at film school. Your experiences would be the very opposite of academic knowledge, for academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion.
Whether I have an ideology is not something that I have ever given much thought to, though I do understand where the question might come from. People generally sense I am very well-orientated and know where I've come from, where I am standing now and where I am going. But it is not an ideology as most people think of it. It is just that I understand the world in my own way and am capable of articulating this understanding into stories and images that seem to be coherent to others. Even after watching my films it bothers some people that they still cannot put their finger on what my ideology might be. Please, take what I am saying with a pair of pliers, but let me tell you: the ideology is simply the films themselves and my ability to make them. This is what scares those people who try so hard to describe, analyse and criticise me and my work. I do not like to drop names, but what sort of an ideology would you push under the shirt of Conrad or Hemingway or Kafka? Or Goya or Caspar David Friedrich?
I have often spoken of what I call the inadequate imagery of today's civilization. I have the impression that the images that surround us today are worn out, they are abused and useless and exhausted. They are limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution. When I look at the postcards in tourist shops and the images and advertisements that surround us in magazines, or I turn on the television, or if I walk into a travel agency and see those huge posters with that same tedious and rickety image of the Grand Canyon on them, I truly feel there is something dangerous emerging here. The biggest danger, in my opinion, is television because to a certain degree it ruins our vision and makes us very sad and lonesome. Our grandchildren will blame us for not having tossing hand-grenades into TV stations because of commercials. Television kills our imagination and what we end up with are worn out images because of the inability of too many people to seek out fresh ones.
As a race we have become aware of certain dangers that surround us. We comprehend, for example, that nuclear power is very real certain danger for mankind, that over-crowding of the planet is the greatest of all. We have understood that the destruction of the environment is another enormous danger. But I truly believe that the lack of adequate imagery is a danger of the same magnitude. It is as serious a defect as being without memory. What have we done to our images? What have we done to our embarrassed landscapes? I have said this before and will repeat it again as long as I am able to talk: if we do not develop adequate images we will die out like dinosaurs. We need images in harmony with our civilization and our innermost conditioning, and this is the reason why I like any film that searches for new images no matter in what direction it moves or what story it tells. One must dig like an archaeologist and search our violated landscape to find anything new. One must go to war, if need be, to find these unprocessed and fresh images.
When I finally walked into their office I saw two men sitting behind this huge oak desk. I vividly remember the moments second by second. I stood there, totally humiliated as they looked beyond me, waiting, as if the father had come into town with the son. The first one shouted something so abusive that I wiped it from my memory while the other slapped his thigh and laughed, shouting "Aha! The kindergarten is trying to make films nowadays!" The whole encounter lasted 15 seconds after which I simply turned around and left the office knowing full well that I would have to be my own producer. The meeting was the culmination of many setbacks and humiliations and proved to be a pivotal point for me. I knew there and then that until the end of my days I would always be confronted by this kind of attitude if I went to others to produce my films.
It was obvious to me that I had to found my own production company and become my own producer which I did immediately. One of my mother's best friends was married to a big and wealthy industrialist who had a huge mansion, and my mother took me to see him so he could explain to me how to set up a production company. He started with this ridiculous loud voice he had and just shouted at me for nearly an hour: "This is completely foolish! You idiot! You have never been in business! You don't know what you are doing!" Two days later I founded Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.
My company was really only an emergency measure simply because no-one else would finance my films and to this I have only ever produced my own films. Right up to around the time of Nosferatu I worked out of my small apartment in Munich with a telephone and a typewriter. There was no clear division between private life and work. Instead of a living room we had an editing room, and I would sleep there too. I had no secretary, no-one to help me with taxes, bookkeeping, contracts, screenplay writing, organisation. I did absolutely everything myself, it was an article of faith, a matter of simple human decency to do the dirty work as long as I could. Three things - a phone, typewriter and car - are really all you need to produce films. Inevitably, as my work reached larger international audiences and there were more and more retrospectives being planned and too many people to stay in touch with, it just became too difficult to operate the office on my own.
Werner Herzog on funding films
I earned my own money by working the night shift as a welder in a steel factory, as a parking lot attendant, things like that. Maybe the most important piece of advice I can give to those of you heading into the world of film is that as long as you are able-bodied, as long as you can make money yourself, don't go out looking for office jobs just to pay the rent. I would also be very wary of bottom-rung jobs in film production companies. Go out to where the real world is, go work as a bouncer in a night-club, a warden in a lunatic asylum or in a slaughterhouse. Real life, this is what's vital. Work on your feet, learn languages, learn a craft or trade that has nothing to do with cinema.For my first film Herakles I needed a good amount of cash relatively speaking because I wanted to start shooting in 35mm and not 16mm. For me filmmaking was only 35mm, everything else seemed amateurish. 35mm had the capacity to reveal much more drastically than anything else whether or not I had anything to offer. When I started out I thought to myself, "If I fail, I'll fail so hard that I'll never recover." I found myself part of a group of young filmmakers, there were about eight of us, most of them were slightly older than me. Out of the eight planned films, four never went into production, and other three were shot but were never finished because of sound problems. The failure of the others was very significant: it dawned on me that organisation and commitment were the only things that started and finished films, not money. When it came to Fitzcarraldo years later, it wasn't money that pulled the boat over the mountain, it was faith.
Werner Herzog on flm schools
I personally don't believe in the kind of film schools you find all over the world today. I never worked as another filmmaker's assistant and I never had any formal training. My early films come from my very deepest commitment to what I was doing, what I felt I had no choice but to do, and as such they are totally unconnected to what was going on at the film schools - and cinemas - of the time. It's my strong autodidactic streak and my faith in my own work that have kept me going for more than forty years.A pianist is made in childhood, a filmmaker at any age. I say this only because physically, in order to play the piano well, the body needs to be conditioned from a very early age. Real musicians have an innate feel for all music and all instruments, something that can be instilled only at an early age. Of course it's possible to learn to play the piano as an adult, but the intuitive qualities needed just won't be there. As a young filmmaker I just read in an encyclopedia the fifteen or so pages on filmmaking. Everything I needed to get myself started came from this book. It has always seemed to me that almost everything you are forced to learn at school you forget in a couple of years. But the things you set out to learn yourself in order to quench a thirst, these are things you never forget. It was a vital early lesson for me, realising that the knowledge gleaned from a book will suffice for the first week on the set, which is all the time needed to learn everything you need to know as a filmmaker. To this very day the technical knowledge I have is relatively rudimentary. But if there are things that seem too complicated, experiment; if you still can't master them, hire a technician.
Filmmaking is a more vulnerable journey than most other creative ventures. When you are a sculptor you have only one obstacle - a lump of rock - which you chisel away on. But filmmaking involves organisation and money and technology, things like that. You might get the best shot of your life but if the lab mixes the developing solution wrongly then your shot is gone forever. You can build a ship, cast 5000 extras and plan a scene with your leading actors, and in the morning one of them has a stomach ache and can't go on set. These things happen, everything is interwoven and interlinked, and if one element doesn't function properly then the whole venture is prone to collapse. Filmmakers should be taught about how things will go wrong, about how to deal with these problems, how to handle a crew that is getting out of hand, how to handle a producing partner who won't pay up or a distributor who won't advertise properly, things like this. People who keep moaning about these kinds of problems aren't really suited for this line of business.
And, vitally, aspiring filmmakers have to be taught that sometimes the only way of overcoming problems involves real physicality. Many great filmmakers have been astonishingly physical, athletic people. A much higher percentage than writers or musicians. Actually, for some time now I have given some thought to opening a film school. But if I did start one up you would only be allowed to fill out an application form after you have walked alone on foot, let's say from Madrid to Kiev, a distance of about five thousand kilometres. While walking, write. Write about your experiences and give me your notebooks. I would be able to tell who had really walked the distance and who had not. While you are walking you would learn much more about filmmaking and what it truly involves than you ever would sitting in a classroom. During your voyage you will learn more about what your future holds than in five years at film school. Your experiences would be the very opposite of academic knowledge, for academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion.
Werner Herzog on storytelling
When I sit down to write a script I never attempt to articulate my ideas in abstract terms through the veil of an ideology. My films come to me very much alive, like dreams without logical patterns of academic explanations. I'll have a basic idea for a film and then over a period of time, when maybe I'm driving or walking, it becomes clearer and clearer to me. I see the film before me, as if I were in a cinema. Soon it is so perfectly transparent that I can sit and write it all down. It is as if I were copying from a movie screen. I like to write fast because it simply gives the story a certain urgency. I leave out all unnecessary things and just go for it. A story written this way will have, for me at least, much more coherence and drive. And it will also be full of life. For these reasons it has never taken me longer than four or five days to write a script. I just sit in front of the typewriter or computer and pound the keys.Whether I have an ideology is not something that I have ever given much thought to, though I do understand where the question might come from. People generally sense I am very well-orientated and know where I've come from, where I am standing now and where I am going. But it is not an ideology as most people think of it. It is just that I understand the world in my own way and am capable of articulating this understanding into stories and images that seem to be coherent to others. Even after watching my films it bothers some people that they still cannot put their finger on what my ideology might be. Please, take what I am saying with a pair of pliers, but let me tell you: the ideology is simply the films themselves and my ability to make them. This is what scares those people who try so hard to describe, analyse and criticise me and my work. I do not like to drop names, but what sort of an ideology would you push under the shirt of Conrad or Hemingway or Kafka? Or Goya or Caspar David Friedrich?
I have often spoken of what I call the inadequate imagery of today's civilization. I have the impression that the images that surround us today are worn out, they are abused and useless and exhausted. They are limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution. When I look at the postcards in tourist shops and the images and advertisements that surround us in magazines, or I turn on the television, or if I walk into a travel agency and see those huge posters with that same tedious and rickety image of the Grand Canyon on them, I truly feel there is something dangerous emerging here. The biggest danger, in my opinion, is television because to a certain degree it ruins our vision and makes us very sad and lonesome. Our grandchildren will blame us for not having tossing hand-grenades into TV stations because of commercials. Television kills our imagination and what we end up with are worn out images because of the inability of too many people to seek out fresh ones.
As a race we have become aware of certain dangers that surround us. We comprehend, for example, that nuclear power is very real certain danger for mankind, that over-crowding of the planet is the greatest of all. We have understood that the destruction of the environment is another enormous danger. But I truly believe that the lack of adequate imagery is a danger of the same magnitude. It is as serious a defect as being without memory. What have we done to our images? What have we done to our embarrassed landscapes? I have said this before and will repeat it again as long as I am able to talk: if we do not develop adequate images we will die out like dinosaurs. We need images in harmony with our civilization and our innermost conditioning, and this is the reason why I like any film that searches for new images no matter in what direction it moves or what story it tells. One must dig like an archaeologist and search our violated landscape to find anything new. One must go to war, if need be, to find these unprocessed and fresh images.