If Werner Herzog didn’t exist, Werner Herzog would surely have created him.
Modern cinema’s great romantic fabulist, the indefatigable director of such
celluloid fever dreams as Aguirre, Wrath of God, The Enigma of Kasper
Hauser, Even Dwarfs Started Small, Where the Green Ants Dream, Fitzcarraldo
and Grizzly Man has accumulated an aura as heavy with myth as any of the 50
or so films he has directed in the past 45 years.
Every film of his seems to generate its own extravagant Tales of Herzog. He’s
been physically attacked by his actors. He threatened to shoot the mad, bad
Klaus Kinski when the actor tried to walk off a production. He had scores of
Indians drag a huge steamboat over an Amazonian mountain. He was thrown in
jail in Cameroon, where he was severely beaten and contracted bilharzia, a
dangerous parasite of the blood. He jumped into a bed of cactuses. He ate a
leather shoe after losing a bet, and filmed it for a documentary, Werner
Herzog Eats His Shoe. In 1974, he walked from Munich to Paris because he’d
heard that his friend Lotte Eisner had fallen ill, and hoped his walk would
keep her alive. (It did.) He’s made films in almost every wild and dangerous
place on the planet in his lifelong search for what he calls “ecstatic
truth”.
Even back in the apparent safety of “civilisation”, trouble seeks him out. Two
years ago, he was randomly shot during an interview with the BBC in LA. And
when the actor Joaquin Phoenix rolled his car on a road in the Hollywood
Hills, he came round to find someone tapping on the window. “There was this
German voice saying, ‘Just relax...’,” Phoenix recalled. “I said to myself,
‘That’s Werner Herzog.’”
I wonder if Herzog is troubled by the myths that have grown up around him.
“Well, I can’t help it and I can’t stop it,” he says. “I see them almost as
paid stooges, doppelgängers. I let them take the brunt.
They protect me.” Perhaps surprisingly, the German-born Herzog has lived in
the USA for more than a decade, and in LA for the past six years. Age seems
to have made him more energetic in pursuit of his dreams. And his latest
film, Rescue Dawn, starring Christian Bale, is adding fresh legends to the
Herzogian mythological canon, not least that some of his crew were thrown
into jail as they tried to leave Thailand, where the film was shot, for
nonpayment of taxes by the production. Herzog managed to escape unscathed.
“Oh, we shouldn’t exaggerate these things,” he says in his soothing German
accent when I bring up the episode. “Yes, I got out of the country. But I
had five passports.”
The story of Rescue Dawn is as strange and unlikely as any Herzog film. He
spent more than a decade trying to pull it together, but couldn’t raise the
money until Bale, who had agreed to star, was cast as Batman and became
suddenly bankable. Bale plays Dieter Dengler, a German-born American pilot
who was shot down in Laos during the Vietnam war and tortured by his
captors. Through sheer guts and ingenuity, he led a break-out and battled
through jungle in the direction of Thailand. In 1997, despairing of ever
making the story as a feature film, Herzog had instead made a documentary,
Little Dieter Needs to Fly, about the airman.
Herzog had first read about Dengler in a German magazine in the late 1960s.
“It was always clear to me and Dieter that such a great, epic, wonderful
story would be a feature film,” Herzog says when I ask why he remade his
documentary. But he also realised he needed to shoot it as a feature when,
after the first screening of the documentary, Dengler told him he had
glossed over many of the worst things he and the other American POWs had
endured in the Laotian camp. “He confided to me that there were moments when
they hated each other so bad, they would have strangled each other if they
had not been handcuffed.”
There were other things Herzog felt he could better convey in a drama. “At the
end of the movie, there are 4,000 men jubilantly greeting him back, which he
speaks about in the documentary. I said, ‘Dieter, this is the moment I am
going to give back to you in Rescue Dawn, but it’s not going to be something
of primitive patriotism.’ So, when he’s asked, ‘Was it your belief in God
and country that got you through this ordeal?’, and he doesn’t know what to
answer, so he’s asked, ‘Well, you must believe in something?’, and he
answers, ‘I believe I need a steak’ – that is the moment I
wanted to give back to Dieter.” Despite Herzog’s insistent intensity and the
hangdog scowl into which his 65-year-old features have settled, which even
he admits makes him look “sinister”, he’s often ironic and gently humorous,
even if he has little truck with the banal.
Bale became interested in playing Dengler, who died in 2001 of Lou Gehrig’s
disease, after seeing the documentary. “Werner said to me, ‘How do you feel
about swimming through a snake-infested river?’,” Bale recalls of their
first meeting, in 2003, in a bar. “I said, ‘How do you feel about it,
Werner?’ He said, ‘I will do this if you will.’ Then he asked, ‘How do you
feel about eating a live snake?’ It was a curious conversation, with more
and more crazy questions. I thought, this sounds like an interesting
endeavour.”
“Interesting” proved a euphemism for what Bale and many others on the shoot,
including Herzog himself, had to go through. Bale, who had lost a lot of
weight before for his roles in American Psycho and The Machinist, had shed
55lb by one point on the shoot in the jungles of Thailand, while Herzog, as
a show of solidarity with the actors, lost nearly 30lb and subjected himself
to many of the privations he forced them to endure, including eating
maggots, handling snakes and plunging into the furious river rapids.
Some members of the crew felt these and other things Herzog insisted on doing,
such as using himself as a stand-in for the actors in dangerous situations,
were crazy and self-indulgent. At times, according to reports from the set,
relationships between Herzog and some of the crew were “toxic”. The American
crew members balked at Herzog’s unorthodox shooting methods and were
appalled when they found out he hadn’t read his script for three years.
Herzog brushes the whole thing off. “No film ever goes smoothly,” he says. “I
had to force the crew into line, to meld them into a unit, and of course
there were frictions. It was hard for some of them to understand that my way
of shooting is not pedantic and is not based on the cooking recipes of
American film schools: ‘First the master shot, then the closer shots, then
the reverse shot.’ I knew exactly what I wanted on the screen, and I went
for it, and that left some of the American crew puzzled.”
Herzog disputes my contention that he seems to enjoy difficult shoots,
especially in the jungle, where many of his movies have been set. “The only
thing that ever counted in my life is the film on the screen,” he insists.
“How it was done, how pleasant or difficult shoots were, has never been of
any significance for me.” But there is obviously an intensity of experience
he seems to relish that comes with working in such difficulties? “No, no,
no, not difficult. Don’t get obsessed with difficulties,” he replies. “Yes,
I have made films where it was obvious it was going to be difficult, like
Fitzcarraldo, moving a ship over a mountain, yes. You know it in advance,
you prepare yourself, you fortify yourself with enough philosophy and you go
into it. But I am not seeking difficulties.
“However, with Rescue Dawn, I knew it had to be done a physical way, for the
actors, for the camera, when they are ploughing through the jungle, the
thickest vines on God’s wide earth, and they crash into it and the camera is
like a wild boar ploughing behind them. I am pretty good in situations where
shooting is physical – in a jungle, on a mountaintop, in a snowstorm. I
function better under such circumstances than in the artificiality and
sterility of a studio. I know how to deal with the jungle. I love it against
my better judgment. The jungle in my films is never a pretty scenic
backdrop. I like it almost as a quality of our human heart, as if it were
the ideal place for fever dreams.”
Herzog’s determination to turn Dengler’s story into a feature came from his
personal affinity for the man, whom he says he “really loved”. “Immediately
we met, we found out that we went through a similar childhood, growing up in
ruins in postwar Germany, being very hungry as children, he literally
starving so bad that his mother would go out with the children and rip
wallpaper from ruinedbuildings and cook it, because there were nutrients in
theglue. Also, like me, growing up without a father, growing up with weapons
and danger and adventure around,a grandiose childhood, totally unique. I
wouldn’t miss one single moment of my childhood, and I’m sure Dieter
wouldn’t have wanted to miss a moment either.
While Dengler pursued his dream of becoming a pilot in America, Herzog, who
was raised with his siblings in the Bavarian mountains by his mother after
his father abandoned them, was briefly apprenticed to a photographer before
making his first film in the early 1960s, with a camera he stole while he
was at Munich university. In the 1970s, he became one of the great names of
European art-house cinema, with films such as Aguirre, Wrath of God,
starring Kinski as a mad 16th-century Spanish explorer in search of El
Dorado; in the 1980s, Fitzcarraldo had Kinski as an entrepreneur who dreams
of building an opera house in the Amazonian jungle. Herzog’s extraordinary,
troubled relationship with Kinski was wonderfully captured in Burden of
Dreams, a 1982 documentary by Les Blank, which includes one of Herzog’s
great lines, as he tries to cope with the great and terrible dramas his
dreams have wrought. “Without dreams, we would be cows in a field,” he says,
“and I don’t want to live like that.”
In recent years, Herzog has continued to pursue his obsession with men who
dare to reach for the stars and the tragedies that can befall them. He has
alternated between features such as Rescue Dawn and documentaries like the
remarkable Grizzly Man, about the self-styled “bear whisperer” Timothy
Treadwell, eaten by the animals he loved in Alaska. Herzog’s approach to
documentaries has proved controversial with purists – and ensured
Grizzly Man was not nominated for an Oscar – because he often sets up
shots and even puts words into the mouths of his subjects.
Herzog says he is looking for what he calls “ecstatic truth”, and dismisses
the cinéma vérité of documentary purists as “films that believe facts alone
constitute truth, which is a gross misunderstanding. Otherwise, the phone
directory of Manhattan would be the most illuminating of all books. It has
four million entries, all of them correct, all of them truthful, and if you
call 420 people with the name Smith, they will all answer, ‘Yes, this is
William Smith’, or ‘This is David Smith’, and you could corroborate it. But
I am not into that. I am after something deeper, something that illuminates
you”.
As an almost secret resident of LA, Herzog believes we are facing “a
monumental onslaught on our sense of reality from reality TV, virtual
realities on the internet and in video games, and digital effects in
cinema”. He believes “modern life has disconnected us from elemental
experience. That’s obvious in very simple things – that we do not
travel on foot any more, even though for thousands of years that was the
natural way to travel”. At the same time, he admits he has become fascinated
by many aspects of modern American culture that sophisticates disdain,
including Anna Nicole Smith. “I always knew there was something big about
her, a value system visibly crumbling, a new way of collectively forming an
image of woman-ness where a human body tries to imitate a comic strip.”
In the meantime, he has “three or four feature films that are pushing me. You
see, they come crawling under the door into my home, and through the
windows, down the chimney. It’s always been like ‘home invasion’. I don’t
know how to get them out quickly enough. I have never coped. That has been
my problem all my life”.
Rescue Dawn opens on Friday
