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WERNER HERZOGINTERVIEW BY ROCCO CASTORO PHOTOS BY BEAT PRESSER  Following that line of reasoning, this is not an interview that attempts to analyze Herzog’s work. That’s been done to death. If you want to know more about the specifics of his movies, watch them. And if you still want to sift through more anecdotes and thoughts on “ecstatic truth” and Klaus Kinski, pick up a copy of Herzog on Herzog. At this point, we want to know more about how the man is capable of doing what he does at such a speed and sustained level of quality. In the past year he has completed two big-screen features with marquee actors for miniscule amounts of money (compared with the sums other directors and producers squander on what usually turns out to be inexcusable garbage). Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans stars Nicolas Cage in a liberal reimagining of Abel Ferrara’s 1992 scumbag cop saga, while My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done is loosely based on a true story about a son who stabs his mother with an antique saber and features Willem Dafoe and Chloë Sevigny. Somehow Herzog has figured out a way to beat Hollywood at its own game. If the soulless opportunists who make up the putrid core of the show-business industry had real hearts and brains, they would just copy what he’s doing instead of spending $200 million on movies based on action figures. But that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen anytime soon, so the best we can do is to ask him about the logistics of the film industry and how the hell he acquired such a voracious work ethic. Hopefully someone out there in la-la land is listening. Vice: You’ve lived in Los Angeles for a while now, and your assertion that it has more substance than any city in the United States is one that puzzles lots of people. I think many assume that you’ve always had an antagonistic relationship with Hollywood. Werner Herzog: I am never speaking of Hollywood; I speak of Los Angeles. But I have never been antagonistic with Hollywood either. For example, I am a great fan of Fred Astaire. Hollywood is a specific culture of cinema and has created very, very fine films. I’m just not part of the purely mercantile industrial production of cinema. It doesn’t affect me. You see, I have never been at parties, I’ve never been to red-carpet events, I do not see the films. I see maybe two films a year, three films a year. Hollywood doesn’t really have any relevance for me. Even though you’re not part of the system, would you say that living in Los Angeles makes it easier to deal with the business aspects of filmmaking? It’s not making anything easier. Filmmaking has always had its complications, but I’m not in the culture of complaint. Los Angeles is just a very exciting city. There’s great excitement, there’s vibrant culture, and there are a lot of things going on here that I wouldn’t relate to filmmaking, but yet they trigger films. For example, I was fascinated by the Galileo space probe, which at the end of an incredible odyssey was sent on a suicide mission into the atmosphere of Jupiter, where it burned into superheated plasma and was gone. Only 30 minutes from where I live there is a mission-control center in Pasadena, and because of this fascination with Galileo I found out that there was a completely unknown NASA archive in downtown Pasadena in a warehouse. I discovered footage of astronauts who filmed on 16-mm celluloid back in 1989, and it is such fantastic footage. In a way it was the backbone of a science-fiction film I made called The Wild Blue Yonder. So you see, the excitements are everywhere, and they don’t have to be connected with Hollywood or production companies. You’ve run your own production company since your late teens. How are your practices different from Hollywood’s? Are actors and other people in the film industry taken aback by the way you run the show? I’m always wearing the hat of a businessman—always. For example, I recently completed a film called Bad Lieutenant. I gave the guarantee that I would, as usual, stay on budget and hopefully under budget. In my entire life I’ve never gone over budget. Five times I’ve been under budget. Every single day I struggled to contain the amount of people that were being tossed at certain problems. I said, “No, it’s not a question of having four or five more people edit. It’s a question of intelligence. Let’s not hire these people, let’s forget about it.” So what happened is that I delivered the film two days ahead of schedule and $2.6 million under budget. Now the main producer, Avi Lerner, wants to marry me [laughs]. These are people who have done nothing but very, very commercial films, including the last Rambo. I’m totally at ease with these people, because I think like a producer as well. For example, I waived my right to have a trailer, a camping trailer on the set… What do you call it? What’s the expression for it in the industry? I would just call it a trailer. Whatever. I’m not even familiar with the terminology. But anyway, I waived my right to have a trailer, I waived my right to have a personal assistant, I waived my right to have a shopper, and I waived my right to have a chair with my name on it, which saved the production 65 bucks! But I hate those chairs anyway. I loathe them. I’ve never had a chair like that. They asked me, “But where are you going to sit?” I said, “I’m going to sit on a metal box or film magazines or anything that’s around.” Most of the time I would be standing anyway. And this isn’t just a personal quirk of mine—it set an example for the whole production. Some of the actors—some of them very big stars—seeing that, would not arrive with an entourage of 12 but with an entourage of two. I want to ask you about some of your earliest days in America. You received a scholarship to study at a place of your choosing in the US. You chose Pittsburgh but quickly abandoned the scholarship. Then you were taken in by a rural family called the Franklins. I get the feeling that this period was pivotal in the way that you use American imagery in your films. Very much of what you see in my film Stroszek is a distant echo of that time. I saw the best of America then. Of course, once I had abandoned my scholarship, I lost all the money. I lost my guest family, and I lost my free passage back. I had to live on my own and was taken in by a wonderful family. That’s what the spirit of America can be at its best. I’m forever grateful to the Franklins, but they represent more than just great hospitality. There’s also a frontier spirit still in them, and that’s something I really like about America. I also have some ambivalent feelings about America, but that’s OK. Shortly after your time in Pittsburgh, you went to New York and then Mexico because you were facing deportation from the US. That was one of the first steps in what was to become a long-standing association with Latin America in your work. My Bavarian spirit somehow seems close to Latin America, in particular to Amazonian Latin America. I think there’s an affinity to this exuberance of fantasy and fever dreams and imagination. South America is where you’ve taken some of your greatest chances, and you’ve always commented on how important it is to take “calculated risks” as a filmmaker. But how do you personally calculate such perilous risks? I always test things out on myself first. I’m good at assessing risks. However, I have to admit that one or two or three times I took risks that were just blind lottery. For example, in La Soufrière I filmed on top of a volcano that was about to explode. Nobody knew if it would happen in the next two minutes or the next two hours or the next two days. That film was about the expectation. Still, you shouldn’t do things like that too often. La Soufrière is a good example of one of your many films where athleticism, or at least enduring very harsh and inhospitable conditions, was essential to the making of it. Are you worried about aging to the point where taking these types of risks and putting your body through these intense experiences are no longer possible? No, I don’t really care about that. The connection between athleticism and cinema is in part, of course, metaphoric. It’s about the understanding of movement in space. That’s why I admire NBA players so much—how they move and how they understand space is just phenomenal. Besides, it is a statistical fact that a good amount of filmmakers have been quite athletic people. You don’t see that among painters or among musicians. I have never met a composer who was an athlete. Another activity you recommend for aspiring filmmakers and other creative types is walking. Is that a hard thing to do in a place like California that’s overrun with freeways? Here you have to have a car, otherwise you can’t function. But I’m not speaking of walking, per se. It’s something else—traveling on foot—that I am talking about. Normally it means longer distances. It does not mean ambling around, it doesn’t mean hiking, and it doesn’t mean backpacking. What I mean is really traveling on foot. I can only say one simple dictum: The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot. You’ve also said that cooking is a similar undertaking. What do you like to make for supper? Oxtail, Spanish style. It’s a complicated one. I would say once a week I cook a decent meal. Many filmmakers are also very good cooks, including Les Blank, Francis Ford Coppola, and others whom I know. You’re known for using the same cinematographers, cameramen, and other crewmembers throughout different phases in your career. How do you know when you want to work with someone new? That’s a difficult question, but I think it’s like casting. You have to have it in you to see who will work right away, like, that’s the right actor for this film, or this is the right cinematographer for that film. If you don’t have it, you shouldn’t be a movie director. It’s a prerequisite of understanding your craft. I’ve done the last 12 or 14 or whatever films with Peter Zeitlinger, an Austrian cinematographer. However, I must say, doing films here in America like Bad Lieutenant and My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done immediately limits the possibilities because you have to use union people in some areas, and many of the people with whom I end up working are not whom I would work with if I were shooting somewhere like Peru or Europe. There are not union men in those places. But it doesn’t really matter. I always connect well with real professional people. Do you think things like YouTube and other digital-distribution systems will help break apart the bureaucracy of filmmaking? Well, the whole thing is still in its infancy, and crude and uncouth. When it comes to YouTube, you get the lowest common denominator out there, but in certain segments of it you may find very high-caliber things in the future. These types of immediate distribution methods are also increasing the usage of digital editing and cameras. The latter is something you’ve always been wary of, but didn’t you just finish shooting My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done on video? Yes, I did, but that was for financial reasons. You can’t make a film for around $2 million if you start shooting on 35-mm celluloid. I like to edit digitally because I work much, much faster. With digital editing you can work just as fast as you are thinking. But it has been a trap for some filmmakers who cannot decide quickly enough, and then they create 22 parallel versions and can’t decide which one to take. I plow through material very, very quickly. For example, Grizzly Man was edited in nine days. I also wrote the entire commentary, recorded it, and did a primitive mix—all in nine days. In Grizzly Man, like most of your documentary films, you provide the narration. I grew into this somehow. In the old days I had the feeling that, yes, I should do it, because I wouldn’t know of anyone who would be as credible as my own voice. It does seem like the best person to narrate a documentary would be its maker. It’s a question of credibility, and I don’t care how bad my German accent is. I make myself understood anyway. See all articles by this contributor
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