Werner Herzog

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0:11Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which the world's leading creative people reveal the formative influences and experiences that inspired their own work. I'm John Wilson and my guest in this episode is the writer and director Werner Herzog. one of the most idiosyncratic, original and prolific filmmakers of modern times. Herzog has made nearly 80 films over six decades. His features include Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre, Wrath of God and Rescue Dawn. His documentaries, which he usually narrates himself, include Grizzly Man, Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Into the Abyss. Werner Herzog productions are the stuff of cinema legend with stories of audacious shoots in inaccessible locations.

0:56He's also written several books, including a newly published memoir called Every Man for Himself and God Against All. He spoke to me from Los Angeles, where he lives. Werner Herzog, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you. Thank you for having me. You were born in Munich in 1942, but you spent your early years in a remote part of the Bavarian Alps. Set the scene for us, if you would. What are your memories of home life and surroundings as you were growing up? Well, technically I was born in Munich, but when I was only 14 days old, two weeks old, there was a carpet bombardment of Munich. The area where we lived was completely destroyed.

1:42A few houses were still standing and one of those was our place where we lived in an attic. And my mother found me in my cradle with a thick layer of glass shards and debris. but I was unhurt but my mother got scared and fled to the mountains to the most remote place in the mountains where there was nothing really to attack and we lived close to the border with Austria in complete seclusion so it was a very particular childhood I had in in this place And you say in seclusion, but did you have electricity, running water? What sort of home comforts did you have? You can imagine that, for example, there was no running water.

2:32We had to go to the well with a bucket and we had no sewage system, no real heating with the exception of a little stove in the kitchen. And the toilet was some sort of an outhouse which was badly constructed in winter when there was snow, snow drifts would come in. So it was quite wild. And our mattresses were made by my mother because we were so poor. She filled some sort of burlap sacks with hay but made of fern. And fern has nasty qualities. When you cut it and it dries, it's like pencil piercing out from the stems. But it was wonderful. It was a great, great time. Of course, we were hungry, but it was beautiful otherwise.

3:26We had no toys. We had to invent our toys. We had no real father figures around who would tell us who would be the drill sergeant out there and educate us. All the fathers were either still in captivity or they were dead. So it was wonderful to grow up in knowing that there was no father figure. It did us very good. I mean, that must have had a huge mental and emotional impact on you growing up in post-war Germany. No, we didn't know what Germany was and we didn't know what was happening out there. The only sign of war was when, and it's my earliest memory, when at the very end of the war, it must have been late in April or so, 1945.

4:1445. My mother grabs my older brother, shakes us awake, wraps us into blankets because it was still snowy out there. And up on a slope, she showed us at the end of the valley. And she said, boys, you have to see that the city of Rosenheim is burning. But Rosenheim was something like 40 miles away. So you don't see the flicker. It was a slowly pulsing sky out there, red and orange, pulsing. And I knew there was something dangerous out there. There was war out there. There was a world out there. For me, the world was only this valley and nothing else. Germany, I had no idea what Germany was. When was the first time you ever saw a film?

5:04I think I must have been 11. You have to imagine there's a schoolhouse, just one room, and first, second, third, and fourth grade children were in there. We were about maybe 25, 26. So the older ones would teach the younger ones how to write letters and things like this. And one day a traveling projectionist came and I think there was a bed sheet placed on the wall and two films were projected, but they didn't make any impression on me. It was just lousy what I saw. What were they? What are your memories of those films? One I remember was a film about Eskimos building an igloo. But I think they were all paid extras from Hollywood or so.

5:51They had no clue how to deal with snow and ice. I was much better at it at my age of 10, 11. So it didn't impress me at all. You have described yourself in the past as a poet. When did you first get a sense of having a poetic sensibility? In my case, I can almost date it exactly. It was around 14 and it was a time of great turmoil inside of me. I had a very intense, dramatic religious phase. I started to travel on foot. Actually, I traveled along the border of Albania as a 15-year-old. I knew somehow I knew I was a poet and I somehow understood my destiny. It sounds awful when I use a term like destiny.

6:42Please touch it only with a pair of pliers. But that's what it was. Did you feel different to your peers and your siblings? I did, yes. I had something that I saw, something that illuminated me. and I saw things that the others wouldn't see. What sort of things? What were you seeing? There's a very primitive example. My friends, we saw Dr. Fu Manchu, one of the sequels. And we always believed it was for real. And one henchman of Dr. Fu Manchu was shot out of a rock. He flies down through the air somersaulting and disappears into nowhere. and 20 minutes later in the film all of a sudden I see the same shot recycled and I told my friends I said no it cannot be because he was dead how can he climb up again and be shot down again they didn't see it but I saw it and from that moment on I saw films differently I tried to understand how is there a shot and how does it form a sequence how do they narrate a film How do they create suspense, for example?

7:58That was my observation in cinemas. And I only saw bad films at that time. So if you weren't impressed by the very few films that you saw when you were growing up, why do you think you were most drawn to filmmaking as opposed to any other art form that might have been more accessible to you at the time? I was not drawn to filmmaking. I was drawn to poetry. I started to write. You're now talking with somebody who is a writer. I'm a poet who coincidentally also makes films. The films are a distraction at the moment. And I try to make a point to deaf ears since 45 years or so when I published Off Walking in Ice.

8:45It's a story when And I traveled on foot from Munich to Paris when an old woman who was my mentor was dying. I wouldn't allow her to die and walked all the way to Paris. And I was sure she would be out of hospital. And actually, she was. She didn't know that I was coming on foot. Since then, I kept saying, I'm a writer. I'm a poet. And I do believe that my writing will outlive my films. But I can believe that at the age of 14, when you first had an awareness of your poetic sensibility and you probably thought, I'm going to be a poet, I am a poet, but you've made over 70 films and most people, if you said Werner Herzog, they'd say, oh, the filmmaker, not the poet.

9:31Yes, that's a common mistake. And you see it's puzzling for some people and apparently for you as well, but I can give you a simple formula or a simple dictum. For me, the films are my voyage and writing is home. Oh, that's a lovely analogy, isn't it? But you chose filmmaking as your medium. No, no. To take the voyage. Well, you took the voyage. No? No. No, filmmaking came at me like writing. There was no real choice to be made. And until today, I do not really make choices. I tackle what's coming with a great vehemence at me. But at an early age, when you chose the medium of filmmaking through which to explore your poetry, how did you learn the mechanics of filmmaking?

10:25When did you first take, did you take lessons? Now I'm completely self-taught. The same thing with literature. I'm somebody who is reading. And you are still on this kind of railroad track. I'm a writer. And what we are talking about movies are distraction. Right, okay. A writer who uses a camera. When did you first... No, no. A filmmaker uses a camera. The writer who uses a pen or a typewriter. So you have to see both and they're not necessarily connected. In some occasions, yes, when I write a screenplay, I would write it always with something in mind that I'm trying to develop a separate genre of literature, screenplays.

11:20And I do odd thing in screenplays. For example, in the screenplay of Cobra Verde, I describe the heat and the dogs motionless in the shadow. And then the second sentence says something like this, infuriated by heat, metallic insects, sting glowing stones. So that's not the way normally somebody would describe heat in a screenplay, but I do. So it all starts with the words? No, no. A film normally starts with an image, a central image. For example, when I traveled on foot on the island of Crete, I think I was 16, with a donkey in the interior. I come across a ledge in the terrain and I look down into a valley and there's something I behold which is unthinkable, which can only be born in madness.

12:22There are 10 ,000 windmills, all cranking and spinning and turning like an entire field of flowers that have gone insane. And this image stuck to me, and years later it comes back. It's transported into something else. Now it is the central metaphor in my first feature film, Signs of Life.

12:52So that's a lovely image that sparked an idea. Yeah. For the sake of argument, let's just talk about you as a filmmaker and how that started, because a filmmaker needs a camera to record those stories. Where and how did you first get a camera? Well, at that time it was 35mm celluloid and I couldn't afford that camera and there was a predecessor of the Munich Film School. They had cameras in some flatbed celluloid editing tables. And I applied. They would give away for free for a few days to aspiring filmmakers a camera for two, three days. They always declined to give me one, although my reasons why I needed it were much better and I had film projects.

13:41And so one day I was in the room where there were the cameras stored and I noticed that nobody is there. And I just took a camera and I looked at it and I checked into the lens. And then I walked outside because I wanted to look at a far distance. And I find myself outside and a camera in my hand. And I decided I'd walk away. I think it was a Friday because I wanted to film on Saturday and Sunday and return it secretly early on Monday morning. But on Monday morning, I was still shooting and Tuesday, Wednesday. And so I just held on to the camera and I made my first films with it. And never returned it?

14:23I did not, no. But I don't see it as theft. I think I brought the camera to its real destination. to. I felt there was a natural right within me to use a camera no matter what. So you have to, when you're making films, you have to develop a certain amount of criminal energy, not to do harm to anyone, but I would, for example, forge shooting permits in a country with a military dictatorship not long ago in Myanmar, for example. So you have to bend the rules occasionally to make your work? No, I don't bend the rules. I create the rules.

15:11On this programme, Werner Herzog, I asked my guests to choose the most significant influences, experiences and inspirations that have shaped their own work. When we asked you that, did you find it hard to pin it down to individual people, works or moments? I could not really pin it down to a direct influence. I always had the feeling since I was not familiar with cinema at all in my youth, I always had the feeling I had to invent cinema. I feel like until today like the inventor of cinema. It sounds odd and sounds pretentious but that's how I feel. I can understand that you didn't have influences in your early years because you didn't like those films and you just weren't moved by them.

16:00But in the years since, you've had a chance to see the work of great filmmakers. Do you not have favourite directors or even favourite movies by other people? I do, and I could name you 500 if you want. But truly, I learned only from bad films the negative definition. Thou shalt not do this. I learned only from bad films, the great films. I'm awestruck and I never can figure out how they did it. Well, the first choice that you have offered us is something you've described as the awakening of your soul. And it's when you discovered a book about cave paintings. When and where was this? It was in Munich.

16:42And I must have been something like 13. I walked by a bookstore. and in the display window there was a book about cave paintings. The cover was a painting of a horse from the famous Lascaux cave in France and I had never seen anything like this. It struck me like a bolt of lightning. I could not believe it. I saw that this is a book about cave paintings dating back 15 ,000 years in time. I could not believe what I saw And I immediately wanted that book. I wanted it so bad. I immediately started to work as a ball boy in tennis courts and whatever. And I would sneak by each week and see, is the book still there?

17:34I had the feeling that this was unique and I hoped nobody else would discover and buy it and I wouldn't get it. So after about seven, eight weeks, I had the money together. It was not inexpensive. And I walked into the bookstore and bought the book and this kind of shiver that went through my entire existence through my soul, I still feel until today. And just explain what you mean then. Your soul awakened. Something that you do not learn in school or in education or in family or predilections of your friends. My own discovery, my own bolt of lightning. So it was like an illumination, like a lightning that struck me.

18:22And if this was like being struck by lightning, what was it? Was it the paintings themselves or the sense of distance and time? The paintings and knowing that this was a dawn of the human race, the dawn of culture, the dawn of painting and an experience that we still share. We are not that different from Cro-Magnon men. And the book that you bought documents, as you say, the Lascaux Caves, but many years later, that book helped you make your film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which was about the more recently discovered art in the Chauvet Caves, which you made in 2010. You had to bid to win the right to film the art in those caves.

19:05How did you do that? What happened? Well, the French are very territorial when it comes to their patrimony. And I knew there were many French directors trying to make that film. And I spoke to the scientists. I spoke to the regional administration of the Ardèche region, the first two obstacles, and then the cultural minister of France. He was kind of very friendly with me because he knew some of my films. And then he was somehow backing out and I said, hold a moment. I think I have a deeper connection to all this. And told him about my awakening, about my bolt of lightning. And he said, don't say anymore and stretched his hand across the table and said, you do the film.

19:58And it was a wonderful moment. and now we have a film that anyone else could have made it, but not the way I made it, with this deep compassion and this deep insight and deep participation of my whole soul in it. This is one of the rare times anyone is allowed inside the cave. This may be the only and last opportunity to film inside. If it was like a bolt of lightning, seeing those reproductions of the cave art in a book many years ago. Tell me what it was like to be one of the very first people in 32 ,000 years to see works of art on a cave wall. It's hard to describe. The most strange or unusual thing was that I felt being watched and the silence in there is so deep in the silence has reigned there for 32 ,000 years, and you know that.

21:02And it gives a very strange transport into another different separate reality. Very hard to describe, but I think the film transports it in a way. And there's a sense of awe and wonder and of the immense power of nature and the universe that recurs in much of your work. How much can that be traced back to the mysteries of cave art that you read about in that book? Well, the awe about the world out there has always been in me since I saw that there was a strange, dangerous world out there where war existed. And I experienced the world and I experienced some of it on foot. And my writing has been, in a way, informed by traveling on foot.

21:56Walking is your next choice for this cultural life. You've said in the past the world reveals itself to those who travel on foot. Yes. And it's a passion that you shared with your friend, the travel writer Bruce Chatwin. How did you first meet Chatwin? Well, I would not call him travel writer. When you read, for example, in Patagonia or song lines, you would hate to see this in the travel department of a bookstore next to Mexico for$5 a day. So please don't call him a travel writer. He would come after you if you said it loud in his presence. I loved his books. And I immediately saw that there was a unique voice, a great writer out there.

22:41his prose has an intensity and it has a clairvoyance that only comes to those who travel on foot. My reason for coming to Australia was to try and learn for myself and not from other men's books what a song line was and how it worked. Obviously, I was not going to get to the heart of the matter, nor would I want to. I asked a friend in Adelaide if she knew an expert. And I met him in Australia when he was researching his songlines. And what was astonishing for me in his rucksack, when he's out in the desert and traveling on foot, and it gets really miserable, he has a few things, a few items for consolation.

23:29For example, a little bottle of champagne. And he has two or three books. and among the two or three books, there was Off Walking in Ice, my book, and I was completely stunned and he said to me, Werner, I don't care about your films, you are a writer and we would tell stories almost non-stop with very short moments of grabbing some sleep in between. We would be into storytelling furiously, ferociously, he telling even more stories than I would tell which is hard to do. Is walking creatively inspiring for you? Do you plot films, for instance, while you're walking? Some elements of films, but I shape whole books.

24:16I form a poem in me and I write a poem. It doesn't have to do with the track itself because I'm completely transported into a separate reality. I participate in the greatest soccer games, but as a player, try to assist them to score a goal. So, and yet... Or save a goal. You're a goalkeeper, aren't you? I used to be a goalkeeper until I had a collision with Maximilian Schell at a game at the Cannes Film Festival between directors and actors. And Maximilian Schell was chasing a ball, but he, like a bison in gallop, runs into me and my elbow snapped. in the wrong direction. So I bent forward instead of backwards.

25:05And that kind of, yeah, he was ambitious, even in a game like that. And we became friends over this incident, by the way. But as a result, I switched into center forward and everyone was technically better, but I could read the game. I understood what was coming and I understood where to be in the right moment. Like a good director. Yes, but when I speak about soccer, you have to understand it was something like fifth division. An outsider among outsiders, Herzog is constantly looking for a country which does not exist.

25:44Filmmaking for me is also a physical work. Landscape, unused and unabused by modern civilization, is for Herzog as important as people. His films are shot in lonely locations, in Africa, Alaska, in Peru and the Amazon. If you are a scientist and want to find out about some sort of inner structure of a matter, you will put it under extreme pressure, under extreme circumstances, and you will find out the very nature of this matter much better. And people under extreme pressure, under extreme circumstances, give you much more insight about what we are. The long, arduous journey has been a recurring theme of so many of your films, not least your epic 1982 historical drama Fitzcarraldo.

26:35Klaus Kinski, of course, plays the Irish opera-loving adventurer who arrives in Peru to make a fortune in rubber as a rubber trader and then who decides to drag a massive steamship over the mountain to get from one Amazon tributary to another. and it's become the stuff of cinema legend that you actually had a steamship dragged by hand over a forest mountain. Why did you choose to make it so hard for yourself? It's not making it hard. I tried to make it easy for myself. But here you had a central metaphor, a ship over a mountain. And it is embedded somehow in us. I think I articulated it. And there's other metaphors out there in literature, for example.

27:35Moby Dick, the hunt for the white whale. Or you have Don Quixote attacking the windmills with his lance. You do not do it second rate. You do not do it, what I call the plastic solution with a miniature. plastic boat over a hill in the San Diego botanical garden. That was actually what 20th Century Fox proposed, who wanted to finance and produce the film. And I immediately knew I was alone. They didn't understand that I needed a situation where the viewers could trust their eyes again. This is no technical trick. They wanted to shoot it in a botanical garden. In San Diego, yes, and an eight-foot-long plastic replica of a steamboat.

28:27And I said, no, my steamboat is 340 tonnes, and it's going to be hauled over a mountain, a hill in the jungle, by 800 native indigenous people of the region with Stone Age technology. So it's about truth and veracity, isn't it? Is the process of filmmaking as important for you as the finished film itself? The finished film is the only thing that counts. And I'm not seeking adventures. I'm not into that business. But the strange thing is veracity. I would not harp on the term veracity or so, because when you see it on the screen and it's filmed in a way that it looks like a mirage, it looks like a big operatic event.

29:17It doesn't look like reality anymore. It looks like poetry. And that's the point.

29:36There's an amazing documentary film about the making of Fitzcarraldo called Burden of Dreams. I mean, it looks absolutely terrifyingly dangerous, the whole process, especially when the boat is smashing against the rocks as it ploughs down the rapids.

29:55I mean, in a way it looks like reckless filmmaking. How do you decide the acceptable level of risk when you're in the middle of that situation? In the media, I'm rumoured to be reckless and whatever, But I think I'm the best and the most careful about assessing risks. I would go through the rapids of Aguirre on a small raft before I invited a crew and some actors with me to do it and film it. I would test whatever is out there first all on myself. So I got injured sometimes. That's quite okay. And in case of Fitzcarraldo, So we had the ship going through the rapids and filmed it. No one was on board.

30:42And my own crew, let's say the five, six key members of the crew, said we should be with cameras on board. And they pushed me into it. And I said, I cannot ask you to be on board. You have to make your own decision because it's dangerous. You may get hurt. Of course, everybody on board was somehow hurt. We had an impact of the ship against a rock, so violent. And I tried to hold on to the cameraman, but we both flew through the air, some 10 meters, 20 meters almost. And he banged with a camera in his hand on the wooden deck, and it split his hand apart. And, of course, that was bitter and painful, and we had to repair his hand in a long surgery, which we did in our kitchen in the jungle.