Herzog '88

Above: Eine schöne Bromanze

[Tape cover]:
"Werner Herzog
Interviewer: Neil Norman
National Film Theater London
7.Sept.1988
Guardian Lecture
Copied from the listening tape held in the bfi Nat. Library"

[On letterhead]:
"bfi National Library
with compliments

Herzog interview as requested.
NB - The audience were not near microphones - consequently their questions are often indistinct BUT in most cases the question is repeated or paraphrased by Neil Norman or by Herzog.
[signed] David Sharp"

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Anonymous Announcer: Just before we start, an announcement about an event in two or three weeks time with the director Wim Wenders. We are still showing the preview of Wender's new film the Wings of Desire, but unfortunately Mr. Wenders is unable to attend...[?] So that event will not be happening, and we hope to announce the replacement in the next couple of days. But Wings of Desire is still on.
Tonight we have the director of Cobra Verde, Werner Herzog, and in about ten or twelve minutes he will be on stage for discussion with Neil Norman. Before that we have three clips: the first one is from Kaspar Hauser, and then Nosferatu, and lastly Burden of Dreams, the film of the making of Fitzcarraldo. Thank you.

Werner Herzog: Good evening.

Neil Norman: Good evening. Yes, we're working [reference to microphone]. Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the National Film Theater and The Guardian lecture. It's my great pleasure tonight to introduce to you as our guest, the director of Cobra Verde, Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre: The Wrath of God and many others, Werner Herzog.
The normal format of these discussions is that Werner and I would talk for a while, and then I would throw the questioning over to the audience for you to ask any questions you have of him. Werner has expressed his desire to keep our chat to a minimum because he would like to have a great dialogue with as many people...as many of you as possible. He has also expressed the desire that the ruder the questions, in fact, the better he responds. So that's...that gives you some preparation.
Werner, let's get the Klaus Kinski questions out of the way to begin with, shall we? The part he plays in Cobra Verde sets up a few echoes to me...to my mind of other films. Especially in the beginning of the film, as the bandit, he is very reminiscent of the hunchback he played in For A Few Dollars More , and also of another character, [Antonio Dezmortez...Glada Rockfort film] . You've had an extraordinary collaboration, the two of you...five films I think?

H: Yes.

NN: To the extent that it becomes...that Herzog and Kinski have become almost synonymous. How far is Kinski, do you think, your dopplegänger or your Mr. Hyde?

H: Very hard to answer that because it was of course a very intensive relationship of work. I wouldn't say that he's an alter-ego. To a certain extent there is a justification to that because when we had trouble to shoot Fitzcarraldo--and we had a different actor at first, Jason Robards who fell ill, couldn't return to the set--we discussed it, what can we do. At that moment I said, "if Kinski," and we didn't know his whereabouts and his contracts and whatever other things he had to do, "if Kinski's not going to do it, if he's under other contracts, I'm going to play the part myself." [quiet laughter from audience] Which is not ridiculous at all. I could have done it. I would not have been ridiculous, and I would not have been undignified. Of course I wouldn't have been as good as Kinski, but I would have been a credible Fitzcarraldo because the task that Fitzcarraldo has to do in the film was exactly my own task, so there was not too far...not too much of a gap in between.
Kinski now, as I've worked for the last time in Cobra Verde, somehow is over the cliff now, I would say. He's...he will age very badly in my opinion [laughter]. He will take a bad end [continued laughter]. I hate to see that. I hate to see it because I still think that he is some sort of a miracle of the world. In the cinema there is no one around who has his presence and his intensity on screen and his force on screen, yet I would say the best thing for him...I really don't wish him anything bad, but I only wish him to die... [laughter] ...quickly, because in that case, you would not see his ugly aging. It's the same...I saw Chaplin when he was 80 years old and pushed out to the audience in Cannes at the film festival, and it was a horrifying experience, and I wish Chaplin had died ten years before that. So it wish I had never seen that, and I have similar feelings with Kinski.
He has been more than extremely difficult of course, and it was no pleasure at all, and I said...before we started the film I said to everyone in the crew, "not him again, I don't want to go through that again." Now that I have a suspicion that he's out of control anyway. Totally out of control. So, but, we went through all the names of people dead, alive, whomever, and there was no one around who could do it. So I finally invited Kinski, and it was the most intensive drama so far. In Fitzcarraldo it was different. It was more a question of perseverance. This time in Cobra Verde it was more dramatical and more unpleasant than ever before, and I swore to God, who does not exist of course, that I would never shoot with Kinski again; five movies are enough. Someone else who is willing to do it should step in; not me again. And there is, of course, very strong and obvious reasons for that, and you can start to post bets if I'm gonna do it because I've declared I'm not going to shoot with Kinski again, and I've done it twice after I've declared it. This time, not anymore because Kinski always was for me a person of new discoveries. In Fitzcarraldo all of a sudden he is charming. In 227 previous films he has never even had a smile [laughter]. So in Fitzcarraldo he's charming, or in Woyzeck he is different. In Aguirre or in Nosferatu he is each time different and has a new segment of life for me. Now I have nothing left to discover. I know that for certain, and this is the major reason I am not going to shoot with Kinski again. I would rather put myself in as an actor in the next movie. If I need someone like Kinski, I'm gonna do it myself.

NN: All right. Well, I think that solves the Kinski problem [laughter]. Back to Cobra Verde itself, the film. It's dealing with a rich and intriguing period of history that is rarely covered in film.

H: Yeah. Never at all really.

NN: Never at all. The last one that I can think of that even approximates the period is Pontecorvo's Quiemada and I'm not even sure that that's...

H: I haven't seen it yet.

NN: ...quite accurate. What aspects of the story itself which is based on the novel by Bruce Chatwin, The Viceroy of Ouidah, appeal to you?

H: It was Bruce Chatwin's novel of course that intrigued me instantly, and that was shortly after I finished Fitzcarraldo, and I said to myself, "this is a film I want to do." And I believe that Bruce Chatwin is the most important and best writer in English language in our days. He has some sort of a touch that rarely you see in literature. I'm a great admirer of Joseph Conrad, for example, and Chatwin somehow is in the same league. And the story was instantly fascinating for me, and I tried to get in touch with Chatwin; didn't reach him, and I said to myself, "I cannot do a monstrous project right after Fitzcarraldo. I have to lick my wounds for a few years; do some easier stuff like some operas, some documentary films, and so on. And I met Chatwin in Australia. He was just releasing his book on the Australian market, and I read in the paper that he was in Australia. I found out the publishing company and tried to locate him, and he was somewhere in the desert in central Australia, and two days later they called me and said, "if you call this number in Adelaide within the next twenty minutes you will reach him before he goes to the airport." So I said...I reached him on the phone and he was going to Sydney, and I said, "no, you don't go to Sydney. Come to Melbourne. I'm there." So he flew to Melbourne. He had apparently known some of my films, and he had read a book, a prose book, Of Walking In Ice--which I like better than all my films anyway--and we became instant friends, and I said to him, "I still can't do this into a movie, but if in the future someone comes and wants to buy the rights, please let me know, and then I'll make up my mind quickly. And two years ago David Bowie's agents tried to buy the rights. Apparently Bowie wanted to act and direct the movie, and his agents were ruthless gangsters. They never spoke about a novel. They always speak about "the property" as they do in Hollywood, and Chatwin called me and said, "there's Bowie who wants to do it," and I said instantly, "yes, sell the rights to them, but with a 'hunchback' on the whole deal with me as the director...on the back." But these negotiations never even materialized, and I had the feeling I had to buy it away from them as quickly as possible because not a person like Bowie should do it. He is not such a good singer anyway [laughter]. And he's a bad actor. And as a figure, how could he play Cobra Verde? How can he do that? He's a neon light bulb. He has the radiation of a neon light, and that's all. So I said, "Out with him! Out with him! How much did they offer? How much was it?" So I mentioned, "the offer...no matter what happens, the story in The Viceroy of Ouidah cannot be made into a movie. It's not a movie story. God knows how I'm gonna convert it into a movie. I have to invent a lot of things. I have to narrate the story in a totally different way." And he said, "it's fine, okay, let's go ahead." And he never wanted to get mixed up with the screenplay or so, and he's very, very...well...how he kept away and how he went into things. He was in Africa, for example, for shooting for ten days, even though he was still very, very ill, and so it's very strange because it was not a movie story, and how it happened I don't really know. It probably came because I went to see all of the locations first, and then I wrote.

NN: Yes. Yes.

H: And that has happened many times before that. Only from a location, all of a sudden the story starts to develop.

NN: You've gotten at another question actually, which is, you've said that you're often searching for new images and concrete images that will express dreams, and that often means landscapes.

H: Not so in this film. Not so much in this film. It's more a whole continent or Africa which is the leading character in the film somehow, and it's what I like about the film. I personally like about the film that everything you see in Africa in the film, you have not seen in the movies before. The kind of...let's say the court rituals or the flag signals that wander across the country or the kind of dialogue, all the little details. It's a different aspect of Africa that is not so well known here. Particularly not in the movies. In the movies you have either Africa as a primitive continent of half-savage or totally savage people, or you have what I don't like at all, this kind of Hemingway Kilimanjaro nostalgia, and the film deviates from that of course. And I always had the feeling that was one of the keys to the making of the film; not so much the image itself but the whole structure of a whole continent, as I see it, of course.

N: Yeah. Yes. Many of your projects tend to generate rumors of a rather sensational nature, and Cobra Verde didn't seem to be too much of an exception in this case. I understand from reports that you had some problems with the Amazons who were trained quite heavily for that particular scene when they attacked the camp. But they also attacked you at one stage, did they not?

H: No, no. Not...Let's put it aside as a rumor. Of course it isn't easy to do a mass scene with Amazon warriors who had to be trained for ten weeks in a football stadium in Accra. We had to select...out of 2000 we selected about a thousand. Of course that is not easy. You don't have a telephone that functions. You hardly have any gasoline for a car or bus or anything. Of course there was a lot of logistical problems. The young women were very, very kind, very articulate, by the way, and of course when something went wrong, they would instantly come and say, "you did that wrong, and you better look after us, and what does this mean," and so on. But Kinski was much more of a problem [laughter].
The Amazons, of course, go with a group leader for each group, but of course sometimes they went totally out of control. When they came into Elmina, our shooting location, which is about 100 miles from Accra, we had it organized one bungalow for each group, and we wanted to hand over the keys to each group leader. But within seconds, 400 stormed the first bungalow, and they trampled in the doors and smashed in the windows and jumped into the place. Or for example when we distributed food on the first day on location, we said "line up," and there were these huge food pots, and they lined up, but after the first 30 seconds they rushed over it, and they piled up--I don't know--12 feet high over it, and they trampled all the food over.
And that was the source of a real problem because on one day, the first day of shooting, we had no appropriate list of names and presences, and I said, "as long as we don't pay blindly, just to anyone." I said, "we are not gonna pay today. We will pay the shooting day of today and tomorrow together, and I will personally guarantee that you will get the money, and I will have a chair outside of the gate of the castle of the fortress." And of course knowing that they would storm the money instantly, I only opened the small gate in this heavy, heavy wooden door in this gate, and I said to them after the shooting, "please go inside the inner yard, put your costumes down, deliver your costumes to the costume ladies, and then come out, one after the other, and you will instantly get your money, because we know you have worked today and yesterday." So, what happened was these 1200 girls--and they were strong women--tried to get at the money as the first one, and there was instantly a push against this much-too-narrow gate which was only for one person to pass through, and it was a little bit like Liverpool against Torino in the Heysel stadium. The girls back there in the inner yard didn't even know that they were crushing the front girls to death. Within sixty seconds, five of them were already standing squeezed in there and unconscious already, and there was absolutely no way to shout, to beat at them. There was no way to help it. Thanks God we had a lot of local police around who kept spectators at bay. Sometimes we had 8,000...10,000 people to keep away from our location because they wanted to storm in front of the camera and look what was going on. And I saw a man, I saw a policeman who had a rifle, and I dragged him to the gate, and I said "shoot, shoot, shoot," and he fired from only five feet distance into the air, and they immediately released the pressure and went inside, and then five of the girls who were already unconscious dropped down. So it was not very polite how I resolved the thing, but thanks god there was...it worked out. That was the incidence. It is not a trouble with the girls that I had. Of course they complained about the payment, that it was too late. I admit that it was too late, but they got it anyway.

NN: Yeah. Yeah. If I may...If I may raise one of your quotes. You've said that film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates, and I'm not sure how Pasolini would react to a quote like that, but how do you reconcile that with your own writing as a poet? Perhaps you could just sort of elucidate that statement.

H: Poetry is not an academic discipline either, or it is not for the very literate people. I don't believe in that. I haven't written that much. I mean, in the last couple of years, yes, I've published six, seven, or eight books, but for example Of Walking In Ice was written while I was walking on foot a...a very long distance, and while I was walking I wrote when I sat down for a moment. I kept writing, writing, writing. And I never thought to publish it, or I never thought about poetry or style or anything like that. It just came physically into the little pages. So it doesn't need reconciliation for me. Of course there are very highly educated poets as well who have studied literature and have all the history of their trade or sport in their mind. I am not one of those.

NN: Film-making for you though is a very physical process it seems. You physically like to engage in everything that your actors and even your crew must go through. For example you went down the rapids in Aguirre...

H: But not because I liked it. I only did it because it was good for the movie.

NN: The question is, is it essential for you?

H: No, of course not. I wish to direct from a chair like this and sit with a microphone and say, "you do this and you do that," and it would be wonderful, but you can't do that in Peru when there is no hotel, no microphone, no chair or anything. So our problem was how, with twenty pennies in my pocket, could I feed 400 people this day? How could I do that? So, that was a daily problem of course. And I'm not doing that for pleasure. I'm not a masochist. And it's very often...and that's one of the stupid rumors that people think: yeah, Kinski and me, or whatever, is always a sadomasochistic affair. It's not like that! Or a love-hatred affair. I don't love the man, and I don't hate him. I have pity for him [laughter]. Yeah, but I mean, what saves a man is that he commands an enormous amount, a good solid amount of natural stupidity. And that of course saves him because he's so naive, and he thinks it's all wonderful and he thinks that he's a genius. Of course somehow he is, but I don't do that for my pleasure, and I'm not looking for dangers or difficulties per se. It would be ridiculous and unprofessional. I am a professional person. That's it.
And I am of course physical. I can give you an example. I've just come from Kiev, from Soviet Union today, because I am acting in a film of Peter Fleischmann which is a very large project, a science fiction project set up on some sort of a twin planet of the earth which has only reached middle-ages so far. They have enormous sets there, the biggest sets that may have ever been built for a movie, just unbelievably monstrous things. And I got murdered. I was supposed to get murdered yesterday with a spear which is just jammed into my back and protrudes on the other side. And we had a stuntman, a professional stuntman who was supposed to hit this one spot where the spear would stick in some sort of a...how do you say...some sort of a casket? Or a...a...a...some sort of a...Around my thorax there was some sort of protection and the spear was supposed to stick in one spot in the right angle, and the guy kept missing it all the time [laughter], and he became timid, and I just felt nothing. There was just this timid kind of stabbing, and I said to Flesichmann, the director, "if my hair," and I had a wig on, "if my hair is not flying around me, there is nothing really." It was ridiculous. So I encouraged the man to be physical, to really stab me all the way through, and I didn't know he was an amateur boxer in the Russian national team a couple of years before, and he really jabbed hard, and he failed and failed and failed, so it was not finished.
But what I want to say is this: in such a moment, of course, it's not very pleasant to be stabbed in the back seventy times to no avail [laughter]. It's not a pleasure at all, and I am still quite sore of it. But for the sake of a movie, you don't have to care. After two days it's all forgotten. It's forgotten. Nobody cares about that anymore, but it has to look convincing. It has to have real physical force until...otherwise the you [the viewer] will not be just knocked off your feet. And that's the way to do movies. And the whole thing happened in a long traveling shot where people got murdered all around the camera in a big confusion; some sort of a palace rebellion. And if such a moment looks ridiculous, you can [might as well] throw away the whole thing, so...of course it's not a pleasure, but movie [sic, cinema] has no mercy. And who does not understand that should not make movies.

NN: [pause] The...yes, the...[long pause, then audience laughter]. The difference...I don't know how to follow that really. The essential...I suppose the essential thing about your movies is the blurring of the line between fiction and reality. Even though you are...many of your subjects...most of your films have been dealing with an historical period--they're not contemporary--there is no sense of fakery. There's no sense of trickery. There's no sense of the fact that we are watching a movie that has been made in the studio. Often, time and again, you get caught up in the fact that what you're seeing is absolutely real. This is obviously very important to you.

H: Not so much for the sake of realism or naturalism. It's something different. A very good example is Fitzcarraldo because Hollywood was interested in the project. For them it was always a 25/30 million dollars affair, but of course, shooting was supposed to be done in the studio and in the botanic garden and so on, and we started to talk about the so-called "plastic solution"; a plastic miniature boat over a plastic hill in the studios. And I always argued against a "plastic solution" because, number one, I knew pulling a boat of that monstrous size over a mountain would create situations that nobody had foreseen that brought real life into a film. That you cannot ever invent. Things going...for example, the sound of the boat. Unfortunately it was not shot in Dolby Stereo. The sound of this boat, of this enormous, 340-or-so-tons hull was so stunning and so amazing, no sound engineer could ever have inventioned that. Or many, many details came that there was real life into the film. I expected that, and I knew that, and it came into it.
And the second and more important thing is...when I sit in the theater as a spectator, I expect and I demand from cinema certain things. For example, in a western I demand to have some sort of a reassertion of my basic sense of justice. In other films, I demand from the movies a position or some sort of being taken seriously as a spectator. I want to be in a position like the early moviegoers who still could trust their own eyes. And the first movie performance ever was Brothers Lumiere "A train coming into the station," and as reports go--whether they are true or not--the first audience fled in panic because they believed the train would run over them. I don't...I can't confirm that. Maybe it's a legend, but I like this attitude very much of this audience. And I have seen people in a small village in Mexico twenty years ago who kept talking back to the bad guy in the scene in an open-air theater, and one pulled a gun and opened fire [laughter], and I liked that very much. Or the way children are seeing movies. And even the six years old kids now can tell in This Science Fiction Movie or in This Movie, it's all tricks. They know it instantly, and I want the audience back into a position where they can trust their own eyes, and that is quite important, and for achieving that, I am doing things that normally movie people would consider as pretty wild or whatever.

NN: So you like your audience to respond as...

H: Not only physically, they...I've become more and more a storyteller. I have a story to tell, and I have a good story to tell in Fitzcarraldo, and I want to tell the story, and I want the audience in a position where they believe their own eyes and where they see things that they have not seen in the movies before. And that makes me content if they respond to that.

NN: Well, I've got a million more questions ,but I'm going to now at this stage throw it over to the audience because I'm sure that there are many people out there who would like to ask a question or two about his films and his work. So now's your chance. If you have any questions, please put your hand up. Yes, the gentleman over there.

Audience Member #1: In Fitzcarraldo, Fitzcarraldo finally manages to get the boat over the hill. In Cobra Verde, Cobra Verde can't manage to pull his boat into the water. Does that indicate that your vision of things has gotten bleaker?

H: No. Could everybody hear the question? Yeah, maybe that whoever asks the question from the audience should speak loud enough for everyone.
Yeah, well, I have made much bleaker films before like Even Dwarfs Started Small, or Kaspar Hauser is some sort of a bleak movie as well, or many of my films are rather bleak. Fitzcarraldo has more relief in it and more charm and more lightweight story in it, at the end particularly. No, I wouldn't say so, and I'm not planning to make a film bleak or sad or gloomy or anything. It's a story that fascinates me, and in this incident [Cobra Verde] I had a totally different ending of the film for a scene in the screenplay. And I...from the point of literature it looks very convincing, very, very good, and people asked me, "why do you want to deviate?" And I said, "for this and that reason," I don't want to go into detail, "it will not function on the screen. I'm not content, I don't know how to finish the film." So I had the feeling that this scene with a boat being pulled into the ocean could be the end of the film or almost the end because I had planned that he's totally exhausted and staggers into the interior of the continent in search of snow, and of course we know that he had heard that there is a mountain, a very high mountain somewhere in the interior of the continent which had snow on its top, and he tries to find the snow, and he would stagger away in exhaustion into the interior of the continent and of course perish.
And we set up the scene with a cripple who follows him. We had this boat on the beach, and nobody at that moment knew it was the last scene. Neither Kinski knew it nor I knew it, and this is one of the moments that I really like about Kinski, and it's very mysterious how it functions. Kinski pulled the boat to such an exhaustion that while he was almost at the end of going away into the interior of the continent, he decided to die. Somehow he felt like dying, and he knew, he knew I would not turn off the camera. He knew it. He knew it somehow, and I, watching him, knew it was not the end of the scene yet. It was not the end, and I sensed it before, and I loaded the camera with a four-minute reel; with a whole reel of film even though this shot that we had never rehearsed was supposed to take about sixty seconds. So it's four times that long now almost, only with one single cut. And somehow both of us sensed it was going to continue, and it would be the last scene, and I...he knew I would not turn off the cameras. And it's very, very strange because it's totally non-verbal how we understand each other. And he had total confidence I would keep the camera on him until he was dazed or supposed to be dead, and it was not planned. It just materialized somehow. And it's like a gift of God falling into my lap, and I have been lucky a couple of times in my life, and I have always cared for good beginnings or for good ending shots or ending sequences in my movies, and in my opinion, that is the strongest. That is the strongest. Unplanned!

NN: Yes.

H: Or I can give you another ending in Kaspar Hauser with the scribe. He was a man, an extra who was supposed to be there for shooting only for one day. I liked him so much that I said to him, "Herr Scheitz, can you stay a little longer? I want to have you tomorrow. I can incorporate you into the scene." And he said, "yes, Herr Herzog, I can be there." And I said, "you will be the weasel tomorrow and you will echo and you will write." So he became bigger and bigger in the film, and I liked him so much that on the last day of shooting, we actually shot the last scene, and I said to him, "Herr Scheitz, I want you to have the last word in the film." And he said, "Herr Herzog, what is it going to be?" And I said, "Herr Scheitz, I do not know , but I will write it overnight." So things happen like that. I do not think about it so much. Of course I had to invent something overnight because the cameras were there, and Herr Scheitz was still there so I had to do it: he hands over his hat to the coachmen who carries it away and he walks behind the coach and has the last lines in the film. So I don't plan to make a bleak ending or this or that ending. Sometimes it just falls into my lap.

NN: What about the ending--just to sort of talk about endings and continue that for a moment--the ending of Nosferatu where Jonathan Harker rides across that...

H: That was well planned, but I like the sky a lot which [originally] didn't look so good. It [the primary image] was shot on the Dutch coast, and I always had the feeling I should change the whole image by superimposing clouds which were shot before that. I had that shot before. The clouds were moving 200 times their speed, and I...and the clouds, of course, were [originally] protruding into the altitude, and I turned them downwards. They are protruding downwards now in this shot, and there was strong wind that blew the sand on this beach. Yeah, I like it quite a lot.

NN: Yes, yes. Yes, audience, another question?

Audience Member #2: You mentioned your book Walking On Ice [sic] and your...

H: Can you speak a little louder please?

AM#2: ...and you're quoted talking very highly about Lotte Eisner. And there was a particular circumstance in Germany after the war. She was "The Mother" who gave weight back into German cinematic history. I don't know, but I think many people in the audience would regard you as equally sort of an inspirational part of this history. You're a brilliant filmmaker. Do you have any plans to sort of encourage filmmakers or invest in talent or film schools? Would you like to adopt like Lotte apparently drew you?

NN: I'll just repeat that question for the rest of the audience. The basis of the question is, with Lotte Eisner's example, does Werner have any plans to encourage future filmmakers through schools or investment or whatever?

AM#2: [something else muffled] ...with his own unique approach...

H: Yeah. First, part of your question's about Lotte Eisner. Of course she has been very charismatic, and she has been the only real stronghold outside who instantly recognized that there was something going on in German cinema again. Of course, probably you know as you are moviegoers or more intimate in your knowledge about film history: she had to flee Germany in 1933, she was one of the most intimate collaborators of Henri Langlois of the Cinematheque Francaise, and she wrote on expressionist cinema in particular. The Haunted Screen is one of the finest books or probably the single most interesting book on German expressionist cinema. She's so important for the younger generation of German filmmakers because she somehow gave us courage, and she gave us something that I can call legitimacy. It's not only the films and the subjects and the style and the renaissance which, per se, of course was some sort of a new event, but after the barbarism of the Third Reich in Germany and after the catastrophe of the Second World War, she was the person who gave us legitimacy. I don't want to elaborate much more into that.
Of course she was very charismatic. Everyone who ever met her admired her. She always gave courage to everyone who came to her and at one moment when after many years of film-making and no echo at all to my films...Aguirre was mentioned before and was a film that for years had not been accepted by any distributor at all. Nowhere. And it was totally put down by the German press and so on, and she gave me courage for the next ten years somehow. I was finished. I was at my end, and I said to her, "it can't continue like that," and I said to her, "as a painter you may go for ten years and paint, and have no echo. In movies you will be destroyed because it is so much money involved." And she just took a sip of coffee, and she said, "listen, film history does not allow you to quit." And she took the next sip of coffee, and that somehow carried me for ten years. So it was just that casual kind of thing she would do, and I personally--I don't know--I don't have the authority that this woman had. I'm working hard and well. As long as I can be a help for other filmmakers, it's quite all right. I don't want to be a nuisance. I don't want to be an embarrassment. If I have that feeling, of course, I will step out of this instantly, and filmmakers quickly become clowns of their own profession, and that has happened to many many, many of them, and even the strongest have had that kind of fate. Yes, I believe that many of the filmmakers nowadays need some courage to do things that normally are not being done, and to be courageous enough to show adequate images for our state of civilization; just to be bold enough. I don't' see that too often. Of course there are many bold people around, but not enough. I wish there were more, and as long as I can be some sort of encouragement to anyone, fine, but I don't know if I am. I just try to do my work as good as I can. That's all.

Audience Member #3: You've talked quite a lot about the importance for you of a sense of physical reality while making a movie; the sounds of the actual boat for example. But for me you're most powerful or most unique when you give us a sense not of reality but of dislocation. I can't put my finger on it, but you use a very strange kind of poetry to dislocate, and in Cobra Verde for example, the two most powerful scenes are one at the beginning between Kinski and the little bar owner when they are in conversation where there is a form of communication that is somehow completely poetic, completely dislocating, and the end scene when there's another form of communication between the cripple and Kinski, and to be honest, in Cobra Verde, I would have given up all the scenes of the spectacles of the warriors for more moments of that unique poetry of dislocation. So I find it very intriguing that you're talking so much about physical reality. Could you just respond to that?

H: Yes. Physical reality is not for the sake of realism on the screen. We have to make a very clear distinction. When I speak of physical reality I mean that something is alive on the screen. Of course a film like Aguirre: The Wrath of God has enormous physical realities in it, and yet it's constantly transformed into some irreal things. The rainforest, the jungle transforms slowly and gradually into some sort of a fever dream of the jungle. It's not real jungle any more, it's some sort of a fever. And yet, of course the jungle was there physically. I'm not one of those who wants to make realistic movies, and I'm glad that movies are existing. For that little money we can step so far out of reality. It's hardly in any other event, maybe with the exception of opera, and that's why I like opera. In recent years I've gone into opera a little bit, and there is exactly that kind of imaginary world, and physical reality again is not encountered during the shooting for the sake of realism. I don't like realism. [side break in tape]
And even in my documentaries you don't see much of realism. It is very stylized, to such an extent that for the sake of a deeper strata of truth, I would even tell you a lie to reach that. A very good example is Land of Silence and Darkness. A woman who is deaf and blind at the same time--you can only communicate with her through a tactile alphabet--and in the beginning of the film she speaks of a ski-jumper she had seen in her childhood while she was still able to see and to hear, and how these faces were in total ecstasy and fear. And she says, "I wish you could see that as well," and of course I cut, and I show the ski-jumpers because I like to show them. And she had never seen that. Everyone who is into cinema verite would say, "ah yes, he is telling lies." Of course I am telling a lie, but for the sake of a deeper dimension of truth, and that is being achieved in this film, and all my documentaries like The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner or many others--very clearly that film--show that I do not care for realism. Even in my documentaries I don't care so much about it. So...

AM#3: Would you agree though that you've become a little bit more of, say, of a prose writer rather than poet...

H: I don't know what the next things are going to be. I'm more of an actor now and next time, and I will do smaller things now this year because I still have to recover from Cobra Verde. So I'm still licking my wounds for a while, and I do smaller stuff; a documentary in the southern Sahara and a film on French people. And I have to go back to this opera in Bayreuth which I did last year, and I'm going to act in two films. In the next one, in the Swiss film, I will be a murderer, sexually disturbed. Very dangerous [laughter]. We will see. So I really do not know what is coming next, and which will be the development of what I will do. I have become more of a storyteller, and it interests me more to tell a story than to show a beautiful image.

NN: Does that mean actually, since you've progressed to that stage--and we'll go back to the questions in a second; I just wanted to follow that up--that you will be unlikely to repeat the kind of experiment that you made in Heart of Glass in which...

H: I hypnotized actors.

NN: ...with hypnotized actors? I mean it's difficult to know how you can go beyond that. I suppose the next stage would be to hypnotize the audience, but...

H: I have done that by the way. [laughter]

NN: Have you?

H: Yes. Yes, and I can tell you why: because under hypnosis, certain elements of the human mind function much better. Like memory; your ability to memorize a poem would be much higher than a different state like being awake. And fantasy in most of the people under hypnosis is highly activated. I had one test done with 25 or so potential actors for the film who were under hypnosis but so deep under hypnosis that they would open their eyes without waking up. And I suggested to them that they were the most incredible inventor and that they had invented a machinery that was so extraordinary that nobody before had ever thought of inventing such a thing, and I said, "I'm going to put my hand on your shoulder, and you will open your eyes, and you will describe me this machine," and there was such unbelievable inventions. It was extraordinary!
Or people would be very poetical. I told them, "you are on a strange jungle island never seen before. For hundreds of years, no people have been there, and there was a holy monk on this island who had lived there all his life as the last one, and there is a huge, mile-wide cliff all of emerald, and all his life this monk spent with a chisel and a hammer to inscribe one poem into this huge cliff of emerald." And I said, "you are discovering this place, and you will read this poem to me." So the first one opened his eyes. He said, "I can't read it properly. I forgot my glasses." I said, "put your glasses on." And he was a man who took care of horses in a stable for police...of a police squadron, and he read. He started to read with a very strange voice, "why can't we drink the moon? Why is there no vessel to hold it?" and so on. Very, very beautiful, and I have the feeling that vision--and we know very little about vision--was extraordinarily activated under hypnosis, and I had a whole movie audience--no, not too many. About a hundred or so--under hypnosis, and I showed films like Fata Morgana to them; also Aguirre: The Wrath of God. I stopped it very soon because reactions were so different, and its very hard to keep an eye in the semi-darkness on each one, and some people were afraid of Aguirre, and they started to hide from his face, and of course I stopped the screening because of one person who got afraid. So it has certain...it goes into a bordering line of risks that should not be stepped beyond, and I stopped the whole thing, and I still believe that with more precise program and aim of...and more precise purpose, it should continue, and we could learn a lot, but it should be with much fewer people and a more precise target of research. Then it would be all right. Otherwise I would not advise to do it.
But of course in the film Heart of Glass I had the idea to have a prologue and an epilogue to the film where I would appear on the screen, and I would explain to the audience from the screen that all the actors were under hypnosis, and it was possible to hypnotize an audience from the screen, and I explain that whoever was willing to see the film from under hypnosis should open their eyes and follow my suggestions. Those who did not want should not listen to my advice anymore, and of course at the end of the film I would appear again and wake everyone who was under hypnosis slowly up into the state of awareness...full awareness. Of course I did not do it. It is possible though. You can even hypnotize somebody over the telephone, I think, or over a TV set. Of course, not to such a high percentage. Out of, lets say, a hundred persons who are willing to be hypnotized from the screen, I would say only twenty percent...twenty persons might be hypnotized, not more. And of course not those who are not willing to be hypnotized. You have to be cooperative, but of course there is nonsense, and it would have a tendency of a circus effect, and it is not advisable and not right to do that. But again I think we can learn a lot from that and I am quite willing to go into anything like that. It doesn't have to be hypnosis; anything else; whatever comes up for the sake of a film. I don't know yet what it might be.

NN: There's a gentleman here who has been very patiently waiting to ask his question. Please...

Audience Member #4: I saw your film Nosferatu alongside the original a short while ago, and it occurred to me that some of the intertitles on the original film had worked their way into your version of it into the dialogue, and it occurred to me that a lot of your films I've seen have a lot of long passages without dialogue. Would it be courageous for you now to make a completely silent film; just music and images?

H: A little bit like Fata Morgana; only music and images. [long pause] I don't see it at the moment. I only have one thing I'd like to do in Australia with an aborigine whom I met, but probably by now he is dead already. He was a very old man ailing in the hospital. He was the last and only surviving person of his tribe and of his language group, so he had nobody with whom he could speak anymore. Nobody on earth speaks his language anymore, and I tried to make a film with the camera one hour on him and some voice from outside trying to establish some contact with him. That's maybe the only thing, but I can't predict it. I don't know. It is possible. It doesn't take much courage to make a silent movie, but I do not believe this is going to be the tendency of the next time to come, because I am much more in storytelling. I wish to do a film like Treasure of the Sierra Madre one day. Then I would finish. I would stop. You would not see me anymore. If I achieve that one I don't need to...

AM#4: Would you like to tell stories with dialogue, though, or images?

H: You should try to avoid to squeeze me into the position of the poet of the cinema or such kind of things. That lady over there [Audience Member #3] had a similar tendency to advise me [laughter] I should be more...I should rather be a poet. I want to be a soccer player. [laughter] Or better, though, rugby!

NN: Yes in the back there.

AM#5: Yes, can you tell us about...you're going to do some work in Bayreuth. Can you tell us what you're going to do in Bayreuth. And also how is your relationship with Wolfgang Wagner?

H: With whom?

NN: Wolfgang Wagner

H: I did not undestand...

NN: He wanted to know about your work in Bayreuth and your relationship with Wolfgang...Wagner?

H: Ah, Wolfgang Wagner. Sorry. I did not understand you acoustically. I have done one opera before. I have to mention that because I am not an operagoer. I had seen but two operas as a spectator. So that was my only qualification, and I like the work in Bologna where I did Dr. Faust by Bussoni. I liked it very, very much. I really liked it a lot, and I had a lot of offers to do opera. I could have ended my days by being an opera director after Bologna. One of the offers was by Wolfgang Wagner who sent a telegram to my office asking whether I was interested to do Lohengrin. I said, "no," and then he advised me...he asked--I had a phone conversation--he asked me, "have you ever heard the opera?" I said, "no," and he said, "would you please listen to a record I am going to send you?" So I did, and when I heard the overture, I was totally stunned, and I knew this was just a lightening that hit me. This was something very, very big, and I had the feeling I should have the courage and tackle that one. So...and I said to Wagner--he's like a peasant and I like to talk to him that way --I said to him, "Herr Wagner, let's just do the overture and then keep the curtain closed, and when people start to make noise and demand the opera, we play it again and then we chase them out." You must listen to the overture. It's one of the most extraordinary pieces of music ever composed. And I must say I like this work very much. Bayreuth has a highly ritualized ambiance, and somehow you cannot change the rituals and the kind of pilgrimage that people are doing to this sacred hill. I even tried to make some sort of statement about it. I wanted to have the set around even into the landscape with huge megalithic sacred sights--a little like stonehenge--even around the opera house which continue on stage and then some sort of a line by a laser beam for eight miles across the valley into the....they didn't allow us that thing. [laughter] But it was too expensive and so on, but still it is a necessity that I do other things as well; that I step out of being a movie maker. And I do other things. I do cooking. I want to be a professional cook. I want to work in a restaurant at night for a year or so. I do photography but with a very old-fashioned camera with plates and bellows and the black clothe over my head. And all the portraits, strangely enough, with this dignified craft. All the portraits are dignified, strangely, as early photographers of last century. Or I do operas, or I walk on foot. I still have an unfinished foot walk of long...really a long one that I have to finish. It's...Or I'm acting now which is a different approach towards movies. So Bayreuth has been very pleasant. Very strange. Very, very strange, but things went well. Of course I got my beating by the press as usual in Germany and in some other papers, but that's okay.

Audience Member #5: You mentioned dreams yet again. Something that comes up in most conversations...in everything you've said. May I ask, a lot of your films seem to be about dreams. Are they dreams of your own or do...

H: No, I do not dream at all. I am one of those who does not dream at night.

A5: ...never?...

H: Yeah, I mean there's...psychology is just a scandal! The whole profession! [laughter] The whole disciple is a scandal, and these bastards [laughter] maintain that every person dreams so and so much time during the night, and I am the living proof [laughter] that it is not like that. I do not dream. I really don't dream. I do so maybe once a year or so, and it's very prosaic. My last dream was that I had a sandwich. [laughter] For lunch! [laughter] And maybe...sorry, I want to add something serious--but it's true, I had a sandwich for lunch [laughter]--but maybe because when I wake up in the morning, I have deficit like some people who do not sleep long enough. They just sense it. Like today for example I have an enormous deficit of sleep. I haven't slept very well the past couple of nights, and I had to drink a lot of vodka last night until I fell out of my shoes [he laughs] but when I wake up in the morning, I have the feeling there is a deficit of dreaming. "Again, goddammit? Again, why haven't I dreamt?" And maybe that pushes me into making films.

Audience Member #6: Many of your films seem to be about dreamers, Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo; they're dreamers. Are their dreams particular to the characters or are they dreams that you share. And just by way of...just having seen your latest film, is there a dream which informs Cobra Verde, because it seems to me almost there isn't. I couldn't see...

H: No. Not! Not to my knowledge, but I think cinema in general should encourage everyone in the audience, to a certain degree, to take their own dreams seriously and to have the courage somehow, even if most of the time it will end in failure. But at least to attempt some of their dreams, and if Fitzcarraldo gives you courage to do that, the film has achieved something at least. And I...in that film, definitely I try that, and whoever has seen other of my film who are not so explicit in this point, I would say if I can give courage to your own dreams, then my existence has...makes some sort of a sense. I mean it doesn't make much sense anyway, but it makes some sort of a sense.

NN: Yes. Right along the back there.

Audience Member #7: ...just tell me why [??? muffled question about a plot point of Cobra Verde]

H: It is an element of the story. Maybe it goes very quickly as you are not the only one who has asked me about it. In the dialogue...of course Cobra Verde receives a letter warning him, "don't come to the palace! It will be your certain death!" and he looks quickly for an excuse, and as he's a merchant of slaves at the coast, he says to the minister of the king, "tell your majesty I cannot come because always one of my feet has to remain in the sea." I don't know how well it was translated in the subtitles. He means he has to remain at the coast, and they take it literally and put a calabash with seawater on his foot, and carry him all the way into the interior of the country, so that's the meaning of it. Period. Very, very simply.

Audience Member #8: To come back to dreaming: the film Where the Green Ants Dream. Can you give us some of the background about how you found out about that story?

H: I'd been in Australia at Perth at a small film festival many years ago, and I came...a coincidence I'd read about in the newspaper about the first real big legal confrontation between black aborigines and a mining company in the northwestern area of Australia. And some or much of the story goes back to this real legal case which, by the way, the aborigines lost, but of course in the long run it was the first real political victory for them because there was an enormous wave of solidarity for them, particularly by urban intellectuals, by university people and then by the media later on. And this trial had a lot of effect in the whole thinking. And of course the story is invented with the aeroplane and the place where the green ants dream. That is basically invention, and I wanted to do this film before Fitzcarraldo, and I had everything prepared. I had very good locations, and I had an unbelievable old man whom I had seen in two documentaries by an Australian filmmaker-- Mikey Edols. One of them is a very, very beautiful film called Lalai Dreamtime with a very wise, charismatic old man, and two months before shooting was supposed to commence, he died, and I said to myself, "there is no way to do this film without this man. I will drop this project, and I will never touch it again." After Fitzcarraldo, after these years of toil, still this project kept somehow moving in my head, and I kept...I couldn't get rid of it. So I said to my friends, "I'm going to Australia again, and maybe I'm lucky, and I will find someone." As a matter of fact, I ended up with three aborigines now. The three major aborigines are some sort of a...are this one person, Sam Woolagoodja who died. It split. This figure now is split up in three different personalities. So...of course there was a lot of change because of the death of the first man who was supposed to play the part. But it had a strange history, the whole film.

NN: Yes, sir?

Audience Member #9: I would like to know, how can I be convinced by a Brazilian barman that speaks in German? And he's very badly dubbed. Why, not even a six year old can be convinced by him. They'd say, "he's not talking German." So why make his piece played in German? ....?....because he's very obviously...

H: Yes, this young man of course...not only was he physically somehow deformed, he had a speech defect and had a very hard time to articulate it. With a great effort he would articulate. Of course dubbing into any langauge--and I knew that beforehand--would be very difficult; almost impossible. Of course I prefer to have his original voice. He in this instance spoke Spanish, by the way. I'd personally prefer to have subtitles and have him in his original, but the problem is that distributors and movie theaters would not like to show the film in such a version. It would be too much of a selective audience only that you can reach with a subtitled film. You have a very, very special type of audience, and you will reach a few thousand, and you can do that as long as your film hasn't cost that much. If your budget stays at a very low limit, you can say, "okay let's forget about the larger sections of the audience who would see that," but you have only ten percent, maybe, of the potential audience, and its a consideration of the market, and I agreed to do it in a dubbed version because as in all my films I am my own producer, and since 20 years I would not have made a film anymore if I had stuck just to subtitled versions of my films. I would have been finished as a producer, and who for God's sake is going to produce my films? [laughter] No one! They have not shown up yet.

NN: We have time for one last question, so we'd like a quick one please. I'll take the one up there. Yes?

Audience Member #10: Many of your films have been made in very remote locations and involved considerable contact with indigenous peoples. You have been accused of being somewhat heavy-handed with them and of disrespecting them from a socio-economic position...

H: Can you say that louder, and can you say that once more? Disrespectful of what? Of who?

AM#10: You have been accused of being disrespectful of the social and economic positions of some of the indigenous peoples that you've worked with, and yet you have a very strong sense of their own cause. How do you feel about any contradictions that there are in the production process of actually working with indigenous peoples and the messages you're trying to get across in your films?

H: Well, would you consider the Ghanese people also as indigenous people? And do you want to say with that or do you want to hint with that that they were abused or misled; not paid; socially mistreated and physically tortured? [laughter] What do...

AM#10: I'm merely referring to various comments that have been made in the press around...

H: Yes?

AM#10: ...associated with Fitz...

H: Yes, but that is not my problem. Sorry. The press in Fitzcarraldo is not my problem. It is a problem of the media, and it went totally wild. The media in...lets go to Fitzcarraldo because that was the worst. For more than two years I was completely criminalized by the international press. The British press was rather harmless in comparison to what the Germans did to me, and I was accused--and I mean literally--I was accused of forcing native Indians of the rainforest who had barely ever had any contact with white civilization with force of weapons into slave labor for my film. And on and on and on; and that I had put resisting people through military people into prisons and so on; and there was a tribunal against, me and I don't know what else. I can only recount in general.
I asked very urgently Amnesty International to go into details of that and to send a commission to Peru which they did. They came back with a detailed report, and this report was never mentioned in not one single line by any of the press. And of course I've never put any one in jail. I've never forced anyone into slave labor or anything like that. This is just media craziness, and it went on into real wild things. There were reports that Claudia Cardinale was hit by a truck and dying in the hospital, and I got the phone calls from all over the world: "what was going on with her?" And I learned from that, because on the first one, I answered not only that she was hit by a truck; the barefoot half-Indian truck driver raped her! [laughter] And you can only fight a rumor by rumor; not by the truth. So that's the way to deal with the press, and these skunks of the press [laughter] have really made it very hard for me. I was attacked! In the streets people came running and kicked me just really hard, and I've gone through many, many things, and as true as I'm sitting here--or let me put it differently--I'm not in possession of truth. No one on earth is. But I have been a witness there, and I have been the one who was responsible for things, and my collaboration with the native Indians in Peru was very, very intimate and very good.
I can give you one example. Shooting was interrupted for five months until we could do the last two weeks of shooting, and we had 950 native Indians in our camp. They had to be gathered from various areas. When we returned for the last fortnight of shooting, 4,000 people wanted to come. So they wouldn't do that if I forced them with guns into slave labor. And of course there was a lot of accusations: that I didn't pay them well enough. All these people got paid twice as much as they would earn in the best kind of job that they could get in Peru. That is number one. And number two, I always said a film like this could not be...can not function only in terms of cash money. They have to have an exchange of services, and in this area where we shot, the native community had the trouble of intruding lumbermen who wanted to chop down all of the forest around them. And I said to them, for example, "let me try. I'm a guest in your country, but I know how to deal with bureaucracy in Lima." For having a claim for territory...for having a land title, for that, first of all you need a land surveyor to measure things and develop a map. So we got a land surveyor in there. We went for two and a half years. We battled this with attorneys, with the ministry of agriculture which is responsible for the 'reforma agraria,' and I personally spoke to the Peruvian president, and I had two of the representatives of the village with me, and it was not over after we had left. It took another two years, and now they have their land title, and I have really struggled for that, and of course nobody reports about that. And the press is interested in the scandal and some sort of a big story, and my only defense is working on. And from the films that you can see that I've made, it is hard to imagine that it was done by somebody who has put people in jail just to force his way through and make the film. I'm not one of those, as true as I'm sitting here, and if you don't believe, we can go out into the street and fight it out, if you prefer that... [laughter]

NN: Well that's...uh...

H: ...physical way. But I have no proof but my physical body here.

NN: On that...uh..

H: As I'm sitting here, I am not a criminal! I am only a criminal as an actor now. I will be a murderer in the film, but not in real life.

NN: On that very positive and...uh...note I'll draw the evening to a close. Thank you very much indeed for coming, and thank you Mr. Werner Herzog for being with us tonight. [applause]


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Transcribed by Ben Simington, Jan. 2005. Keene, NH.