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WASHINGTON — He has directed some of the greatest films of all time, be it fiction like “Aguirre: Wrath of God” (1972) and “Fitzcarraldo” (1982) or documentaries such as “Grizzly Man” (2005) and “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” (2010).
Over the weekend, legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog was honored at AFI Docs’ Guggenheim Symposium, an annual honor saluting the most important filmmakers the medium has to offer.
Herzog sat down with WTOP before the big honor.
“I appreciate to be in Washington D.C. I haven’t been here for a while, and I find it an impressive place,” Herzog said. “Unfortunately, never really long time, maximum like three days. I’ve never really stayed here for more time, and in a way, it’s not right. I should be here more time and longer time.”
While other symposium honorees have come before him, Herzog doesn’t like to think of himself as a product of any other filmmaker, saying all his influences come from his own personal expression.
“Nobody has inspired me because I hardly see any films,” Herzog said. “I knew I was a poet and I would do films and they would be much better than everything around. … Since I had no knowledge cinema even existed until I was 11, I always had the feeling I’m the inventor of cinema. Until today, I make films as if I had invented it. … We are inventing cinema right here and now. That’s what we do.”
In many ways, he did.
After about a dozen shorts, docs and indie features, the West German filmmaker saw his global breakthrough masterpiece with “Aguirre: Wrath of God” (1972). Set in the 16th century, the “fiction” film starred Klaus Kinski as an insane, ruthless conquistador leading a Spanish expedition into Peru in search of El Dorado. The film was powerful for its social themes and its gritty documentary style.
“It’s all movies for me, simple as that,” Herzog said. “The line is not that clear and it’s in a way blurred.”
A decade later, Herzog returned to the Peruvian jungle for “Fitzcarraldo” (1982), casting Kinski as an opera enthusiast who dreams of pulling a steamship over a mountain to reach rubber-rich territory. The film won Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival but was infamously difficult to shoot.
“‘Fitzcarraldo’ was not a crazy shoot,” Herzog said, “It was just haunted by complications and catastrophes, real ones like two plane crashes, or the whole film ending up at the front in a border war between Peru and Ecuador. My camp was attacked by a thousand people and burnt down.”
The hardships were immortalized in the making-of documentary “Burden of Dreams” (1982), similar to “Heart of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse” (1991) about “Apocalypse Now” (1979).
“You have to understand that whatever is being thrown at me, I have to deal with it,” Herzog said. “There’s no chance to be broken by what is happening. At the same time, I’m a very professional person who looks at what the risks are out there. I do not need to explore my outer limits; that’s a very silly idea of extreme mountain climbers. … I’m a very professionally functioning person.”
Few films have chronicled the risks of on-location filmmaking like Herzog’s documentary “Grizzly Man” (2005), which won the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. It explores the real-life tragedy of Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard, a pair of grizzly bear activists who were eaten by bears in 2003 while living among their furry “friends” in Alaska.
“The main tragedy of Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend … was a deep misunderstanding of what constitutes wild nature,” said Herzog, who tastefully doesn’t show the footage but shudders on-screen upon listening to the audio. “For them, it was a Disneyzation of wild nature, that grizzlies are really nice, sweet teddy bears and you can sing songs to them and you can even hug them.”
If “Grizzly Man” showcased mankind’s yearning for the primal instincts of our past, Herzog’s newest documentary “Lo & Behold” (2016) just showed the AFI Docs crowd the dangers of our digital future.
“I’m personally somebody who doesn’t use cellphones, not because I’m nostalgic. I do not use it for cultural reasons,” Herzog explained. “I do not want to be available all the time. I do not want to examine the world through applications on my cellphone. … I do not want any hacker, be it a private person or a government agency, to know all the time where I am. … Nobody can track me down.”
He admitted that not all technology is negative, but that it must be used in moderation.
“I think we can derive a lot of joy through the internet and through our cellphones, but ultimately we have to create a filter, and we don’t have a clear idea what the filter [is],” Herzog said. “I use internet via my laptop, for example, but very limited. I use it for emails, sometimes when it comes to family on another continent I do Skype, and sometimes I look at Google Maps, but that’s basically it.”
Herzog spoke with horror about a personal encounter with someone else’s digital dependency.
“One of my editors has a girlfriend that visited him literally every day by car in Los Angeles and she’s only a mile and a half away, only three turns left or right, very simple … She did it 40 times in the last 30 days,” Herzog said. “Her GPS system was down one day and she couldn’t find him. … She had no conceptual idea about a very simple pattern where she was and where he was.”
Such sad dependence can be unhealthy for our society as a whole.
“There’s not enough preparation for a failure of the internet,” Herzog said. “It can be wiped out for quite some periods of time because, let’s say, massive solar flares. That would mean we can’t do any financial transactions anymore. You cannot buy a hamburger, because the cash register is connected to the internet. You cannot make any phone calls. … You cannot pump gasoline anymore. You cannot flush your toilet anymore. You have no drinking water from your tap. No light. Nothing.”
These themes of looking up from our digital world ties perfectly into Herzog’s previous work.
“‘Lo & Behold’ is not a singular film that is somehow out of line with what I have done before,” Herzog said. “Subjects like that have somehow always fascinated me.”
Consider his fascinating narrative film “The Enigma of Kaspar Houser” (1974), which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival by telling a mysterious true story from 1928 Nuremberg.
“A young man who was found in the street [after being] kept captive in a basement without light and without ever seeing a human being or a house or a tree or clouds or hearing human language, and all of a sudden, he’s exposed to the real world,” Herzog said.
Such a premise may recall Brie Larson in “Room” (2015), but it works on the same philosophical idea of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” This has fascinating implications on Herzog’s “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” (2010), which won Best Documentary by the Washington Area Film Critics Association.
“[The film] examines the first 32,000 years [of] pictorial messages that we receive from Paleolithic people and the awakening of the human soul and the awakening of art and music,” Herzog said.
Ironically, after so many groundbreaking works of fiction and documentary, Herzog’s only Oscar nomination to date came recently for the documentary “Encounters at the End of the World” (2007), capturing the beauty of Antarctica and investigating the characters that live there.
In such extreme conditions, it’s important to have a clear vision so as to not waste footage.
“I see some films in front of me so clearly as if I were sitting in a theater,” Herzog said. “This is why I can write a screenplay so fast. I’ve never spent more than a week writing a screenplay. This is why I do not need to shoot that much. I see young filmmakers who come at me exuberant, ‘I shot 650 hours’ … and my heart is sinking. The market doesn’t allow this amount of wasting of time, energy and money.”
Of course, even best-laid plans require the flexibility of capturing happy accidents that may occur.
“A few weeks ago I was filming a volcano in Indonesia and all of a sudden there’s an eruption,” Herzog said. “Huge glowing blobs of lava are flying at you. You do not turn away and run. You do not duck. You look up in the air, you look at the trajectory and if it comes at you, you step out of the way. That’s the right thing to do. Looking straight in the face of danger … that has carried me over many films.”
In addition to this gutsy resolve, Herzog says filmmakers should form a subjective opinion.
“I have called it an ecstasy of truth, an ecstatic truth,” Herzog said. “Much of what you’re seeing today in documentaries is an extension of journalism, and I think we should divorce ourselves [from that]. It should not be so completely fact-based. Facts do not illuminate you, per se. … In documentary filmmaking, we should look beyond what is the factual and beyond what is a journalistic quest for something … [That’s] totally OK, but it belongs more to television. I try to divorce myself from that.”
Still, just when he thought he was out, television pulls him back in.
“Having a guest role in ‘The Simpsons’ [was] my apotheosis in American pop culture,” Herzog said. “I had to ask, ‘Do they talk?’ … They said, ‘Are you pulling our legs? ‘The Simpsons’ are on television since 24 years!’ … They said, ‘Your voice doesn’t have to be cartoonish, just keep your accent.'”
This accent has also proven juicy for a cameo in NBC’s “Parks and Recreation.”
“It is really funny,” he said. “The kind of humor that I have echoes very visibly … in almost all my films. There’s a lot of stuff to laugh [at]. It’s a very unusual type of humor, sometimes a very dark humor.”
That dark side can also make him a convincing screen villain.
“I have entered into the consciousness of wider pop culture by playing a villain in ‘Jack Reacher’ … an action film with Tom Cruise where I was paid handsomely for being frightening. I knew I could do that,” Herzog said with a smile. “Although in my private life, I’m absolutely not that kind of guy. My wife would testify and swear to you, to God, or to anyone that I’m a fluffy husband.”
How fluffy? In his spare time, Herzog admits he watches cute kitten videos on YouTube.
“Cats can be very crazy,” Herzog said. “Sixty-second crazy cat videos are delightful. … [If] I had a bad night, I want to see a cat video before I touch my coffee in the morning. It just makes you feel lighter.”
Listen below for the full conversation between Werner Herzog and WTOP’s Jason Fraley in a roundtable that included Jason Dick from CQ Roll Call, Pat Padua of DCist and Alan Zilberman of Washington City Paper:
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The post From ‘Aguirre’ to ‘Grizzly Man’ to ‘Fitzcarraldo,’ the rare genius of Werner Herzog in his own words appeared first on WTOP.
