Today Werner Herzog has chosen to be interviewed indoors. Perhaps it's for the best. One of the more puzzling and improbable moments in the legendary 68-year-old German director's career, and there have been many, came when he was doing a filmed interview for a BBC program called The Culture Show in 2006. He was standing a few miles from here on some barren scrubland in the Hollywood Hills, chosen so that the city of Los Angeles would be the backdrop falling away behind him, and he was explaining how nobody seems to care about his films in Germany when an unexpected noise interrupted him. Herzog flinched. Understandably so, because he had just been shot.
It has never been established who was doing the shooting—if it was more than just someone with an air rifle taking a random pop at a stranger for fun, it may have been because Herzog and the film crew were trespassing. Afterward, Herzog refused to call the police, fearing a SWAT-type overreaction, and he also declined, for the same reason, to seek medical help. Still, the pellet made its mark—under his mauve and pink windmill-motif boxer shorts, now blood-blotted, was a seeping entry wound near Herzog's groin.
This shooting is an event he still chooses to play down—"It was kind of insignificant"—although I get the sense he also quite likes the opportunity to play it down. "It was just very silly," he insists. "I have been shot at, without being hit, much more seriously. What I experienced here was completely harmless." Barely worth noting. Though when I persist in challenging him to name one other person who has ever been shot in this way while doing a TV interview in America, he naturally has no answer. "The funny thing is, people sometimes believe I make things up, and nobody would believe it if it hadn't been caught on tape. Nobody would have believed it."
He is right. It seemed so unlikely, so preposterous, and yet somehow so perfectly Herzog. So much so, I tell him, that I think some people still suspect it was a great stunt he'd somehow arranged.
"You may speculate as much as you want," says Herzog, a man whose own work frequently involves fascinating juxtapositions of fact and fantasy, and who is long accustomed to drawing such suspicions. In 2005 he made an acclaimed documentary about a man called Timothy Treadwell who tried to live alongside, and was ultimately killed and eaten by, bears in Alaska. The film was built around footage Treadwell had filmed of himself with the bears. Or so Herzog said. "You find on the Internet," he recounts, "that the film Grizzly Man is all done in a studio with digital effects: 'No man walks three feet toward a bear and even touches his nose.' There's a massive following of this idea. People believe it was digital effects and that it was Peter Jackson in New Zealand who ultimately made the film." This seems to please him.
For what it's worth, I don't think there's even a chance that Herzog faked Treadwell's home movies (the contents of Treadwell's footage were well-known before Herzog's documentary), let alone set up his own Hollywood Hills shooting, even if he's somewhat attracted by the absurdity of people believing he might have. (The indoor space he has chosen for our meeting, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, is a kind of grand, wonderful art project masquerading as a conventional museum and thrives on a similar spirit; he calls it "my favorite place in America.") But these days, he also finds himself surrounded by other kinds of fictions. "I find it interesting that there are impostors out on the Internet," he says, "pretending to be Werner Herzog."
He partly means the kind of mundane wannabes who set up competing Werner Herzog Facebook pages, but more interesting are those impersonators exploiting a public fascination with Herzog's way of speaking English, in a Bavarian accent with its own very distinctive, mannered enunciation that has become familiar from his documentaries. "My voice," he notes, "has become kind of notorious." This recent epidemic of faux-Herzog narration appears to have begun with YouTube videos in which imitators read aloud children's books such as Curious George, Where's Waldo?, and Winnie the Pooh, wherein his clipped Teutonic tone—methodical, world-weary, and as stoic as he can manage to be in the face of mankind's annoying idiocy, but still somehow also grouchily acceptant that there may yet be wonder in the universe—seems both hilarious and poignant.
"It's mushrooming," he says of all this imitation. "What it's about I don't know, but I welcome it, because I see them as some kind of protectors around me. As though they were bodyguards."
Like Saddam Hussein's?
He nods. "The doppelgängers. The paid stooges, shielding me."
As for that one insignificant Hollywood- hillside projectile that nonetheless got through, Herzog concedes that he does still have a slight scar.
"It still hurts," he says, "when I laugh very hard. Slightly. I feel the spot here. Don't make me laugh too hard."
One's first instinct is that this probably won't be the greatest challenge to be faced when interviewing Werner Herzog.
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Herzog's original renown came from the innovative, unconventional, and often mysterious feature films he released in the '70s and early '80s—movies like Aguirre, Wrath of God; Stroszek; Even Dwarfs Started Small; and, most famously, Fitzcarraldo. It's hard to remember now that there was a time, not just before Netflix but before VHS home video, when most movies were secrets. Movies with special images and weird dissonant ways of looking at the world could usually be seen only with great effort, typically when they came to the one cinema in town that catered to the arty college crowd; even the keenest movie fan might have to wait many years to see every film by a favorite director. Herzog's were the kind of films that thrived in such a world. They may at times have been narratively oblique and frustrating, but they would contain moments—sometimes of great beauty and vision, and sometimes of surreal jarring oddness—that many who saw them would hold within and cherish for years.
The myth of his movies was compounded by the myth of Herzog himself; over time he became almost as famous for the stories of what happened during the making of his movies as for the movies themselves, particularly the two he made in the Peruvian Amazon, Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo. Fitzcarraldo took several years to complete and was beset by obstacles, and its on-screen story—the tale of an ambitious delusional man with a crazy dream to carry a ship from one river to another over a jungle-covered mountain—seemed to also become the story of its making. (Characteristically, Herzog decided that the best way to film a ship being moved over a mountain deep in the rain forest was to actually move a ship over a mountain deep in the rain forest, and film it.) From such stories, and from the intense and obsessive man Herzog seemed to be in the interviews he would give back then, the perception grew that he might genuinely be crazy.
Even now, though he rejects the conclusion, Herzog seems to simultaneously encourage and discourage such talk. "I read something very beautiful," he tells me. "A journalist writing on the Internet when I did the film My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, and David Lynch was the executive producer. And it said, beautifully, 'The potentially insane David Lynch is finally teaming up with the certified insane Werner Herzog.' I found this totally wonderful. I find it kind of humorous, and it appeals to a kind of opinion out there that I must be insane, because I moved a ship over a mountain and things like that. And of course my answer to that is: 'I have seen many other colleagues in filmmaking, and I am the only one who is clinically sane.' "
Likewise, Herzog suggests that he has been making movies for the mass market all along. He has a phrase that he likes to use: the secret mainstream. "All my films are mainstream," he asserts. "Sometimes people fail to notice that." I take this as both an assertion and a provocation, for the world's failure to notice this has been at times emphatic. But there are signs recently that the gap is narrowing. In the past few years he has made feature films starring Christian Bale (the surprisingly straitlaced Rescue Dawn) and Nicolas Cage (the wonderfully demented Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans), and two well-received documentaries, Grizzly Man and his Oscar-nominated exploration of life in the Antarctic, Encounters at the End of the World.
His latest film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, is a documentary about the oldest paintings known to man. Chauvet cave, which had been closed off by a rockfall about 20,000 years ago, was discovered in southern France in 1994 and has remained off-limits to all but a few chosen scientists who may only study the images on its walls for a few weeks each year. Because this is a film by Werner Herzog, much of it is made up of respectful and almost reverent footage of the paintings and of thoughtful if also typically idiosyncratic encounters with their guardians and studiers, but it is also a movie that ends with footage of some albino crocodiles swimming in a nearby but otherwise unrelated French eco-park over which Herzog's voice can be heard wondering what the reptiles would make of the paintings.
It is also in 3-D.
Herzog's producer first suggested this. "I immediately had the feeling it was a wrong idea," Herzog tells me. Later, when he realized just how deeply integrated the images were into the extreme contours of the rockfaces—"such a drama of formations and bulges and protrusions and niches and pendants"—he changed his mind. Completely. It was, he then decided, "the only way to do it."
Nonetheless, he remains a skeptic about 3-D generally, though he has only seen one other movie from the modern 3-D era: Avatar. (He's not a big consumer of modern popular culture. When he was recently asked to appear in a long-running TV show, he asked for the network to send over a DVD—Herzog was, it turns out, the last man in America to see The Simpsons.) Though he says he appreciated Avatar's "sheer fireworks," he also says that he found them exhausting enough that he had to take off the glasses every now and then and that he thought the use of regular action-movie quick editing was a mistake.
And aside from that?
"I don't like the storytelling, the kind of New Age climate that it creates, which I just can't stand."
You didn't feel chastened as part of a cruel, exploitative, invasive race?
"I didn't. But it doesn't matter."
Did you care what happened?
"No."
Explaining his own film, Herzog says, "I follow my own fascinations...." He also has a story about how he saw a book of cave paintings in a shop when he was a child and saved up for six months to buy it. But when I ask him to consider why he has always been fascinated by cave paintings, he looks at me as though I have just said something slightly distasteful. (Steady yourself. We are only seconds away from tumbling down a vortex and toward our first real-life glimpse of the world as seen by Werner Herzog.)
"Oh, I don't want introspection," he demurs. "I don't like to look at myself."
Why?
"I've always been suspicious. I don't even look into my face. I shaved this morning, and I look at my cheeks so that I don't cut myself, but I don't even want to know the color of my eyes. I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century. A major, major mistake. And it's only one of the mistakes of the twentieth century, which makes me think that the twentieth century in its entirety was a mistake."
What's the mistake with psychology and self-reflection?
"There's something profoundly wrong—as wrong as the Spanish Inquisition was. The Spanish Inquisition had one goal, to eradicate all traces of Muslim faith on the soil of Spain, and hence you had to confess and proclaim the innermost deepest nature of your faith to the commission. And almost as a parallel event, explaining and scrutinizing the human soul, into all its niches and crooks and abysses and dark corners, is not doing good to humans. We have to have our dark corners and the unexplained. We will become uninhabitable in a way an apartment will become uninhabitable if you illuminate every single dark corner and under the table and wherever—you cannot live in a house like this anymore. And you cannot live with a person anymore—let's say in a marriage or a deep friendship—if everything is illuminated, explained, and put out on the table. There is something profoundly wrong. It's a mistake. It's a fundamentally wrong approach toward human beings."
And so if humans persist in this way...?
"They persist in stupidity, then."
And what will the consequence be?
"For example, for me, I could never ever be with a woman who is three times a week with a psychiatrist. It's like an iron curtain between us. Like venetian blinds rattling down."
I don't know if it's related, but you've previously mentioned an intense antipathy to yoga classes. Could you be with a woman who did yoga?
"Of course not. Of course not. I think there should be holy war against yoga classes. It detours us from real thinking. It's just this kind of...feeling and floating and meditation and whatever. It's as tourism in religions. People all of a sudden becoming Buddhist here in Los Angeles."
For the record, the principal reason Herzog gives for living in Los Angeles is his marriage to the 41-year-old photographer Lena, his third wife. But I think he also enjoys people's surprise at finding him here. As he argued a couple of years back during an event at the New York Public Library: "The last half century, almost every single important cultural trend and technological trend originated from California—like computers, like the free-speech movement, like accepting gay and lesbian people as an integral part of society...on and on and on." Los Angeles, he likes to tell people, is the only city in America with any real substance.
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To propose to his first wife, Herzog traveled on foot about a thousand miles, across the Alps. (Herzog, who had made several other such journeys, is insistent that this not be referred to as walking. "Traveling on foot," he says. "Walking is something different.") He went because he had something important to ask. When I press him to explain further, he says: "There are certain things out there that a manly man has to do in his life, at least once."
Years ago Herzog declared that if he ever opened a film school, people should have to travel by foot from Madrid to Kiev before even being permitted to apply. In the past couple of years, he has finally created such a school—he calls it the Rogue Film School—which exists as occasional weekend seminars popping up around the globe. Though the actual application process is not as strident as he'd once anticipated—not quite—his policy hasn't wavered in spirit. "Three months traveling on foot, let's say, which would be something like 3,000 kilometers," he declares, "would have more value than three years in film school."
Point four of the school's online rules forcibly clarifies this: "The Rogue Film School will not teach anything technical related to filmmaking." Other points illuminate aspects of Herzog's aesthetic, attitude, and method. There are taboos (one of which will be already familiar): "Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth." There are compulsory and voluntary reading lists. (On the former, Virgil and Hemingway. On the latter, the Warren Commission Report into the JFK assassination: "A most fantastic crime story—a most conclusive, most intelligent thing that human mind can ever put together," Herzog tells me. "It's a fantastic piece of human ingenuity." He declares that anyone who has actually read it has no doubt that Oswald did it, and did it alone. "Everybody raves and rants against it, and nobody has read it, including those like Oliver Stone who has made a film on the assassination. He has not read it. I know it because I asked him. Oh no, he is not reading this kind of crap. I said, 'You're wrong, and shame on you.' ") There is also a list of applicable skills for would-be filmmakers. As well as traveling on foot, these include the art of lock-picking, the creation of your own shooting permit, and the neutralization of bureaucracy.
Another skill Herzog has advocated for filmmakers (and, I suspect, pretty much anyone else whom he considers truly worthy of respect) is the ability to milk a cow: "If an actor knows how to milk a cow, I always know it will not be difficult to be in business with him." Herzog has also previously claimed that when he walks into a room, he can tell who in there has previously had hand to udder. Or, at the very least, would.
"I can tell from miles away, yes," he confirms. "Woody Allen is not ever going to milk a cow."
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Much of the mythology surrounding Herzog's early work is entwined with that surrounding the lead actor in five of Herzog's best films, Klaus Kinski. It's hard to think of two other regular collaborators who insulted each other so much in their public writings and statements. Here is how Kinski first describes Herzog in his autobiography: "His speech is clumsy, with a toad-like indolence, long winded, pedantic, choppy.... It takes forever and a day for him to push out a clump of hardened brain snot. Even if his vocal cords were sliced through, he'd keep talking like a ventriloquist. Even if his throat were cut and his head were chopped off, speech balloons would still dangle from his mouth like gases emitted by internal decay." It goes on like this for pages and pages, for years and years: "I've never in my life met anybody so dull, humourless, uptight, inhibited, mindless, depressing, boring and swaggering...the spawn of his megalomania, which he mistakes for genius. Herzog is a miserable, hateful, malevolent, avaricious, money-hungry, nasty, sadistic, treacherous, cowardly creep.... He's the same decaying garbage heap that he was ten years ago—only more moronic, more mindless, more murderous." And so on.
Kinski died in 1991, and Herzog has long claimed that they actually colluded on some of these descriptions, Herzog helping Kinski to find ever-more-insulting synonyms. He points out that, for all the harsh words hurled, they kept working together: "He refused offers by Fellini, Kurosawa, others. It was clear to him that the films we made would define him. Why does he refuse an offer by Fellini, for example? Because he thought he made bad films. And I share his opinion."
Still, there was also genuine enmity and contempt at times in their relationship, and sometimes more than that. One of these moments came near the end of their first collaboration, Aguirre, Wrath of God, when Kinski announced that he was leaving the Peruvian jungle and abandoning the film. Herzog took Kinski aside and told him: "You leave this jungle now and you'll find eight bullets in you. The ninth one is for me." And he has always insisted that he absolutely meant what he said and that Kinski knew that he did, which was why he stayed.
When I ask him about this, Herzog says that he had thought through this scenario months before. "And I had very clearly thought about even the unthinkable. I had made up my mind months before it came to that moment. So there was no thinking at all, there was no emotion at all. I was talking to him in a very low voice—he barely could hear me."
But if he had called your bluff and carried on leaving? You really think you would have...?
[pause] "I don't want to speculate about it anymore. I only can say in retrospect when I look back at this moment, yes, I think I would have shot him."
The thing that puzzles me, and maybe I'm being too logical about it, is that you don't win by shooting him.
"Of course not. It had to do with a duty. A duty that was much higher than the two of us. Violating a duty—that's what I would not... [pause] like to allow."
In the documentary that Herzog made about Kinski after his death, My Best Fiend, he alludes in passing to one other time when he sincerely entertained murderous thoughts toward his leading man, when he planned to firebomb Kinski's house until deterred by Kinski's dog. I'd like to know more.
"We had plans to kill each other, strangely enough, at exactly the same time," Herzog begins, a little hesitantly. "But you have to see it as these beautiful plots, like in a detective story, and those were mostly plots, I would say, in sheer fantasy. But at some moment it got closer than just a pure fantasy."
What were you going to do?
[pause] "Well, as I said, I plotted to kill him."
Did you actually have the firebomb?
[long pause] "I can't answer that. I only can answer that he had this very vigilant shepherd dog, and the presence of the shepherd dog dissuaded me."
But no man goes to firebomb a house and gets close enough to be dissuaded by a dog without having a device ready to do the deed—would that be a fair observation?
He wriggles a little on his seat and laughs nervously. "I'm sorry, but you have to start speculating now yourself."
Is this some sense of self-preservation?
"To firebomb Kinski?"
No, not explaining further. Do you not want to explain because it is incriminating? Or embarrassing?
"Well, there is a certain embarrassment about it, let's face it. But it certainly had its funny side to it as well. Like in Italian comedies in the '50s when the bank robbers tried to drill through a wall into the bank and they end up in the kitchen with their own people having a glass of wine. It had elements of a farce."
I think the exact moment it stops being a farce is probably when a bomb goes off.
"Yeah, and let's face it, it still remains a farce, and I'm glad, and let's live with that."
Do you think you ever could have done something like that?
[pause] "I can't answer that." [I begin to talk about something else but he interrupts me.] "But let me say one more thing. Those were the times decades back. In a way I have matured. And I'm a very fluffy...at least a fluffy husband. You have to ask my wife."
So you're not completely proud of every way that you were?
"Of course not."
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There is certainly a sternness and an intellectual ferocity about Herzog, but that is not the whole story. Our conversation is punctuated by more laughter than you'd imagine, if not of an intensity to irritate old wounds, and there is also a quite unexpected sweetness and gentleness about him.
It is Herzog who brings up the moment captured on film in Burden of Dreams, the documentary made about the filming of Fitzcarraldo—"a moment which I still feel very strongly inside of me"—where he suggests, after a series of trials and mishaps and disasters, that he should no longer make movies anymore and that perhaps he would be better to go straight to an insane asylum. "Or I should do something more dignified," he reflects. "A grown-up man should do something more dignified. You never see a cattle rancher who is not dignified. You never see a farmer who grows wheat and is not dignified. No one is undignified for raising cattle, and filmmakers are."
You still think that?
"Yes."
And you feel yourself undignified, being a filmmaker?
"It's always borderline. You have to look at yourself, and you know there is something very, very strange about what you are doing."
When you look at other filmmakers, do you think they are engaged in something that—
He interrupts me. "Always, always the same. And you can straightaway, when you see films on filmmakers—they're always, always embarrassing. Including me. I cannot elude that embarrassment, either. I do not feel it as deeply as others should feel who have an ego problem and play the king on the hill, the genius behind the camera. That's an additional embarrassment. But when you look at movies made about filmmakers, they are without exception embarrassments."
I suppose the counterargument should be something about this glorious role as a grand storyteller, the spinner of illusions.
"There is nothing glorious about making a film. It is an endless sequence of banalities."
With a magical goal?
"Yes. But shooting a film itself is nothing but banalities. [Then, as though reluctantly, he continues.] However, there's very rare moments where I get the feeling sometimes I'm like the little girl in the fairy tale who steps out into the night, in the stars, and she holds her apron open, and the stars are raining into her apron. Those moments I have seen and I have had. But they are very rare."
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