Werner Herzog: Stories and Images

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Directed by Werner Herzog)

Werner Herzog was born September 5, 1942, in Munich, Germany. With Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlöndorff, Herzog led the influential postwar West German cinema movement. During his youth, Herzog studied history, literature, and music in Munich and at the University of Pittsburgh and traveled extensively in Mexico, Great Britain, Greece, and Sudan. Herakles (1962) was an early short, and Lebenszeichen (1967; Signs of Life) was his first feature film. He became known for working with small budgets and for writing and producing his own motion pictures. Herzog’s films, usually set in distinct and unfamiliar landscapes, are imbued with mysticism. 

In Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen (1970; Even Dwarfs Started Small), the microcosm of a barren island inhabited by dwarfs stands for a larger reality, and in Fata Morgana (1971), a documentary on the Sahara, the desert acquires an eerie life of its own. One of Herzog’s best-known films, Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972; Aguirre, the Wrath of God), follows a band of Spanish explorers into unmapped territory, recording their gradual mental and physical self-destruction. 

Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (1975; Every Man for Himself and God Against All or The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser) is a retelling of the Kaspar Hauser legend. Herzog’s most realistic film, Stroszek (1977), is a bittersweet tale of isolation concerning a German immigrant who, with his two misfit companions, finds the dairy lands of Wisconsin to be lonelier and bleaker than the slums of Berlin. Herzog’s other films include Herz aus Glas (1977; Heart of Glass), Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979; Nosferatu the Vampyre, a version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that is an homage to F.W. Murnau’s film of the same name), Woyzeck (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1982), and Schrei aus Stein (1991; Scream of Stone). 

Later in his career Herzog focused primarily on documentaries, including Glocken aus der Tiefe (1995; “Bells from the Deep”), which examines religious beliefs among Russians, and Grizzly Man (2005), an account of Timothy Treadwell, an American who studied and lived among grizzly bears in Alaska but was mauled to death along with his girlfriend. Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) centres on a German American pilot shot down in the jungle during the Vietnam War; the story inspired Herzog’s narrative film Rescue Dawn (2007). Among his later documentaries are Encounters at the End of the World (2007), which highlights the beauty of Antarctica; Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), which explores in 3-D the prehistoric paintings at the Chauvet cave in France; and Into the Abyss (2011), a sombre examination of a Texas murder case. 

Herzog’s other narrative films include Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), a drama about a police officer (played by Nicolas Cage) struggling with drug and gambling addictions, My Son, My Son, what Have Ye Done (2009) and Queen of the Desert (2014) with Nicole Kidman, James Franco and Damian Lewis. Herzog’s films are characterized by a surreal and subtly exotic quality, and he is hailed as one of the most innovative contemporary directors. He often employs controversial techniques to elicit the desired performances from his actors: he ordered that the entire cast be hypnotized for Heart of Glass, forced the cast of Aguirre, the Wrath of God to endure the arduous environment of South American rainforests, and required his actors to haul a 300-ton ship over a mountain for Fitzcarraldo. Herzog’s subject matter has often led to such offbeat casting choices as dwarfs in Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen and Bruno S., a lifelong inmate of prisons and mental institutions, in The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser and Stroszek. His volatile love-hate relationship with the brilliant but emotionally unstable actor Klaus Kinski resulted in some of the best work from both men, and both are best known for the films on which they collaborated. Herzog celebrated their partnership with the well-received documentary film Mein liebster Feind (1999; My Best Fiend). In addition, Herzog occasionally took acting jobs himself, with notable roles including a stern father in the experimental drama Julien Donkey-Boy (1999) and a criminal mastermind in the big-budget action movie Jack Reacher (2012). 

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Werner Herzog, director of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo and Nosferatu, on the art of storytelling and the importance of searching for fresh images:

When I sit down to write a script I never attempt to articulate my ideas in abstract terms through the veil of an ideology. My films come to me very much alive, like dreams without logical patterns of academic explanations. I’ll have a basic idea for a film and then over a period of time, when maybe I’m driving or walking, it becomes clearer and clearer to me. I see the film before me, as if I were in a cinema. Soon it is so perfectly transparent that I can sit and write it all down. It is as if I were copying from a movie screen. I like to write fast because it simply gives the story a certain urgency. I leave out all unnecessary things and just go for it. A story written this way will have, for me at least, much more coherence and drive. And it will also be full of life. For these reasons it has never taken me longer than four or five days to write a script. I just sit in front of the typewriter or computer and pound the keys.

Whether I have an ideology is not something that I have ever given much thought to, though I do understand where the question might come from. People generally sense I am very well-orientated and know where I’ve come from, where I am standing now and where I am going. But it is not an ideology as most people think of it. It is just that I understand the world in my own way and am capable of articulating this understanding into stories and images that seem to be coherent to others. Even after watching my films it bothers some people that they still cannot put their finger on what my ideology might be. Please, take what I am saying with a pair of pliers, but let me tell you: the ideology is simply the films themselves and my ability to make them. This is what scares those people who try so hard to describe, analyse and criticise me and my work. I do not like to drop names, but what sort of an ideology would you push under the shirt of Conrad or Hemingway or Kafka? Or Goya or Caspar David Friedrich?

I have often spoken of what I call the inadequate imagery of today’s civilization. I have the impression that the images that surround us today are worn out, they are abused and useless and exhausted. They are limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution. When I look at the postcards in tourist shops and the images and advertisements that surround us in magazines, or I turn on the television, or if I walk into a travel agency and see those huge posters with that same tedious and rickety image of the Grand Canyon on them, I truly feel there is something dangerous emerging here. The biggest danger, in my opinion, is television because to a certain degree it ruins our vision and makes us very sad and lonesome. Our grandchildren will blame us for not having tossed hand-grenades into TV stations because of commercials. Television kills our imagination and what we end up with are worn out images because of the inability of too many people to seek out fresh ones.

As a race we have become aware of certain dangers that surround us. We comprehend, for example, that nuclear power is a very real certain danger for mankind, that over-crowding of the planet is the greatest of all. We have understood that the destruction of the environment is another enormous danger. But I truly believe that the lack of adequate imagery is a danger of the same magnitude. It is as serious a defect as being without memory. What have we done to our images? What have we done to our embarrassed landscapes? I have said this before and will repeat it again as long as I am able to talk: if we do not develop adequate images we will die out like dinosaurs. We need images in harmony with our civilization and our innermost conditioning, and this is the reason why I like any film that searches for new images no matter in what direction it moves or what story it tells. One must dig like an archaeologist and search our violated landscape to find anything new. One must go to war, if need be, to find these unprocessed and fresh images.

- Werner Herzog in ‘Herzog on Herzog’

Michael Winterbottom: On Adapting Jim Thompson

The Killer Inside Me (Directed by Michael Winterbottom)

The pulp writer Jim Thompson, wrote over 30 novels and is  known for writing some of the bleakest noir ever put to page. Stephen King, who claims Thompson among his favorite authors, wrote with a kind of wonder of Thompson’s desolate stories. “There are three brave lets” in Thompson’s writing, King explained in the introduction to Thompson’s Now and On Earth: “he let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it.” 

The director Stephen Frears, who adapted Jim Thompson’s The Grifters for film, was struck by the relationship between Thompson’s work and certain aspects of classical Greek tragedy. Thompson’s uncompromising noir informs and feeds back into these tragic aspects to create a vision of a hell in earth; an a stark but recognizable—vision of present day life. This relationship is particularly evident in Thompson’s 1952 masterpiece The Killer Inside Me.

Killer Inside owes much to traditional noir tropes. The principle character, small-town sheriff Lou Ford, is obsessed with setting right a wrong. His brother, he believes, was killed by a corrupt local industrialist. Ford devises a strategy to bring the man down, beyond the law, by setting his son up with a prostitute. Ford however falls in love with the woman himself, but continues with the scheme: to murder both the prostitute and the son and make it look like a murder-suicide. The plan falls apart in the best noir tradition, leading Ford to kill further to cover up his initial crime. The crimes become increasingly savage as Ford’s recklessness grows, but Ford continues to remain convinced right until the end that he’s in control of events and can, ultimately, not face the consequences. By the novel’s end, Ford is in jail and reflecting, in his typically calculated manner, on his crimes, his reasons, and his own state of mind.

British director Michael Winterbottom’s faithful recent adaptation divided critics and audiences. Here he discusses his approach to the book and adaptation in general.

Q: Your method of adapting novels—Tristram Shandy, Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge—is not to be strictly faithful to the story or methodology of the source text. How did that play out here?

A: Well, it was the opposite, really. When I read the book, I thought that you could almost film it. The book tells its story through dialogue. Jim Thompson is a brilliant dialogue writer and plotter. And then I approached the people who had the rights, and they already had a version of the screenplay which they’d sent me. In terms of individual scenes, it was very close to the book anyway, but the order had been changed. So my approach was to go back to the original story of the book and really keep the film as accurate and as faithful to the text as possible.

Q: What themes in the novel captivated you, and which of your own did you want to incorporate?

A: I think one of the great things about the book is the pace of the narrative. Within a few pages, the story’s being set up. Lou’s gone to meet Joyce Lakeland, there’s been a moment of violence and sex, and really from that point on, Thompson keeps the story moving so new things are constantly happening. The story unfolds incredibly fast and it was that, I think, that made me feel it would be kind of interesting to make into a film.

Q: The Killer Inside Me is structured as a first-person narrative told by a deranged personality. Was there something about the psychology of Lou Ford that especially intrigued you?

A: Obviously, if you read a book and want to make it into a film, there have to be lots of things you like about it. There’s something about the way Lou narrates his own story that makes you feel sort of close to him, and makes you feel as well that’s something going to happen to redeem him. And what’s brilliant about the way Jim Thompson tells the story is you’re constantly feeling that you’re going to come to this moment of knowledge—and then the book ends! [Laughs] There’s a great story in the middle of the [narrative] that Lou Ford tells. He’s read somewhere that there was a guy who was happily married, who had a wife and a couple of children, and then he got a girlfriend in the neighboring town, and he’s happy with the girlfriend. And one day they discover the girlfriend had been killed and that the wife and children had been killed as well. And as he’s telling the story, he wonders, Why does someone do that? People do these things for no apparent reason, without any explanation. Newspapers are still full of stories like that, about people who seem to live normal lives, love their children and wives, and then they decide to destroy everything, to tear everything up. Lou is that sort of character. The people who he kills are quite close to him. A lot of people in the story love him, a lot of people love him despite the fact that he’s been violent towards them. So there’s a sense of the kind of waste that violence creates, which [anchors] the movie, rather than the psychology of why he does it. There are psychological explanations in the book, but it’s more the sense of that pointlessness and waste, and the tenderness of the situation that attracted me.

Q: A lot of readers of Thompson’s novels have seen aspects of Greek tragedy at play in his work.

A: For me, it’s Shakespearean as well. There’s a sense of this person who people do love, he does have this ability to inspire trust and faith. And yet, whether because of what happened in his childhood or what his father did to him, he feels worthless in a sense. When he’s destroying other people, he’s trying to destroy himself. He feels like he’s not worthy of being happy or being loved. So you have all this kind of stuff going on. Obviously, there’s a big play on fathers in the novel: the relation- ship between Lou and his father, but also between Lou and Sheriff Bob Maples, who’s a sort of alternative father figure, and between Chester Conway and Elmer Conway, who’s another bad father. There’s a pattern of relationships with fathers and surrogate fathers that runs through it. So it’s an incredibly rich book, you know, it’s not necessarily a naturalistic novel. But it’s full of human emotions.

Q: I’m just wondering if Thompson’s connections to cinema interested you at all.

A: In terms of his own writing?

Q: Yeah, his writing for Kubrick, for instance.

A: That would not be a reason for me to make a film of this book. The reason is because it’s a great book and when I read it, I felt it would be a really interesting film to make, and completely different from the films I normally write. In the end, when you choose a film, it’s for that reason. The material is interesting. It’s not that surprising that Jim Thompson had a connection to cinema because he’s brilliant at dialogue, he’s brilliant at stories, and the worlds he writes about in his novels seem like worlds that would be interesting for cinema. I think with Kubrick—I’m not sure what kind of credits he got on the two collaborations [The Killing and Paths of Glory]—I think he got an “additional dialogue” credit on one. I was talking to his daughter, who came onto the set, and she was saying that, you know, he did a lot more work on it than that. So that’s kind of fascinating, but it wasn’t the reason for making the film, obviously...

Q: In general, you invoke genre—road movies, for example—without retaining all the expected codes. Did you see yourself trying to steer clear of certain noir conventions with this film?

A: Only in the sense that from the beginning we didn’t want to do a pastiche of the 1950s. We didn’t want to shoot it in a particular style because of genre or the content of the story. So it’s not a particularly noir-looking film. Jim Thompson is a great writer, but he’s a very simple, direct writer. He’s very focused on the story and the character and what’s happening and why are they doing that. Really, he’s writing very lean and kind of spare. So it was trying to be true to that more than [make it] look or feel like a noir fifties’ film. So in that sense, perhaps, we got away from generic convention, I’m not sure. But basically, it’s okay, this is how the book works, and [we said] let’s find an approach to the film that will be in keeping with that...

Q: In the past, when you’ve made period dramas like Jude or The Claim, you always manage to retain a very contemporary language and feel to the way you dramatize things. Is that something you’ve continued here, with The Killer Inside Me?

A: Well, I think Jim Thompson’s stories are actually very contemporary, and one of the things is that it’s someone writing in the early fifties about small-town Midwest America, talking about the sex and violence that goes on behind closed doors. The dialogue we’re using in the film is very much taken from the book. Even so, it feels very contemporary because when you read the novel, it’s very fresh. You really don’t feel you’re reading a creaky old period piece.

– Excerpted from Michael Winterbottom. Interviews. Edited by Damon Smith, 2009.