The enigma of Werner H that eats an antelope. Werner allows us just to see the world." John O'Mahony Guardian As a consequence of this compulsive drive for Saturday March 30, 2002 authenticity, Herzog is one of the world's most controversial film-makers, with a reputation that Born in war-time Germany, he wrote a prize- is perched precariously on a mountain of winning screenplay at the age of 15 and made his mythology, fabrications and sensational truth. He first film at 20. Now one of cinema's most refers to these distortions of biography as his controversial and iconoclastic directors, he is also "doppelgangers", media projections that roam the credited with leading a renaissance in European globe independently. film. John O'Mahony reports They include the story of how, during the making It's a fine, clear California day on Santa Monica of Signs Of Life (1968) on the Greek island of pier. Body-beautiful rollerbladers swerve along Kos, the 24-year-old is said to have fallen foul of the runways as women in bikinis stride by briskly the military and threatened to shoot and kill on their way to sample the best view of the anyone who tried to halt filming. For Heart Of Pacific in Los Angeles. It seems an unlikely spot Glass (1976), Herzog supposedly put the entire to meet Werner Herzog, European cinema's most cast under hypnosis. For his documentary La vociferous prophet of Teutonic gloom: "I've Soufriere (1977), he took his film crew up the side never really been out here before," he says, in of a volcano that was threatening to erupt. And halting, clipped tones. "I just thought it would be during the shooting of Aguirre in the Peruvian so much better than the average dull interview jungle, he is reputed to have directed the late location." Klaus Kinski, his lead actor in five films, at Soon, however, the full melancholic potential of gunpoint from behind the camera. the pier in its off-season glory begins to shine Many attribute all of this to Herzog's willingness through. Along the boardwalk, from the soulless to go to extremes to realise his vision: "He always Playland arcade, comes the sound of a manic, wants to do the impossible," says Claudia laughing voice grating against the nerves. And Cardinale, who played the lead female role in right in the centre of the pier is the rollercoaster, Fitzcarraldo (1982). "During the shoot, all the its candy-coloured cars huddled at the bottom of specialists who came from Hollywood told him a precipitous loop. All that is missing is Herzog's that he couldn't do it. But he resisted them. It was "dancing chicken", the image that ends his that enthusiasm that drew me to him." downbeat classic Stroszek, the story of a German innocent's failure in capitalist America. Others have criticised Herzog for being monomaniacal and exploitative. After the filming Described by Janet Maslin, the New York Times of Heart Of Glass, co-writer Herbert critic, as the "consummate poet of doom," Achternbusch wondered whether Herzog "might Herzog is one of cinema's most crusading possibly nail his actors to trees in his next film". directors. Along with Wim Wenders and the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder, he has led German In his outspoken biography, Kinski goes even film-making out of the post-war doldrums and further in rubbishing Herzog's delusions: "He into a period of rebirth. This has been mirrored doesn't care about anyone or anything except his by a personal quest for a "cinema of illiterates", wretched career as a so-called film-maker. Driven that has led him to explore subjects such as by a pathological addiction to sensationalism, he collective insanity (in Heart Of Glass) and the rise creates the most senseless difficulties and dangers, of Nazism (in his new film Invincible, which risking other people's safety and even their lives - opens this week) and taken him to the depths of just so he can eventually say that he, Herzog, has the Peruvian jungle, (for films such as Aguirre, beaten seemingly unbeatable odds." The Wrath Of God and Fitzcarraldo) and the Wandering around Santa Monica pier, or sitting in Sahara desert (for Fata Morgana). the Pacific Park cafe in front of a cup of weak "At a time when everything is fake and virtual and coffee, the real Werner Herzog seems to resemble digital, he brought back the idea that cinema is to none of his mythical doppelgangers. Often, he record basic human experience," says his fellow comes across as preternaturally gentle and film director and friend, Volker Schlondorff. vulnerable; even when he smiles, his eyes look tormented. "He takes away all the make-believe and fabrication to get back to the real thing, back to "He has got much milder as he got older," says when directors first had a movie camera and they his first wife, Martje, a homeopath. "The time we set it up to shoot a ski-jumper taking off or a lion spent together was the 'fighting years'." However, it would be a mistake to label Herzog in utter distortions, with which I can identify, but any way reticent or shy: "He might seem like that which do not exist independently. It's fine by me when you first meet him, but he is actually the that there are some doppelgangers out there." opposite," says his brother, Tilbert. Werner Herzog was born in Munich on "He is extremely self-confident and convinced of September 5 1942, the second son of Dietrich himself. For example, he will openly declare that Herzog and Elizabeth Stipetic, biology graduates he writes the best prose since Kleist. If you know who met at university in Vienna. Dietrich was him for a longer time, you realise the more immediately conscripted into the German army. reserved side is a certain mask that he puts on, The couple split up and Dietrich remarried on his not voluntarily but more without knowing it return. It was left to Werner's mother, Elizabeth, himself." whose maiden name he would bear into his 20s, to bring up their two sons. When a bomb In many respects, Herzog is closer to his destroyed their house, they moved to the Bavarian turbulent "nemesis", Kinski, than outward village of Sachrang, on the Austrian border. Then, appearances, or the ferocity of the onslaught in when Werner was about seven or eight, they Kinski's autobiography, would suggest: "Herzog is moved briefly to the town of Wastenrot in a miserable, hateful, malevolent, avaricious, Warttemberg, to live with their father's second money-hungry, nasty, sadistic, treacherous, family, before finally settling in Munich three cowardly creep," Kinski fumes. years later. "His speech is clumsy, with a toad-like indolence, In material terms, the family's situation was long-winded, pedantic, choppy... I've never met extremely difficult: "We had very little money," anybody so dull, humourless, uptight, inhibited, says Tilbert. "In the village, we had only one mindless, depressing, boring and swaggering..." room and it was bitterly cold in winter. Often Herzog explains away this tirade by saying that when we woke up in the morning the duvet the two had cooked up the offending passages would be frozen stiff." together: "Kinski came to me and said that he had In temperament, Werner seems to have been to write bad things about me, that is what his unruly and introverted: "He was quite solitary," filthy readers wanted. I even supported him in Tilbert recalls, "and he had a violent temper. finding even viler and fouler and baser expletives. When he was three he tried to throw a stone at I would come to his place with the dictionary and me and ran after me but the stone dropped out of thesaurus and together we would take the page of his hand and fell on his bare toes. He was quite invective and make it more colourful." wild." Understandably, much of Herzog's conversation In his youth, Herzog was exposed to surprisingly is taken up with such refutations: "A rumour little cinema other than popular B-movie fodder cannot be eliminated by truth," he says such as Zorro, Tarzan and Fu Manchu. However, provocatively, "you can only kill it by an even when he was 13, the family moved to Berlin. One wilder rumour." of the other tenants in the boarding house they On his personal life, he is particularly evasive. He lived in was a capricious, self-obsessed young talks about his children - Rudolph, a 29-year-old actor named Klaus Kinski. magician and film-maker, his 21-year-old "The owner of this place picked up starving artists daughter, Hanna, who studied linguistics, and his from the street and she came up with Kinski one youngest son, Simon, who is 12 - but refuses to day," Herzog recalls. "We lived in the same large divulge much about their different mothers: "It is flat for close to three months and, of course, from very complex. But I have good relations with all day one he terrorised everyone." At one point, the women I have been with." Kinski locked himself in the bathroom for two Of his current wife, Lena, a Russian photographer days. Herzog says: "He smashed everything, to less than half his age with whom he lives in a tidy the point where you could sift it all through a cottage overlooking Los Angeles, he says: "Lena's tennis racket." age is unknown, but she is younger than me, Herzog's desire to become a film director seems though she looks much younger than she actually to have formed, at about the age of 14, during a is." fervently religious period when he also briefly With this combination of obfuscation and converted to Catholicism: "It was a very intensive bravado, Herzog has undoubtedly been a major couple of weeks when everything became clear to contributor to his own mythology: "I would me," he says. Tilbert was alerted to his brother's prefer it if there was total anonymity," he says, ambitions only when, aged 15, Werner decided to "but I find it all right that many things appear in enter a script-writing competition: "He sat down and wrote the script in five days and said, 'I will Herzog returned to the US and then to Germany win this prize'. in 1965. With a camera which he is reputed to have purloined from a Munich film school, he "I didn't like him saying that because it was his managed to make another short film entitled The first attempt. But three weeks later the phone Unprecedented Defence Of The Fortress rang. It was the jury saying he had won." Deutschkreutz, in which four youths defend a By this time, Werner was travelling widely, fortress against an invisible enemy. Then, in 1966, sometimes on foot, to destinations such as Herzog finally managed to raise the budget to Albania, Kos and North Africa. In 1962, using the make his first feature Signs Of Life, the story of a money he earned working night shifts as an recuperating soldier who is put in charge of a industrial welder, Herzog managed to make his munitions dump on a Greek island, a plot loosely first feature, Herakles, a documentary-style short, adapted from a novella by Achim von Arnim. in which shots of body-builders are intercut with Shot on Kos, the film marked the beginning of footage of a crash at the Le Mans 24-hour car Herzog's legendary on-set difficulties, as the race. He also made a never-released short called Greek military threatened to veto a vital scene, Spiel Im Sand and won the Carl Meyer award for and Herzog in turn is said to have warned that he the screenplay of Signs Of Life. However, would shoot anyone who dared try: "I'm sure it attempts to get anything more substantial off the has all been embellished by rumour," he says. ground ended in frustration: "I was still very "The military would not have been so intimidated young and my puberty was late," says Herzog, "so by a very young man who looked like a high- I looked like a child when I had to meet film school kid." executives. It was really very humiliating." The film won a Silver Bear at the 1968 Berlin film Instead, in 1963, he accepted a Fulbright grant to festival for best first film and was hailed by the study literature and theatre at the University of influential film critic Lotte Eisner as having "a Pittsburg. On the Atlantic crossing he met Martje romantic spirit inspired by German silents". Grohmann, on a Fulbright to study literature in Wisconsin: "One day Werner came to our table The film also received a DM300,000 government and talked about one of his dreams that he had film award which helped fund his next projects, the night before," she remembers. "It was so including Fata Morgana, a trek through the Sahara visual, so visionary I would say that it impressed in search of mirages, and a wildly offbeat feature, me very much. He came more often and I Even Dwarfs Started Small, the story of an thought, my God, he has the quality of a biblical anarchist uprising in a criminal institution for prophet or something." After a courtship small people. This picture caused uproar when conducted mostly on deck playing shuffle-board, shown at the 1970 New York film festival, with they fell in love and married in 1967. Herzog accused of fascism for what was perceived as a satire on the 1968 student Herzog lasted just three days at the University of uprisings, and of exploiting his actors: "They were Pittsburg, causing him to lose both his grant and performing in some sort of a 'tiny town' visa. Instead, he applied for a job making films for amusement park," he counters. "For the first time the space agency Nasa, which has since been they got some real, decent work and enjoyed it mythologised into a stint working as an tremendously." intelligence agent, the very first of the Herzog dÀppelgangers. "I never started," he says, By now, Herzog was already feverishly immersed "because there were security checks and it was in his next project, Aguirre, The Wrath Of God, found out very quickly that I was not supposed to the film that would eventually mark his be in the country. So, I was summoned to international breakthrough. The script, which emigration." follows the 16th-century conquistador Lope de Aguirre's mutinous and ultimately suicidal Facing deportation back to Germany, he fled to expedition down the Amazon river, called for a Mexico where he worked at the charreada, the full-scale location shoot in the Peruvian jungle, Mexican equivalent of rodeo. This period has complete with a fleet of rafts and a cast of 270 since mutated into reports that he was a gun- native Indians. Herzog decided to offer the lead runner. "It has a grain of truth," Herzog admits. role of the maniacal, malformed Aguirre to his old "I stole a special commuter pass which allowed acquaintance Klaus Kinski: "Between three and me to get across the border without being four in the morning, the phone rang," Herzog checked. Some wealthy rancher asked me to take remembers. "It took me at least a couple of across a pistol made of pure silver and bullets of minutes before I realised that it was Kinski who silver. Now it has transformed me into a gun- was the source of this inarticulate screaming. And runner." after an hour of this, it dawned on me that he found it the most fascinating screenplay and clairvoyant, Hias: "I think that most of them only wanted to be Aguirre." pretended to be hypnotised, so they could take part," he says. By this time Kinski was a movie and theatre star, though he had also earned himself a reputation "Only one of them seemed really to be in a trance for being viciously difficult, having once almost in one of the preceding hypnosis exercises: an smashed a co-star's skull with a sword. Almost older man was sitting at the back of the room and from the first day of shooting, the tantrums fell asleep. Everybody else was waving their hands began: "Travelling all the way to the jungle is the wildly, some even threatened self-mutilation. As worst kind of agony," wrote Kinski, "penned up all the actors, whether hypnotised or only in old-fashioned trains, wrecks of trucks and cage- pretending to be, were doing these strangely like buses, we eat and camp out like pigs." uniform movements, it did, however, give a sense of the collective insanity which had struck the Herzog, who insisted that the actors live in huts villagers." and brave the Amazonian rapids, bore the brunt of Kinski's ire: "I'm hoping that he'll attack me. Keen to work again with Bruno S, Herzog fused Then I'll shove him into a side branch of the his own experiences in the US with fragments of river, where the still waters teem with murderous Bruno's shattered biography to create Stroszek, piranhas, and I'll watch them shred him." released in 1977. The uneven story of a Berlin street musician who chases the elusive American When Kinski threatened to leave, Herzog came dream all the way to Wisconsin, Herzog regards it close to fulfilling this wish: "I told him I would do as one of his finest movies. During the shoot, him in if he left the set now," says Herzog, "that I though, the crew didn't share his enthusiasm: had a gun with nine bullets, eight of which I "They would get up from the breakfast table very would use on him, leaving the final one for reluctantly with nasty remarks and say that only myself. He understood that it was not a joke." because I was paying them were they willing to For the last 10 days of shooting, Herzog claims, continue this shit," he recalls. Kinski was quite docile. However, the film was "The cinematographer didn't even want to turn given a low merit classification by the German the camera when I wanted to have the close-ups film board and struggled to get a release. of the dancing chicken, which turned out to be Undaunted, Herzog proceeded to his next project, one of my inspired moments." The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser, the true story of a young man who appeared in Nuremberg in By this time, however, Herzog's reputation had 1828, unable to speak or walk. For the lead, begun to grow. Aguirre was belatedly picked up Herzog chose Bruno S, a disturbed individual by arthouse cinemas in Paris, where it ran for two who had been brutalised as a child by his and a half years.Kaspar Hauser won the Grand prostitute mother, losing the power of speech as a Jury prize at Cannes in 1975 and had gained a cult result, and had spent 23 of his 40-odd years in following in America, particularly in LA. This led mental institution. When the film was released in to backing from 20th Century-Fox for Nosferatu, 1974 it was hailed as a "stunning fable", though a reinterpretation of FW Murau's 1922 vampire Herzog was again accused of exploitation, in classic that led Lotte Eisner to exclaim: "The film particular for allowing Bruno to return afterwards is not being remade, it is being reborn." However, to his squalid life. the substantial box office takings in the US can be put down less to the rejuvenation of the For his next film, Heart Of Glass (1976), which Germanic film tradition than to its wonderfully centred on an isolated town in Lower Bavaria gothic indulgences and Kinski's radiant intensity whose inhabitants struggle to regain the lost as the vampire. secret of their traditional ruby-coloured glass, Herzog insisted that all cast members be Shot back to back with Nosferatu, with Kinski hypnotised, with many of the lines conjured up again in the title role, was the far more modest merely by the power of suggestion: "In the story, adaptation of Buchner's stage play, Woyzeck. the village community kind of sleepwalk into a During this shooting a relationship developed catastrophe," he says. "I kept thinking about how between Herzog and his leading actor, Eva I might produce a somnambulistic, collective Mattes, which had perhaps originated when she trance and that is when I came up with the idea of played the female lead in Stroszek. When Mattes hypnosis." fell pregnant with Herzog's second child, Hanna, it created enormous tensions with Martje, though The result is the most demand- ing of Herzog's she seems to have remained philosophical: "Men movies. It also opened him up to accusations of who are in any way outstanding as artists or dilettantism, charges to some degree backed up by politicians, or whatever, have a sexual appeal Josef Bierbichler, who played the lead role of the because of their power," she says. "They always have affairs of that kind. I think it was good that to a village you don't ask what kind of problem he stood by her and he paid for the upkeep of the does the tornado have. It is a force of nature. It is child. The children understand each other and are the village that has the problem." on a good footing and they are glad that they The past decade has seen Herzog move away exist." The marriage to Martje survived for from features and towards opera productions and another decade before ending in divorce in 1987. documentary films such as Lessons Of Darkness, The success of Nosferatu paved the way for what an apocalyptic vision of hell gleaned from the is arguably Herzog's finest film, Fitzcarraldo. Shot burning oilfields of Kuwait in the wake of the once more in the Peruvian jungle, the movie has Gulf war, and Little Dieter Needs To Fly, about a also been the source of the director's most fighter pilot captured in Laos. However, it would disfigured and destructive dÀppelgangers: Herzog appear that his new film, Invincible, about a the imperialist, who pays scant regard to the Jewish strong man co-opted into a Nazi natives or their culture; Herzog the delusional vaudeville act, does signal a return, with plans romantic, who places the success of his film currently in the pipeline to remake Little Dieter as above all else; Herzog the dictatorial "Pharaoh", a full-blown feature. as Pauline Kael put it, who "risked other people's But no matter which path Herzog chooses, it is lives and put his co-workers through misery". certain that he will be a contentious yet welcome The plot centres around an Irish rubber baron presence in European cinema: "I don't have an called Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, who dreamed of awareness of myself or my work beyond my bringing opera to the jungle and planned to fund physical existence," he concludes. "I am a hard- it with a scheme that included hauling a 340-ton working man and that's that. I've never had an steamboat over a mountain, which Herzog affinity with romantic culture. There is no intended to recreate in its full, budget-breaking romanticism in me. Posterity can kiss my ass." actuality. The production appears to have been Born September 5 1942, Munich blighted from the beginning, as Herzog's camp, appropriately named Pelicula O Muerte (Film or Relationships and offspring Martje Grohmann, Death) was burned down by the indigenous married 1967, divorced 1987, one son Rudolph, Indians, because of some dispute. Herzog moved born 1973; Eva Mattes, one daughter Hanna, deeper into the jungle, but after completing 40% born 1980. Son Simon, born 1989 of the film, the lead male actor, the late Jason Robards, dropped out. The official reason was Some feature films Signs Of Life, 1968; Even Dwarfs always amoebic dysentery, though Claudia Started Small, 1971; Aguirre, The Wrath Of God, Cardinale, who played the brothel-keeper Molly, 1972; The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser, 1974; says: "He was very fragile, and, in fact, after a little Heart Of Glass, 1976; Stroszek, 1977; Woyzeck, time he just went out of his mind. One day, he 1979; Nosferatu The Vampyre, 1979; went up to the top of a tree and he didn't want to Fitzcarraldo, 1982; Invincible, 2001. come down." Early shorts Herakles 1962; Spiel Im Sand, 1964; When shooting recommenced, the difficulties The Unprecedented Defence Of The Fortress continued, as a canoe capsized, drowning one of Deutschkreuz, 1967. the Indians, and a plane crashed, causing serious Documentaries Fata Morgana, 1971; The Great injuries. Finally, Kinski threw such Herculean Ecstasy Of Woodcarver Steiner, 1974; La tantrums that one of the Indian chiefs offered to Soufrière, 1977; Wodaabe: Herdsmen Of The have him killed: "Once again our lives are Sun, 1989; Echoes From A Sombre Empire, Little constantly put at risk," Kinski ranted, "because of Dieter Needs To Fly, 1997 Herzog's total ignorance, narrow-mindedness, arrogance and inconsideration." After four years, in 1982, the film was finally released, though its reception was tinged by the controversy. Herzog was to work with Kinski only once more, on Cobra Verde in 1986, but by the end of shooting the actor seemed a spent force: "He burned away like a comet," says Herzog. "Afterwards he was ashes." By the time of Kinski's death in 1991 Herzog had vowed never to work with him again, though now his opinion has mellowed: "He was like a tornado," he says. "When you watch a tornado laying waste