The brilliant and innovative filmmaker Werner Herzog talked about his film career, the difficulties he faced in the beginning, the things life has taught him and the future of cinema during a captivating masterclass on Saturday, November 21, at the packed John Cassavetes theatre in the framework of TIFF.
Present at the event were TIFF president Georges Corraface, TIFF director Despina Mouzaki, the director of Thessaloniki’s Goethe Institute Karl-Heinz Thalmann, and students of the Festival’s Salonica Studio program.
The inspired masterclass, coordinated by journalist and film critic Giorgos Krassakopoulos, started with the screening of a brief excerpt from George Stevens’ Swing Time (1936) in which Fred Astaire dances with his “living” shadow. “Having watched this, we can all pack up and go home, quit cinema for a month and start all over again. In this simple shot, with the camera standing still, one can marvel at the quintessence of cinema, watching shadows being brought to life – here we can clearly see the magic of cinema. Cinema cannot get better than that – this is a shot that needs few explanations. All of you can do it”, noted Herzog, adding that “cinema is above all entertainment, not a torturing device”. “If things are so simple, why are there so many books and articles on cinema, with many references to your own work?”, Herzog was asked. His reply was disarming: “I wish that all that did not exist. I wish no one knew my name. Even in the jungles of New Guinea, there would be someone with a cell phone taking my picture and sending it with a message. From the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, only Leonida’s name became known and lived forever. Personally, I would really like to be one of the anonymous 300”.
Referring to his first contact with the cinema, Werner Herzog noted that up until he was 11 years old, he didn’t even know cinema existed. “One day, a wandering filmmaker visited our school in the Bavarian mountains and made a screening. This was the first film I had ever watched. Later, when I was in Munich, I would watch movies more often, but they were trivial ones, like Zorro or Tarzan. However, watching this particular movie, I noticed that a shot was repeated twice, something none of my friends had noticed. Then I started wondering: ‘how can they play such a trick on us?’”. By the time he was 14, he knew his future lied in the cinema: “It was by then clear to me that I would write poetry and make movies. The bad thing was, however, that I had been rejected from all production companies and TV stations. On top that, my puberty came late, and up until I was 16, I looked like a schoolboy. I decided I would have to produce my movies myself, so I started working at nights as a factory worker, going to school in the mornings. This way, I managed to collect enough money to fund my films myself”. Addressing the audience and the Salonica Studio students, he added: “You can do this too, if you cant find someone to produce your film. I won’t listen to people complaining about something being impossible. Technology allows us to have very small and relatively cheap cameras, with which you can make decent movies. There is no doubt it is a torturing, painful profession, full of humiliations and defeats. You will be defeated, but you have to have the courage to move on. One day, you will all achieve something worth while”.
Answering how one can become a masterful filmmaker and produce good cinema, Herzog stressed there is no magic recipe. “It is not hard to understand the basics of a camera, of montage, the narration techniques or film processing. You can learn all this in a week; you don’t have to go to cinema school. But all the rest, you can only learn walking alone. The world is revealed to those who travel on foot”, he stressed, adding: “One has to gather mental experiences, to live alone for a while in order to get into the hearts and lives and souls of people. For example, I was in a state of permanent hunger as a child but this taught me to eat only as much as I really need. Furthermore, while in Africa, I spent some time behind bars, and this also taught me some valuable lessons in life”.
Commenting on the development of technology, Herzog advised the young filmmakers to insist on using the traditional celluloid, saying this was “the mother of all battles”. Although his latest film, My son, my son, what have ye done? was filmed with the help of digital technology, he admitted he did not like the end result. “We shot the film using a very innovative camera that looks like a gigantic PC. Just to turn it on I need 4.5 minutes, which is a disaster for me. The new, high-tech cameras are made by computer people, who do not know cinema’s 200 years of history; a history based on the precision of mechanics, which is equal to the precision of a microscope, a Panavision camera or reflexes. So you have to be careful with selecting your equipment, because the more technologically advanced they are, the more problems they will cause you”, underlined the director. Furthermore, Werner Herzog asked the young filmmakers to never stop reading books, in order to acquire knowledge of the world. He also advised them to live their lives in the real world, not through the Internet. “The French nouvelle vague filmmakers watched all the movies from the Soviet Union and China they could get their hands on, without subtitles. They approached the films like illiterates and took careful notes on their structure, the plot and the flow, trying to understand what the film was all about”, he noted. He added that he watches only 2 or 3 of his favorite movies a year, but he is a voracious reader.
Asked about how easy it is to be a walker in a world full of cars and high-speed roads, Herzog replied that massive tourism is what destroys the culture of a place, and not the lonely traveler. He has traveled to Crete and explored the inner island avoiding the popular beaches. “I was on a donkey and carried with me a revolver to shoot partridges. At one point I got to Lasithi, where I saw a field with 1.000 windmills and I couldn’t believe how beautiful the scenery was. This moment exerted such an influence on me, that it inspired me to film Signs of Life in Crete and Kos. The windmills were critical in this film. They were like flowers gone crazy, spinning endlessly and fiercely”, said the filmmaker, adding that the landscape he saw then, although real, was so outlandish, that it deeply touched his soul. Referring in general to the influence of landscapes in his movies, he said that “the landscape in Fitzcarraldo, although being a jungle, symbolizes something different and is gradually transformed and connected to the human soul and its qualities”.
Then, Herzog showed the audience some images from landscape paintings. He made special reference to the work of Hercules Seghers, an artist that predated Rembrandt. “Seghers died an alcoholic and in deep poverty. During the last years of his life, he painted on his bed sheets. Most of his work was destroyed, while Rembrandt himself saved a part of it. These saved paintings are exhibited at Uffizi gallery in Florence”, noted Herzog. He then told the young filmmakers in the audience: “you have to find the artists and poets that are close to your heart. Once you discover them and become close to them, you will create something that surpasses your own existence - this will be cinema”.
Asked about the rejections he experienced in his early days, an experience that many new filmmakers also know very well, Herzog said they should not fear rejection and have the courage to move on. “If your story is good, funding will eventually come. In my own career, I had no success in the first ten years. The audience hated Signs of Life, despite all the awards and the good reviews. Years after, the audience discovered it and asked me to screen it again”, he noted, adding: “I was ready to call it quits, when my mentor, cinema historian Lotte Eisner, told me coolly that “the history of cinema will not allow you to quit”. This made me go on working for the next ten years. She also presented some of my work to Fritz Lang, who said he liked it -he wasn’t thrilled of course”.
Talking about his film Little Dieter Needs to fly, he said that sometimes he had to film the same shot six times to get what he wanted. “Our goal was to ‘shine on’ both the protagonist and the hearts of viewers, since it was impossible to do one without the other”. Asked about humor in his films, Herzog said it was high time people understood the humor in his work. “Many believe I am a melancholic German filmmaker, but this isn’t true. I may not be like Eddie Murphy, but I do have a sense of humor. I feel closer to Buster Keaton, who used humor to overcome the cruelty of the world”.
Answering a question about the difference between talent and skill he said: “With the proper skills, you can make good movies, but the poetry of cinema is not something that can be learned. If you don’t feel the need to say something to an audience, if you don’t feel you have something that needs to be expressed, skills will not get you far”. As far as his films’ music is concerned, he said: “music is the art that is closer to cinema, closer than theater or photography. From age 13 and up till I was 18 I avoided music, because of a traumatic experience I had in school, when a teacher asked me to sing before the class. After I turned 18, however, I felt that I missed music a lot and started to explore it”. Talking o his movies, Herzog admitted that he loves his films like children, but he doesn’t watch them again. According to the great filmmaker, a director must be ready for anything, and this why in Fitzcarraldo he didn’t not hesitate to forge papers, in order to get through some military blockades and continue filming.
Herzog believes the future will bring many changes to the cinema: “There is going to be a deep change in the cinema in our equipment, but there is also insecurity stemming from the changes in the distribution system and internet piracy. All things can change, but the values of cinema, the magic of narration, the poetry of the Seventh Art, is unalterable. Our century, despite the boom of the media, will be a century of loneliness. Only cinema can unite people”.
Herzog revealed that he does not feel like a philosopher when making movies, but more like a mathematician. To him, abstract thought is limited to the understanding of mathematics. Closing his inspired masterclass, he referred to his film Nosferatu and the reasons that made him change the ending. “I didn’t wasn’t to make a remake of the old, silent film. In the original film, the vampire has no feelings, it is a dying insect. I wanted to present the vampire as an agonizing soul. Murnaou’s film was way ahead of its age and symbolized that something dark was looming over Germany – I think he meant Nazism. In my film, I think I have managed to create a bond with the filmmakers of the past, whose vision and thought abruptly came to an end with Nazism”.
