Director Werner Herzog says filmmakers need “good criminal energy” to make movies
A teenage Werner Herzog needed just one thing after he decided filmmaking was his destiny: a camera. He found one at a film school in Munich and walked off with it — something he calls “more expropriation than theft.”
“You have to have a certain amount of, I say, good criminal energy [to make a film,]” he said.
Herzog now has more than 70 documentaries and feature films to his name. And at 82, he’s still working constantly – making movies no one else would, or could ever, dream of.
He’s also passing on his skills at what he calls his “film school for rogues.”
“You have to go outside of what the norm is,” Herzog said.
Defined by a childhood in poverty
Herzog has never had any formal training as a director. He was born in Munich during World War II, just two weeks before the Allies bombed the city in 1942. His father was away serving in the German army, when his mother fled with him and his older brother to the mountains of Bavaria. Herzog grew up in poverty. The family rarely had electricity and lived without running water or a sewage system.
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“We were hanging at her skirt, wailing that we were hungry,” Herzog said of his mother. “And she spins around and she looks at us and she says, ‘Boys, if I could cut it out of my ribs, I would cut it out of my ribs, but I can’t.'”
It’s an experience Herzog said shaped him into the man he is today.
Herzog didn’t see his first film until he was 11, but quickly got hooked on American B movies — cheap, low-budget films.
How far Herzog will go for a movie
Herzog started directing his own movies in the 1960s, but it was 1972’s “Aguirre, the Wrath Of God,” that introduced him to the world. The film was about a group of conquistadors who gradually descend into madness as they search for a lost city of gold in the Amazon.
The movie, shot on a shoestring budget in Peru, was only finished because of Herzog’s force of will and determination. He sold his shoes to get some fish to feed the crew.
“It’s not normally what a director has to do,” Herzog said. “It’s good to have some good boots, and you can barter it for a load of fish or my wrist watch I would give away. I would give away everything.”
To him, it’s worth it. He considers the end product of a movie as “loot,” rather than the money he might make from it.
“And of course I make money sometimes and I invest it in the next film,” Herzog said.
In 1979 Herzog started working on “Fitzcarraldo,” which took three grueling years. German actor Klaus Kinski played an obsessed Irishman who would stop at nothing to build an opera house in the Amazon. To raise the money for it, Fitzcarraldo hatched a plan to harvest lucrative rubber trees in a remote jungle and hired indigenous laborers to haul a 340-ton ship over a mountain to do it.
The director said 20th Century Fox suggested shooting the film in a botanic garden in San Diego using a miniature boat.
“It would have been a lousy film,” Herzog said.
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He instead bought a 340-ton steamship and actually moved it up a mountain during filming.
It was far from the only challenge. A border war between Peru and Ecuador forced Herzog to move the production a thousand miles away to a new location. The film also faced financial difficulties, plane crashes, fighting between local indigenous groups and constant battles against the rain and mud.
Herzog’s relentless pursuit of his vision took a toll on the cast and crew – and on him, too. A documentary film crew shot the chaos behind the scenes and turned it into a movie all its own called “Burden of Dreams.” It has just been re-released in theaters.
Herzog also had to deal with “Fitzcarraldo” lead actor Kinski, who Herzog said was prone to explosions of rage. Kinski was a “madman” and “as demented as it gets,” according to Herzog.
“You had to contain him,” Herzog said. “I made his madness, his explosive destructiveness, productive for the screen.”
Kinksi had his own take on Herzog. Before his death in 1991, Kinski described the director in his autobiography as dull, humorless, uptight, swaggering, avaricious and a cowardly creep. Herzog, for his part, calls Kinski’s description “beautiful stuff,” and said he actually helped the actor write it with a thesaurus.
Despite their tempestuous relationship, Herzog won the best director award at the Cannes Film Festival when “Fitzcarraldo” was finally released in 1982.
One of the most unusual filmmakers of our time
Over the last six decades, the German director made movies about everything from an unhinged cop in New Orleans, to a man who thought he could live with Grizzly bears — he did, until they ate him. Herzog has never shied away from the extreme. If anything, he’s drawn to it. His movies are often dream-like explorations of the power of nature, the frailties of man and the edges of sanity.
His curiosity has taken him to the remotest regions of our planet. Herzog has revealed hidden landscapes under the Antarctic ice sheet and apocalyptic oil fires in Kuwait after the first Gulf War. He risked his life to capture the power of volcanoes and rarely-seen-before ancient cave paintings in France.
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Herzog is not only a director. He turned journals he wrote while making Fitzarraldo into a book, called the “Conquest of the Useless.” He has published 11 others: fiction, poetry and memoirs.
Herzog hasn’t just worked behind the camera. Every now and then he has acted, most recently in the “Star Wars” series “The Mandalorian.” He has also lent his distinctive voice to several characters on “The Simpsons.”
Herzog continues to direct, and is now working with his editor Marco Capaldo on a documentary about the search for a legendary herd of elephants in southern Africa.
Passing on his skills — both the usual and unusual
Last September, 60 Minutes joined Herzog as he taught aspiring filmmakers on the Spanish island of La Palma off the west coast of Africa; it’s covered in volcanic rock and ash from an eruption three years ago.
It’s an 11-day workshop, which he refers to as a “film school for rogues,” that’s less about the fundamentals of filming, and more about poetic vision and grit.
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“For the rogues, I also say, ‘You are able-bodied. Earn money to finance your first films. But don’t earn it with clerical works in an office,'” Herzog said. “Go out and work as a bouncer in a sex club. Work as a warden in a lunatic asylum. Go out to a cattle ranch and, and learn how to milk a cow. Earn your money that way, in real life.”
“You do not become a poet by being in a college,” he said.
He teaches his “rogues” how to forge a shooting permit — something Herzog said he’s done himself.
“And I teach lock picking. You…have to be good at that,” he said.
Herzog also advises his “rogues” to carry bolt cutters everywhere.
“It’s not for the faint-hearted,” he said.
