Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (16 page)

The problem, he said, is that people insist on getting everything straight. On having movies make sense, and on being provided with a key for unlocking complex movies.

"It's the weirdest thing. We're willing to accept anything, absolutely anything, in real life. But we demand order from our fantasies. Instead of just going along with them and saying, yeah, that's right, it's a fantasy and it doesn't make sense. Once you figure out a fantasy, it may be more satisfying but it's less fun."

For reasons having something to do with that, he said, he likes to take chances on his films: "Every film should be different, and get into a different area, and have its own look. I'd hate to start repeating myself. I have this thing I call a fear quotient. The more afraid I am, going in, the better the picture is likely to be." A pause. "And on that basis, A Wedding is going to be my best picture yet.

"I like to allow for accidents, for happy occurrences, and mistakes. That's why I don't plan too carefully, and why we're going to use two cameras and shoot 500,000 feet of film on A Wedding. Sometimes you don't know yourself what's going to work. I think a problem with some of the younger directors, who were all but raised on film, is that their film grammar has become too rigid. Their work is inspired more by other films than by life.

"That happened to Godard, and to Friedkin it may be happening. To Bogdanovich without any doubt. He has all these millions of dollars and all these great technicians, and he tells them what he wants and they give it to him. Problem is, maybe when he gets it, it turns out he didn't really want it after all, but he's stuck with it."

Altman has rarely had budgets large enough to afford such freedom, if freedom's the word. Although he's had only one smash hit, M*A*S*H, he keeps working and remains prolific because his films are budgeted reasonably and brought in on time. For example, 3 Women is a challenging film that may not find enormous audiences, but at $ 1.6 million it will likely turn a profit.

"I made a deal with the studio," he said, "if we go over budget, I pay the difference. If we stay under, I keep the change. On that one, we came in about $ioo,ooo under budget, which certainly wasn't enough to meet much of the overhead of keeping this whole organization going ... but then of course you hope the film goes into profit."

He always makes a film believing it will be enormously profitable, he said: "When I'm finished, I can't see any way that millions of people won't want to see what I've done. With The Long Goodbye, for example, we thought we had a monster hit on our hands. With Nashville, my second biggest grossing film, we did have a hit, but it was oversold. Paramount was so convinced they were going through the sky on that film that they spent so damned much money promoting it that they may never break even. It grossed $16 million, which was very good considering its budget, but they thought it would top $40 million, and they were wrong."

But, of course, A Wedding will be a monster hit?

"I really hope so. If things work out the way I anticipate they will, it will certainly be my funniest film. I mean really funny. But then funny things happen every day."

The man in white came on quiet shoes, and there was another scotch and soda where the old one had been. Altman obviously had a funny example in mind.

"I had this lady interviewer following me around," he said. "More of that in-depth crap. She was convinced that life with Altman was a neverending round of orgies and excess. She was even snooping around in my hotel bathroom, for Christ's sake, and she found this jar of funny white powder in the medicine cabinet. Aha! she thinks. Cocaine! So she snorts some. Unfortunately, what she didn't know was that I'm allergic to commercial toothpaste because the dentine in it makes me break out in a rash. So my wife mixes up baking soda and salt for me, and-poor girl."

He lifted his glass and toasted her, and Cannes, and whatever.

INTRODUCTION

met Werner Herzog right at the beginning, at the 1967 New York Film Festival, in a party at the apartment of Bob Shaye, who was about to found New Line Cinema. Herzog is one of my heroes, because over forty years in fifty features and documentaries he has never compromised himself, has always defended his radical artistic vision, his mission to provide us with new images, that we may not die or despair (that's how he thinks).

At the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis one year, after a retrospective of his work, we sat onstage and talked for three hours and he was not eager to stop. No one left. He is one of those speakers, like Buckminster Fuller, whom you want to listen to indefinitely. We had two other long public discussions, at Facets Multimedia in Chicago in the 1970s and at my Overlooked Film Festival in 2003, and both ran until the small hours of the morning. He does not repeat himself, cannot bore, will not compromise, leads a life of ceaseless curiosity.

Once he told me that as a youth he walked around Albania. Why Albania? "At that time, they would not admit you to Albania."

MAY 1982

(CANNES, ]FIRAN(CTE-On the day after Fitzcarraldo had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, I sat and had tea with Werner Herzog, the West German who directed it. Werner Herzog is a strange, deep, visionary man. With other directors, I have an interview. With Herzog, I have an audience.

He does not speak of small matters. He would not say so, but he obviously sees himself as one of the most important artists of his time-and so, to tell the truth, do I. He makes films that exist outside the usual categories. He takes enormous risks to make them. In a widely discussed article in the New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann wondered if it is an item of Herzog's faith that he must risk his life with every movie he makes.

It is a logical question. Herzog makes movies about people who have larger dreams and take greater risks than ordinary men. Herzog does the same. He once went with a small crew to an island where a volcano was about to explode. He wanted to interview a man who had decided to stay behind and die. Herzog has also made movies in the middle of the Sahara, and twice he has risked his life and the lives of his associates on risky film projects in the Amazon rain jungles.

His Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1973) told the story of one of Pizarro's mad followers who pressed on relentlessly into the jungle in a doomed quest for El Dorado. Now there is Fitzcarraldo, based on the true story of an Irishman who tried to haul a whole steamship over dry land from one Amazonian river system to another.

As nearly everybody must know by now, Werner Herzog did the same thing in filming Fitzcarraldo. But Herzog's historical inspiration (who was named Fitzgerald) had the good sense to disassemble his steamship before hauling it overland; Herzog used winches and pulleys to haul an entire boat overland intact. And that afternoon over tea at Cannes, he was not modest about his feat: "Apocalypse Now was only a kindergarten compared to what we went through," he said.

At forty, he is a thin, strongly built man of average height, with hair swept back from a broad forehead. He usually wears a neat mustache. He spent an undergraduate year at a university in Pennsylvania and speaks excellent English; he once made a movie, Stroszek, on location in northern Wisconsin, and it included a striking image of the lost American Dream, as his hero, Bruno, looked in despair as the bank repossessed his mobile home and left him contemplating the frozen prairie.

I had seen Fitzcarraldo the day before. I also had seen Les Blank's Burden of Dreams, an unblinking, unsentimental documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo. It is good to see the two films together, because Blank's documentary paints a portrait of Herzog seemingly going mad under the strain of making his impossible movie. I asked Herzog about that: did he really crack up during his months in the rain j ungle and his legendary problems with civil wars, disease, Indian attacks, and defecting cast and crew members?

"Sanity?" he said. "For that you don't have to fear. I am quite sane." He somehow sounded like the vampire hero of his Nosferatu. He sipped tea. "I make sense. I don't push myself to the edge." Having said that, he proceeded to contradict it: "It is only the project that counts. If the nature of the project makes it necessary for me to go very far, I would go anywhere. How much you have to suffer, how little sleep you get.... I am the last one to look for a situation like that, but the last one to back out if it is necessary."

He looked out over the veranda of the hotel, at the palm trees in the spring sunshine.

"I would go down in hell and wrestle a film away from the devil if it was necessary," said the man who had just told me he didn't push himself to the edge.

Do you feel you have a personal mission to fulfill? I asked. Other directors sign up Goldie Hawn and shoot in Los Angeles. You sign up Klaus Kinski and disappear into the rain forest.

"If you say `mission,' it sounds a little heavy," he said. "I would say `duty' or `purpose.' When I start a new film, I am a good soldier. I do not complain, I will hold the outpost even if it is already given up. Of course I want to win the battle. I see each film more like a high duty that I have."

Is your duty to the film, I asked, or does the film itself fulfill a duty to mankind? Even as I asked the question, I realized that it sounded grandiose, but Herzog nodded solemnly. He said his duty was to help mankind find new images, and, indeed, in his films there are many great and vivid images: a man standing on a drifting raft, surrounded by gibbering monkeys; a ski jumper so good that he overjumps a landing area; men deaf and blind from birth, feeling the mystery of a tree; a man asleep on the side of a volcano; midgets chasing runaway automobiles; a man standing on an outcropping rock in the middle of a barren sea; a man hauling a ship up the side of a mountain.

"We do not have adequate images for our kind of civilization," Herzog said. "What are we to look at? The ads at the travel agent's of the Grand Canyon? We are surrounded by images that are worn out, and I believe that unless we discover new images, we will die out. Die like the dinosaurs. And I mean it physically."

He leaned forward, speaking intensely, as if time were running out. "Frogs do not apparently need images, and cows do not need them, either. But we do. Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel for the first time articulated human pathos in a new way that was adequate to the understanding of his time. I am not looking to make films in which actors stand around and say words that some screenwriter has thought were clever. That is why I use midgets, and a man who spent twenty-four years in prisons and asylums (Bruno S., the hero of Stroszek) and the deaf and blind, and why I shoot with actors who are under hypnosis, for example. I am trying to make something that has not been made before."

I said Fitzcarraldo almost seemed to be about itself: a film about a man who hauled a ship up a hill, made by a man who hauled a real ship up a real hill to make a film.

"It was not planned like that," Herzog said. "It was not planned to be as difficult as it was. It came to a point where the purpose of the film, the making of the film, the goals of the film, and how to make the film all became one and the same thing: to get that ship up the hill. When Jason Robards fell ill and returned to America, before I replaced him with Klaus Kinski, I thought about playing Fitzcarraldo myself. I came very close."

Why did you have to use a real boat?

"There was never any question in my mind about that. All those trashy special effects and miniatures that you see in Hollywood movies have caused audiences to lose trust in their eyes. Here, in my film, they are given back trust in their own eyes. When the boat goes up the mountain, people look at the screen, looking for something to tell them it's a trick, but it's no trick. Instinctively, they sense it. An image like that gives you courage for your own dreams."

He smiled, a little grimly. "It's a film," he said, "that will not have a remake. That man who is going to make this film again has to be born first." He paused for thought. "The mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria," he said, "could have made this film."

I observed that in Burden of Dreams there seemed to be some controversy over the safety and practicality of hauling the ship up the hill.