Thanks to all those who sent in questions for Werner Herzog. He answered a selection about his new film Wheel of Time, his career and also offered advice to young filmmakers: "Work as a bouncer in a sex club".
BBC Four
The first group of questions are about Wheel of Time, then we can talk about other things.
Howard Hoy
Did making Wheel of Time change your understanding of Buddhism, or put into perspective your own views as to the significance of art?
Werner Herzog
I came to it as an outsider without any profound knowledge of Buddhism and I'm still lacking deeper understanding of Buddhism but I think it does not really matter. I had a physical curiosity to depict spirituality and it can be done on film, so I hope I've succeeded to some extent. As for the second part of the question, not really. I think in this case, as strange as it may sound, it was my most physical film. With half a million pilgrims piling up and mayhem among them, we would instantly dig into the crowd, not with a long lens and a tripod, we would participate in any mayhem that would occur. I loved doing the film for this physical approach that we took.
Iain MacDonald
I like your expression "the ecstasy of truth" and it strikes me that it is very similar to the Tibetan Buddhist ideas of "universal truth" and "conventional truth". Did you study Buddhism at all before making the film? And since making the film has it led you to think more about Buddhism?
Werner Herzog
I did not study Buddhism before making the film. I am staying within my own culture and I am not part of some sort of a Western idea of religion tourism. I think even the Dalai Lama has been very explicit in recent years. He says do not leave your faith, do not leave the faith of your traditional culture, remain Catholics or whatever but study Buddhism because only through an understanding of the other cultures and religions will we create lasting peace on this planet. Even if I studied Buddhism very intensely now, which I'm not doing, I would not "convert to Buddhism". I'm not into that.
As regards the "ecstasy of truth" I came to this conclusion after more than 30 years working in the medium of film and understanding that there are very deep strata of truth inherent in cinema which we have almost stopped asking for. I seek a deeper truth than the cinema vérité truth which only scratches the surface. You can only reach ecstasy by imagination, by fabrication and such things. I would like to point out to a manifesto that I published, which is only half a page long and quite funny, the so-called Minnesota Declaration. You can find it on my website www.wernerherzog.com. You will find it under "News".
Dave Roberts
Having seen Wheel of Time twice now I am very struck by the hypnotic and serene nature of Buddhism and the film had a calming effect on me. I would have liked an even longer version of your film with your own feelings and impressions included. Is it too soon to ask if there will be a longer version?
Werner Herzog
No, I will not consider this. The footage that I shot and my fascination that I took from it and the focus that my film has with these materials brought the film, in my opinion, very clearly to its natural length. I have the feeling it's very ballanced and it should not be longer, it should not be shorter.
Jim Kolmar
I've always thought of your films as hungry for the images they contain. Do you think the filmmaker, as a re-layer of truth, has an obligation to "devour" his/her surroundings so they may be better communicated to an audience?
Werner Herzog
I do not want to go into general rules of what a filmmaker should do and how he should approach his work. I do have a certain attitude and deep fascination for my subjects and I do my best and I probably have my kind of handwriting in them. But I am not Moses on the mountain who proclaims the rules of procedure and what is sin and what is virtue. I just do it the best I can and I try to stay that way.
Mary
Since you have had a close up view of many faithways and religions, do you not find it true that God finds man rather than the reverse?
Werner Herzog
[Laughs] It is a very beautiful, poetic question. I think we should keep the question as it is. It's more beautiful than any answer could be.
Dave Roberts
I am very interested in the subject matter of Wheel of Time. However, working at high altitude can be very arduous. Was this film physically demanding for you and your crew? I always feel a great deal of sympathy for the crew on a Herzog movie!
Werner Herzog
[Laughs] He's referring to filming at Mount Kailash in Tibet. He doesn't have to feel bad about the Herzog crew, because there was only one man and that was me. I did the sound and camera work myself. There was no one with me. The reason for that was we didn't have any shooting permits and I didn't have a visa. I got a tourist visa at the very last moment. As I was waiting in Thailand in Bangkok at sea level I flew into Kathmandu and from there straight into Tibet. Within a very short time I arrived at something like 18 or 19,000 feet altitude not acclimatised. Of course I was panting and puffing, but that's okay, that happens once in a while. No crew at all had to suffer. My wife was actually with me and she had the feeling she was going to die [laughs]. But physically it is not easy for someone who is not acclimatised at all. Otherwise it was a very pleasant kind of work. The entire film came very easily for everyone involved but particularly for me.
BBC Four
I'll ask the last question about Wheel of Time, which lots of people wanted to know the answer to. Will it be released on DVD or video?
Werner Herzog
We are considering it. I just finished the film and the film was made with no real money. I started the film with zero, I just had money to finance a few tickets to India and that was about that. Only later when there was some footage there the BBC stepped in and some others followed up. So the situation that the film is finished is sensational and new for me [laughs]. But of course there is the question to put out the DVD and the video. We shall do it as soon as possible.
Michael Fenton
A number of the films you have been involved with have dealt with the experience and social consequences of mental illness and abnormality. What would you say was distinctive about your treatment of these themes?
Werner Herzog
I cannot accept the question as it is, otherwise that would confirm the statement. But I would like to point out when he speaks of abnormalities, doing a film for example with an entire cast of midgets [Even Dwarfs Started Small], the midgets are depicted in the film as the only inhabitants of the world. They are the ones who are beautiful, who are proportioned, whereas the entire mechanics of life, the apparatus of everyday instruments like a car or a door knob all of a sudden become monstrosities. Let's say mental illness, maybe, I have never done anything like that. If we refer to Kaspar Hauser, he is not mentally ill, he is the only normal one, the only one who has no deformities of civilisation. He's the one who is totally alright. The Biedermeier, the bourgeois society around him clearly seems to be the deformed part. So I couldn't see it like the question proposed.
Young William
You are friends with Harmony Korine, and yet don't you find his work draws a little too much from your own? For example, the "beautiful" rendering of ice skaters in Julien Donkey-Boy comes across as a poor equivalent/copy of sequences of ski jumping from your quite magnificent The Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner.
Werner Herzog
It's not a very healthy argument that is given there because Harmony Korine is so much alone in his style and in his subjects and thank God we have such a great talent. I was fascinated that Harmony Korine has such a lively way to approaching images, to narrative forms that are quite different from me. He actually sees me as some of sort of father figure, like a mentor. He urged me to act in his film and he even wanted to act himself as my own son. It has a deeper meaning. I accepted that and I enjoyed it and I think that I'm a good actor; at least totally dysfunctional, hostile and terrifying. Harmony is really on his own and there is never an attempt to imitate my work from his side.
Young William
If I was to walk across the nation (from London to Cornwall), like you did to get to Paris and Lotte Eisner, should I prepare - get money, consider a route and train my body and feet, or simply take a cursory look at a map and walk?
Werner Herzog
He should take a cursory look at the map and walk because you don't have to undergo any training to go from London to Cornwall let's face it [laughs]. My advice is don't take a backpack with you, be exposed, be unprotected, be in a situation where you have to ask the next farmer at nightfall to sleep in his hay, or find a place under a bridge or whatever. Don't do it as a backpacker. Travel on foot yes, but I would only do it if there was a real reason for it. For me, I'm as lazy as anyone else, I would walk only from Munich to Paris because I would not allow Lotte Eisner to die. She had a very severe stroke and was quite old at that time. It was like a rebellion against her imminent death. Or for example I would walk across the Alps and all the way to the border of Slovenia because I wanted to propose to my wife. I wouldn't fly with an aeroplane or call with my celluar phone. I think a grown-up man in such a case should travel on foot. London to Cornwall would be good if you had a reason to do that.
Jason Parkes
There's an interesting coincidence regarding your great film Stroszek. Reading about the suicide of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis in the book Touching from a Distance we learn that he watched Stroszek before killing himself. While reading Faber's Lynch on Lynch, David Lynch talks about being in the UK filming The Elephant Man and seeing Stroszek on TV.
Curtis and Lynch appear to have been watching the transmission of the same film at the same time. Although it's a huge simplification, the reactions of the two viewers appear to swing between a complete enchantment of life and self-destruction. Do you find this reveals something about your work?
Werner Herzog
It is a very heavy question. There is no frivolity in answering this. I cannot really argue. It is as it is. I wish this singer was still alive and hadn't seen Stroszek at that moment. But deep at the bottom of my heart I do believe that Stroszek was not the reason that he killed himself. I do believe that he must have had some very, very serious deeper other reasons and he may have, and I'm very cautious, he may have used the film as a ritual step into what he was doing.
Regarding David Lynch when he was doing Elephant Man, which is a wonderful film, I do not know. I actually know David Lynch personally and I should speak to him and ask him. There's no real answer to that question, only regret that a young man committed suicide. That's a fact that is sad which is very, very serious and is very disquieting.
BBC Four
This is a more light-hearted question.
Piers
What became of all the grey rats you used in Nosferatu?
Werner Herzog
We sold them and even made some profit! They were laboratory rats from Hungary that we had transported all across Europe into the Netherlands. But we had made a deal with a similar institute that would raise the rats in Hungary. I think most of them were used for testing hair cosmetics. We brought in 11,000 and I actually sold 11,350 because the birth rate was quite high. And we lost not one. I have to stress that. There were wild rumours about. We lost not one single rat in the city of Delft.
BBC Four
So you can confidently say "No animals we harmed during the making of this film".
Werner Herzog
I was harmed [laughs]. We shot in May but it was still quite cold. When we had the rats out in this street near the harbour they would pile up to warm themselves. I stepped close and with my hands I dispersed them and got bitten over 40 times that day so I was the only casualty.
John Davies
You've had many extraordinary adventures and experiences, but what expectations do you have of an afterlife?
Werner Herzog
Number one, I was never in adventures. That's a concept that I loathe. Adventures had their time and that was in the Middle-Ages when the knight would set into the world, into the unknown. And then later when the explorers went out to terra incognita. But since the turn of the last century, it already became an embarrassment. Going into adventures was a senseless and ridiculous attempt to be the first one on the South Pole and so on. Since then it has degenerated and it just doesn't fit in our times any more. I reject that idea of adventure totally. I've never gone for adventure. For the afterlife, I do not know. I do not expect anything for myself. How would I know?
Gareth Buckell
The nature of your working relationship with Klaus Kinski has been very well documented, but how would you describe your experience with Kaspar Hauser and Stroszek star Bruno S?
Werner Herzog
That would require a very long answer but I'll try to focus. Bruno is man whose life in his youth was catastrophic and obviously made him a "difficult" person to deal with because he would be suspicious of anyone from outside, he would not trust anyone. I had to establish trust and having established trust with him he was very easy to work with. Sometimes he would stop work by ranting against the injustices of the world. I would stop the entire team in their tracks. I told them that even if it takes three or four hours of non-stop Bruno speaking about injustice we would be there and we would all listen. That was always significant. I would always make physical contact with him. I would always grab him and just hold his wrist. That always did him good. Otherwise, he is a man of phenomenal abilities and phenomenal depth and suffering. It translates on the screen like nothing I have ever done translates onto a screen. He is, for me, the Unknown Soldier of Cinema.
BBC Four
Are you still in touch with him?
Werner Herzog
Since I live in the United States now I have not seen him for quite a long time. He is retired now. He used to work in a steel factory as a forklift truck driver.
David
My question really relates to production funding and your thoughts on creative documentary as a form that is not well supported in television generally. Can you suggest possible strategies for funding creative, observational documentaries for new comers?
Werner Herzog
I have no advice because each situation is different. If this, probably young, person is into alternative subjects and unusual things I would advise take initiative and grab a small camera. Nowadays you can do it with digital camera like I did in Tibet. I shot the entire Tibetan part of Wheel of Time on a tiny digital camera. Work as a taxi driver, work as bouncer in a sex club, work as a warden in a lunatic asylum. Do something which is really into pura vida as the Mexicans would say, into the very pure essence of life. I would prefer you to work as bouncer in a sex club to earn money. You have to take the first steps yourself because nobody is going to be on your side. And once you have something presentable, from there it may or may not take off, but at least you have a much better chance. At least you can make the film.
Rachel
Why did you ascribe the words at the beginning of your film Pilgrimage to Thomas a Kempis?
Werner Herzog
I have to make a confession. It is a fake quote that I made up myself. I love to do things like that because I want to have the audiences entering the film at a very, very high level. I do the same in Lessons of Darkness. There is quote by Blaise Pascal which I invented myself. It's as good as Blaise Pascal by the way [laughs]. He would welcome this as being part of his work. Joke aside, it's the same thing. It actually has to do with ecstatic truth again. How do I approach a film, how do I step into a film? I step far out into some sort of an almost ecstatic thought and I impregnate the film with that and we are entering into the film in a different way.
Joseph Sacks
What do you consider the most outrageous myth about you?
Werner Herzog
I invite any sort of myths because I like the stooges and doppelgangers and doubles out there. I feel protected behind all these things. Let them blossom! I do not plant them, I do not throw out the seeds. I advise you to read Herzog on Herzog because there you see a few clarifications.
Peter Roberts
In retrospect, has filmmaking been an enlightening experience and could you ever consider leaving it behind?
Werner Herzog
My destiny was somehow made clear to me very early on so there was no question what I should do and was never really a choice so I can't really answer that. It has given all to me and it has taken all from me. It is just that I have shouldered this destiny and I think I have lived my life alright. I have that feeling that I have made major mistakes and just accepting my destiny was the right thing.
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