Herzog: "It was more expropriation than theft. You have to have a certain amount of, I say, good criminal energy to make a film. Sometimes, yes, you have to go outside of what the norm is."
And I like this, about Klaus Kinski: "I had a a mad man as a leading character. He had a temper as demented as it gets. You had to contain him, and I made his madness — his explosive destructiveness —productive for the screen.... Every gray hair on my head I call Kinsky."
Later Cooper confronts Herzog with what Kinsky wrote about him in his autobiography: "I've never in my life met anybody so dull, humorless, uptight, and swaggering. Herzog is a miserable, hateful, malevolent, avaricious, money hungry, nasty, sadistic, treacherous, cowardly creep."
HERZOG: "Yes, it's beautiful stuff, I actually helped him."
COOPER: "You helped him write this?"
HERZOG: "With a dictionary, yeah. With Roget's Thesaurus."
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38 comments:
I watched his “Aguirre, The Wrath of God” recently. Completely terrible. My “Frankenstein, Part II” is 10x better.
I liked his statement about bears. That nature does not care about us. Sounds sane to me.
Herzog has some movies that I want to watch, but never seem to find the time for. The world would be so much less interesting without him. Unless, of course, "Frankenstein, Part II" is ever finished.
A friend of mine (EdRoland) played the black slave in Aguirre. He told interesting stories about it. He had been wandering around South America when he ran into the film crew, and they just wrote him onto the script.
I learnt about New German Cinema in a 1982 film studies class by a visiting Kraut professor who wrote a book on Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Part of the class material outline a contrast between Herzog who was essentially a libertarian Gonzo filmmaker and Fassbinder who was a socialist whom was funded by the state. We learned about the stolen camera story.
During the semester, the local Arlington theater screened agera the wrath of God. That is one movie that you should definitely see you on a big screen to really feel immersed in the unfathomable power of that great Peruvian river.
I love the notion of these two lunatics sitting around with a thesaurus, finding the most inventive adjectives in the book to shape their own history.
I never got Aquirre, wrath of God. It seems like a well made movie. But what was the point? Maybe its better in German.
But Herzog sounds like a funny guy. A true wit.
"The trees were in misery. The birds were in misery. They didn't sing. They shrieked in misery." .......He doesn't sugarcoat it. Red in tooth and claw and spoken syllable. Kinski was just a warm up. Herzog found his ideal avatar in Grizzly Man......Anyone here a bit unnerved to hear that Germany is re-arming?
I love Herzog. I've always joked that he should give the eulogy at my funeral, but only if I can listen. "My Best Fiend" is a favorite documentary of mine.
Werner Herzog's Yelp Review of the Trader Joe's on Hyperion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YW-5Flkiuw
(Paul F. Tompkins' brilliant impression of Herzog)
Reminds me of an embryonic Bob Dylan. “Bob recounts how he stole essential folk and blues records from a friend. ‘Just being a musical expeditionary.’”
"It was more expropriation than theft"
important to Understand..
It's NOT WRONG, when *i* do it..
It's Only WRONG, when corporations do it!!
I almost never watch 60 Minutes, but I caught that segment last Sunday.
I think his life is more interesting than his work--not that I've seen all his work, but the big films that everyone cites strike me as ponderous.
Serious Question
Who paid for Google's 1st severs?
"Who paid for Google's 1st severs?"
I give up. Have you asked anywhere else?
"Grizzly Man" was interesting in the, " Does anyone else but me see how this will end?" kind of way. I highly recommend "The Happy People" about state sanctioned trappers. It was filmed before the Soviet Union fell which gives it much more meaning.
What we have here is failure to communicate.
Herzog and Cooper should have a cop show: "Trümmerkind [Rubblekid] und Vanderbilt" in which the spoiled Vanderbilt learns a few lessons about life from the guy who grew up on the mean streets of postwar Munich and walked all the way to Paris (on foot, naturally) in his younger years.
I like Herzog's films, but when he narrates it sounds like he can barely keep from falling asleep himself, and that can have a soporific effect on audiences.
to be a penguin is the best
Joe Bar:
"Frankenstein, Part II" is finished, but I haven't sold it yet. I'm going to do a rewrite.
What I'm hearing now is that when everything is "literally Hitler" nothing is "literally Hitler," but for those who need a playbill or authorial notes, Aguirre is at least figuratively Hitler. Fitzcarraldo is sort of Hitler-adjacent.
Redistributive change. It's Diversity, equity, and inclusion. #NoJudgment #NoLabels
I recommend watching Burden of Dreams about the making of Fitzcarraldo. Kinsky is the only one who seems sane it.
Begley, the only way you'll ever sell that screenplay is if you print it on rolls of toilet paper during the next pandemic.
Lazarus, Thats exactly what a Hilter would say. Monty Python Hilter sketch
I recommend Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun. Excellent allegory about the division of Germany after WWII and what would happen when they reunite. Made in 1979.
It's like the creativity and art continued past the film and into real life.
I remember hearing a similar story about the great Stanley Kubrick. He was interested in a particular kind of camera (special to him) that was no longer available in the market.
He was pretty terrifying as the Zek in Jack Reacher, then again so is Klaus Kinski in anything,
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans… that film disturbed me almost to the point of insanity...there. I am insane now.
Stay away from German cinema, is my rule, unless I feel really depressed and want to confirm to myself that the whole world is horrible. Wrath of God should never be shown to teens, it will destroy their next decade of life.
thats a thumbs up for me, Roger, lol
Remember early in the blog when ann's husband richard told us she had stolen a grocery cart in their early NYC years because she didn't want to have to carry the bags home? She denied it, but they're all thieves like that really... "You can justify it in the end." Damn art majors.
Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe
The Most Insane Actor Ever
A fun drinking game would be to watch that mini-doc and take a drink whenever there's a desire to kill a co-worker, and two drinks when there's a threat to kill a co-worker, and three drinks when there's a murder attempt.
> Who paid for Google's 1st servers?
CIA
In the early 90's, The Harvard Film Archive had a Herzog retrospective with a lot of his movies including short films. A few remembrances:
Even Dwarves Started Small- His first film, absurd, allegorical, I guess. B&W, stars dwarves inside a cave and trapped in a prison hospital or something, I forget. Contains the first of a recurring Herzog motif, a driverless car running in circles.
Strozek- A dark, depressing movie about a poor German half-wit street musician whose only friend is an old man and a good-hearted prostitute. Things are so bad for them that they escape to America and end up in Wisconsin where they find out what "things are bad" really means. Moral of the story- Don't go to Wisconsin.
Le Soufrierre- A short film about an impending volcanic eruption on a Caribbean island. The entire island is evacuated and Herzog goes there to film the aftermath of a city without people. Animals are roaming the empty streets and it looks apocalyptic. Having been through the covid lockdowns, I too have now seen major cities emptied of humanity. In the end, Herzog finds one lone man in the island lying in the sun on the side of the volcano. He refused to leave and was just waiting for the lava flow, which never came BTW.
Herzog gave a speech on the last day and talked a lot about Kinski and also Bruno S, the mental case he used in couple of his movies. Herzog was always interested in the extremes, the outcasts, and beyond the boundaries of polite society. Sad that he's turned into such a libtard, but not surprising that a German autocrat would feel sympatico with the fascist nasties of the Democrat Party.
They didn't tell him a camera was missing is not the same as they didn't notice it. The person in charge of the equipment could have been fired, or at least lost out opportunities for further jobs, over this.
"It was more expropriation than theft. You have to have a certain amount of, I say, good criminal energy to make a film. Sometimes, yes, you have to go outside of what the norm is."
So film making is very like politics.
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