Magic Hours (23 page)

Yet Herzog kept working with Kinski—they eventually made five films together—and in this, one can detect something of the perversity that impelled Herzog to drag a boat across a mountain in the first place. Herzog has never really been able to provide full accounting for his and Kinski's twisted reliance upon each other.
He did pull from Kinski some astonishing performances—particularly in
Woyzeck,
a film basically composed of several long one-take sequences—but their working relationship involved serial pledges to kill each other. Kinski, who died in 1991, wrote in his autobiography that “I absolutely despise this murderous Herzog.... Huge red ants should piss into his lying eyes, gobble up his balls, penetrate his asshole, and eat his guts!”
⁵

Herzog avoids filming in studios. His films, he has said, are “killed stone dead without the outside world to react to.” He resists resolutely such elementary film devices as the freeze frame or zoom. His camera is largely stationary, and he holds on his images with vulturous patience. These are traits Herzog developed by necessity.
Aguirre
, for instance, was filmed with only one camera—the camera he liberated from the Munich Film School—and Herzog's view of much of modern filmmaking's “flashy tricks” and “excess of cuts” is predictably dour: “This kind of filmmaking... gives you a phony impression that something interesting might be going on. But for me it is a clear sign that I am watching an empty film.” For Herzog, emptiness is analogous to the devices most of us associate with film. Kinski, then, illustrates what it is about Herzog's films that is simultaneously real, unmediated, and manipulated. While his actors deliver crazed, scripted speeches days after taking crazed, unplanned potshots at extras, and his non-actors are asked to reenact their most painful life experiences and then to engage in unusual behavior that will be portrayed as characteristic, we can see Herzog's films as an ongoing attempt to illustrate the porosity of the barrier between fiction and nonfiction. What is any
film, after all, but a series of images burned onto celluloid?

“When I see a great film,” Herzog has said, “it stuns me, it is a mystery to me.” Images, Herzog's films repeatedly suggest, have their own mysterious reality that, finally, cannot be codified, only beheld. His strength as a filmmaker is certainly not psychological, and often his fictional characters behave inexplicably. Thus his tendencies toward halos of imagery, as though to fill in the motives his screenplays refuse to provide. This can sometimes amount to a kind of idolatry of composition. Herzog has not helped himself when he speaks of film as being the “art of illiterates,” or when he repeatedly expresses disgust toward film criticism. As one of Herzog's more eloquent critics once wrote, Herzog and his “celebrants” believe that “there are more things in heaven and earth than are canvassed by our dictionaries. Most of us, I think, would assent to this.” But Herzog is not being mystical as a means toward will-to-power supremacy. His films are too overwhelmingly concerned with the vagaries of human experience, which is different from human behavior, to allow him such easy metaphysics, especially when the types of experience he is most interested in fall beyond the parameters of the imagination. Fini Straubinger is real. Don Lope de Aguirre is not. Neither is a typical human being. Their realness is of only incidental importance when one attempts a full understanding of what Herzog has spent his career attempting to achieve. His films are the alembic through which life itself is distilled—not explained but
distilled
—and we are his fellow alchemists. Upon seeing the boat in
Fitzcarraldo
finally inch over the mountain, Herzog says this on his DVD commentary: “I always knew it was a central metaphor of this film, maybe even of life. And I can't even say [a] metaphor of what. I can't even name it.” A critic, perhaps, could. But in presuming to name it she, too, will have become an artist.

For the final-stage edits of his new film
Rescue Dawn,
Herzog was working out a suite of soundproof rooms in a gated building in an indistinct Los Angeles neighborhood, the nearby streets of which were lined on one side with tattoo parlors and the other with “laser tattoo removal” specialists, among whom one Dr. Tattoff stood out.

After introducing me to Joe Bini, his editor on his last nine films, Herzog sat down and prepared himself for yet another round. At this late stage editing seemed to involve watching slightly different versions of the same take, discussing the microscopia of what made them better or worse, and after a semi-automatic flurry of Bini's mouse clicks judging the results of their decisions, at which point they either moved on or started over.

Rescue Dawn
is Herzog's attempt to retell the story of Dieter Dengler, the captured pilot of
Little Dieter Needs to Fly,
who died in 2001. It is the first time Herzog has fictionalized one of his own documentaries, and during a lull I reminded Herzog of his statement, “I have never made a distinction between my feature films and my ‘documentaries.' For me, they are all just films.” If that was the case, why did he feel the need to make to remake what had already been recognized as one of his most extraordinary films?

“It's basically the same story,” he said, “but it's unfinished business. Much what you see in
Rescue Dawn
is something you do not see or hear in the documentary. So there's a huge amount of story that is untold.” When I asked if he approached representing the story differently now that it had assumed explicitly fictional form, Herzog shook his head. “I do not fear representation. I represent at the personal level. That's what Dieter himself understood. When I said, ‘Dieter, I'd like to shoot a scene where you are opening and closing your front door,' he said, ‘That might look funny—my friends will think I'm bonkers.' And I said, ‘No,
you have to understand this gives a deep insight into who you are.' He looked at me and said, ‘I think I understood you.' And he did it. He did something staged and scripted for the sake of truth, the deeper truth, something that is deeply embedded in his soul. You cannot make it visible otherwise. Of course, it depends on what you're doing. Timothy Treadwell in
Grizzly Man
had been dead almost a year when I got his footage. And you do not invent around his material. You respect it. You don't fool around with it.”

I thought of the sequence in Zak Penn's agreeably minor, frequently amusing fictional documentary
Incident at Loch Ness
(2004), in which Herzog plays himself making a documentary film about the Loch Ness Monster. Penn, who has great fun playing himself as Herzog's producer, stages repeated Nessie sightings until Herzog threatens to quit. The aggrieved Penn says to Herzog, “You once said to me, ‘Cinema is lies.”' Herzog's response: “There's a distinction. If you can't make the distinction, if you just can't make the distinction, why don't you become a talk-show host?” The scene's intention is comic, but the point it makes is a serious one. There
are
distinctions to be made. Herzog's distinctions about when to mingle fact and fiction may appear to take place within a corona of nebulousness, and may even appear self-justifying, but then so do most matters of human morality, which in all but a few extreme cases are fluid rather than fixed. The morality of narrative art, whether fictional or fact-based, hinges upon knowing when the additives one injects into representation begin to poison rather than fortify the narrative—knowing, in other words, what to include and what to leave out. Every artist will judge differently, but these are judgments that must be made—even by those who fanatically insist that any fabrications, however small, inserted into what is intended to be “real” result in fiction—and they implicate even such elementary decisions as choosing where to begin telling a story. Yet is not choosing
where to begin a story so subjective it amounts to a lesser brand of fabrication?

Herzog went back to observing Bini, whose round face was lit with the glow of the three flat-screen monitors off of which he worked. The left screen held a tabular file listing of all of
Rescue Dawn
's catalogued shots and takes. The center screen was where useable shots were stored before their transfer into the final cut. The right screen held the ever-mutating film itself, and on it I watched Christian Bale (playing Dengler) and Steve Zahn (playing Dengler's doomed friend Duane Martin) wander, shoeless and bloodied, through some Thai jungle, which stands in for Laos.

Herzog described for me his typical process. Shortly after a film wraps, he and Bini view all the rough footage, which in optimal conditions they can do in one or two long sittings. While watching the footage Herzog takes notes. These notes, he said, can be very cryptic—Bini smiled in apparent agreement—often amounting to nothing more than “!!” for takes he particularly likes. Herzog assured me he did not need to take extensive notes. “I remember everything, even the tiniest shots.” To illustrate this he asked Bini to call up a just-completed scene near the end of the film in which Dengler is signaling the spotter plane that ultimately summons a rescue chopper. While editing this scene Herzog remembered, for instance, exactly how long the spotter plane hangs behind some treetops, for it was a moment he wanted to elongate as much as possible. He also remembered a certain look on Bale's face from a previous discarded take, and made sure to insert it right after the plane reappears. Watching the rough cut again, though, Herzog seemed suddenly unsatisfied, and told Bini, “Probably we'll need his face once more.” He then turned to me, as if in apology. “This is a
very
rough version.”

Herzog's elephantine memory is necessary for several reasons, among them the fact that he does not watch dailies. Instead he
knows “in my stomach” if a scene is strong or not. This is good and even noble, though only to a point. Occasionally in Herzog's work, though usually in his feature films, there occurs some moment of inexplicable clumsiness. A key scene in
The Enigma of Kaspar Houser
, for instance, in which the hero is attacked by his former captor, is so poorly filmed that what should be a frightening moment of reckoning instead looks like something out of a home movie:
America's Funniest Assaults.
A look at that day's rushes might well have prevented it. But what Herzog often lacks in elegance he more than makes up for in the unusual ferocity of his vision. The critic Clive James once wrote that today's blockbusters, “despite the technical bravura of their components, rarely strike us as being very well put together.... The special effects leave NASA looking underfunded, yet the general effect, despite oodles of expertise, is one of a hyperactive ineptitude—of the point missed at full volume.” Herzog has never had in his films much by way of special effects, though his film
Invincible
(2001) had some digital effects, as will
Rescue Dawn.
While making
Fitzcarraldo,
Herzog needed to send his three-story barge down rough, dangerous rapids. He did not use a model. He and his crew and actors climbed aboard the ship and filmed it themselves. At one point the vessel almost capsized. The footage Herzog and his crew shot from onboard is uniquely jarring, and the actors themselves look appropriately terrified.
⁶
It is not a bludgeoningly impressive sequence when judged alongside the sinking of James Cameron's
Titanic,
say, but what Herzog captured has to it a dreadful intensity altogether lacking in the more expensive film.

Rescue Dawn
's budget is around $10 million, some of it Hollywood money. Thus I asked Herzog if this meant
Rescue
Dawn
qualified as a “studio film.” Herzog laughed and shook his head. He has never made a studio film, and probably never will. He does not like to be edited, proudly maintaining that every one of his films is a “director's cut.” He then informed me that
Rescue Dawn
's financiers are “newcomers from different professions.” One is the Los Angeles Clippers forward Elton Brand, whom Herzog deemed “the most reliable investor in the whole thing.” Another is a man named Steve Marlton, a former businessman and nightclub owner whose lapses, both financial and aesthetic, during the filming of
Rescue Dawn
resulted in the dismissal of several of Herzog's longtime collaborators and no small amount of trouble with the Thai authorities. (As Daniel Zalewski wrote in his 2006
New Yorker
profile of Herzog, Marlton, at one point, suggested to his director that a recent adventure film starring the Rock would be a useful model for
Rescue Dawn
.) But of Marlton Herzog had nothing bad to say. “What endears to me to him,” Herzog said, “is that he gave up a college career, quit everything, went into foosball, and then twice became the world champion foosball player. Of course, we ran into trouble on this film because he was too inexperienced. But that's okay. That happens. The film is in the can. I am very close to finishing it now, even though there was a six-month hiatus because there were no funds for post-production. We were in limbo for a while. Which also is okay. It will not damage the film.”