Will Sloan's Wonder Emporium

herzogology:

From Werner Herzog’s visit to DePaul

Presented without comment.

WILL’S ART HOUSE

Werner Herzog week concludes with Les Blank’s Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980)

From Les Blanks, director of the monumental Herzog documentary Burden of Dreams (1982), comes this decidedly less monumental short film in which Herzog makes good on a promise he made that if a young Errol Morris ever completed his first film, Herzog would cook and eat his shoe. Since then, Errol Morris has, of course, gone on to become one of the preeminent documentary filmmakers - The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, Standard Operating Procedure, Fast Cheap and Out of Control, Tabloid, etcetera etcetera etcetera. And I think it’s fair to say that Herzog has grown much more comfortable with being wacky and avuncular.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Werner Herzog week continues with Grizzly Man (2005)

In a remarkable late-period that includes Encounters at the End of the World, Rescue Dawn, Into the Abyss, Encounters at the End of the World, The White Diamond, and The Bad Lieutenant - Port of Call:New Orleans, Grizzly Man stands out as one of Werner Herzog’s very best. Timothy Treadwell, a failed actor (he claims to have been the runner-up for Woody Harrelson’s role on Cheers) turned “environmentalist,” spent every summer among the Alaskan grizzly bears - “protecting” them from poachers, he claimed, although most park officials insisted that poaching was not a serious problem. Over the years, he became uncommonly close to the bears, regarding them as his friends and giving them nicknames like “Mr. Chocolate,” until 2003, when one of the grizzlies finally ate him and his girlfriend.

Assembled from hundreds of hours of footage, Grizzly Man plays like a self-aggrandizing Timothy Treadwell self-portrait, remixed and annotated by a very skeptical Herzog. Valuable for the extraordinary footage that Treadwell captured of the bears, Grizzly Man is even more interesting as a kind of posthumous debate by two filmmakers: the wide-eyed, slightly deranged nature lover Treadwell, and Herzog, who states in his narration, “I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.” Considering that only Herzog is alive today, guess who wins?

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Werner Herzog week continues with Cobra Verde (1987)

Herzog’s working relationship with Klaus Kinski dissolved for good during the filming of their fifth and craziest collaboration (Kinski was “completely out of control” says Herzog on the DVD commentary), and Herzog’s last fiction feature until Invincible (2001). Based on Bruce Chatwin’s novel The Viceroy of Ouidah, Kinski stars as Francisco Manoel “Cobra Verde” de Silva, a sinister bandit in 19th Century Bahai, who manages to impregnate every one of his wealthy plantation-owner boss’ daughters. As punishment, Cobra Verde is sent to West Africa to work in the slave trade, but winds up leading the slaves as a rebel army. And, of course, he goes insane - but not before fathering dozens of children with his rebel army.

This is the least-seen and least-loved of the Herzog/Kinski films, but it’s a lot of fun. As usual, there are many wild and memorable images, particularly the sight of the raving Kinski leading an army of topless natives (“A spectacularly Freudian nightmare conjured after wanking to one too many National Geographic magazines,” said Ed Halter in The Village Voice), but the biggest pleasure is the unhinged Kinski. In a career full of over-the-top performances, this may be the craziest.

***

Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Roger Ebert from 2005:

RE: I don’t want to prompt you with another story that I probably have wrong, but when you mention being 11, I’m trying to remember the details of something you told me once of having seen Klaus Kinski. When you were young.

WH: I was 13 then.

RE: Thirteen. And knowing, somehow. You saw him and you knew something.

WH: We had moved to Munich, and we lived in some sort of a boarding house, the four of us, my mother and my two brothers, so it was four persons in one room. One day, the owner of the place, an elderly lady who had a heart for starving artists, picked up Kinski literally from the street, well, actually from an attic that he had occupied, he had squatted in an attic and filled it up with autumn leaves, and made huge scandals, and would climb up to the roof and defy policemen who would try to arrest him. And she picked him up and fed him and gave him a very small room in our boarding house. She did his laundry, fed him, everything, for free. And from the very first moment I was terrorized. Everyone was in sheer terror. It took him only 48 hours and the entire bathroom was in smithereens.

He would yell and scream, and the only one that was not afraid — who
was just in amazement and wonderment — was a young peasant women,
something like 17 or 18 years old. She was not afraid at all and she had a tray and Kinski flung the tray against the wall and all the dishes left a mess and I still see her, she bends down, slowly picks up the empty tray, and smacks him in the face with it. And he would calm down for a moment, but it was only fleeting, because he would be like, how should I say, like a hurricane. Laying waste two apartments, movies, he would wreck cars, he would wreck Ferraris, no it was not Ferraris, it was Rolls-Royces, at a rate of a Rolls Royce  a week.

Later when he was in Italy and earned a lot of money, there was always a trail of devastation behind him, and some of it was not funny because part of him was really, really, really bad. So he may rest in peace and make his peace with the creator if ever he encounters him. So then I was 13. And of course one day I asked him to do “Aguirre.” When I sent him the screenplay, 12 years later, I knew if he would accept it, what I had to expect, but I was never afraid.

RE: Many directors do not hire someone that they believe is going to be trouble.

WH: No, it was much more.

RE: It was much more than trouble. You were going take him into the middle of the rain forest hundreds of miles from anything and live with him there for months. And it was a film that you could not possibly start again if anything went wrong. And you bet everything on that. When we think of “Aguirre” we think of Kinsey, so yours was the right decision, but what a chance you took.

WH: When you know that there is only one option that you have, there is no alternative. There is absolutely no alternative. But Kinski doing Aguirre must not be afraid of actually doing it, and no matter what comes along you will prevail as long as it’s a secure vision.

RE: The legend is that Kinski accepted movies entirely on the basis of convenience and location.

WH: Money.

RE: Money.

WH: He would even do hard-core pornos for money. Money,
money, money! And if for any reason he would start to scream, he
would scream until he had frost on his mouth. He would scream about
this pig who didn’t offer him decent money, who was this psychopathic
asshole. Obviously he made some distinctions, because I obviously
paid him much less than others would offer him. I mean a fraction of
that. I didn’t have the budget. Kinski the bastard won a third of the
entire budget.

And then, there’s an interesting thing, the real good version is the German version, it’s the authentic version, but since we filmed a lot in rapids there was such a huge noise that — of course we did have some direct sound — but you could hardly understand a word. We had to post-synch it, so I said to Klaus, “We need you for looping, for one and a half days.” He said, “Yes, I’m coming, but it will cost a million dollars.” And there was absolutely no way. He knew, of course, I didn’t have a thousand dollars, everything was gone, my wrist watch was gone, everything, and he asked for a million dollars, he hated the film so badly you could not believe it. And he didn’t show up for looping so I looped it with a different voice, and the voice is as good as Kinski. I took a lot of effort; nobody, nobody would ever know. But you know it now. Can you please not… do not leak to the press.

RE: But you have just told 1,600 people. (Laughter) What is astonishing, you returned to the jungle for “Fitzcarraldo,” and it seemed like you both wanted to do this.

WH: We were not mad I think. He understood that there was a higher duty that both of us had to accept. That was actually the most dangerous of all, because of course I could tolerate all sorts of  things, and it was not only Kinski that was hard to take. Moving the  ship over the hill was something you could not imagine, and we had  all sorts of catastrophes. We had two plane crashes. We had people  shot with huge arrows at the throat that almost killed them and we  operated on them on kitchen tables. Everything in the book happened,  with now Kinski on this location. Everyone in the crew after two  days would turn against me: “How can you have the guts to bring in  this pestilence again? We are refusing!” The actors on a daily basis would threaten to terminate with a strike. For me there was one borderline, it was duty, a high duty. High duty on which he stood and I stood.

In “Aguirre,” at the end, ten days before the end of shooting, Kinski, I believe as usual, didn’t learn his lines. They were very short lines anyway, and he all of a sudden interrupts everything and throws everything around and he screams in a tantrum and destroys half the set and screams that the still photographer had smiled and had to be dismissed on the spot. Of course I wouldn’t dismiss him because everyone else would have walked out in solidarity.

I said “No, I’m not doing it, let’s calm down and we’ll continue.” And he left the set. And I knew why he had done it because he had done it 35 times just within the last five years. And because of that, movies were canceled and destroyed. It was too well documented. He packed his things into a speedboat and screamed and screamed. And it was somehow not correctly reported in the press, but I have witnesses that I was unarmed, and did not point a gun at him, but I walked up and I said to him, “Klaus, I don’t have to make up my mind. I’ve had months of deliberating where is the borderline that we will not transgress. This would be the transgression, the borderline. This is something that you will not survive.”

I said to him, “I do have a rifle,” very calmly. He could try to take the boat and he might reach the next bend of the river but he would have eight bullets through his head. But of course there were nine bullets, and I said, “Guess who gets the last one?” And he looked at me and he understood it was not a joke anymore. I would have done it. He understood he better behave, and it was kind of hostile for the next couple of days. But what I’m trying to say is, the incident may sound funny now, and it seems funny and bizarre to me; if I sat out there I would laugh with you. But what I’m trying to say is that there’s always been a very clear borderline, a line that must not be stepped over. So once you accept the duty you have to understand the duty that is upon you. I’ve always understood it myself.

From the set of Cobra Verde.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Werner Herzog week continues with The Wild Blue Yonder (2005)

One of Herzog’s greatest talents is the way he can use the camera to make the mundane and familiar seem odd, askew, even unnerving - the endlessly repeating shots of a plane landing in Fata Morgana, or the dancing chicken in Stroszek, or the pungent jungles of Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, or practically any scene in Encounters at the End of the World. If those films are some of Herzog’s masterpieces, then the no-budget, little-known “science-fiction film” Wild Blue Yonder is more of a sketchbook, filled with strange ideas and beautiful images.

In a performance best appreciated in small doses, Herzog regular Brad Dourif plays “The Alien,” who has come to earth from his dying home planet in search of colonies. As the human race also departs from the over-polluted earth in search of other planets, Douriff settles on our abandoned planet. The film alternates between Dourif ranting at the camera from unsettlingly bleak and empty American landscapes, footage from a NASA space mission (the human colonizers, we’re told), and footage from an exploration under the ice of Antarctica (Dourif’s home planet; Herzog used similar footage to similarly alien effect in Encounters at the End of the World). This is not one of Herzog’s more fully-realized films, and even at 80 minutes it’s about twice as long as it needs to be, but it is worth a look for its otherworldly ambience, its visual beauty, its distinctly Herzogian blurring of fiction and documentary, and its general nuttiness.

Here’s an excerpt of an interview between Herzog and Mark Kermode:

MK: We should also say that there’s a very close bond between this film [Encounters at the End of the World] and Wild Blue Yonder, in which you’re using the photography of the same guy.

WH: Yes, Henry Kaiser is mostly a musician but his real deepest passion is diving. He’s an expert diver. In Antarctica, they wouldn’t allow anyone who’s not an expert diver because it’s dangerous – if some sort of underwater current swept you away, or if you got disoriented, you would perish. By coincidence, I saw his footage while I was doing the music for Grizzly Man, which he produced with Richard Thompson. I was with the musicians, right next to them, where I would say things like, “Can you take your shoes off?” So I’m behind two glass walls and in the control room, I see my editor and Henry Kaiser looking at a laptop. By coincidence, Henry Kaiser turns around, and for a moment, for two seconds, I see something extraordinary on the laptop, and I said immediately, “Stop everything. Stop the machines.” And I rushed out and said to Henry, “What is this?” And he said, “I did some underwater filming and it’s really bad, I don’t like it much. I don’t know why I showed it to Joe Bini.” But I insisted on having a look, and of course it was kind of unorganised but had an incredible profound beauty. So I asked Henry to give me this footage for a science-fiction film, which he did, so I owe him a lot. Then I kept bothering him over the next months: “I want to go there, I want to film this.” And he said, “No, there’s no chance. You will not make it.” So when I kept insisting, he said that maybe there was a chance because there’s an artists and writers’ programme at the National Science Foundation, to which anyone could apply. So I made a strange, wild application, and they invited me, to my surprise. And that was how I stumbled into it. Henry Kaiser was the one who got me into this mess. [audience laughs]

MK: For anyone who hasn’t seen Wild Blue Yonder, would you like to explain it?

WH: Yes. Brad Dourif plays an alien who has landed on our planet, but he’s a failed alien. It’s not like they are superhuman beings who finish off humanity with a few nuclear blasts; they all suck, yet they somehow survive. He comes from this planet, the Wild Blue Yonder, which he explains is a planet of great beauty. When you visit the planet, you float in liquid helium, which is only two or three degrees from absolute zero, but doesn’t matter. And it’s a very beautiful strange story. I also found footage that was shot by astronauts back in 1989 on a Space Shuttle mission. And I think that was the last time that astronauts shot on 16mm celluloid – footage of extraordinary beauty and strangeness. So I asked to use this footage. And this is one of the things I like about America: that things that were created for an official American agency, like in this case Nasa, these are public property, they are the property of the people. And not just the American people; I’m a German and they were available for me as well. So it was property of the world, which is a wonderful concept. I used some of these wonderful shots that the astronauts did for this film – it was made very quickly and with very little money, and I’m very proud of it. It’s out on DVD now.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Werner Herzog week continues with My Best Fiend (1999)

To my eyes, My Best Fiend, Herzog’s documentary self-portrait about his personal and professional relationship with Klaus Kinski, is both one of the most irresistible and most flawed of Herzog’s films. It suffers the practical flaw that little footage exists of Kinski and Herzog together, so for much of the runtime, Herzog simply sits in the locations where their films were shot and tells anecdotes to the camera. However, what footage Herzog digs up is uniformly memorable: Kinski raging at the audience during his “Jesus Tour”; Kinski berating a crew member on the set of Fitzcarraldo (a deleted scene from Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams); a touching moment of Herzog and Kinski hugging each other/chatting affectionately at the Telluride Film Festival; a side-by-side comparison between Jason Robards’ aborted performance as Fitzcarraldo, and Kinski’s.

The other flaw is more conceptual. Ostensibly a tribute to his late collaborator Klaus Kinski, My Best Fiend strikes me as more than a little self-serving. No doubt plagued for years by the myths that arose from the productions of Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo (like the old story that he forced Kinski to act at gunpoint - or at least threatened it), My Best Fiend feels like an attempt by Herzog to position himself as the only sane man who could harness the volatile madman. There are many stories of Kinski’s ranting and raving, and comparatively few about his talent or warmth (Claudia Cardinale and Eva Mattes are on-hand to provide some kind words), and it’s hard not to wince when Herzog says things like, “Together we were like two critical masses which made for a dangerous combination when coming into conflict.” More than anything, My Best Fiend makes me wish Kinski was alive to provide a rebuttal.

But while this is hardly a great movie, it is, as I said, irresistible. All these flaws could be excused away by the sheer fact that a film like this is a valuable document. You may quibble with his presentation, but this is inarguably Herzog’s perspective of Kinski, and how wonderful it would be if every prolific actor/director team produced an autobiographical document of this nature (Scorsese/DeNiro, Kurosawa/Mifune, Von Sternberg/Dietrich, Greydon Clark/Joe Don Baker… the possibilities are endless). And, if you like hilarious stories about Kinski throwing tempter tantrums, My Best Fiend has ‘em in spades.

Recommended after - and only after - viewings of all five Kinski/Herzog films.

***

There are very few English-language interviews with Klaus Kinski, but this invaluable collection of Kinski resources includes an interview he did with Fangoria, issue #24:

Fangoria: One of your latest films, Fitzcarraldo, is already something of a legend…

Kinski: Yeah, they made a legend out of it. It’s strange to see how a legend grows.

Fangoria: How did this one grow?

Kinski: Werner Herzog invents his own legends to make himself look interesting. He was writing down notes the entire time he was shooting the film. He had a notebook with him, always. It took him longer to write his ledger than it did to film the movie. Every three minutes he’d be off scribbling. He was printing tinier than the print you find in the Bible. Brave! You can print smaller than the Bible. [NOTE: Herzog’s diaries were published in 2009 as “Conquest of the Useless”]

He would send these letters back to newspapers in Germany, like some explorer describing the conquest of the North Pole. “This morning, Kinski tempts me…but I resist! I cannot give up!” That sort of shit. “I have the feeling that Kinski is terrified of being filmed!” Of course I was terrified of being filmed! The cameraman didn’t know anything about lighting and half the crew didn’t understand the movie.

Fangoria: Was filming in the Amazon jungle as rough as Herzog states?

Kinski: We made it rough. The jungle is life itself. A thousand times more alive than anything you’ve ever seen. We didn’t go there to be a part of it. We invaded it. We shaved the jungle and made a stinking camp in the middle of it. Radios blaring. It was disgusting.

Herzog was most interested in showing the world that he could pull a 250 ton ship over a mountain. That’s the plot of the movie. I would say things like, “You are stupid! This task is stupid! What are you trying to prove? American movie makers would use a small model ship that would duplicate the full scale ship. You’d save time. You’d save money!”

He said, “No, I want to show the world that I can do what nobody has ever done.” I say to that, “Fuck that, asshole.”

The real Fitzcarraldo’s ship was only 35 tons. He had it dismantled and carried across the jungle. Herzog wanted to outdo the real Fitzcarraldo. That’s crazy.

Fangoria: Did Herzog’s behavior strike you as being particularly odd?

Kinski: No. Herzog’s always been like that. He did strange things when we were filming Aguirre 12 years ago. He wanted us to do suicidal things. But he didn’t count on me. I wouldn’t get trapped like the others.

We were supposed to go down the jungle rapids in a raft. The local natives were saying “You’ll die! You can’t do that!” Herzog dismissed them. He was in a motorboat. I was on the damned raft with over 40 pounds of armor on. If I had fallen into the water, I wouldn’t have been able to swim. The raft ran into a tree. We were in the water up to our waists. I started cutting my armor off. Herzog told me to stop. To keep it on. I yelled back “Fuck you!” He didn’t care about me. He filmed the entire scene, with me cursing at him and cutting off my armor. Later, he played that one scene in Germany before the movie opened. He was already creating legends years ago. Me? I think a movie, if it’s good, will create its own legend once it opens.

Fangoria: Do you dislike Herzog?

Kinski: No. He’s a highly talented guy. He does very good movies and he’s not the sort of person who always talks in bullshit. He does man,y many things right. But he’s also sick. Obsessed. He wants to make history, not movies. Anyone who wants to make history is stupid.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Werner Herzog week continues with Encounters at the End of the World (2007)

In this hypnotic tour of Antarctica, everything from the remarkable (footage captured beneath the ice - or, as Herzog so beautifully puts it, “the frozen sky”) to the mundane (talent-show night at an Antarctica pub) looks equally strange and beautiful. Herzog the narrator is also at his best: describing Antarctica’s biggest town, he deadpans, “McMurdo has climate-controlled housing facilities, there’s a radio station, a bowling alley, and abominations such as an aerobic studio and yoga classes. It even has an ATM machine.”

I remember, back in my misspent youth, writing a review of this where I pontificated pedantically about the lack of a typical Herzogian hero - an eccentric, deranged dreamer/loner. First of all, give me a break - I was 18, and learning the joys of the auteur theory. Secondly, how could I have overlooked the deranged penguin=? At the beginning of the film, Herzog’s hilariously grave narration states, “I did not want to make another film about fluffy penguins” (a thinly-veiled swipe at that distinctly un-Herzogian documentary, March of the Penguins); leave it to Herzog to find the Klaus Kinski of penguins.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams (1982)

One of the great films about filmmaking, this documentary follows the production of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo during its most challenging stage: the hauling of a giant steamship over a hill in an Amazon jungle. By this point, Fitzcarraldo had been in production for two years, and had already faced such hardships as terrible weather, the abandonment of original actors Jason Robards and Mick Jagger (who had already shot 40% of the film), and wars between native tribes. There are many who consider Burden of Dreams better than Fitzcarraldo itself, perhaps because a nonfiction madman trying to lift a steamship over a hill beats a fictional one; certainly, Burden of Dreams shares with Fitzcarraldo a pungent, sometimes overwhelming jungle atmosphere. In both of these films, the jungle isn’t just pretty scenery - it’s “full of obscenity… fornication and asphyxiation and fighting for survival and just rotting away,” to quote Herzog.

In this delightful clip, Herzog sounds every bit like a man who has been stressed out in the jungle for too long.

Here’s what Herzog had to say about Burden of Dreams in the invaluable book Herzog on Herzog (2002):

I did not invite Les Blank to the jungle, but he was very eager to come down and make a film down there. I was at first quite reluctant to have a camera around because there is something distasteful about making films about films. When you work, like when you cook a meal at home, and there is someone staring at your hands, watching what you are doing all the time, suddenly you are not a good cook any longer. I have the feeling that we function differently when being observed. But Les turned out to be a good presence. He is very unobtrusive and he certainly does have a good eye. But something to remember is that what he recorded for his film was shot in only five weeks, while Fitzcarraldo took four years to make. So he captured only a tiny fraction of what went on during the making of the film.

What I always liked about Les was that he was not some sort of a court jester who would adulate the production. Most of the time he would hang around the camp where the natives would do their cooking. He would cook with them, he would shoot trails of ants, he was as much interested in what was going on with the ants as he was with the film itself. I always liked that attitude. Though in some sequences the film might not project a particularly favourable image of me, I do like Burden of Dreams, though it did cause some problems for me. For example, at one point in the film I talk of how people have lost their lives, but Les did not include my explanation of the circumstances in his film. He just cut it out, and so all of a sudden it sounds as if I had risked lives for the sake of a film. This stench followed me for a whole decade.

Klaus Kinski, the star of such New German Cinema masterpieces as Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, was not only a great and memorable actor: he also got angry a lot. In another exciting instalment of KLAUS KINSKI GETS ANGRY, we celebrate this famed thespian’s struggles to keep a leash on his temper.

In today’s episode, Klaus has an altercation with a crew member on the set of Fitzcarraldo.

ANOTHER MOLDY ARTICLE FROM THE ARCHIVES

This one come from November 19, 2009 issue of The Varsity.

LIEUTENANT WERNER

By Will Sloan

Werner Herzog would like to make something very clear about his new film, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. You know that 1992 film called Bad Lieutenant? The one directed by Abel Ferrara, starring Harvey Keitel, and the “inspiration” for Herzog’s film (at least according to the studio press notes)? Forget about it. There’s no relation.

“I know you changed the location from New York to New Orleans,” says a journalist at a roundtable interview with Herzog during this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, “but how else did you make this remake your own film?”

“Explain ‘remake,’” intones Herzog gravely in his deep German accent.

“Uh…”

“What is a remake? Explain it.”

“Uh…uh…”

He leans forward, and continues talking in a foreboding monotone. “Explain it. You are the one who is challenged now.”

“Uh… well, it’s based on the film by Abel Ferrara…”

“No, it is not. How is it based on the film by Abel Ferrara?”

The journalist is practically quivering. “Uh…well, it has sort of a similar…I mean…”

“It is not. What is similar? Not one scene.”

“You’re right. It’s not similar,” she interjects.

“Okay, so why do you use that term?” A pause, before his voice lightens. “Because it is floating around?” Herzog’s famously frowning mouth breaks into a smile, and everyone laughs. “It was just a title that was owned by one of the producers, and they hoped to own some sort of a franchise. It’s nothing to do with the other film.”

No kidding. Both films centre around a corrupt police lieutenant plunging into sex, drug, and gambling addictions, but where the original was gritty, intense, and charged with Catholic guilt, Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is more of a weird, over-the-top ride. If the lieutenant were asked to make a film about himself while at his most intoxicated, it would look something like this.

The film is set in a pungently atmospheric post-Katrina New Orleans, a nightmare version of the city where prostitutes are on every street corner and the sun shines on the demolished Lower Ninth Ward so brightly that it’s almost cruel.

“The screenplay was written either for New York or Detroit,” says Herzog, “and there was a purely financial reason. The producer, Avi Lerner, said, ‘Could you consider to do it in New Orleans? Because we have these fantastic tax incentives in Louisiana.’ And I said, ‘Sure! Wonderful! Can’t get any better! Let’s move it along!’”

“You can see that the city in a way is a leading character,” he continues, “but I always avoided [having] the kinds of New Orleans clichés: Bourbon Street, and jazz musicians, and you just name it. There’s dozens of clichés that I circumnavigated…I think New Orleans apart from the postcard clichés becomes very palpable.”

This is one of the best movies of the year, but here’s the real surprise: it’s the funniest movie Herzog has ever made. Framed by a brilliant, maniacal lead performance by Nicolas Cage, Bad Lieutenant starts as a standard police procedural drama and quickly, unashamedly descends into crazy-town. Who but Herzog would fill a cop drama with lines like, “Don’t you have a lucky crack pipe?” Who else would have the lieutenant say, “Shoot him again! His soul is still dancing!” and then actually show a corpse’s soul dancing? Who else would be mad enough to have our hero hallucinate iguanas, and then linger on the iguanas in extreme close-up for a full minute?

Herzog describes Bad Lieutenant as a new kind of film noir. “In the classic ’40s, ’50s film noir, the darkness is an all-pervading, oppressive force that stifles everything. In this film noir, it’s all joyful: a bliss”—he practically licks his lips on this word—“a bliss of evil…[Cage] asked me why is [the lieutenant] so bad? And I said, ‘Oh come on, don’t bore me with conceptual questions! Let’s focus on one single thing: there is such a thing as the bliss of evil.’”

“It seems to me,” I say, “that you took the archetypes of film noir and sorta kicked them into high gear.” He smiles broadly. “It’s probably in overdrive! It’s somewhere beyond it. It spins not out of control, but it spins into a different stratum.”

An octogenarian journalist chimes in. “I don’t understand this ‘bliss of evil.’ I’ve never felt it. I’ve felt bliss of goodness, but I don’t get ‘bliss of evil’ at all.”

For a moment it appears that Werner Herzog, that fearsome warrior of cinema, willing to risk life and limb to pull a steamship over a mountain in Fitzcarraldo or climb an active volcano in La Soufrière, is actually at a loss for words. He smiles again. “Uh…you are speaking of personal life, and I am speaking of movies—figments of fantasies. So, sure, we have to make a distinction.” A pause. “And you have probably lived a blessed life so far.”

She shrugs her shoulders and shakes her head. Herzog sighs. “Well, whatever…”

WILL’S ART HOUSE

Werner Herzog’s La boheme (2009)

Filmed around the same time as Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (which could perhaps be grouped with the rather less-goofy Rescue Dawn as the director’s American Genre Trilogy, or something), La boheme is a five-minute short film by Werner Herzog in which “harsh life of Africa” (I’m quoting IMDb here) is set to the music of Puccini. Specifically, Puccini’s “O Soave Fanciulla” (“Oh, you vision of beauty”).

I don’t really get it, truth be told. I think there’s an ironic point here, or maybe a sad point, or some other type of point, but I think Herzog is occasionally guilty of treating his films’ various African/South American Tribesmen as props rather than flesh-and-blood humans. Like, remember than scene in My Best Fiend when he’s telling us some story about “zat madman Keeenskeeee” while sitting next to some utterly indifferent-looking South American natives who clearly don’t understand a word he’s saying? I guess my point is, Herzog sometimes has trouble regarding these people as humans instead of icons, or ideas.

But I dunno, I might be wrong. Anyway, it’s a Werner Herzog film you probably haven’t seen, so you should probably watch it.

It’s time for another exciting instalment of GREAT MOMENTS FROM BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS, wherein we celebrate the many delightful moments from this Werner Herzog/Nicolas Cage crime classic.

In today’s episode, Lieutenant Nicolas Cage finds himself in an altercation with a pharmacist.