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Well, listening to Werner Herzog speak was a treat (to say nothing of seeing Aguirre and Fitz on the big screen).

Posted by sjb (A) on March 25, 2007 at 08:08:14

He touched on some interesting things during the Q&A between films.

He was asked about shooting digitally and he said he’s a celluloid man (with a couple of situational exceptions). He said that when shooting digitally people don’t know when to turn off the camera and you often wind up with a LOT'S of mediocre footage. He talked about Aguirre and how they shot 40k feet of film total (I’ve gotten more footage than that for a set of 4 or 5 30 second commercials) and that he was so aware about how valuable each roll of film was that he really had to be precise about what he shot with it. He had to make decisions and trust his instincts all at the same time.

The same thing is lost editing digitally. We can easily try every (or many, many) possible combination(s) and no one has to commit until the very end. I never cut on film but when they did they HAD to make a decision (yes, you can cut and re-cut but they didn't have nearly the same latitude).

He spoke about how in Aguirre they had extra’s they’d hired off the streets of Cuzco or hippie travelers in the mountain towns and they often caused trouble/started fights, etc. Herzog said that he’d kill off (and thereby get rid of) whoever the worst troublemakers were at any given time.

He spoke about the monkeys at the end and how they were biting him and the cameraman and how he (Herzog) couldn’t get rid of the one on the camerman's shoulder that was biting him without jarring the camera and messing up the shot.

He also said that the man who sold them the monkeys turned around and sold them again to someone else (an American businessman) so that when they were supposed to be available to shoot that last scene they were on their way to the airport. Herzog said he went to the airport and they were being loaded onto a cargo plane so he drove to the plane and went nuts demanded the monkeys’ vaccination records (told them he was a veterinarian) and ordered them to load the crates of monkeys onto his truck so he could take them and vaccinate them.

He was asked about his professed aversion to "self-knowledge" and he likened the trend of trying to really dig into and know our-selves to the Spanish Inquisition (in that they’d try to peek into every corner of your soul and have you try and describe your faith). He said that a home which has every dark corner illuminated isn’t one that can be lived in. He said that self-knowledge (and the quest for it) is a modern disease… a poison.

He said many other things that I don’t remember so well. He was asked about the “adventure” of shooting AWOG and Fitz and he went on a bit about how ever since the first guy set foot on the South Pole and Hillary climbed Everest there is no more adventure. That by our HAVING to bother these places we’ve made the word an embarrassment (that you can have an “adventure” in Borneo for $5000 with an “adventure” company) and that people shouldn't focus on the stories of making the films but on the films themsleves.

In regards to that he said one thing he's proud of with Fitzcaraldo is that you can trust your eyes. When you see a ship it is a ship and when you see a mountain it is a mountain. He was wishing that cinema would turn back in that direction (but he was also aware of the futility of that wish).

It was a nice evening with an enthusiastic crowd of movie lovers.

Don't piss on my shoe and tell me it's raining.

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Kimber Kable

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