It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive (35 page)

Most moviemakers are indeed boringly well behaved, but Herzog is one of those rare few who seem to treat cinema as a genuinely spiritual art form, and he is more than willing to suffer for his art if his celluloid vision demands it. Like the wounded heroes of his epic movies, he is a man on a mission which draws him ever closer to the abyss. At the time of our meeting in LA, he had just completed work on
Grizzly Man
, a documentary about gung-ho animal lover Timothy Treadwell who went native with the bears up in Alaska’s remote ‘grizzly maze’. Treadwell spent thirteen summers communing with these bears, living, sleeping and eating with them until (inevitably?) one of them ate him. Treadwell was amiably nuts, giving these mammoth beasts cuddly names like ‘Rowdy’ and ‘Mister Chocolate’ which suggested a wild underestimation of their capacity for casual slaughter. Tellingly, Herzog described Treadwell as having ‘something missing’ before embracing him as ‘definitely one of the family. He had something volatile. Something broken, something dark, something inexplicably wild in him. He had something in his nature which reminds me of some of my leading characters, like Kinski.’

In his commentary for
Grizzly Man
(which recalls the writings of Joseph Conrad) Herzog talks of Treadwell’s misjudgement of nature as essentially benign in contrast to the quiet dark-hearted horror which underwrites his own cosmic philosophy.’Once in a while Treadwell came face to face with the harsh reality of nature,’ he intones over footage
of Timothy examining the severed paw of a young bear – torn off not by hunters, but by an adult male bear seeking food, fighting, and sex, and with no time for kids.’This did not fit into his sentimentalised view that everything out there was good, and the universe in balance and in harmony.’ Where Treadwell saw growing friendship in the faces of the bears, Herzog found only ‘a bored interest in food’, culminating in his deadpan declaration that ‘I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.’ Considering the fact that Treadwell’s blindingly naïve optimism led to the violent death of not only him but also his long-suffering girlfriend Amie Huguenard it’s hard not to conclude that Herzog was probably right. No wonder he viewed getting shot at as so utterly unremarkable – something to be expected in a uniformly hostile and chaotic world.

In fact, the reason we were up on that wretched promontory by Lookout Mountain in the first place was Herzog’s declared expectation that he would probably get shot at if we stayed at his house. Upon our arrival chez Werner, our BBC director David Shulman had asked if we could get an establishing shot of me arriving at the house and meeting Herzog in his front garden – the fearless Bavarian legend now ensconced on the leafy borders of Hollywood. Herzog shook his head gravely and explained, ‘This is not a good idea. I do not want the outside of my house to be shown on television because I attract crazy people.’ By way of example, Herzog recounted being in his office back in Munich when a woman arrived demanding to see him.
The woman had rung several times insisting that she was close to Herzog and forcefully requesting his assistance in her current (non-specific) travails. Somehow she had managed to inveigle her way into Herzog’s office where she declared that the director was in league with 20th Century Fox to destroy her life.’She had a bag with her,’ Herzog remembered, ‘and she began to reach inside it. I don’t know what it was, some kind of
intuition
– but as she reached into her bag I
lunged
across the table and grabbed it, and in the bag was a gun. Loaded. It was somewhat upsetting.’

And that’s not all. Other attacks upon Werner’s person included someone ‘diving through my kitchen window at night, flying through it like Batman, a car jack in their hand’, the context and gravity of which I was frankly unable to comprehend. What was clear was that we probably
didn’t
want to be advertising Werner’s home address to any wandering whackos. Instead we decided to take a drive uphill, up toward Lookout Mountain Avenue where the road arches majestically along the edge of the hill and the entire vista of smog-bound LA is laid out below. The sun was hanging low in the late-afternoon sky, and the light as ‘magic hour’ approaches always looks good on camera. David had earned a reputation as one of
The Culture Show
’s most visually ambitious directors, and it was no secret that he took little pleasure in simply filming two people in a room talking to each other, so the possibility of getting something that actually looked vaguely cinematic was an attractive one.

So off we went, two cars pootling quietly up into the hills, cicadas buzzing gently in the hedgerow – an idyllic evening.
When we reached the appointed place it was impressive indeed, although annoyingly someone had fenced off the particular slice of roadside headland from which the best view of the city was available. Herzog insisted that the fence wasn’t there a couple of days ago, and since it didn’t seem to be
doing
anything we decided to just scoot round it; after all, who was going to object to us walking on a bit of old scrubland? As it turned out, a resident up the hill started barking at our cameraman that this particular bit of scrubland was ‘about to be developed’. We asked if he owned it, or if indeed he
knew
who owned it. He didn’t. So, what the hell. We thought: ‘We’ll get the shot, it’ll only take a couple of minutes, and we’ll be gone.’ We were very polite; we said please and thank you. The neighbour wasn’t, and didn’t. He just muttered something about us having inappropriate relations with our mothers and stormed back inside his house across the street. We all got on with the job in hand – after all, what’s the worst that could happen?

‘In Germany,’ intoned Werner sombrely as the cameras started to roll, ‘I’ve somehow left a paved road. Nobody cares about my films.’ It was a bleak assessment of his legacy in Europe, the continent from which Herzog had effectively fled seeking artistic sanctuary in America. Having spent a lifetime refusing to play the mainstream movie game, it seemed both poignant and bizarre to find him here in the very heart of the beast, lurking on the outskirts of Hollywood, an industry town in which art is endlessly (and unashamedly – even
proudly
) devoured and regurgitated by commerce. A land of agents, percentages and power lunches.
Hardly a place where you’d expect to find ‘ecstatic truth’.

Yet Herzog, ever the contrarian, had seen something here that fitted his fractured world view. A few months later he would amaze interviewer Henry Rollins by telling him that Los Angeles was the most ‘substantial’ city in America. Certainly it made sense for anyone attempting to finance their films to make occasional forays into the wilds of Hollywood like military platoons performing operational raids into hostile enemy territory – get in, take what you need, and get
out
, hopefully unscathed. But Herzog seemed to actually
like
it here, or at least to like it
more
than Europe, which is perhaps not quite the same thing.

And then he got shot – or as Herzog himself later termed it, ‘unsuccessfully shot’. Looking back on it now, the entire episode seems so bizarre that I’m inclined to think I must have made it all up. As we’ve seen, I’ve spent so much time telling wildly exaggerated stories about my past that I can no longer tell a real-life falling cymbal from a fictional perambulating drummer. More often than not I just end up believing the myths I created for entertainment (and, let’s be honest, self-aggrandisement), abiding by that timeless maxim from
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
that ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend’.

So long as the legend is ‘inspired by real events’.

But poetic licence aside I’m pretty sure that the Herzog shooting did
really
happen. So I go to YouTube and put ‘Herzog/Kermode/Shot’ into the search engine, and there it is: Werner and me, together in LA, providing target practice for some nut-job with a BB gun. There’s Werner in his dark
brown leather jacket, quietly complaining about his outsider status in Germany; there’s the weird cracking noise that was the only aural indication that anything untoward had happened; there’s the brief moment of confusion as Werner lifts his arm, looks down at his waist and wonders quietly ‘What was that?’ And then there’s the footage of me hanging off the fence trying to get back up on to the roadside, captured by David on his DV cam after the main camera stopped rolling at the first sound of gunfire. The effect is not dignified – although my hair seems to be standing up well. So not a complete disaster.

Back in the car, David kept his video camera rolling as Werner strapped himself in, remarking with a frown that ‘Los Angeles is not really very friendly toward film-makers.’ No kidding! We wanted to call the police and get Werner to a hospital, but Herzog was having none of it.’It is not a significant bullet,’ he kept repeating, adding that ‘in Los Angeles if you report a shooting they overreact. They send out a SWAT team with helicopters and squad cars. We don’t need that.’

It was clear that Herzog wasn’t going to change his mind (‘I have been shot at in the jungles of Peru –
that
is being shot at’) and so eventually we headed back down the hill toward his house, Werner trudging woundedly up the garden path, apparently resigned to the fact that he really did attract crazy people wherever he went.

Inside the house, David and the crew began to assemble the barrage of lights, cameras and dolly tracks that make any television interview look like a small-scale military
intervention. In a matter of moments we had successfully rendered Herzog’s house unfit for human habitation, a criss-crossing maze of power leads and camera cables making every step a potentially electrifying experience. (People who work in television – myself included – complain endlessly about all the health and safety red tape we have to deal with but honestly it’s surprising that more people don’t die while attempting to tell Richard and Judy about their fifteen-year battle with IBS.) Herzog eyed the expanding chaos with mild amusement before falling into conversation with our cameraman about some innovation in the field of digital photography. Meanwhile I lurked in the background, trying to figure out how to approach the forthcoming interview in the wake of all that weirdness up on Lookout Mountain. Eventually we were ready, and Herzog eased himself gingerly into his chair, ready and willing to be probed, if not actively penetrated.

Herzog was engrossing, and his company effervescent. He spoke eloquently about
Wrestlemania
as a modern form of Greek theatre and explained why it had been important to keep abreast of Anna Nicole Smith’s reality TV show. He talked about being a ‘good soldier for cinema’ and of the poet’s responsibility to look the world in the eye and to have ‘no fear’. And he spoke movingly of Treadwell’s grisly death, the sounds of which had been captured on Timothy’s own camera but which Herzog refused to include in his documentary because ‘there is such a thing as privacy’. Yet all the time we were talking a voice in the back of my head kept saying: ‘He just got shot. He just got
shot
! Jeeze Louise, he
really
did
really
just get
really
shot.
Really
. Surely he’s hurt. What if he’s
bleeding
? What if he’s hurt
and
bleeding and I’m just sitting here talking to him about
movies
and ecstatic truth and
Wrestlemania
and Anna Nicole Smith and all the while his insides are gradually becoming his
outsides
? What if the bullet’s still inside him? Isn’t that
bad
? Isn’t that
very bad indeed
? Won’t it go septic? Doesn’t someone have to suck it out? Oh no, that’s snakes, isn’t it. Westerns. Sorry, wrong genre. OK, what do they do in cop movies? Should we pour whiskey on the wound and then get Herzog to bite down on a stick while I remove the bits with a red-hot blade? No, that’s Westerns again. Damn, I can’t think straight. But that’s because I’m talking to a man who
just got shot and has now probably got a bullet lodged in his abdomen
. Why isn’t he weeping in pain? Why isn’t he giving me a letter and demanding that I promise to take it to his sweetheart in Bavaria? Did any of this really happen? What the hell
is
happening …?’

Eventually I could contain it no more.’Look Werner,’ I blurted as the crew stopped to change tapes.’I can’t just go on not mentioning this. We have to talk about this whole getting shot thing.’

‘It is not signif —’

‘I
know
it’s “not significant” to you, but that’s because you’re Werner Herzog, the fearless Bavarian film-maker who has faced down death in the jungles of Peru. But I am Mark Kermode the much less fearless film critic who once had fifty pence stolen from him by a tough-looking teenager on Whetstone High Street and thought that was pretty
Mean Streets
so it is
not insignificant to me
! OK? And about half an
hour ago I was standing next to you in gun-toting Los Angeles when smoke started to emerge from the waistband of your trousers. And to me that seems
very significant indeed
. And I
need
to talk about it. If that’s OK with you.’

‘It is OK,’ Werner shrugged.

‘On camera!’ said David in a not very sotto voce stage-whisper.

‘What?’ we both replied in unison.

‘You need to talk about it
on camera
…’

It transpired that David had no idea whether or not the shooting, which we’d all witnessed and which was now proving so preoccupying, had actually been captured on film. If it
hadn’t
, and if we were going to make reference to it in the finished piece, then we needed something –
anything
– to prove that we weren’t
making this all up
.

‘It happened,’ said Werner.’And I am happy to prove it … as long as you don’t sensationalise what happened.’

Presumably it wasn’t sensational enough already.

‘Great. Then when you’re ready, we’ll talk about it. On camera …’

The tapes started rolling again. I took a deep breath and tried to look casual.