It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive (36 page)

‘So Werner, during the course of your career you’ve been shot at a couple of times. And in fact when we started this interview somebody took a shot at you, and they
hit
you.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Herzog demurred, beaming, apparently now finding this hilarious.’Yes, it hit me. I
heard
it. And it hurts a little bit.’

‘And I was standing right next to you …’ I interjected.

‘Yes, but it is not a significant bullet.’

‘So have you got a wound?’

‘Yes. I think so.’

‘Well
show
me. Let me
see
.’

Unperturbed, Werner got up and started to loosen the leather belt around his waist and undo the top of his trousers.’I’m sorry,’ he intoned drolly, with just a hint of sauciness.’I shouldn’t do this on camera …’

The belt was lengthy, the buttons fiddly, and the overall effect like some bizarrely clumsy striptease. Come Inside! Bavarian Film-Makers – All Nude! But with a degree of fumbling Herzog got his trousers open and lifted up his jumper to reveal blood seeping through into his white woollen vest. Another layer was peeled back to reveal a pair of purple paisley boxer shorts now emblazoned with a darkening red patch. The surreal burlesque continued as the elasticated waistband of his boxers came down to reveal a palpable hole in Herzog’s abdomen where (as Billy Bragg once poetically put it) no hole should be. The wound was about the size of a dime, with an angry red bruise spreading out from its enticing epicentre. For a second Herzog teasingly fingered the surrounding flesh, causing the wound to gape briefly like the mouth of a tiny sea anemone. Then after this quick illicit flash the boxers came back up like the feathers of one of Mrs Henderson’s racy dancers, and Werner was back – intacto.

‘But Werner you’re bleeding!’ I protested.’Someone has shot at you and created a wound in your abdomen.’

‘It is not significant,’ Werner repeated.

‘But to
you
it’s like this is some sort of everyday thing. “Hello I’mWerner Herzog, the film-maker who gets shot at!”’

‘It’s not an everyday thing,’ laughed Herzog, still retying his belt, ‘but it does not
surprise
me to be shot at.’

The cameras stopped rolling, and Werner walked to the sink to get a drink of water, limping very slightly but otherwise apparently unharmed. David was fiddling with something technical in the corner, and called me over for a discreet word.

‘We need to get him to a hospital,’ he said quietly.

‘He won’t go,’ I replied.

‘I know, but for heaven’s sake, you
saw
it. He’s wounded. OK, it’s probably a
small
wound, but do any of us have any idea what a
big
wound is meant to look like? I don’t. What if that
is
a “big wound”? What if there’s something stuck inside him?’

‘I know, I
know
,’ I whispered.’I’ve been thinking exactly the same thing. What if he gets septicaemia? Isn’t that what happens in movies? Someone gets wounded and no one does anything about it and the next thing someone else is having to saw their leg off without anaesthetic because gangrene’s set in. Or is that only in Westerns?’

Werner was wandering back from the sink, admiring the mini-DV cams, utterly at ease.

‘Look, Werner …’ David and I said in unison.’We need to get you to a hospital.’

‘No!’ he said firmly.’No hospital!’

‘But why not? You’re hurt. What if you’ve been …damaged?’

‘Because,’ said Werner, ‘if I go to hospital with what looks like a gunshot wound then they call the police. And it doesn’t matter if you did the shooting or the getting shot
at
– you are
part
of the shooting. It is a lot of trouble. And anyway, I am fine.’

David had a brief go at pulling rank with some ‘BBC health and safety’ regulations shtick but Werner was having none of t, so eventually we gave up.

Defeated, we packed the gear into the vehicles, the cameras going into a van while David and I piled into his pokey little rental car. We said goodbye to Werner, and pulled away from the house, watching him waving from his garden looking exactly as he had looked when we arrived – only without the bullet hole, obviously.

We trundled down through Laurel Canyon in silence, the oddly pastoral sound effects of the Hollywood Hills warbling away in the background. Finally, I spoke.

‘I need alcohol,’ I said firmly.’And food. Although I could probably live without the food.’

‘Right,’ said David.’Where do we go to get alcohol? Or maybe food?’

Neither of us had any idea. To be honest, we weren’t entirely sure what day of the week it was. I’d only arrived at the airport a couple of hours earlier and my head was still going round and round the baggage carousel.

‘Let’s go back to the hotel and regroup,’ said David.

‘Good idea,’ I replied.’As long as we go straight out again and get alcohol. And maybe food. But with the emphasis on the alcohol.’

So we drove down toward Sunset, toward the thrumming
metropolitan area around the Chateau Marmont and the Standard and the Hyatt, just round the corner from the Magic Castle, and all the other reassuringly familiar hotels in which I habitually stayed (along with every other passing media type) whenever I was filming in Hollywood. For some reason, however, David seemed to be going the wrong way, heading
down
Sunset toward the less salubrious end of town, past the ‘Sunset Strip’ club (Girls! Girls! Girls!) and the In-N-Out burger joint (Burger and Fries $1. 99!) and the ‘Cheques Cashed’ minimart, drifting inexorably toward that end of town where people tend to congregate in search of assistance – financial, sexual and chemical.

‘David, where are we going?’ I asked.

‘We’re here!’ he announced, pulling into a side street and stopping outside a shabby hotel which seemed to have been specifically positioned for ease of access to pushers and pimps. And burgers.

‘Here? Where is “
here
”?’

‘At the hotel.’

‘Sorry, what do you mean “at the hotel?”’

‘I mean “at the hotel” as in “we are at the hotel in which we are staying”.’

I peered out into the gloom. Two hours ago I was getting shot at on some alien LA hillside. But that was a walk in the park compared to this.

‘David, you’re not serious. You’re not really staying in
this
otel.’

‘No,’ said David.’
We
are staying in this hotel. What’s the problem? It’s fine. I’ve been here two nights already.’

The hotel, it transpired, was not David’s choice, but had been booked by a production co-ordinator in London who was apparently mad keen on saving licence-payers’ money. David understood this admirable intention and was clearly making do. But he was made of sterner (and less pampered) stuff than me.

‘But
David
,’ I bleated, ‘we are in the “wrong part of town”, the part of town where people come seeking the kind of “refreshment” for which you and I are not in the market. This is the part of town where anyone who is not a hooker, a pimp, a junkie, a pusher or a john, is clearly
lost
. You could probably get picked up by the police just for being here
without
intent to purchase hard drugs and be beaten up by a large and heavily tattooed transvestite. I wouldn’t even park here let alone
stay
here. So please tell me that this is an example of your darkly ironic New York wit, and I will laugh indulgently, and then we can head back
up
Sunset to the nice part where the wanky media types like you and me stay and we can pretend that this never happened.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ said David.’It’s fine. Grab the bag. And the camera.’

‘“
Grab the camera
”? Are you
mad
? You want me to parade around the streets with a
big expensive camera
? Why don’t I just pin a hundred-dollar bill to my forehead and stand on the street corner shouting, “Hey, I’m from out of town and I’m clearly lost so please mug me!”’

‘You’re being ridiculous,’ said David.’How bad can it be? Look, we just got shot at in Laurel Canyon and that’s meant to be “safe”.’

‘Oh right. And somehow that’s meant to make me feel better is it? The reassurance that
everywhere
is just as dangerous as
everywhere else
?’

But David had gone on inside, and I had no choice but to follow, camera in one hand, kitbag in the other, a look of petulant self-indulgent misery and loathing stamped across my middle-class British face. How bad could it be?

As it turned out, very bad indeed. Having conducted my usual anally retentive room-disinfecting routine (take a towel from the bathroom, place it on the bedspread – the one part of the bed that
never
gets changed or cleaned – grab the bedpsread
through
the towel thereby avoiding physical contact with the vast bacterial ecosystem now thriving thereon, and throw the resulting bundle into the furthest corner of the room before covering it with a
second
towel), I set about investigating the regular thumping sound coming from the wall by the head of the bed. Depressingly, it did indeed turn out to be the soul-destroying sound of the bedstead on the
other
side of the wall (which appeared to have been made of Kleenex and spit) rhythmically shifting back and forth as a couple trudged their slow but sure way toward some form of quasi-congressional climax. Every now and then you could hear some gasping ecstatic yelp the gender of which seemed curiously non-specific. Over the course of the subsequent evening, the neighbours made two further explorational sorties into the world of fleshy fun, each louder and more laborious than the last. Despite the fact that I never laid eyes on them, by morning I felt that I knew them both quite well.

‘Alcohol,’ I said out loud. Again.’I
need
alcohol,’ and I slammed the door shut and trudged down the corridor toward David’s room. When I say ‘corridor’, of course, I mean no such thing. The connecting passage between David’s room and mine was an open walkway which fronted straight on to Sunset, so that anyone who felt the need to do so could actually walk off the pavement and into the room without effort, thus giving the hotel an alarmingly earthy street-side ambiance. (This was also presumably the sort of street-facing window through which the car-jack wielding Batman clone came hurtling in search of Herzog.) More alarming still was the fact that David had
opened his curtains
– a wildly impetuous act as far as I was concerned.

‘For heaven’s sake David,’ I bleated, sounding increasingly like Little Lord Fauntleroy.’You can’t
open the curtains
! You’ll be killed in your sleep. And you
can’t
put the camera there. Hide it in the wardrobe. Or in the bathroom. Or, better still, move the wardrobe
into
the bathroom and then hide it in
both
of them. Just to be safe.’

David rolled his eyes upward, grabbed his jacket and keys, and strode out into the night.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s go and get some food.’

‘And alcohol?’

‘Yes, Mark – “and alcohol”.’

And off we went.

The next morning we rang Werner to see if he was still OK. Unsurprisingly his abdomen had stiffened up overnight, and the wound itself had become rather more painful. But he insisted that he’d dressed it and it was still ‘not significant’, so after a few minutes of pleading for him to allow us to take him to hospital we said our goodbyes.

Back in London, we struggled to figure out how to put the piece together. David had checked the tapes and confirmed that the cameras had indeed been rolling when the shot was fired, and everything was captured – both sound and vision. But could we actually
use
any of that footage? Since Herzog had been so determined to downplay the entire event, wouldn’t we be exploiting him if we showed the shooting on TV? There also remained the issue of who was to blame for the whole weird affair – not in terms of who fired the shot, but who was responsible for Herzog’s safety when the shooting happened. Had we somehow inadvertently placed him in danger?

This latter question particularly troubled David, who is both a brilliant director and an Olympic-level worrier. If David can find a way to take the responsibility (or more precisely the blame) for something then he will do so. That’s what makes him such a terrific person to work with – if it all goes well, I get the glory; if things screw up (which they never do with David), it’s all
his
fault. Perfect!

We swiftly resolved that we wouldn’t do anything with the footage without Herzog’s permission. Nor would we talk to anyone about what had happened – although word was already leaking out that ‘something really weird’ had
happened during the interview. After all, if Herzog wanted the issue to remain private, then that was his right.

As it turned out, we needn’t have worried. A few days after our return to the UK I started getting emails from people in LA who had heard all about Herzog and the ‘crazed sniper’ – from Herzog himself. One particular contact sent me a digital photo of Herzog on the set of Harmony Korine’s new film (in which he played a small role) proudly displaying the wound to all and sundry. By now the bruise surrounding the hole had started to go a bit manky, and looked a lot larger and angrier than when I had last set eyes on it. But Werner seemed happy and otherwise unharmed, and was clearly enjoying regaling the assembled masses with tales of his fearlessness in the face of adversity.

As the weeks went on the story grew, appearing first in the
Hollywood Reporter
, and then in newspapers back here in the UK. A couple of journalists rang me to check the details, and I confirmed that yes, Herzog had indeed been utterly unflapped by this sudden unexpected violation of his person. And as the story grew, two interesting things happened. Firstly, an ‘axis of terror’ began to emerge, growing in stature and imbalance with each subsequent retelling of the tale. Within this economy of fear, Herzog’s own stoical response to the shooting became increasingly matched and even outdone by a growing hysterical cowardliness on the part of the BBC crew. The braver he got, the more whimpering we became. By the time Herzog recounted the story to Henry Rollins on American TV a few months later, the assembled Brits had been reduced to the
status of mere quivering wrecks, fleeing at the first sign of danger while the Bavarian legend impassively took incoming fire.