My ten creative books #10: A Guide for the Perplexed

Note: I’m counting down ten books that have influenced the way that I think about the creative process, in order of the publication dates of their first editions. It’s a very personal list that reflects my own tastes and idiosyncrasies, and I’m always looking for new recommendations. You can find the earlier installments here.

As regular readers know, I’m a Werner Herzog fan, but not a completist—I’ve seen maybe five of his features and three or four of his documentaries, which leaves a lot of unexplored territory, and I’m not ashamed to admit that Woyzeck put me to sleep. Yet Herzog himself is endlessly fascinating. Daniel Zalewski’s account of the making of Rescue Dawn is one of my five favorite articles ever to appear in The New Yorker, and if you’re looking for an introduction to his mystique, there’s no better place to start. For a deeper dive, you can turn to A Guide for the Perplexed, an expanded version of a collection of the director’s interviews with Paul Cronin, which was originally published more than a decade ago. As I’ve said here before, I regret the fact that I didn’t pick up the first edition when I had the chance, and I feel that my life would have been subtly different if I had. Not only is it the first book I’d recommend to anyone considering a career in filmmaking, it’s almost the first book I’d recommend to anyone considering a career in anything at all. It’s huge, but every paragraph explodes with insight, and you can open it to any page and find yourself immediately transfixed. Here’s one passage picked at random:

Learn to live with your mistakes. Study the law and scrutinize contracts. Expand your knowledge and understanding of music and literature, old and modern. Keep your eyes open. That roll of unexposed celluloid you have in your hand might be the last in existence, so do something impressive with it. There is never an excuse not to finish a film. Carry bolt cutters everywhere.

Or take Herzog’s description of his relationship with his cinematographer: “Peter Zeitlinger is always trying to sneak ‘beautiful’ shots into our films, and I’m forever preventing it…Things are more problematic when there is a spectacular sunset on the horizon and he scrambles to set up the camera to film it. I immediately turn the tripod 180 degrees in the other direction.”

And this doesn’t even touch on Herzog’s stories, which are inexhaustible. He provides his own point of view on many famous anecdotes, like the time he was shot on camera while being interviewed by the BBC—the bullet was stopped by a catalog in his jacket pocket, and he asked to keep going—or how he discouraged Klaus Kinski from abandoning the production of Aguirre: The Wrath of God. (“I told him I had a rifle…and that he would only make it as far as the next bend in the river before he had eight bullets in his head. The ninth would be for me.”) We see Herzog impersonating a veterinarian at the airport to rescue the monkeys that he needed for Aguirre; forging an impressive document over the signature of the president of Peru to gain access to locations for Fitzcarraldo; stealing his first camera; and shooting oil fires in Kuwait under such unforgiving conditions that the microphone began to melt. Herzog is his own best character, and he admits that he can sometimes become “a clown,” but his example is enough to sustain and nourish the rest of us. In On Directing Film, David Mamet writes:

But listen to the difference between the way people talk about films by Werner Herzog and the way they talk about films by Frank Capra, for example. One of them may or may not understand something or other, but the other understands what it is to tell a story, and he wants to tell a story, which is the nature of dramatic art—to tell a story. That’s all it’s good for.

Herzog, believe it or not, would agree, and he recommends Casablanca and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre as examples of great storytelling. And the way in which Herzog and Capra’s reputations have diverged since Mamet wrote those words, over twenty years ago, is illuminating in itself. A Guide for the Perplexed may turn out to be as full of fabrications as Capra’s own memoirs, but they’re the kind of inventions, like the staged moments in Herzog’s “documentaries,” that get at a deeper truth. As Herzog says of another great dreamer: “The difference between me and Don Quixote is, I deliver.”

Lessons of darkness

Yesterday night, while browsing through the movies available on Netflix, I stumbled across Werner Herzog’s documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly. I’d never seen it, so I put it on, and I was immediately entranced—it’s one of the most fascinating films I’ve ever seen. By now, the story is a familiar one, both through Herzog’s initial treatment of the material and his return to it in the movie Rescue Dawn. Dieter Dengler was born in Germany in 1938, fell in love with the idea of flying, emigrated to the United States to join the Air Force, and was shot down on his first bombing run over Laos. After his capture, torture, and imprisonment, he made a bloody escape, survived a barefoot trek through the jungle and downriver, and was rescued six months after his disappearance. Herzog never forgot the news reports, and in the finished film, which consists almost entirely of Dengler recounting his memories to the camera, he sticks mostly to the facts. Occasionally, he indulges in a heightening touch, as in a scene when Dengler arrives at his house in the Bay Area. As Herzog reveals in his wonderful book A Guide for the Perplexed:

When he gets out of his car, Dieter repeatedly opens and closes the car door before walking to the front door, which he again opens and closes. Eventually he goes inside. This is a scene I created…“Open and close your front door a couple of times,” I said, “then talk about the door as a symbol of freedom.” He hesitated and said, “I’ll look weird to my buddies.” What finally convinced him was when I told him how charming the ladies would think it was.

There are a few other staged moments, and most of them draw attention to themselves, as when Dengler delivers a monologue on death while standing before an aquarium tank of glowing jellyfish. For the most part, he seems happy to indulge Herzog, and we only gradually become aware of the reservoir of emotion and endurance behind his air of guilelessness. We never see Herzog, who speaks only in voiceover, but the film slowly reveals itself as a dialogue with a subject for whom the director feels nothing but respect. Herzog has made a point of cultivating his own mythology, and he more than lives up to it in practice, most famously when he was shot while talking to the BBC and made a point of finishing the interview. But he’s the one who really seems obsessed with jails, locks, and doors. In A Guide to the Perplexed, he tells us: “There is nothing wrong with spending a night in a jail cell if it means getting the shot you need.” A few lines later, he follows it with perhaps my favorite piece of advice for all aspiring artists: “Carry bolt cutters everywhere.” We can only imagine his feelings when confronted with Dengler, who, even in civilian life, is the epitome of the competent man. In his youth, he trained as a tool-and-die maker and a blacksmith, rebuilt church clocks, and willed himself into his dream job as a pilot. (Robert A. Heinlein would have loved him.) In the film, he nonchalantly shows us how to make a fire using two tubes of bamboo and how to escape from handcuffs using a paper clip, noting casually that it’s a skill that might come in handy. When Dengler displays the drums of rice and honey that he keeps under the floor of his house, just in case he needs them, you can sense Herzog nodding in agreement behind the camera.

Yet the film is also a remarkable interrogation of the myth of competence, and the ways in which it seems inseparable from luck, good timing, and even destiny. After years of trying to become a pilot, Dengler was shot down forty minutes into his first mission. In his escape from the camp, seven other prisoners got away, and five were never heard from again. The man with whom he fled, Duane W. Martin, was beheaded by a villager, and Dengler only narrowly escaped. A few weeks later, on the verge of death, he was rescued by the purest chance, when an American pilot happened to see a flash of white at the bend in the river. Only an extraordinary personality would have survived at all, but Dengler had been placed in a situation in which training, intelligence, and endurance were necessary, but not sufficient. There are obvious parallels to the American experience in Vietnam, but Herzog resists them, presumably because he doesn’t find them all that interesting. What intrigues him is the idea of competence pressed to its limits, which Dengler was forced to experience, while Herzog has actively courted it for his entire life. In a profile in The New Yorker that I’ve never forgotten, published before the release of Rescue Dawn, Daniel Zalewski quotes Herzog’s first assistant director Josef Lieck:

I have formed this theory that Werner has, probably from midpuberty, been trying very hard to die a grand, poetic death. Whenever there is anything dangerous, you can be sure he’ll run out to do it first. But I think he will have his grand, poetic death in a different way. I think he will live to be a hundred and five. He’ll have tried all his life to get chopped to pieces or fall from a helicopter, and, in the end, he will die on his pillowcase.

It isn’t clear yet how Herzog will die, a prospect that fills me with more dread than that of any other celebrity. But we know a little about how Dengler passed away. In A Guide for the Perplexed, Herzog only says: “[Dieter] died some years ago of Lou Gehrig’s disease, and the first thing the illness took was his power of speech. How scandalous that in his final days he was bereft of words…He died…a few years after Little Dieter Needs to Fly was released, having battled the disease like a warrior.” In fact, he shot himself in front of a fire station, and you can read a lot into Herzog’s unusual reticence. Dengler, a fundamentally gentle man, was repeatedly confronted by the kind of physical and spiritual struggle that Herzog seeks out, and the comparison only makes the director seem more like “a clown,” as he once described himself, particularly in the way in which he drags along his collaborators. (My favorite moment in Zalewski’s profile comes when Herzog dismisses a safety issue in a scene involving Christian Bale, who erupts: “I am not going to feckin’ die for you, Werner!”) It’s been a quarter of a century since Little Dieter was released, but I’m glad that I saw it only now, at a point in my life when I can better understand Herzog’s awe toward his subject:

What I continue to find wondrous is that Dieter emerged from his experiences without so much as a hint of bitterness; he was forever able to bear the misery with great optimism. Dieter had such an impressive and jubilant attitude to life, able to brush his experiences aside and deal with them, never making a fuss. He has been a role model for me, and even today when I am in a complicated situation I ask myself, “What would Dieter do?”

Werner Herzog’s forgotten dreams

But listen to the difference between the way people talk about films by Werner Herzog and the way they talk about films by Frank Capra, for example. One of them may or may not understand something or other, but the other understands what it is to tell a story, and he wants to tell a story, which is the nature of dramatic art—to tell a story. That’s all it’s good for.

—David Mamet, On Directing Film

It’s amazing how an artist’s reputation can evolve over two decades. When Mamet published the comment above, it was 1991, and Werner Herzog was best known as the director of several strange, brilliant, often impenetrable films staring the German actor Klaus Kinski. And as much as I love Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, and Nosferatu, I can see Mamet’s point: moving beyond the core works of Herzog’s filmography can be pretty taxing. (I tried watching Woyzeck on video a few years back, and fell asleep within twenty minutes.) So it was hard to imagine, twenty years ago, that Herzog would ever become anything resembling a beloved cultural figure.

But incredibly enough, that’s what happened. Part of it might be due to the mainstream breakthrough of Grizzly Man, and Herzog’s unforgettable narration. (“I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.”) Part of it might be the landmark New Yorker profile of Herzog on the set of Rescue Dawn, which gave us my favorite Christian Bale quote of all time: “I am not going to feckin’ die for you, Werner!” Part of it might even be Herzog’s recent weird proposal for a rogue film school. But whatever the reason, Herzog, while not quite our greatest living filmmaker or documentarian, has become something more: our greatest living exemplar of the artist’s life.

At first glance, it might seem that his example is a hard one to follow: Herzog has simply seen more, risked more, and imagined more than most ordinary mortals, which is reflected in his extraordinary face. (Age alone has turned him into the sort of sage that he always showed promise of becoming.) But in a way, this misses the point. Herzog’s vision of art isn’t meant to be inaccessible to the rest of us: it’s about stealing a camera, going on foot instead of driving, doing whatever it takes to bring great images to a starving world. In Herzog’s case, this restless intensity, and willingness to keep his own promises, has taken him from the Amazon to Antarctica, from the abyss of Klaus Kinski to that of Nicolas Cage, but his fearlessness should be an example to all of us. He’s the sanest man in the world, which in many cases is indistinguishable from insanity.

His latest film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, might be his most significant adventure to date: a 3D exploration of the Chauvet Cave in France, which contains the earliest known cave paintings in the world. It’s a work of undeniable cultural interest, the kind destined to be shown in high school history classes, but it’s also, wonderfully, a Herzog film. Some have called the movie too slow, or overlong at ninety minutes, but as with much of Herzog’s work, the deliberate pace is intentional, and ultimately hypnotic. It’s full of surprising beauty and odd, beguiling moments, like its climatic encounter with an albino alligator—the natural successor to the chicken of Kaspar Hauser and the iguana of Bad Lieutenant. And it’s such a singular work of art that I can’t help believing that these paintings survived 32,000 years mostly just so that Herzog could film them, one artist reaching out to another across the expanse of time.