Werner Herzog on Acting, Americana, and Journeys Into the Abyss

The hardest-working filmmaker on Earth was back in New York last week, making the latest of what have basically become semiannual tours in support of his movies. Thus what felt like a continuation of last spring's chat with Werner Herzog, whose latest documentary, Into the Abyss, finds the endlessly curious director exploring one of American society's darkest. sparsest frontiers: Capital punishment.

But don't call it an issue film. Herzog doesn't make those, and indeed, Into the Abyss is not without his customary wit, openness and inquisitive fervor. They abide throughout the story of condemned killer Michael Perry, who, along with his lighter-sentenced accomplice Jason Burkett, rended the fraying small-town fabric of Conroe, Texas, in 2001 with a brutal triple homicide. Herzog talks to parties on all sides of both the crime and its punishment -- the convicts, the victims' families, a police investigator, a death-row chaplain, a prison bride, a retired executioner and more -- in search of his cherished "ecstatic truth" of nonfiction filmmaking.

That's not all he's up to. Herzog's forthcoming Hollywood acting debut as the villain in Tom Cruise's One Shot follows another whirlwind of directing projects that would prostrate even Tyler Perry with fatigue. We spoke last week about his agenda, his ambition, and the grave urgency of Into the Abyss.

Another press day already! Amazing.

I am doing my duty. I wouldn't complain.

Does this get any easier over the years?

No, but it is part of your duty as a filmmaker -- to somehow bring across a film to an audience. That's why the media are there. It's a natural concomitant of what I'm doing. Let me say one thing: I hear filmmakers often complain about it, but I'm not in the culture of complaint.

So we have about 15 or 20 minutes to talk, which isn't a lot less than you had with some of the subjects of this film. How did you get what you needed to get for this film in that time?

Well, I'm a filmmaker. I'm not just a fly on the wall. Sometimes you hear filmmakers postulating, "We should be like flies on the wall." I don't want to be the security camera in Wal-Mart and record hundreds of hours of something where nothing ever happens. We are storytellers. I get involved. I focus. By the way, when you have 50 minutes only with someone, you have to hit the right tone instantly. So, in a way, you have to know the heart of men to find the right tone. For example, I'm [interviewing] the death-row chaplain -- who appears at the beginning of the conversation almost like a TV preacher -- and I crack him open. All of the sudden he starts to unravel, and I ask him to tell me about an encounter with a squirrel. And he unravels. And all of the sudden you can look deep inside of him. So... How can I say it? That's why I'm a filmmaker.

The flipside are these long, silent, lingering shots that are so customary in your documentaries: The chaplain, the detective, the wife...

The captain of the tie-down team. There's a long moment of complete silence where he really looks anguished. There's a written caption before that: He quit his job working in the death house as a tie-down captain at the cost of losing his pension. And I didn't even put it under his face. I put it on black. Now you are watching his face and there's nothing -- only silence. But the silence is so significant and so anguished. Other filmmakers wouldn't do that, but I do it. You see, I'm a storyteller, and this is in the story. All of the sudden you have a silent inner story -- the parallel story that looks deep inside the human condition.

You also chose not to apply your trademark narration to this film. What was your thinking behind that?

You have to make your decisions according to the subject. The subject dictates the form. I think it wouldn't have been right -- me as the one who asks questions and has discourse, and then the same voice commenting. And it doesn't need commentary. Sometimes you have a few written captions to let the audience know some fundamental things: that one of the inmates committed his crimes as an 18- or 19-year-old teenager, and now, 10 years later, he's facing execution. It's OK that you know that as audience, but that you know it through captions.

What's the perspective of the film? You state very early on that you are steadfastly against capital punishment, but--

Which is OK! I also say I respectfully disagree with the practice of capital punishment. I am a guest of your country, I do not have voting rights. I have a different historical background, and I'm speaking of the Nazi [era] with the genocide and euthanasia and everything. And I would be the last one -- I would be the last one -- in the position to tell the American people how to handle criminal justice. So that's why I say, "I have a different opinion, and I respectfully disagree with the practice."

Are you still trying to work out your feelings about America after all these years?

Yes. In a way, it's kind of about Americana -- much of what I've done. Grizzly Man is Americana in a way, and that's why it somehow struck a chord with audiences here in the United States. This film, I hope, will strike some sort of a chord, but of course I'm somebody from outside. I have a fresh and different look, but a fascination about Americana -- about Conroe, Texas, about an American Gothic, about criminal justice, about families of victims of violent crimes, and on and on.

I think the question comes up in another film I made on a death-row inmate. There's Into the Abyss, which is a feature-length theatrical film, but parallel to that, I have filmed with other death-row inmates for a series of shorter films for television. Those are more focused on just one person. One of them, who was 23 minutes away from execution, got a stay. He tells me about his last trip from death row -- which is in Livingston, Texas, but they don't have a death chamber. So they're transported 43 miles to Hunstsville, to Walls Unit, where they have a death house. And for the first time in 17 years, he sees trees. He sees other cars; he's riding in this van. Actually, I did this trip now with a camera, because he says something very, very beautiful: Seeing an abandoned gas station, for example, or seeing a cow in a field is something very magnificent. And he says for him, it was like Israel -- it was like the Holy Land. All of the sudden I look at America -- the forlorn, kind of bleak part of Texas between Livingston and Huntsville -- and everything appears like the Holy Land. You see, because of this project and talking to death-row inmates, my perspective has shifted somehow. And it's not just America. If I travel from Munich to the village where I grew up, this is holy land.

I've asked a few people about this recently, but what is it with the enduring preoccupation with America -- particularly Texas, or these forlorn stretches -- for foreign filmmakers? To visit, to explore--

But I'm not a visitor; I live here in America.

Of course, but before that. Or, say, something like Stroszek.

I am a guest, but I am still a Bavarian deeply entwined in my culture. I have moved to a different country, but I'm still attached to my own culture.

I guess I'm wondering if there's something to reconciling the European experience with the American experience.

I don't have to reconcile with America. I love the country. Otherwise I wouldn't live here. And I love my wife. Otherwise I wouldn't live in America, let's face it. Of course in some questions I have an ambivalent feeling, like probably every citizen has some ambivalence about his home country. And I respectfully disagree with certain things that I see. It's as simple as that. And you can have a very civil discourse about capital punishment with people in Texas. It's very easy, and the respectfully differ from my opinion. But America is such a fascinating country, and I've looked at it with more and more fresh eyes recently.

What have you seen, aside from what's presented in Into the Abyss?

Well, for example, talking with every single death-row inmate, I ask them, "How should we conduct our lives -- we outside? How should we do it right? You have not done it right." And it always comes down to something I have almost overlooked in recent years: Family values. Small family values. In a way, almost like Hollywood movies are insisting on small family values. They prevail at the end of a movie; there has to be a happy end, and they prevail. I kept looking down at it a little bit, and all of the sudden, it moves dead center: These guys are right. Yes. And then I look at family values with great intensity -- with much more sympathy, with much more attention than ever before.

Does any of that have to do with your age? Getting older?

No. No, it has nothing to do with age. It has to do with insight. And insight doesn't come from me -- from thinking. It comes because I have been in intense contact with men and one woman on death row.

Pages: 1 2