Werner Herzog at the New York Public Library
Posted by MiguelSaturday, February 17th, 2007, 8:34 pm
Yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing Werner Herzog speak at the New York Public Library. (Event info.) He spoke with the Director of Public Programs there - apparently a friend of his - and was as insightful and entertaining as I could have hoped.
Some memorable things he said, while they are still fresh in my mind.
- Eating vitamins is a sign of the mistakes of the modern world. People eat handfuls and it is “too disgusting to talk about.”
- Environmentalism is very important, but people should not overlook how horrible it is that languages are rapidly dying: of 6000 spoken now, more than half will be dead by 2050.
- It is unpleasant to talk to French people. Relatedly, it is amazing that anyone with even a tiny functioning brain could have said something like the famous Godard quote “Film is truth 24 times a second.”
- Mick Jagger is a great screen actor who has never been used to his full potential and it is a great disappointment of Herzog’s career that he hasn’t released a film using Jagger’s screen presence. (This was in a discussion of how picking actors is an important skill for a director, and Herzog also mentioned that it was a sign of his own talent that he saw how Mr. Jagger could perfectly portray a retarded Englishman who quotes from Richard III).
- Fred Astaire is just about the greatest actor in American movie history, in spite of - or maybe thanks to - his “insipid face.” The program began with a clip of Astaire taping and singing a song called “Please Don’t Monkey With Broadway,” which Herzog said perfectly represented how film is an imaginative medium - since while the song purports to be about the charm of Broadway, nothing could be further from the reality of New York.
- Every important cultural trend of the past 50 years originated in California, except for militant Islam.
- News about Anna Nicole Smith (even though it’s a shame she died) is currently much more interesting than any other form of entertainment and illustrates well some of how the modern world is a disaster.
- While his mustache was a very fine one indeed, he felt as if he were hiding behind it, so now he shaves.
- He doesn’t really like movies and only went to two last year. At hotels he finds that he becomes bored of TV programming and switches to porno.
- He was friends with Lotte Eisner (author of The Haunted Screen, a book I got at the Neue Galerie a few years ago) and gave her permission to die when she was old and blind. She did die a few weeks later.
- He thinks James Joyce books are not really that good and in the event of a huge catastrophe which required picking books to be saved, his should be saved as an example of literary dead ends. He likes Conrad, Kafka, and Hemmingway better from that era and thinks Cormac McCarthy is a good current writer.
- While he believes that tourism is sin and destroys the places people visit as tourists, he believes his films are not sins because their exotic locales are part of the intense metaphors in the movies. Metaphors for what, he can’t quite say.
- His friend Errol Morris used to be obsessed with the serial murderer Ed Gein. One of Gein’s hobbies was gravedigging and using the skin of the recently dead for various disgusting purposes. The graves he chose were located in concentric cirles around Gein’s mom’s grave, and Morris (and subsequently Herzog) was fascinated by the question “did Gein dig his own mother’s grave?” Herzog suggested that there was only one way to find out: go there it dig it themselves to check if the body had been tampered with. Morris stood him up in Plainfield, Wisconsin and Herzog now believes that this is a good example of a question more interesting if left unanswered.
Here is a photo that may be the gesture he made for how the French talk. His newest film is called Rescue Dawn - here is a trailer. It is a dramatization of the amazing documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly.
