Werner Herzog, The Ambitious Visionary. (Part Six)

In 2009 Herzog released a film that has a fascinating origin story.  

The script began as a project of classics scholar Herbert Golder.

Golder was inspired by the 1978 film "A Dream of Passion" directed by Jules Dassin. The film tells the story of an actress who is playing the role of Medea from Greek Mythology who was the wife of Jason of Argonauts fame who murdered her children and in the film she enacts Medea's crimes in real life.  

There was also an actual murder case where a man named Mark Yavorsky who was an actor who murdered his own mother using an antique sword, reenacting an actual scene from the Greek tragedy "Orestes" that Yavorsky had played the lead on the stage. 

Mark Yavorsky was found not guilty in court by reason of insanity. He was committed to Patton State Hospital where he stayed for a few years but by the 1990s he was living in a trailer in Riverside County California.  

Golder heard about the case and began communicating with Yavorsky and cultivated a relationship with him that would last for several years. Golder conducted a series of taped interviews which he would use to start writing his screenplay.  In 1995, Herzog joined Golder in the last of these meetings. Herzog described Yavorsky as "argumentative".

Yavorsky seemed to have erected a shrine to Herzog's film "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" In his trailer. This concerned Herzog so much that he refused to meet Yavorsky again and advised Golder to do the same.

Please note this meeting with Yavorsky and Golder and Herzog collaborating on the script all took place in the mid 1990s. The film then stagnated for many many years after the script was complete. Herzog and Golder were unable to find anyone willing to fund and produce the film. In the late 2000s Werner Herzog was chatting to legendary filmmaker David Lynch who both desired to Herzog's words, "a return to essential filmmaking" meaning working with a modest budget a good story and the best actors available.

Lynch asked Herzog "Do you have a project?" Herzog told him about "My Son" and then pre-production began immediately via David Lynch's production company Absurda.

The main film location was a real home in Point Loma, San Diego, near the actual location of the Yavorsky murder home. The actors Michael Shannon and Grace Zabriskie said they appreciated filming being so close to the story's actual setting but the production team said that the choice of location was purely for financial reasons, and Herzog says that it was simply "a matter of convenience". However this location was very close to San Diego International Airport, which made shooting relatively challenging. I say relatively because we are talking about a Herzog film. Werner had crew members stationed on the roof of the house with binoculars who could signal when aircraft would pass to avoid ruining takes as Herzog insisted on only using the production sound on the finished film.

One sequence in the film was shot in a market in Kashgar, China. Not wanting to endure the lengthy process of actually getting shooting permits in China, Herzog went to Kashgar with Shannon on tourist visas and shot the scene "guerrilla film style". Herzog bought a small digital video camera there and then filmed Shannon wandering around in a crowded outdoor market.

The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival on the 5th of September 2009.

After a very limited festival and theatrical release it came out on DVD a year later 2010.

The critics consensus reads: "Enigmatic and digressive, this mystical potboiler possesses director Werner Herzog's penchant for offbeat atmosphere, but lacks the absurdist humor and profundity that makes his previous trips into madness compelling."

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said the film "Confounds all convention and denies all expected pleasures, providing instead the delight of watching Herzog feed the police hostage formula into the Mixmaster of his imagination."

The last run of films I'm going to look at are all Documentaries. With total respect to the director his early work yielded two feature films that are in the mix when the best films of all time are discussed "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" (1972) & Fitzcarraldo (1982) which is truly an epic achievement for any filmmaker as well as making a string of beautiful and thought provoking works such as The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), Heart of Glass (1976), Stroszek (1977), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) that are all respected and enjoy cult film status but post 1980 the very best of Herzog's work has been his work as a documentarian Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997), My Best Fiend (1999), Grizzly Man (2005) & Encounters at the End of the World (2007) all being masterpieces. 

In 2010 Herzog released a documentary film that can be added to that list of masterpieces.   

Herzog became interested in The Chauvet Cave after reading an article in the magazine "The New Yorker" called "First Impressions" by Judith Thurman published in June 2008 and began pursuing making this film. Judith Thurman is credited as a co-producer on the film.

Further restrictions placed on the production included Herzog could only have 4 additional crew members accompany him into the cave. So Herzog's team for the shoot consisted of   

his cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger, sound recordist Eric Spitzer-Marlyn and one general assistant leaving Herzog to direct, handle lighting and carry equipment. 

They could not run mains electricity into the cave so all their equipment had to be battery operated. They also had to use minimal lighting due to concern regarding the lights emitting heat that would affect the caves climate. 

Anyone who enters Chauvet Cave must wear special suits and fresh shoes that have never been worn outside the cave before and only walk on a 60cm wide walkway inside the cave and not touch any part of caves floor or walls. 

The strict time limits on the crews visits to the cave is not only due to conservation but the cave also has near-toxic levels of radon and carbon dioxide so nobody can stay inside for more than a few hours each day.

Shooting in natural environments with a single 3D camera was pretty much unknown and the ability to use the footage effectively in the project had to be worked out via experimentation by Herzog and his crew in post-production. After finishing work on this film, Herzog stated he had no plans to film in 3D again. This all sounds like a total nightmare but remember this is the guy who made "Fitzcarraldo" (1982).

Cave of Forgotten Dreams was the first 3D film to screen at the festival and the digital projectors crashed five minutes from the end, interrupting the showing. Nightmare! 

Two days after the screening at TIFF, IFC Films announced it had secured the film's US distribution rights in a "mid-six-figure deal" the television rights were already owned by the History Channel, who helped financed the film.

The film premiered in cinemas in the UK on 25 March 2011 and in the U.S. on the 29th of April 2011. It's opening weekend in the U.S. the film earned an average of $25,500 from each of the five screens on which it was shown in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. This was Herzog's best-ever per-theater opening.

Unfortunately where "Grizzly Man" (2005) was widely discussed and seen by people who could buy it on DVD or rent the film from a Blockbuster and to this day you can watch it on Amazon Prime. This film had its limited theatrical release, was shown on The History Channel and appeared to have had a brief Blu-Ray release so I can tell people how great this film is BUT best of luck being able to see it. I feel due to the film being co-owned by The History Channel they maybe gatekeeping it preventing it from showing on mainstream streaming services and the fact it is thought of as a 3D movie preventing it getting a re release on Blu-Ray since 3D Blu-Ray is now defunct. My Blu-ray has a 2D version of the film which is the only version I have seen and it should be available to watch.  

A bit of a jump in time but the next film I must highlight is 

The primary goal of Herzog's quest is to get a better idea of our origins and nature as a species. He finds volcanoes mysterious, violent, and rapturously beautiful, and claims that "there is no single one that is not connected to a belief system."

This film was made and then bought by Netflix and released on their platform. 

Luckily it is still available to watch on that platform and if they decide to switch it off it will be gone.    

"Into the Inferno finds director Werner Herzog observing some of the most beautiful and terrifying wonders of the natural world with his signature blend of curiosity and insight."

the film is rated at 92% at Rotten Tomatoes, 7.2/10 on IMDb, 3.8/5 on Letterboxd  

I need to hit you with a double hit of lava here! 

The initial idea of doing this film originated from a concept by Producer Peter Lown and Professor Clive Oppenheimer who had collaborated with Herzog on 2016's "Into the Inferno".

When the two met with Herzog around the time of "Into the Inferno" Werner disclosed he had long wanted to make a documentary about The Kraffts.  

Herzog agreed to come onboard and direct the film on the understanding the project must be framed as a 'requiem'.

The film premiered at Sheffield DocFest in 2022. It won best documentary at Shanghai Film Festival in 2023. It was also screened in October 2022 at the 60th Viennale as part of the celebration of Herzog's 80th birthday and at Telluride Film Festival.

Critically the film was well received,  Cineuropa comments: "Rather than shoot a straightforward documentary, the director opted to arrange the couple’s footage like a “musical”. Herzog's film is meant to be a requiem to them, fueled by heavy instrumental and choral music." The Telegraph found the film "mesmerising" and gave it 3 stars out of 5.

The film is rated at 88% on Rotten Tomatoes, 7.6/10 on IMDb and 4.1/5 on Letterboxd.

Massive thank you to anyone who has read this far and there is only one more part of this series where I have assembled a pretty complete chronological filmography list and cover Herzog's non film work and incidence that have occurred in his pretty full and adventurous life.       

End of Part Six