Forty-plus years into a still-vital, ever-proliferating filmmaking career, Werner Herzog has aged gracefully into the role of the sage adventurer, still fearlessly exploring the terrain between documentary and fiction as well as the vanishing point between charismatic eccentricity and full-blown psychosis. Born in Munich, raised in the Bavarian Alps, and lumped early on with other avatars of the New German Cinema, Herzog has ceaselessly chronicled the obsessions of dreamers and renegades both real (God’s Angry Man) and imagined (Stroszek, The Wild Blue Yonder), as well as social outcasts whose quest for ecstatic truth leads to madness, self-destruction, or sometimes, in the case of Grizzly Man’s Timothy Treadwell, both. There are those who find Herzog’s documentaries to be the apotheosis of that singular vision, and those who are partial to the fevered collaborations with Klaus Kinski, when Herzog seemed to be placing his own life at risk in order to realize impossible ambitions, just like the protagonists of his twin monuments to crazed hubris, Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, The Wrath of God. In recent years, he has journeyed to a science colony in Antarctica (Encounters at the End of the World), ringed the jungle canopy with a high-flying inventor (The White Diamond), and revisited the story of downed airman Dieter Dengler (Little Dieter Needs to Fly), this time in fiction (Rescue Dawn). Regardless of whether it makes sense to divide such effulgently individualistic output into separate genres (in this director’s cinema of extremes, we are forever on the brink of both catastrophe and revelation), one thing is certain: only Herzog is ever Herzogian.

His latest film is Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a rogue-cop drama loosely based on Abel Ferrara’s 1992 crime thriller about a drug-deranged, out-of-control New York detective investigating the murder of a nun. (Herzog claims never to have seen Ferrara’s film.) In the new reimagining, Nicholas Cage plays Lieutenant Terence McDonagh, a decorated Crescent City officer who injures his back rescuing an inmate from a flooded cell in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and then spirals downward into pill-popping addiction, boisterous self-abuse, and all manner of depravity (extortion, bad gambling debts, forced fellatio). Under Herzog’s resolutely go-for-broke direction, Cage’s wild-card badge careens between feats of grotesque gutsiness and coarse-tongued slapstick. When his inner demons finally materialize as a pair of iguanas, all he can do is snicker, knowing how screwed he is. It’s a full-bodied, often hoot-worthy performance by the actor, enacted with all the ardently strange facial tics and bizarre vocal mannerisms Cage can muster, as he riffs off Val Kilmer’s blithely amoral cop and Eva Mendes’s easygoing, coke-snorting hooker. Part garish psychodrama, part cable-TV-grade policier gone horribly foul, Bad Lieutenant is one of Herzog’s cheekiest, most offbeat features in years.

Filmmaker spoke to Herzog about the appeal of shooting a modern noir in New Orleans, the viciousness of certain desert lizards, and why aspiring filmmakers should consider working in a sex club.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday.

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Filmmaker: What was the challenge for you in taking on the renegade-cop genre?

Herzog: It wasn’t a big deal to take on this story, and of course there’s a sense of being in times of crisis where film noir always has fertile ground to sprout. But it’s so simple: just imagine you were a director and an opportunity arises to work with Nic Cage and to do a film in New Orleans and have Eva Mendes on board, would you say no? [Laughs] You just can’t. It’s a no-brainer.

Filmmaker: Was the idea also to be playful with this as well?

Herzog: It was inherent in the screenplay, in a way. But we emphasized it. Immediately I said to Nicholas, there has to be such a thing as “the bliss of evil.” Enjoy yourself, as vile and as debased as you get. And of course, he’s getting hilarious, but it was not as strongly there. It was some sort of color that the film gained during shooting, and many things were invented en route, like the iguanas and the dancing soul. Hilarious moments.

Filmmaker: Cage’s Terence McDonagh has the manic ferocity of some of the charismatics we’ve seen in your other films. He’s even got some of Kinski’s wild intensity, except Cage is pushing his performance into broad humor at times. What was the guiding principle for his character, or was it sui generis?

Herzog: I would say sui generis. But we should let Kinski rest in peace [laughs] and not burden him with Nic Cage or vice versa. It wouldn’t do justice to either one. They’re both phenomenal actors. You wouldn’t compare Marlon Brando with Humphrey Bogart. It doesn’t get us anywhere. What they have in common is that kind of presence and intensity on the screen. That’s about it.

Filmmaker: I was thinking about something you said to the BFI Southbank audience not long ago when you presented Encounters at the End of the World. You had just finished filming Bad Lieutenant and you said you’d taken Nicholas Cage to places he’d not been before. What did you mean by that?

Herzog: Well, I think he has a platform from where he can depart into the unknown. Nicholas has a very nice phrase for it: he says it was a “designed” role and you cannot [measure] it with a ruler, so you have to give him the liberty and the security to just go for it. I gave him the security for doing that.

Filmmaker: Your touch is definitely in evidence here, and you mentioned the iguanas, so let me ask you about those sequences. Were they a holdover from your South American adventures?

Herzog: Not at all. I saw an iguana in a tree, next to where our camera truck was parked, and it was just sitting there. I thought, man, I need an iguana for one of the next day’s scenes. Actually, [in the film] it wasn’t two iguanas—one was one of these vicious desert lizards that bite like hell! [Laughs] It jumped forward and got my thumb and gripped it like a vise of steel, and I couldn’t shake it off. But these are the pleasures of making a movie.

Filmmaker: You seem to magnetize those experiences in a way.

Herzog: No, that’s just a little arabesque in making a film. I was filming it myself. I was shooting only millimeters away from the skin of the lizard, and getting very close to the eyes only, an inch away or less, and of course, one of them didn’t feel very happy about it. It just bit like hell.

Filmmaker: I understand they have a third eye, a parietal eye.

Herzog: I don’t know, it just went after me! It was a funny moment and everybody in the crew enjoyed it.

Filmmaker: Bad Lieutenant is a little unusual in that you didn’t write the entire screenplay yourself.

Herzog: It was Billy Finkelstein’s screenplay and it still is. However, we had to modify certain elements. The film was originally written for New York City, and it starts in a subway station. New Orleans doesn’t have a subway, so I said let’s start it in a flooded prison cell right after Katrina. And things like that I invented, but I would do that with my own screenplay as well.

Filmmaker: Why was it important for you to contextualize the film in the aftermath of Katrina?

Herzog: I think that’s why it really fits extremely well: it’s a city that was destroyed by a natural disaster which was neglected by the government and where civility had collapsed. That’s the right place for doing something like the Bad Lieutenant.

Filmmaker: You’ve said many times that you’re not a big filmgoer.

Herzog: No, it’s true.

Filmmaker: Do you have any particular fascination with film noir apart from this story?

Herzog: I haven’t seen too many, maybe two or three. I remember there was one with Edward G. Robinson, but I forgot the story and the title. I’m not, for example, like Marty Scorsese, who loves to watch movies, day in and day out. It’s joyous, this kind of life. But I’ve been different in that respect.

Filmmaker: At this point in your working career, having done so many different films, all of which really bear your personal stamp, do you find yourself drawn more toward documentary or drama?

Herzog: It comes as it comes, you see. It’s like burglars in the night. I have to get them out of my home or off my shoulders. No, the next four or five projects that are pushing me already are features, however there’s one or two docs as well. I don’t worry about which form it takes. And many of my docs are feature films in disguise anyway.

Filmmaker: There’s one wacky scene in Bad Lieutenant that I really loved, which is when you cut to the assisted living facility where the nursing assistant is tending to the elderly lady. The door closes, and Cage pops out from behind it, grooming his face with an electric razor.

Herzog: Yes, that was his idea. It’s just wonderful to work with an actor like that. And the scene was scripted only halfway through it. He intimidates them until he has the information about where this young kid is, the 15-year-old boy who was a witness to the crime. But then I said to him, “I think there’s more to it. You should turn the hawk loose.” [Laughs] And man does he do it! And it’s all his own design. Today, for the first time, I heard Nic talking in a roundtable interview about designing [his role], and this is a very well-coined word to describe what he’s doing. It’s not just acting, he’s designing.

Filmmaker: And you respond to that as well.

Herzog: Yes, and I know how to embed him in a texture of supporting cast. Without Eva Mendes or the other very strong members in the cast, it would be a no man’s land.

Filmmaker: There’s certainly plenty of acting talent in this film, like Brad Dourif, who was in the The Wild Blue Yonder, and Michael Shannon, who I really admired in Shotgun Stories, and who also stars in your other new film, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done.

Herzog: You see with Mikey Shannon, before I started this film, I told him I would love to put the leading character of my new film on his shoulders. And in order to warm up with each other, I said “I have a small role and I’m sorry I can’t offer you anything bigger. But would you like to come for two or three days, to see how I’m working?” And he accepted the invitation. It was healthy and good to learn about each other a little bit, and then more than half a year later, we filmed My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done. At that time, when we did Bad Lieutenant, he hadn’t gotten an Academy Award nomination [for Revolutionary Road]. And I was so proud when he did. A phenomenal talent.

Filmmaker: When you make a film like Rescue Dawn or Bad Lieutenant, do you ever feel like you’re beating Hollywood at its own game?

Herzog: No. I don’t have to beat anyone. I make the films that I love to do. I have nothing against Hollywood. For example, The Dark Knight, which I saw because I wanted to see how Christian Bale was doing. How dark and how intense this film was—a total, wonderful surprise, and it can’t be more mainstream. Yet it’s the film with the most substance, probably, of last year.

Filmmaker: Would you ever consider making a film specifically for an online platform, like David Lynch has decided to do recently?

Herzog: No, I think the mother of all battles will be decided in theaters, with a large audience seeing a film and giving you a ripple of laughter coming from the front row and passing through the whole house. My goal is the movie theaters. Everything beyond that is secondary.

Filmmaker: Science seems to be a prevalent theme in many of your films, like Lessons of Darkness and The White Diamond, and your expedition to Antarctica for Encounters yielded what for me is one of your most amazing legacies. Is there any technology that you fear? Is it a source of anxiety at times?

Herzog: It doesn’t really frighten me, but when you look at the explosive evolution of means of communication — cell phones and television and radio and talk shows and blogs and virtual reality and the Internet — I think it does not isolate people, but it does creates a deep existential solitude. It’s very strange because it seems like a contradiction, a paradox. I’m one who, for example, does not have a cell phone. And people find me anyway. I like real conversation among grown-up men, face to face. And I think there’s a value to it, which we cannot ever underestimate.

Filmmaker: And here we are on a phone, talking.

Herzog: Yes, but you see sometimes these instruments and tools are a technical necessity, fine. But I don’t spend my life on the Internet.

Filmmaker: I understand you’re starting a film school. Can you tell me about it?

Herzog: Oh, you have to look at it on the Internet! It’s kind of provocative and it gives everyone who actually will be admitted courage to realize their own dreams — beating bureaucracy, for example. It’s more about a very basic attitude than technical things you can learn. For that, you’d better sign up at your local film school. And of course, I give a reading list, starting with a poet of Roman antiquity, Virgil. We take it seriously. Read read read read, or travel on foot or work as a bouncer in a sex club. [Laughs] I’m doing the first weekend seminar early in January, but applications are coming in great numbers, so I have to reduce those. I study them very carefully. I have to reduce the number to a very small group.

Filmmaker: What’s your greatest unrealized dream, Werner?

Herzog: Well, the funny thing is that in a way I have realized my dreams. I wouldn’t know. Of course, there’s quite a few projects that are pushing me, but it’s not that I have somehow bypassed a great dream and then am longing to fulfill it. I’m not into this kind of life. I’ve been blessed in a way.

Filmmaker: And in terms of cinema?

Herzog: Well, I’m still plowing on, let’s face it. And I’ve done every film I’ve really wanted to do. There’s one or two exceptions, but I’ve always had a nonchalant attitude. There was one project so huge that I knew I could do it eventually if my last film made $300 million domestic box office. Then I would have enough money. But it doesn’t really matter whether out of fifty or sixty films I’ve done, one somehow is still dormant, so what.

Filmmaker: Do you see the direction cinema is headed in, at least in the U.S., as productive for the kind of communal theater experience you were talking about before?

Herzog: Well, it’s a huge question. Let’s make it very short. I’m not worried about cinema. It’s so robust and so vibrant in our culture worldwide that we shouldn’t be worried. And cinema always finds its outlets, its paths. But the theaters, as I said before, are the mother of all battles.

# posted by Damon Smith @ 11/18/2009 09:52:00 AM Comments (0)

If one had only a single adjective with which to describe the body of work that directing team David Siegel and Scott McGehee have crafted over the past decade and a half, cerebral immediately jumps to mind. Since their debut film Suture (1993), an austere, black and white thriller starring Dennis Haysbert that took Toronto and Sundance by storm, they have often found it difficult to get their peculiar brand of thoughtful, idea driven filmmaking off the ground. Even if it was far from experimental hijinks of a Hollis Frampton or Kenneth Anger, the fact that the original Suture VHS and DVD boxes from MGM were packaged as "Avant-Garde Cinema" surely didn't help the film find the audience it should have.

After The Deep End (2001), a startlingly effective update of Max Ophuls' The Reckless Moment (1949) with Tilda Swinton and Bee Season (2005), a star studded adaptation of Myla Goldberg's celebrated novel, they embarked upon a series of projects that proved difficult to make a reality. In the interim they conceived and quickly made Uncertainty (2008), a film that conjoins the formalistic and genre elements of Suture and The Deep End with the familial drama of Bee Season.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lynn Collins play a young New York couple who are at a loss as to how to spend their Fourth of July; should they go to her families' Brooklyn enclave, where during the course of a long holiday dinner party various secrets and disappointments may unavoidably be revealed, or should they go to Manhattan to celebrate at a friends apartment? The film allows the couple to indulge in both choices with the help of some metaphysical chicanery; They dash to opposite ends of the bridge separately, only to inexplicably meet the other upon arriving in Brooklyn and Manhattan. The film tracks both pairs of lovers as the Manhattan bound couple find themselves pulled into an elaborate thriller upon finding a phone in the back of a Manhattan cab, while a visit to Kate's family in Brooklyn slowly enmeshes us and our protagonists in the rhythms of domestic drama.

Filmmaker caught up with the directing duo, out for breakfast at a Flat Iron district bakery, to discuss the unorthodox process through which they made the film, the various pros and cons of shooting on HD and how the desire to work with (and against) genres impacts their choices.

Uncertainty opens in Manhattan and on VOD this Friday.

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Filmmaker: What informed the conceptual quality and look of the film? It has both a formal and a loose quality. You often use composition and color very deliberately, yet you relied on hand held shots more so than your previous films.

McGehee: I think this film more than any we’ve done since Suture started out with a broad concept. We were frustrated with the process of trying to make another film, a bigger film that had reached a dead end. We were really frustrated with the process of making films that were traditionally financed, the cast contingent, foreign money model. We were looking for something to do that we could do quickly and immediately. The whole idea of how things happen or don’t happen and why was really on our minds. We set a task for ourselves to sort of make a film about chance. We came upon the title of Uncertainty very early on and that was the mantra of the entire process of the film, how do we keep an element of Uncertainty and chance in the filmmaking itself? The dialogue was improvised through a long process of rehearsal with them. We’d written a whole script of story beats where the plot of the film was laid out, but we shaped the voices of the characters through a process with the actors.

With the camera style, it was partly a necessity driven by the style in which we were working with the actors. We knew that each take would be a little different and we needed to develop a style that would be loose enough to cut between takes that didn’t match. We also thought it would be interesting to have a different relationship with the camera and the DP.

Filmmaker: When did you settle upon the idea of having a two pronged story involving the same pair of lovers, a thriller set in Chinatown and a familial drama set in Brooklyn? What specifically about those boroughs made them the desired setting for each half of film?

Siegel: Well, the Brooklyn Bridge connections them. [Laughs]

McGehee: The Queensboro Bridge doesn’t seem quite as romantic. [Laughs]

Siegel: It’s a lot longer for Joe and Lynn to run.

McGehee: It's not as photogenic either.

Siegel: The story got built from little nuggets of ideas. Tossing a coin and running in opposite directions on the bridge was an early idea. Part of the idea of chance as Scott was saying. So the Brooklyn Bridge seemed like the obvious bridge for us because it connects what are perhaps the two most iconic boroughs of New York. So the idea of a genre story and a more neo-realist, quotidian story and how those two things might relate to each other, we didn’t go into the process of writing thinking we would know how those two stories relate to each other before making the movie. I’m not even sure after making the movie precisely how those stories relate to each other. We like that they create something else, a third thing resonate in people’s minds about the process of living.

Filmmaker: Throughout your career, the pair of you have been very attracted to the notion of genre. You’ve not so much worked within genres as on top of them. I don’t think either of the strands here function in the typical way we come to expect from the genres you’re indulging in, but the cool formalistic quality of the movie seems to tie them together. Was this a conscious attempt to get back to some of the formal rigor of Suture?

Siegel: That’s very perceptive of you. No one else has quite formulated it like that and I think it’s really true. We thought a lot about Suture when we were thinking about this. We liked the building blocks of Suture a lot when we were making it and writing it. As you were saying, we are very attracted to genre and we consider ourselves American filmmakers who appreciate the old Hollywood methods of storytelling very much. That idea of doing something that was both rigorous and free was something we were thinking about very much when we were writing it.

McGehee: I was saying how we started with the idea of chance and Uncertainty. With Suture we started out with a big, broad concept as well, the idea of identity. The story was generated from conceptual level down, in a way. That’s not a typical way to generate entertainment.

Siegel: You could just write an essay instead. [Laughs]

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McGehee: Its been a rewarding process for us, to take a big idea like that, a fairly robust idea that can reach into a lot of places and just start thinking about genre, plot, ways to get at that idea from a storytelling place. In both of these films, the process of writing them was similar in that way. It’s the only two times we’ve made films that we’ve written from scratch.

Filmmaker: What is it like directing as a pair? How has it informed your films in a way that would be different if the division of labor was more distinct?

Siegel: We didn’t go to film school. I was a painter. Scott was going to be an academic. We were finishing graduate school when we started working together. It was quite a long time ago. There was no institution to say, maybe one of you should do this and one of you should do that. We were so ignorant and naïve about what filmmaking was, what the process of making movies was.

McGehee: We’re also fans of Powell and Pressberger, so we had one model to think about. [Laughs]

Siegel: So we just did everything together. Things worked out in the way that they did or things remained together in the way they are together simply because that was the process that got worked out. It’s a little bit of a miracle that its lasted this long in that we’re still best friends and yet we’re not a couple and we’re not brothers. I know it’s the luckiest thing for me because I think neither one of us would have probably chosen film. I would have become a painter, Scott would have become an academic. We were both having success at those things. Something clicked between us and that’s continued to work for us.

In terms of what might have been different had we been working individually in film, we both level of ideas with each other, which at times might be a negative thing, but we inspire each other, which is the positive side of it. We made a pact early on that we wouldn’t compromise in terms of ideas. So if one of us did not like something, we wouldn’t say, well you take this one and I’ll take that one. We’d just find another way. That’s served us very well over the years.

McGehee: I agree.

Filmmaker: What was the extensive improvisatory process like? Did it change how you went about directing the film in unforeseen ways?

McGehee: It was interesting. It was a process that really started with auditions. From the first audition on, David and I were learning about the script we wrote, learning how actors would react in certainly situations. We had never directed this way either. It was a very open thing. Actors would come into auditions and we didn’t really know how to help them get to what we needed. Some of them were really good at it and some of them weren’t. Some very good actors aren’t very good at improv, it’s a very different skill. It was kind of self selecting; some people wouldn’t show up to auditions because they got scared. The ones who did, and who were enthusiastic were the ones who were better at it generally. We didn’t end up with anybody on set who was afraid of the process or who wasn’t into it.

Filmmaker: Was it ever unnerving, working without the safety net of a text. With your previous two films, The Deep End and Bee Season, you had a pair of texts, seeing how both films are drawn from other source material…

Siegel: For us at least, filmmaker has to remain a little bit loose. Even with scripts in which we want the actors to say a very specific thing, it’s more about the emotional beat of the scene, than it is about sticking to the book, so to speak. We’ve always allowed a certain amount of freedom with the words. There were times, both of The Deep End and Bee Season, where we’d be like, “no, I want you to say this. Stop saying that.” [Laughs]

We were really lucky with Joe and Lynn, to have actors who are both as talented as they are and committed to the process through which we wanted to make the movie. They didn’t fight us in that regard. That opened up so much trust amongst the four of us. That month rehearsal period we had with Joe and Lynn was mostly spent rehearsing scenes that would never be in the movie. They were scenes from their history, to create a history for them to lean on. That was such a rewarding process for us in a way we had never experienced with actors before. It was so intimate. We would be rehearsing here, right? We’d say, lets do a scene that’s the second time you’d had coffee, after you’d had sex, right? So we’d do it a City Bakery or some other place. We got to be in their private little world in such an intimate way that over the course of a month of that, we really became our own therapy group. [Laughs]

Filmmaker: You shot much of the film on long lenses in very populated, uncontrollable New York City locations. It really comes off quite beautifully.

McGehee: It was really thrilling. We weren’t sure how it would go. Normally you lock off a street and fill it with extras that you can control. When we were shooting, we knew Joe had a bit of notoriety, we weren’t sure if he would attract attention, I think it might be different for him now after 500 Days of Summer, we may not have been so lucky…

Siegel: He’s a regular enough looking guy…

McGehee: He fits into the city, he looks like the other people in Union Square enough except for wearing a yellow T-shirt that made him stand out. New York being New York, people kind of avoided the film shoot, even when we were right there with a camera close by and it was clear what we were doing, people don’t look at the lens, people don’t gather around, it was very comfortable shooting a film right in the middle of New York.

Siegel: It was eye opening in terms of what you could pull off. That rooftop chase, had it been done by a studio, would have cost, all by itself, more than the budget of this entire movie. It was like, we can do this in this way and do something interesting for peanuts compared to what a studio would spend and it has more authenticity. So it was pretty exciting.

Filmmaker: You worked with Rain Li for the first time, Christopher Doyle’s longtime protégé. How did she add to the process of shooting the film in this fashion?

Siegel: She’s a tremendously gifted hand held operator, I’d say that’s Rain’s great skill, as it is with Chris Doyle. Her ability to work in natural light and available light, her ability to operate a camera on sticks in a fluid and open way, she’s a very good operator.

McGehee: She’s the same generation as Joe and Lynn. The camaraderie they had was nice to watch. I think that’s a really important thing. The person behind the camera is someone that the actors can relate to and trust and connect with. They had a nice relationship that way.

Filmmaker: How much of the inter cutting between the stories was in the original writing and how much did you find in the editing room? Was it difficult to find a balance between the two story threads?

Siegel: That was the real challenge in the editing. The way we wrote the script, the blocks of moments in each story were much bigger than they were going to be in the cutting. We couldn’t write a script so cutty or it wouldn’t read. So we had imagined in advance moments that we thought would be very cutty and some moments that we felt would be much longer. Finding balance was the real trick. We thought for a long time in the cutting that it was the Brooklyn story that was giving us more trouble. We had to find a kind of life in it, because the Manhattan story had so much more plot in a way. In the end it was the Manhattan story that was more trying in terms of finding emotionality. To talk about things we find successful and not so successful in the movie, we always wanted more conflict on the Manhattan side between Joe and Lynn in terms of the issue of pregnancy. There are things that we shot that are intended to do that. Yet, they didn’t work in relation to the cutting back and forth. So eventually, we found ourselves pushing to have the cutting replace some of that conflict, or stand in for some of that conflict. We thought it was relatively successful at the end, but that’s an example of the struggle we found ourselves facing as we cut the movie.

Filmmaker: This is the first time you’ve worked in HD. Did you like working in the format? Were the differences concerning the quickness with which you were able to shoot, color saturation, ability to handle darkness, difficult to adjust to?

McGehee: Pluses and minuses.

Siegel: Arriflex makes a camera called the D-20. It’s enormous. We chose it eventually. When we started this process, we thought we were going to make this with a camera that’s the size of my first. There are many of those. We tested them and immediate we were like, that’s not really the look that we want. So as we moved up the HD food chain, we looked at the Viper, the Genesis, and then at the Arri D-20. It’s a big camera, its quite heavy, and it looks like a machine.

McGehee: It looks like the bastard child of a cinder block and a machine. It weighs that much.

Siegel: It’s an easier camera to use in terms of being able to see directly on the monitor what you’re getting. We think we got a great look out of it, but it was big camera, it wasn’t faster to shoot that 35mm camera, we were tethered to a deck, it was quite cumbersome. We were able to run though. It allowed us to shoot many, many more hours of footage than we were accustomed to however. It was much less expensive than film.

McGehee: We abandoned that camera when we went into the subway. We shot Super 16mm on the subway. We shot in the subway on the DL. The first time we went down into the subway with that D-20 camera, we were building the camera, and we’re just watching our AC put the camera together, he’s got a battery belt on his waist, he’s attaching a red cable and then a blue cable to this box, then connecting this other box…

Siegel: You’re a suicide bomber. [Laughs]

McGehee: This is clearly not a stealthy way to get a shot in a subway. [Laughs]

Siegel: Who are all these guys standing around? [Laughs] Why are they whispering? [Laughs] Film shoot? Yeah, sure.

# posted by Brandon Harris @ 11/11/2009 12:01:00 PM Comments (0)

Ex-LAPD Detective, investigative journalist, 9/11 truther, foreteller of the coming apocalypse --- these are just some of the roles Michael C. Ruppert has inhabited in his fascinating life, one that versatile filmmaker Chris Smith (American Movie, The Yes Men) has chosen to examine in his newest film Collapse. It is a return to documentary films for Smith, who has oscillated between disparate narrative and documentary work with a rare deftness. His most recent film The Pool (2007), a naturalistic narrative which Smith photographed himself, tracks a rural teenager working in a Panjim hotel to support his family who becomes obsessed with a swimming pool in the opulent Goan hills and the mysterious family who owns it. His newest picture couldn’t have less in common with that film. Reminiscent if Errol Morris’ work, Collapse is a chilling look at the mind and opinions of a man often labeled a conspiracy theorist and nut job who first came to notice as a whistle blower on the CIA's alleged involvement with drug traffiking in the 1970s and 80s. In Smith's film heoffers lucid and persuasive analysis of the ways in which the realization of time worn concepts like peak oil and climate change and the unquestioned acceptance of fractional reserve banking and fiat currency are pushing our overpopulated world toward unimaginable catastrophes of famine and deindustrialization.

Smith, a native Midwesterner who now lives in London, entered the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Graduate Film Program in 1995 after shooting his feature debut American Job (1996). Chris met Mark Borchardt while editing that film and quickly began filming a documentary about the making of Mark's psychological thriller Coven (2000). Both American Job and American Movie (2000), his sublime chronicle of Borchardt's quixotic filmmaking ambitions, played at the Sundance Film Festival, and American Movie won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary, after which Sony Pictures Classics acquired the film and Borchardt became a minor celebrity, with segments of The David Letterman Show and bit parts in myriad B films.

Collapse opens on Friday in Manhattan, November 13th in Los Angeles and on Video on Demand via Cinetic FilmBuff.

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Filmmaker: When did Michael Ruppert first come to your attention? When in the process of making the documentary you set out to make about the CIA’s involvement in drug smuggling did you decide to focus on Ruppert’s opinions and ideas instead?

Smith: We’d heard about him four or five years ago. He was doing some lectures and I had seen the videos of them on YouTube. I knew about him for a long time. I had heard the story about his alleged recruitment by the CIA to get involved in drug trafficking in the 70s. We were finishing our last film The Pool and researching different projects. We had contacted him to talk about that and possibly working on something. We set up a meeting at his house. When we got there he had literally just finished his newest book. Or at least, he was very close to finishing it. This was in February of 2009. He was consumed with this idea of collapse which he saw happening all around him. It was something he had talked about for many years. All the things he thought were going to happen in the near future were starting happen. He was just obsessed with where we were at this point in history. We went over there intending to talk about his personal history and the experiences he had had. He said that he was just focusing on what was happening now. He talked for two or three hours. He hadn’t done any press or interviews for a couple years. He just had so much energy. He was bursting at the seams. We left there scratching our heads. He had so many other things on his mind then going back and delving into what had happened to him in the 1970s.

We went away and two or three weeks later wrote him and email with a proposal for an idea, which was to just do an interview based on this book and what he sees happening around us. It was such a fascinating monologue. That’s really where it started. We were planning on it being a very short, interim project, where we would film for a couple days and cut something together quick, then maybe throw up what we’d done on YouTube or just give it to him. We didn’t really plan to make it the next film we were working on. It’s just one of those things were once we started filming, it just sort of evolved into what it is now. We filmed the bulk of the movie over two days and then we did three additional days of shooting over the few weeks that followed to clarify a few things, but for the most part the movie was shot in March over the course of the first two days.

Filmmaker: Although he’s incredibly persuasive, was there any point in which you thought about expanding the scope of the film outside of Michael’s point of view?

Smith: Ultimately I was interested in making a character study about a guy who’s dedicated his life to these issues. He’s spent thirty years coming up with this theory. To me, the film was about who he is and how he ended up here and the effect that this process has had on his life. I personally wasn’t interested in making a movie about energy or sustainability or food or overpopulation or economics. There are so many of those films that have come out over the last couple of years. I find that they can feel somewhat educational. I find Michael to be an incredibly entertaining person. His philosophy, the way he looks at the world, is more unique than anyone I’ve ever met. That was what we wanted to focus on, on him. We wanted to make a character study as opposed to an issue driven movie. The issues are there and for you to understand him I think you have to understand why he thinks these things are going to happen and what his theory is.

The thing that is fascinating about Michael is that he sort of takes a step back from all these various issues and ties everything together. I think to do a fair and fully informed movie that analyzes every one of those issues from every angle would be impossible. The amount of material necessary could never fit into a feature film. At least how I would want to do it. So what was most intriguing was Michael; he’s whom we wanted to make a movie about.

Filmmaker: How challenging was it to edit Michael’s expansive analysis and find supplemental footage to illustrate his points?

Smith: The amount of information that’s swimming in Michael’s head is incomprehensible. He came into this basement with no notes. He didn’t know any of the questions we were going to ask him. We basically just started talking. For us the challenge became to cull that down. We’d jump from topic to topic and then come back to things. Making something that seemed cohesive was challenging, more so because the way the film was shot than Michael himself. We followed the energy in the conversation to wherever it would lead us as opposed to saying, “let’s talk about each one of these things in a compartmentalized way”. Ultimately, that’s how we had to structure the film, but we let it be a much more loose, organic process while we where shooting. That’s what allowed Michael to be himself, to allow his train of thought to flow and work tangentially through these various topics. I think that’s where he’s the strongest.

Filmmaker: For being such a self-contained film, you worked with two cinematographers, including the great Ed Lachman (Far From Heaven, Lightning Over Water). For a film about one man and his opinions, it had a very dynamic style. How did you come up with the visual design?

Smith: The first three days we shot with a cinematographer named Max Malkin. He’s incredibly talented. I talked to him before we started filming. We talked about a few ideas, weather we should shoot on a stage or somewhere else. Max was talking about some apocalyptic café, playing off the idea of the collapse, but we ultimately decided to go with the basement of an abandoned meat packing plant in downtown Los Angeles. It gave the feeling of an interrogation, the sense of being let in on some secret information about how things really work. It ties into Mike’s history and mystique, the dealings with the CIA and that world. We wanted a look that complemented that feel. It should look and feel like its taking place at four in the morning while everyone else is sleeping. So we set it up with Max and then the last two days of shooting, Ed came in and did those. So it looks very similar. Ed is an incredible cinematographer and he loved the way the first three days were shot, so he basically went in and matched that.

What was nice about both of those DPs is that when you are working with people that are so talented, they’re not just running a camera they’re also thinking about the film’s subject matter and what you’re trying to achieve thematically. They both contributed greatly not just in capturing a look, but in effecting the content of the piece as well.

Filmmaker: You move between the worlds of narrative and documentary, tackling vastly dissimilar topics, with what seems like relative ease.

Smith: When looking at new projects I always work intuitively. I always assume whatever interests me might be interesting to someone else. When this came about, I thought it was interesting because it was so different from anything I had ever done before and I thought it was challenging from a formalistic point of view to see if you could make something interesting from just this guy talking. To be honest, after we did The Yes Men film, I had personally told myself I was going to quit doing documentaries. I had started in narrative filmmaking back in 1996 when my first film American Job went to Sundance. I had never actually planned to make documentary films. I always liked them but it wasn’t something I wanted to do. At the time that I was planning to work of new projects however, the documentary subjects I had at my disposal just seemed more interesting. So that’s how I ended up making American Movie, Home Movie and The Yes Men. After The Yes Men, we went to India and made The Pool. From there I was writing and researching narrative projects when we met with Michael and it was one of those things that, it was too good to pass up. It was right there. You have to follow your instinct at that point, weather you want to do another documentary or narrative or what have you. At a certain point you just look at what’s been presented to you in terms of opportunities and kind of go with it. I’m hoping this is the last one, but you don’t know.

Filmmaker: How have audience responded to the film so far? Has its near apocalyptic message been the catalyst for naysayers?

Smith: I find that the people that stick around and ask you questions are generally the people that like the film. I think the people that don’t like the film you generally don’t hear from. They’re critics and they write about it. Toronto for us was incredibly positive. We expected the film to be more controversial than it was just because of Michael’s nature and his extreme view on certain things. He really has conviction and isn’t afraid to say what he thinks. There was some thought that his opinions would cause more controversy. What surprised us the most was that people who agreed with him wholeheartedly, as well as people who agreed with some of the things he said and people who didn’t agree with him, all really liked the film. I think that made us really happy, that people were able to enjoy the film regardless of how much they align themselves with his views.

Filmmaker: Has Michael seen the film?

Smith: He saw it right before we went to Toronto.

Filmmaker: What did he think of it?

Smith: We didn’t get into many specifics, but he told me he liked it. There are some things he takes issue with. Ultimately we were trying to make a film that was entertaining, that moved, that wasn’t just and educational exercise. So there’s little things, like in the clean coal section, where he wishes we had put in how clean coal doesn’t deal with the sludge or the toxic waste that’s produced, there’s technical things that he wishes could have been included, but ultimately he understood that it’s a movie and if people want to learn more about it they can read his book or they can go to any number of people who have written and talked about these subjects. So I think ultimately he loved the film, that it really captured him and that it was fair. I think he’s smart enough to realize that the stuff that’s critical of him is important to have in there so that people can make up there own mind about him and what they choose to believe about his message and what he’s trying to do. If it was a one sided portrayal of him I think he knows that would be something that wouldn’t be able to reach a wide audience, but beyond that, I think he understands that he’s a complicated person. I think that comes across in the film and he appreciates the work that was put in to make that come across. Its difficult when a film is about you. I’ve dealt with this one American Movie and on The Yes Men where, you become close with the people while making the film so you can see how it weighs on them because they’re so under a microscope. I think if you put any of us in front of a camera for twelve, fourteen hours, there’s going to be things in there you may or may not wish you had said, but they’re all part of what makes that person who they are and I think that’s what comes across.

Filmmaker: Have you noticed any difference in how people of various political persuasions have viewed the film? Has there been any split across ideological lines?

Smith: It wasn’t appealing to people on a partisan level. There have been a lot of Republicans and Democrats we’ve heard from, a lot of financial people who’ve responded to it. I think it appeals to everyone on a certain level who’s interested in any of these issues. Michael comes from a Republican family. His just the facts, straight-forward way of talking appeals to certain people. Yet, I think everyone takes what he says with a grain of salt. I think what we hope people will do is use the film as a catalyst to do some research and come up with there own well-informed opinions. There are many varied opinions on these subject matters. History teaches us that no one knows anything really, no one knows for sure what’s going to happen. I think to have least thought about some of these issues is not harmful. If anything, I think it could be positive. Regardless of your take on the material, I think the film is entertaining and you get to peer into someone’s life. I’ve always thought that’s what the best documentaries do; transport you into someone else’s world and you get to understand and live with them for a period. That’s all you can hope for.

Filmmaker: Are you planning on buying a farm?

Smith: No [Laughs]. I’m fairly optimistic. I don’t know why [Laughs]. Maybe I’ve hit the level of acceptance as a result of working on this project. I feel fairly at ease with everything. I know when we first starting working on this, there were a few nights where we were just staring at the ceiling for a couple of hours thinking about everything, but when you come to the other side you realize that regardless of weather these things will or will not happen, opening up your mind to think about these ideas to this degree and to the degree Michael thinks about them is really fascinating. The amount of time we spent on this film led us to really have to go through the mental process of taking in all this information. It’s been really interesting. The discussions we were having while making the film and the discussions we’ve had with people who’ve seen the film have all been really interesting and useful. I feel so well informed now that I feel like I can at least try to voice my opinion and vote appropriately when and if these issues become something we can have a say in. There are many well-informed, smart, educated people who fall on both sides of several of the issues Michael talks about. There are people that agree with him 100% and people who disagree with him 100%. So I hope we can open up a lot of debate.

# posted by Brandon Harris @ 11/04/2009 12:14:00 PM Comments (1)