Bladders n' Synch: A Screening of Werner Herzog's Happy People

I was in Brad’s Café, the Columbia Journalism school hangout, when I overheard a student mention the name Werner Herzog. I swiveled my chair to interrupt his conversation. One cannot afford to pay heed to social conventions when important matters are possibly at stake. This was Werner he was talking about.

“What did you just say about Werner?” The kid was taken aback by the sudden intrusion, but he understood; this was Werner.

“Oh, well he’s coming to the MFA Film department tonight to present his newest film.”

“Okay, where do I get a ticket?”

His name was Jimmy and the two of us walked through the pouring rain to the MFA building. I had never been there before. If journalists and fictionists are to be caught commiserating on Columbia’s campus there is sure to be trouble. We found out the tickets were reserved strictly for MFA students, so we begged a few of them in the hallway to procure us two. My day had just become much more exciting. I was going to see Werner at 6:30.

I left campus shortly thereafter to go to the divorce attorney’s office where I have a gig filing documents and running papers to the court clerks. While sorting through child support documents and scornful emails between exes I recollected my previous private Werner screening, which occurred in early October.

He was showing his other latest documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Werner Herzog is a German filmmaker who has been making films for nearly half a century, but more recently he has made Hollywood movies (Rescue Dawn, Bad Lieutenant: The Port of Call – New Orleans) and ‘documentaries’ (Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the World), which are more like film essays that he narrates himself. German accents have a way of obliterating any grace within the English language, but Werner’s voice avoids this pitfall. The emphatic manner with which he states his words washes out a portion of the normally abrasive German accent, and the final outcome is something that can be poetic, insightful, obnoxious, or comical, or even all of the above, depending on the context and tone. Personally, I can’t get enough of it.

Throughout the day I bothered my girlfriend, Shula, with text messages of fake Werner lines. “Why is it that human beings love pools and lakes, but yet many of us despair the rain? We always want abundance, and so it seems little droplets just won’t do.” When six O’clock rolled around, I filed away the last prenup and made my way back up to Columbia to the Dodge building. Outside the screening room on the fifth floor, the hallway was filled with hipster-like film geeks, perhaps more my speed than know-it-all news geeks. I could have perhaps been one of them had I not missed the application deadline. But no regrets, I have made peace with the Journalism program. Before the film was to begin, I looked for the nearest restroom.

The bathroom was small and though there were panels between the two urinals to protect for modesty, the layout was such that I was uncomfortably close to the pisser to my left. While peeing I noticed that as the man next to me peed, he was sighing and grunting, lost in relief. Washing our hands in the one sink behind us, the man asked me if I had the time. He had an un-kept look; long frizzy black hair and a slight gap in his front teeth. I told him the time. I was curious about these film kids. Who was I dealing with here?

As a journalist I have found that the best way to get a quick cultural gauge of an unfamiliar group of people is to act brashly and then observe the response. When you have to play guinea pig though, there is risk involved. If humor and wit align, there is potential for instant kinship; if not, there can be consequences.

“Pardon me for saying so,” I told the man, as we dried our hands on paper towels, “but that sounded like a good one.”

“Oh, you mean like a good sniffle?” Apparently, he had just sniffled, but I didn’t notice and I have no idea what a good sniffle is.

“No like a good pee.”

“What did you say?” The man was incredulous.

“I said it sounded like you just had a good pee.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Were you just observing my pee?”

“I wasn’t observing your pee. I just noticed certain noises you were making, like a deep sigh, which says to me that you were enjoying the pee. I can’t turn off my senses when I walk into a bathroom, so I noticed it; it’s a good thing. You should be happy.” The man was not happy.

“I don’t expect some dude to be observing me when I’m in the bathroom.”

“What do you think people plug their ears and close their eyes when they are in public bathrooms? Is that what you do? I asked, raising my voice to match the rise in his.

“Well, nobody’s ever said anything to me about my peeing.” I turned to move towards the door.

“Well, how does it feel?” As the door was closing behind me he caught my eye with his.

“Awkward!”

Time for Werner. There was no sign of Jimmy, but someone I was in line with had been nice enough to save me a good seat. I settled in just before Werner walked in to introduce Happy People, a title he told us he loathed but had been asked to keep. The film was not his, he told us, but rather an 89-minute version of a four-hour Russian documentary made by a filmmaker named Dmitry Vasyukov. Werner explained that he had loved the film and offered to cut it down to make it marketable to an international audience. He had also changed the music, used English translators to speak the translations instead of subtitles, and of course, added his own narration. The movie was a fascinating look into the lives of fur-trappers in Siberia, a wilderness one and a half times the size of the United States.

There are two things I love about Werner documentaries: one is they are fascinating; and two is Werner. He knows how to connect to his subjects so that they instantly become whole characters. When Werner questions scientists, he not only asks about their area of expertise, but about their dreams and they answer him without missing a beat. No matter what his films are about on the surface, they are always journeys into something much deeper and universal; they plunge into the unconscious. And then of course, there is his narration. All of Werner’s documentaries, or film essays as they have been called, have one or two moments where his voice is so serious, resounding, and intense about something that is visually implicit, that it borders on comedy. In one scene of his film Encounters at the End of the World, a scientist explains that penguins sometimes get confused and run away from the ocean and into the mountainous interior of the arctic. When Werner’s camera finds one such penguin waddling off into the mountains he chimes in. “…with 500 kilometers ahead of him, he is marching towards certain death.” Happy People, has these classic Werner moments too. At one point the filmmaker interviews a veteran from the Soviet War who becomes too overcome with emotion to continue speaking. While the man cries on camera Werner says in voice over, “This man has been so traumatized by the war, that he cannot continue to speak about it.”

His interactions with audiences also have a peculiar humor to them both because of the way he strings sentences together and because of his ardent tone. Over the course of the 30-minute Q&A that followed the screening of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, unfazed by the New York audience, Werner bashed New Age philosophy, psychotherapy, and yoga, which he called, “an abomination.” After the Happy People screening he again took a shot at yoga, and stressed the importance of traveling on foot, “and not with these ridiculous backpacks and sleeping bags and all that, but just a rucksack and you go.” My favorite line of the evening was when after stressing the importance of reading, Werner listed a few of the books that were required reading for anyone who enrolls in his film school in the UK. There were some odd choices in the mix. Someone questioned him about one in particular to which he answered:

“Yes, absolutely, I require all of my students at the Rogue Film School to read The War on Commission Report.”

On a more serious note, as fascinating as Happy People was, I was equally enthralled with the story of how Werner came across the original four-hour Russian documentary. He was driving by his friend’s house in Los Angeles and noticed that there was a parking spot. “There is never a parking spot there,” he tells us, “so I took it.” After knocking on his friend’s door he was invited in. His friend paused the film he was watching so that they could chat but before leaving, Werner told his friend to play part of the movie. “And I ended up staying to watch the end of this four hour Russian film about hunters in Siberia.” As soon as it ended Werner asked his friend to rewind it back to the beginning to watch again.

“And I thought one should make an international version of it,” he explained.

I chatted with Werner briefly before leaving and he said that by living his life through his intuition he frequently stumbles upon “gifts” such as this film. Even in going to see Werner films, I have had strange serendipitous experiences. In order to acquire a ticket to the screening last month, I waited in an hour-long line outside of a box-office that was selling tickets to at least 20 other events as part of the New Yorker Magazine Festival. The woman one spot in front of me was not only also in line to get tickets to the new Werner film, but she had also spent time in working in the Locations departments in the film industry (albeit a bit higher up than me; she is Woody Allen’s NY Location Manager). The two of us formed an instant bond. More recently, having impressed myself by sneaking into the sold-out Halloween Phish show based on an intuitive sense that I could, I have noticed my own intuition bearing fruit. Hearing this lesson from Werner was very timely. Even the way I happened to hear about this screening from Jimmy was a random occurrence. And, that’s not all.

Before making the hour-long trip home to Brooklyn, I thought it a good idea to relieve myself. I went back to the same bathroom and took the one open urinal; the one on the right, where I had relieved myself pre-Happy People. Looking to my left, I did a double take. It was him; frizzy hair, gap in the tooth, shaggy look. He had to have noticed me, yet he didn’t say anything. There was, however, no way in hell that I was not going to comment on the situation. Werner had taught me otherwise. What makes this happening even weirder is that he didn’t even go to the Werner film. This wasn’t just the pre-relief, post-relief encounter of two men attending the same event. This was something grander; bladders in-synch. I looked at him closely to make sure he was in fact the guy, and then I cut in on the sound of our respective streams.

“Come on. What are the chances? This is funny. You can laugh.” He looked at me blankly, zipped up, then turned around to head to the sink. “Just admit it, it was a great piss you had earlier. Am I wrong? Why can’t you admit that you had a great pee?” At this point I was at the sink too. He looked at me blankly.

“Who are you?” He asked. “I’ve never seen you. You’re just here for the event, right? I nodded.

“Figures.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked. “Figures what? Do you like Werner?”

“Eh, I could take him or leave him.” He was drying his hands now with a paper towel.

“Ok, I see. So you’re saying figures that I would like him. You’re saying you can take or leave me? You don’t like me, do you?”

He chucked the used paper towel in the trash, looked me in the eye and said, “Kid, I don’t even know you.” Then he turned and walked out.

“Just admit it,” I screamed after him, “It was a great pee.”

I wonder what Werner would have thought of all this. I think he would have sided with me. “Yes,” he would have said, “great pees and traveling on foot, these are two things essential for every man to live a full existence.” I walked to 96^th Street before hopping the subway home.

Critics of Sincerity

In his early sixties, Clint Eastwood picked up his first Oscar nomination for Best Director with his 1992 film, Unforgiven. In his seventies he was nominated for Best Director on three occasions: 2003 for Mystic River; 2004 for Million Dollar Baby, which he won; and 2006 for Letters from Iwo Jima. In his eighties Eastwood is not relenting; his boldest film, Hereafter, about people who can communicate with the dead, is in theaters now, but predictably little is being said about it. Like the rest of us humans, critics are averse to mortality, so woe to the filmmaker who tries to deal with death sincerely.

Every now and again, filmmakers take risks. Rather than choosing a project that a director thinks has a reasonable chance to get financed, draw crowds, earn money for all involved, receive critical acclaim, and guarantee a better next contract, a filmmaker will choose to focus on a subject that will likely lead to the opposite. Financing may be difficult, critics will misunderstand the work, moviegoers will misunderstand the trailer and never see the movie, and any subsequent undertaking by the filmmaker will run further risk of being viewed by ‘the biz’ with skepticism.

When passionate filmmakers take risks, the end result is not always a movie that represents the pinnacle of technical proficiency or story structure. There will possibly be moments of incoherence, or pretension, which flummox and anger both viewers and critiques. Take Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, for example. “The film is either a masterpiece,” writes The Guardian’s Peter Bradshow, “or a massively dysfunctional act of self-indulgence and self-laceration.” “I’m here to tell you that although Synecdoche, New York has its moments of brilliance,” Sean Dwyer writes for the film reviews blog, Film Junk, “overall it is one of the most impenetrable and frustrating movies I have seen in a very long time.”

Before a single frame can be shot, a filmmaker has to persuade financiers, studios, and star talent to want to take part in the project by invoking genre names or calling upon precedents. For example, if a filmmaker wants to make a horror film that is set in the woods with non-professional actors, then in pitch meetings he or she will likely invoke the successes of The Blair Witch Project—$600,000 to make $250 million gross. Among other things, a successful movie pitch from the financer’s or studio’s point of view identifies the genre, the target demographic, and what the film is ‘about.’ Easier said than done, especially for an art film budgeted at tens of millions of dollars.

In 2000, writer and director Darren Aronofsky procured the needed $70 million to get a green light to make The Fountain. It wasn’t the commercial viability of the story or genre that attracted the investment. The film is genre-less, and the story treads on new territory. The Fountain is three interwoven stories, about two lovers, spanning one millennium, as they try and find a way to be together for eternity. The film found funding when it found a star. But just before shooting was to commence, Brad Pitt dropped the role, taking half of the movie’s budget with him. Set pieces were auctioned off as years of preparatory work were scrapped. The DVD extras of The Fountain includes a ‘making of’ video, which devotes a few minutes of material to the collapse of the first attempt at production. In a memorable scene, Aronofsky announces the news to his crew that they are being shut down. After an ensuing moment of somber silence, Aronofsky chimes back in: “Anybody need a hug?”

If anyone needed a hug though, it was Aronofsky. It is often said in filmmaking that a director is the loneliest person on the set. If the work fails, is shut down, or becomes burdened by seemingly unsolvable dilemmas, the actors will find other work, the crews will move-on, and the studios and investors will find a new movie in which to invest. Worse than bearing the brunt of the blame for a failed film, the director is now an artist with images trapped drifting in the mind, pruning, desperately waiting for a new outlet to open.

The greatest directors are those with such strong visions of their work that nothing can possibly come between them and their film. Few directors could have withstood the mayhem that Frances Ford Coppolla did in the making of Apocalypse Now. After striking out with every other major Hollywood studio, a largely unknown director named Peter Jackson convinced New Line Cinema to undertake one of the largest efforts in filmmaking history (8 years, $285 million) to make Tolkien’s trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. Everything that could have gone wrong went worse than wrong in the making of the film Fitzcarraldo, but director Werner Herzog would stop at nothing to complete his film. Herzog was interviewed periodically throughout the production by a documentarian and had this to say about the possibility of not finishing his movie. "If I abandon this project, I would be a man without dreams, and I never want to live like that. I live my life or I end my life with this project.”

Part of the art, and therefore part of the skill of an artist, is making the art happen. Whether or not Aronofsky was willing to die to make The Fountain is inconsequential. What matters is that when his actor and money went out the window he replaced them with a new script, less costly methods of production, and actors Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz. After six long years of making a film that was supposed to take two years, The Fountain” premiered at the Venice Film Festival. When the film ended and the credits rolled, the audience booed.

After director Robert Zemeckis brought us the beloved Back to the Future trilogy, he made a much bolder attempt at the Science Fiction genre by adapting a novel by Carl Sagan. Contact follows Dr. Eleanor Alloway, played by Jodie Foster, on an exploration into the possibility of the existence of intelligent alien life. Contact is a normal-enough Science Fiction movie until about three quarters of the way through the film, when Foster’s character finds out that her lack of faith in the divine disqualifies her as a suitable representative to meet and greet the extraterrestrials. The remainder of the film explores concepts of the afterlife, culminating in a ten-minute scene on an unknown planet between Jodie Foster and her dead father, played by a wonderfully Zen-like performance by David Morse (kudos to the casting on that one). Contact is now mostly a revered film, but it was initially met with very mixed reviews. “While the movie doesn’t qualify as an awful waste of space by any means,” wrote Dennis Howe in the Washington Post, “it has so many creative black holes, you’ll have to weigh the entertainment odds before making this journey.”

In 2001 Richard Kelly came out with his remarkable directorial debut about a teenage boy named Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) who learns from his dreams that he is able to see multiple dimensions and manipulate both space and time. Kelly packaged the movie into a high school satire, science fiction, horror, thriller, and drama, called Donnie Darko. But the reviews were not flattering. "Donnie Darko has plenty of problems,” writes Todd McCarthy in Variety, “But most stem from a young filmmaker over-swinging on his first time up to the plate and hitting a deep fly out rather than a home run. This overweaningly ambitious picture will be difficult to market.” Donnie Darko has since become a cult classic.

Hereafter, Clint Eastwood’s latest directing effort written by Peter Morgan, tracks the separate stories of three individuals whose lives will eventually intersect. One of our heroes is a French journalist (Cecile De France), another is a blue-collar American man (Matt Damon), and lastly an orphaned English boy (Frankie McLaren), but they are all united by a common thread: A special connection to the afterlife. Even if the movie were a disaster, Eastwood would still be due credit for the audaciousness of attempting a genuine film about death without hiding behind an inch of frivolous comedy, action, or sex. But the reviewers mostly disagree.

New Yorker film critic David Denby writes, “most of the movie is not about what the dead mean to the living; it’s about having nice little chats with ghosts, and neither Eastwood nor [screenwriter Peter] Morgan has the taste for such flamboyant stuff." Erik Childress at Cinematical called it “a unchallenging dullard.” Peter Sciretta at Slashfilm wrote that the movie ended with, “logically-laughable coincidences,” and noted that, “coincidences are bad storytelling.”

Though there are outliers, movie critics respond in predictable ways. When it comes to action movies, critics look for clever plot twists and innovative action sequences (Google: critical response to Inception). With drama and thriller films, critics tend to favor the movies with the highest levels of atrocity (Crash, Babel, Precious). But when it comes to films that make sincere efforts at grappling with something cosmic, unless the movie is science fiction, critics never like it. Roger Ebert seems to agree with this assessment. In his review of The Fountain he wrote, “The movie’s biggest aesthetic gamble: its earnestness.”

At the very least Hereafter is worth seeing if only to prompt a discussion with your buddy, date, self, or Mommy, about a topic people often like to avoid until it happens. Death. Though they are absolutely all must-sees in my opinion, Donnie Darko, Contact, and Hereafter are not flawless films, but as consumers or experiencers of art, if we do not allow artists some space for miss-steps, or even total failure, then we can’t complain when everything comes out looking, sounding, and feeling the same.

Having reached the age of 80 and continuing to direct damn good movies, if there is one man who has earned the right to direct from the heart, it is Clint Eastwood. And if there is one movie worth seeing right now it is Hereafter.

I will leave you with a portion of Roger Ebert’s review of The Fountain.

Yes, The Fountain overreaches on every level, and that's exactly what I like about it. Big subject, big canvas, big ambitions. A young director's ungainly and overwrought folly? By all means, in the sense that Paul Thomas Anderson's "Magnolia" or Gus Van Sant's "My Own Private Idaho" or Martin Scorsese's "New York, New York" or Bernardo Bertolucci's "1900" are follies.

They're all bold attempts -- some more successful than others -- by passionate young filmmakers in their late 20s to mid-30s to sum up their own sensibilities and experience, to cram just about everything they know and feel, about life and about movies, on the screen at once.

That doesn't make for smooth, comfortable viewing, but I'd much rather watch somebody shoot for the moon when the stakes are sky-high than sit back while they play it safe.