On new film 'Into The Abyss'
Werner Herzog has encountered many strange tales over the years, but his latest film could well be his most important work to date.
Werner Herzog is perhaps the most consistently fascinating director alive. His fictional body of his work has seen him coax Nicolas Cage into delivering his finest performance in years in The Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans, while Aguirre: The Wrath Of God influenced Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. His documentaries unveil strange characters in even stranger environments and often see Herzog’s German accent employed to deliver obtuse questioning. In Encounters At The End Of The World, a study of people working in Antarctica, he asks an expert interviewee: “Is there such a thing as insanity among penguins? I try to avoid the definition of insanity or derangement. I don’t mean that a penguin might believe he or she is Lenin or Napoleon Bonaparte, but could they just go crazy because they’ve had enough of their colony?”
Sometimes fate leads his films to cross territories. Fitzcarraldo follows the story of a man who attempts to pull a steamship over a steep hill - something that the production itself replicated without special effects. Such were the burdens of the film’s creation that it inspired Les Blank’s Burden Of Dreams and Herzog’s book Conquest Of The Useless. And when he’s not making his own films, Herzog can be spotted acting in other people’s films, notably as a gas mask-clad abusive father in Julien Donkey-Boy and as a priest who leads a nun to a likely death in Mister Lonely.
Needless to say, Herzog is quite a character. He once told Errol Morris that he’d eat his shoe if Morris completed his pet cemetery docu Gates Of Heaven, and was subsequently filmed doing exactly that in Blank’s self-explanatory short Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. Most famously, he was shot by an air rifle during an interview with Mark Kermode. His reaction? “It hurts a little bit, but it’s not a significant bullet.” He’ll assert himself if he doesn’t agree with a line of questioning or subtly mock those which he doesn’t approve of, but there’s no malice involved. (“Would you consider yourself more of a storyteller than a documentarian?” I ask. “Documentaries should be storytelling as well,” he replies. “Let’s face it, we’re not in the business of accountants”). Regardless, Herzog has helmed roughly twice as many documentaries in the past two decades as he has feature-length fictional movies. Not that this has been his conscious plan. In his own words, delivered in that famous quizzical Germanic tone, “It comes like an uninvited guest, like burglars in your kitchen in the middle of the night.”
Herzog’s playfulness understandably takes a back seat in his new film Into The Abyss: A Tale Of Death, A Tale Of Life which examines two men, Michael Perry and Jason Burkett, who were convicted of a triple homicide that occurred in Texas and the aftermath of their actions. Perry was executed eight days after Herzog interviewed him for the film, while Burkett is serving a life sentence.
Despite his opposition to capital punishment, Herzog is eager to emphasise that Into The Abyss is not a film about that issue. “It’s a film about life, it’s a film about a senseless crime and the repercussions of that crime. The whole tapestry is of a very dark Americana.” Just as importantly, he declares, “Being a German, with the dark past of Germany under the Nazis, I would be the last one to try to tell the Americans how to handle their criminal justice.”
Herzog pulls no punches when he first meets Perry, telling him: “Destiny has dealt you a bad deck of cards which does not exonerate you, and which does not necessarily mean that I have to like you.”
“I risked the film with that,” states Herzog. “I wanted to tell him and I wanted to be a straight shooter with him, like with everyone else. I had to anticipate that he wouldn’t get up and leave the discourse. People on death row who spend ten years in isolation in a tiny concrete cell, they can tell from miles away if somebody is a phoney or not.”
In addition to Into The Abyss, Herzog also created Death Row, a four-part television series which studies those awaiting their final fate. Herzog isn’t interested in addressing questions of guilt or innocence - half of those interviewed admit to their crimes, while the evidence against Perry and Burkett is overwhelming. What sparks his curiosity is the minutiae of each person’s background, and what small steps have taken them to catastrophic consequences, using Death Row subject Joseph Garcia as an example: “His catastrophe starts with the most average everyday encounter with a young women with some friends. She’s on a couch, he happens to sit on the same couch and she has no socks on. Her toes are cold and she asks him whether she can tuck her toes under his thighs. Of course, with great pleasure he agrees. And this gesture leads to a jealous confrontation with one of the other guys in the room and has all of a sudden catastrophic consequences which ultimately take him all the way to death row. I’m fascinated by these details, how they turn into something cataclysmic.”
Herzog uses another Death Row subject, Hank Skinner, to illustrate how the death sentence alters someone’s perspective: “He was taken from death row forty-two miles to Huntsville because that’s where the death chamber is, where he’s to be executed. For one last time, the first in many years, they see the open sky, they see a gas station. They’re in a cage in a van accompanied by police armed to the teeth. And they see the world one last time for forty minutes. And Skinner says something very remarkable: ‘Everything looks like Israel. Everything looks like the holy land.’ It made me curious and I travelled the same forty-two miles from death row to the death chamber. And all of a sudden an abandoned gas station with a decrepit ramshackle hut with a sign, ‘Happy worm bait shop’, becomes something magnificent. The most insignificant landscape all of a sudden is magnificent. Even a cow in a field. The pasture looks like the holy land.”
The director certainly isn’t an apologist for those convicted of such heinous crimes. “All the cases I went into had something specific, the amount of senselessness,” he sighs with evident sorrow. “The amount of senselessness is staggering. It’s completely and utterly senseless. As you know I’m not an advocate of capital punishment. But in very severe cases and this is one of them, I would be an advocate of life in prison. If I were in Texas and had I committed a triple homicide and the jury walked out to deliberate whether it would be life in prison or execution, I would ask for execution for myself.” Ultimately, the film is dedicated to the families of the victims of violent crime.
Words by Ben Hopkins
Into The Abyss: A Tale Of Death, A Tale Of Life is in cinemas now and will be released on DVD on April 13th.
The full interview and feature on Werner Herzog appears in the Film issue of Clash magazine, out 5th April. Find out more about the issue HERE.
Werner Herzog is perhaps the most consistently fascinating director alive. His fictional body of his work has seen him coax Nicolas Cage into delivering his finest performance in years in The Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans, while Aguirre: The Wrath Of God influenced Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. His documentaries unveil strange characters in even stranger environments and often see Herzog’s German accent employed to deliver obtuse questioning. In Encounters At The End Of The World, a study of people working in Antarctica, he asks an expert interviewee: “Is there such a thing as insanity among penguins? I try to avoid the definition of insanity or derangement. I don’t mean that a penguin might believe he or she is Lenin or Napoleon Bonaparte, but could they just go crazy because they’ve had enough of their colony?”
Sometimes fate leads his films to cross territories. Fitzcarraldo follows the story of a man who attempts to pull a steamship over a steep hill - something that the production itself replicated without special effects. Such were the burdens of the film’s creation that it inspired Les Blank’s Burden Of Dreams and Herzog’s book Conquest Of The Useless. And when he’s not making his own films, Herzog can be spotted acting in other people’s films, notably as a gas mask-clad abusive father in Julien Donkey-Boy and as a priest who leads a nun to a likely death in Mister Lonely.
Needless to say, Herzog is quite a character. He once told Errol Morris that he’d eat his shoe if Morris completed his pet cemetery docu Gates Of Heaven, and was subsequently filmed doing exactly that in Blank’s self-explanatory short Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. Most famously, he was shot by an air rifle during an interview with Mark Kermode. His reaction? “It hurts a little bit, but it’s not a significant bullet.” He’ll assert himself if he doesn’t agree with a line of questioning or subtly mock those which he doesn’t approve of, but there’s no malice involved. (“Would you consider yourself more of a storyteller than a documentarian?” I ask. “Documentaries should be storytelling as well,” he replies. “Let’s face it, we’re not in the business of accountants”). Regardless, Herzog has helmed roughly twice as many documentaries in the past two decades as he has feature-length fictional movies. Not that this has been his conscious plan. In his own words, delivered in that famous quizzical Germanic tone, “It comes like an uninvited guest, like burglars in your kitchen in the middle of the night.”
Herzog’s playfulness understandably takes a back seat in his new film Into The Abyss: A Tale Of Death, A Tale Of Life which examines two men, Michael Perry and Jason Burkett, who were convicted of a triple homicide that occurred in Texas and the aftermath of their actions. Perry was executed eight days after Herzog interviewed him for the film, while Burkett is serving a life sentence.
Despite his opposition to capital punishment, Herzog is eager to emphasise that Into The Abyss is not a film about that issue. “It’s a film about life, it’s a film about a senseless crime and the repercussions of that crime. The whole tapestry is of a very dark Americana.” Just as importantly, he declares, “Being a German, with the dark past of Germany under the Nazis, I would be the last one to try to tell the Americans how to handle their criminal justice.”
Herzog pulls no punches when he first meets Perry, telling him: “Destiny has dealt you a bad deck of cards which does not exonerate you, and which does not necessarily mean that I have to like you.”
“I risked the film with that,” states Herzog. “I wanted to tell him and I wanted to be a straight shooter with him, like with everyone else. I had to anticipate that he wouldn’t get up and leave the discourse. People on death row who spend ten years in isolation in a tiny concrete cell, they can tell from miles away if somebody is a phoney or not.”
In addition to Into The Abyss, Herzog also created Death Row, a four-part television series which studies those awaiting their final fate. Herzog isn’t interested in addressing questions of guilt or innocence - half of those interviewed admit to their crimes, while the evidence against Perry and Burkett is overwhelming. What sparks his curiosity is the minutiae of each person’s background, and what small steps have taken them to catastrophic consequences, using Death Row subject Joseph Garcia as an example: “His catastrophe starts with the most average everyday encounter with a young women with some friends. She’s on a couch, he happens to sit on the same couch and she has no socks on. Her toes are cold and she asks him whether she can tuck her toes under his thighs. Of course, with great pleasure he agrees. And this gesture leads to a jealous confrontation with one of the other guys in the room and has all of a sudden catastrophic consequences which ultimately take him all the way to death row. I’m fascinated by these details, how they turn into something cataclysmic.”
Herzog uses another Death Row subject, Hank Skinner, to illustrate how the death sentence alters someone’s perspective: “He was taken from death row forty-two miles to Huntsville because that’s where the death chamber is, where he’s to be executed. For one last time, the first in many years, they see the open sky, they see a gas station. They’re in a cage in a van accompanied by police armed to the teeth. And they see the world one last time for forty minutes. And Skinner says something very remarkable: ‘Everything looks like Israel. Everything looks like the holy land.’ It made me curious and I travelled the same forty-two miles from death row to the death chamber. And all of a sudden an abandoned gas station with a decrepit ramshackle hut with a sign, ‘Happy worm bait shop’, becomes something magnificent. The most insignificant landscape all of a sudden is magnificent. Even a cow in a field. The pasture looks like the holy land.”
The director certainly isn’t an apologist for those convicted of such heinous crimes. “All the cases I went into had something specific, the amount of senselessness,” he sighs with evident sorrow. “The amount of senselessness is staggering. It’s completely and utterly senseless. As you know I’m not an advocate of capital punishment. But in very severe cases and this is one of them, I would be an advocate of life in prison. If I were in Texas and had I committed a triple homicide and the jury walked out to deliberate whether it would be life in prison or execution, I would ask for execution for myself.” Ultimately, the film is dedicated to the families of the victims of violent crime.
Words by Ben Hopkins
Into The Abyss: A Tale Of Death, A Tale Of Life is in cinemas now and will be released on DVD on April 13th.
The full interview and feature on Werner Herzog appears in the Film issue of Clash magazine, out 5th April. Find out more about the issue HERE.
