Bad Lieutenant was a critical hit in Toronto, but director Werner Herzog says that doesn't mean much. "The press is an abnormal audience. The real test comes when you show the film in Omaha, Nebraska, and in Stevens Point, Wisconsin."
Photograph by: Getty Images, Getty Images
TORONTO -- Werner Herzog is talking about violence in the movies -- he's mostly against it -- when a cellphone goes off, and won't stop ringing. "It must be the Vatican," Herzog says, apropos of nothing you can put your finger on. "He must be trying to reach me. He's a fellow Bavarian. He knows I'm in distress."
No, Benedict XVI is not really on the line. Herzog is being funny.
He's a lot funnier than you think he is. He'll tell you so himself, and with the same kind of straight-faced obsession that characterizes his movies. "I've always been labelled 'that obsessive Teutonic filmmaker,'" he told a Toronto film festival news conference earlier in the day. "But wrong; I've always been hilarious."
Indeed, he's had his moments -- one of his early films was called
Even Dwarfs Started Small -- but he's mostly known for intense fare, such as his 1982 movie
Fitzcarraldo, based on the true story of a man trying to build an opera house in the Peruvian jungle. The shooting of the movie itself became an obsessive exercise about an obsessive character: Herzog had to replicate the feat to make the movie, and all the while, he was at odds with his leading man, Klaus Kinski, whom a native chief volunteered to murder. Herzog wrote a book about the experience called
Conquest of the Useless.
There is also undeniable humour in his latest movie,
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a film noir with Nicolas Cage as a drug-addicted policeman. The movie is a remake of sorts. Abel Ferrara made a 1992 film called
Bad Lieutenant with Harvey Keitel, but Herzog insists he's never seen it, that his movie is not a remake at all, and that he fought against the title from the beginning, although in the press notes, he writes that film academics will probably find parallels. "Go for it, losers," he advises them. For his part, Ferrara has been quoted as saying, "As far as remakes go . . . I wish these people die in hell. I hope they're all in the same streetcar, and it blows up."
Nevertheless,
Port of Call is a huge departure from Ferrara's movie. It's both hallucinogenic and funny. Herzog says he advised Cage, "This time, you shall turn the pig loose," which is his way of saying it's all right to go over the top.
"It's not so much the idea," he says of his decision to direct
Bad Lieutenant. "It was more a few things more, in general. Number 1, working with Nicolas Cage. Number 2, doing it in New Orleans. Number 3, doing a new form of film noir. Different. A new way of doing it. You can see what I tried to explain to Nicolas Cage by bluntly telling him, 'Let's go for the bliss of evil. Not for the guilt, not for the all-pervasive darkness of it. Let's be so vile, so debased, that it becomes hilarious.' And I hope it works."
Herzog says he has wanted to work with Cage for years. They met decades ago, when Cage was young Nicolas Coppola, nephew of filmmaker Francis Coppola. "We kept looking at each other's work over a long time," Herzog says. "It never occurred to either one of us to work together, and they almost simultaneously we had the feeling, 'Why have we not worked together ever?' It's kind of inexplicable." He says Cage pushed himself to the limits in the movie, so "in that sense, we were a very good combination."
Bad Lieutenant was shot on the run: Herzog chose 40 locations, cast 35 speaking parts and put a crew together in three or four weeks.
"When you feel so confident about the substance of a project, it doesn't matter," he says. "You can wake me up at four in the morning with a bucket of ice-cold water and say 'next scene,' and I'd be wide-awake and I'd shoot the next scene. It's professional work, and Nicolas Cage is a professional and so am I. It doesn't matter what time of the night you wake us up, we'll be right there and we'll deliver."
Along with Cage's performance,
Bad Lieutenant is known for its bizarre scenes. In one, a gangster is shot dead, but his soul survives and begins to breakdance until it is shot again. There is also an alligator-eye view of a car accident, and a sequence where two iguanas are visible to Cage's character but not to anyone else.
"Completely big, completely demented, a complete figment of a crazed crack-cocaine fantasy," says Herzog, who adds that, if the iguanas had been cut from the story, he would quit the movie business. He just loves putting animals into his films.
"I don't know. I love to cast them," he says. He filmed the iguanas himself, using a tiny lens inside a fibre-optic cable that moved in front of the iguanas' eyes.
"They are totally perplexed and so utterly stupid and so utterly strange that it had to have its effect," he says. "I'm not surprised that people talk about the iguanas or the dancing soul or the alligator." Those elements were all added by Herzog, who says he loved the original screenplay by William Finkelstein but felt he had to personalize it.
"I immediately told him, 'Billy, I have to mould the screenplay where I can feel comfortable, where I am at my best,'" Herzog says. In return, Finkelstein was given the role as the gangster with the dancing soul. "I knew I would make him a good actor," he says.
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans was a critical hit in Toronto, but Herzog says that doesn't mean much. "The press is an abnormal audience. The real test comes when you show the film in Omaha, Nebraska, and in Stevens Point, Wisconsin." Still, he says he's not worried.
"I know that we have a fine movie, very entertaining, very hilarious, very good story, extremely good acting. So what else can you offer an audience?"
Source:http://www.canada.com/entertainment/celebrity/Filmmaker+Werner+Herzog+turns+pigs+loose+Wait+minute+those+iguanas/2228303/story.html
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