Category: Interviews

Lola Versus: Redressing the Imbalance in Women’s Roles

Lola Versus' Zoe Lister-Jones & Greta Gerwig with LFM's Govindini Murty.

By Govindini Murty. The turn toward female-centered comedies seems to be accelerating in the indie cinema as much as in mainstream Hollywood. In the wake of Bridesmaids and HBO’s Girls, the new comedy Lola Versus, starring indie favorite Greta Gerwig, is the latest risque, R-rated project to explore the imperfect reality of women’s lives. The film screened this spring at the Tribeca Film Festival and is currently playing in theaters.

Greta Gerwig plays 29-year old Lola, a graduate student working on her Ph.D. in literature who thinks her life is perfect until she is dumped by her fiance just a few weeks before their wedding. Lola is devastated by the break-up – and flummoxed at the prospect of turning 30 as a single in New York. She swerves into a series of comic misadventures: hooking up with the wrong men, drinking and partying too hard, and neglecting her work, as she tries to figure out what to do with her life. Aiding and abetting her are her friends, the zany aspiring actress Alice (Zoe Lister-Jones, also the film’s screenwriter) and a quirky musician named Henry (Hamish Linklater). Lola’s parents are played in nice turns by Debra Winger and Bill Pullman.

Gerwig shines as Lola, bringing a quirky charm and intelligence to what might otherwise be a standard rom-com role. It’s easy to see why directors Whit Stillman (in Damsels in Distress), Woody Allen (in From Rome With Love) and mumblecore favorite Mark Duplass have all worked with her.

I had the chance recently to chat with Greta Gerwig, as well as with director Daryl Wein and screenwriter Zoe Lister-Jones, at a screening of Lola Versus at USC Cinema School in LA. Interestingly enough, all three of them emphasized the importance of making a film that celebrated a woman’s point of view. As Wein said in the Q & A after the screening:

“We realized that we really wanted to do a female oriented film just because we weren’t really seeing female-driven stories about single women, especially at this age. …  Even me as a man, I wanted to see a portrait of a woman I could relate with.”

I asked them what influenced them as filmmakers in this regard, and Gerwig, Wein, and Lister-Jones cited films from two distinct eras: the 1970s/‘80s (with a smattering of ‘90s indie cinema) and classic Hollywood in the 1930s and ‘40s.

Greta Gerwig answered:

“I’m a cinephile – I love movies … I like movies that have a really strong writer, I love Howard Hawks’ movies, I love Preston Sturges movies, Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch. Those are the movies that I love because they’re almost “plays as films.” They have this quality of – you can almost see the dialogue when people speak it.  [That’s] really important, and I think that that’s still what I love, and I’m so grateful that I got to work with someone like Whit Stillman who is in that tradition, who’s really erudite and literary. …  And I also love Woody Allen, I mean he’s kind of a person I think of all the time. But those filmmakers – that’s what I always look for, what I always hope for, and when I see echoes of that in things I just get so excited.”

Zoe Lister-Jones added:

“I love John Hughes, I love Pretty in Pink … and obviously Woody Allen … Daryl and I as filmmakers are very inspired by him, he’s just sort of the OG and no-one can ever top him. I like Robert Altman, I think his movies are really cool, and Hal Hartley, I grew up really being into Hal Hartley in the ‘90s. Music’s really important to me and he always had really good music – and you know, complex characters who were dark and dry.”

As for Daryl Wein, he recounted: “I grew up on classic guys like Scorsese and Spielberg and Kubrick. Big fan of Hitchcock’s films, and I love some of Hal Ashby’s movies, and of course Woody Allen is a big influence.”

Of course, many of these filmmakers are notable for creating witty, dialogue-centered movies that took a fresh approach to depicting women’s lives. And as women gain greater power in the film industry, it seems we may have a new era upon us of character-driven women’s comedies and dramas. Greta Gerwig, for example, who studied at Barnard to be a playwright before turning to acting, has written and directed an indie women-centered comedy that will be unveiled later this year. Gerwig in particular spoke with great passion at the screening about what she saw as a coming revolution for women in the movies.

“This is a huge moment, I really think, for women in film. I think it is as big as anything that has happened for women. I think people look at television and movies to figure out who they are and how they live and what’s important, and for the first time in a big way women are being shown to women as they are. I think it’s unprecedented, and if I get to participate in it even a little bit it’s the most exciting thing I can think of. I went to women’s college so I get really excited about it. But it’s true … If women aren’t represented in media the way they are, it’s like they don’t exist. I just think it’s such a huge moment. … and I hope it keeps going because I feel seen and heard in a big way as a woman…”

To which Wein piped up: “Greta for President. First female president!”

Director Daryl Wein, writer/actress Zoe Lister-Jones, star Greta Gerwig.

After the Q & A, I chatted further with Gerwig, Wein, and Lister-Jones about the issue of women’s representation in the film industry. We discussed the absurd fact that three or four men are still cast for every one woman in film and TV, and Wein indicated his own commitment to making more movies that featured women. I told them about the work of Geena Davis’s Institute on Gender in Media, and all three of them expressed how glad they were to hear about her work. I also told Gerwig that I agreed with her that we’re entering an important new era for women in film, and that the success of Twilight and The Hunger Games had been crucial in this regard. Wein and Lister-Jones added that they thought that Bridesmaids had also played a major role in showing that women-centered comedies could make money.

In all, I think we have some very provocative and interesting times ahead of us as more and more women get both in front of and behind the camera.

Posted on June 25th, 2012 at 11:47pm.

LFM’s Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty in The Atlantic: ‘Black Lagoon’: The First, Great Pretty-Girl-Attacked-By-Aquatic-Beast Film?

[Editor’s Note: the article below appears today on the front page of The Atlantic.]

Chatting with Julie Adams, the star who helped set the formula followed by the new Piranha 3DD.

By Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty. From piranhas and sharks to brain-eating crabs and giant leeches, Hollywood has provided some frightening and improbable reasons over the years for why pretty girls in bikinis should stay out of the water. Long before this week’s Piranha 3DD or even classics like Jaws, however, it was the lustful Gill Man from 1954’s Creature From the Black Lagoon who first made young women think twice about going swimming.

A beauty-and-the-beast tale of an aquatic humanoid who falls for a female scientist during a research expedition to the Amazon, Creature helped inspire the 3D science fiction craze of the 1950s. It also made its young star, Julie Adams, sci-fi’s first pin-up girl—and launched her distinguished career in film, TV, and on stage.

Still vibrant and active at age 85, Adams remains a popular draw at sci-fi and classic film conventions, where she’s currently promoting her lively new autobiography, The Lucky Southern Star: Reflections From the Black Lagoon, which she cowrote with her son, Emmy Award winning editor Mitch Danton.

From "Creature" to "Piranha": why pretty women should stay out of the water.

Over her lengthy and colorful career, Ms. Adams has seduced Elvis Presley and Dennis Hopper on screen, played John Wayne’s wife, tussled in a burning basement with Barbara Stanwyck, and played the love interest to James Stewart, Rock Hudson, and Charlton Heston. She’s been directed by Anthony Mann and Raoul Walsh—and more recently has appeared in projects like Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center and TV shows like CSI and Lost.

Yet Adams still remains best known for her role as Kay Lawrence, the sultry brunette in a plunging one-piece pined over by the Gill Man in Creature.

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What was your initial reaction upon getting offered Creature?

[Laughs.] Well, I wasn’t thrilled, you know, and I thought I could turn it down, but then I would go on suspension [from Universal Pictures] and wouldn’t get paid … and so I thought, well, the studio wants me to do it, what the hey, it might be fun. And it was!

What was director Jack Arnold like, and how did you two get along?

I got along great with Jack Arnold, and he was a wonderful director. He was very low key, he seemed almost casual—but it was very easy to work with him. Any suggestion he made always made sense.

Did you interact much with William Alland, the producer?

Not that much, because he was not on the set that much—but I liked him. He was always very nice to all of us.

Actress Julie Adams.

Alland played the reporter in Citizen Kane, and he apparently attended a dinner party hosted by Orson Welles while they were shooting Kane. Welles’s lover Dolores Del Rio was also there, and she brought along Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. Figueroa had heard a legend as a child about an Amazon water creature, half-man and half-lizard. And the story went that there was an Amazon village that would bring a virgin to the creature once a year in order for the creature not to terrorize the village.

Poor virgin!

Right. So Alland went home later and wrote Figueroa’s story down. And then about 12 years later the whole 3D craze started, and at that point he pulled out the story and started to make a movie of it.

That’s a very interesting story—it fits in, in a wonderful, cuckoo way.

>>>FOR THE REMAINDER OF THIS ARTICLE, PLEASE VISIT The Atlantic.

Special Note to LFM Readers:

Julie Adams’ autobiography The Lucky Southern Star: Reflections From the Black Lagoon is available exclusively at her website . Featuring 300 photos of the gorgeous Adams and her famous co-stars, the book provides a charming look at Adams’ experiences working with movie greats like James Stewart, Tyrone Power, Ida Lupino, and many others. While supplies last, the book also comes with a bonus CD of the iconic score for Creature From the Black Lagoon, re-recorded by Monstrous Movie Music and featuring music by Henry Mancini, among others.

Posted on May 29th, 2012 at 10:13am.

LFM’s Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post and AOL-Moviefone: The Most Provocative Filmmaker in the World: A Conversation With Mads Brügger on The Ambassador

Filmmaker Mads Brügger, director of "The Ambassador" at the Sundance Film Festival.

[Editor’s Note: The post below appears today on the front page of The Huffington Post and AOL-Moviefone.]

By Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty. His documentaries have been among the most provocative films featured in the Sundance Film Festival over the past several years. Bolder even than Sacha Baron Cohen, he’s punk’d both the North Korean communist government and now, in his new film The Ambassador, the Central African Republic and the corrupt diplomatic culture that supports it.

He’s one of Europe’s funniest and most controversial filmmakers, although most Americans haven’t heard of him — yet.

The name of this lanky, cerebral enfant terrible is Mads Brügger.

In Brügger’s previous film The Red Chapel (read the Libertas Film Magazine review of the film here), winner of Sundance’s 2010 World Cinema jury prize for documentaries, the filmmaker pulled off one of the most dangerous and politically provocative stunts in cinema history by infiltrating North Korea as part of a fake socialist comedy group. Operating under the watchful (and vaguely confused) gaze of the North Korean government, Brügger’s cameras proceeded to document the bizarre, Orwellian nether-world of today’s Pyongyang and its frightening cult of the ‘Dear Leader.’

In his new film The Ambassador (read the Libertas Film Magazine review of the film here), which recently screened at Sundance, Brügger now attempts an even more complex and daring stunt by purchasing a Liberian diplomatic title and infiltrating one of the most dangerous places on Earth — the Central African Republic (CAR) — as an ersatz Ambassador. His purpose? To expose the illegal blood diamond trade — and the corrupt world of CAR officials, bogus businessmen and shady European and Asian diplomats that it benefits.

Like a tragicomic version of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, The Ambassador takes viewers into a rarely-seen world of European influence-peddlers who exploit the African continent — and the amoral retinue of African officials, petty businessmen and hangers-on who are complicit in the exploitation.

Along the way Brügger and his hidden cameras have close encounters with everything from an obese ex-French Legionnaire heading the CAR’s state security (who is assassinated shortly after talking to Brügger), to armed militias in the middle of Africa’s ‘Triangle of Death,’ to a diamond smuggler with a secret child bride and potential terrorist ties, to a tribe of inebriated pygmies organized by Brügger to staff a match factory.

Mads Brügger talks with Jason Apuzzo at Sundance.

It all makes for a potent, carnivalesque and politically incorrect experience — and one that exposes the mutual racism (of Europeans toward Africans, and Africans toward Europeans) that makes central Africa such a hotbed of corruption and violence.

In the midst of all this is Brügger himself — a tall, soft-spoken Danish journalist (and son of two Danish newspaper editors) with an ironic sense of humor and an uncanny ability to transform himself into the kind of diffident European grandee that African officials are accustomed to exploiting — and being exploited by — well into the 21st century.

Along with my Libertas Film Magazine co-editor Govindini Murty, I sat down with Brügger at the Sundance Film Festival to talk about his funny, horrifying and highly controversial new film. With a shaved head, and wearing a skull ring from DC Comics’ The Phantom, Brügger arrived looking very much the part of an experimental European director.

Apuzzo: What got you interested in [corruption in the Central African Republic] as subject matter for a film?

Brügger: I like doing films that divert from their own genre. I wanted to do an Africa documentary without all the usual semiotics and codes of the generic Africa documentary. You know — NGO people, child soldiers, HIV patients, and so on. But also I wanted a film where you would meet all the people you usually don’t get to see – you know, the kingpins, the players, the ministers who live a very secure and comfortable life away from the scrutiny of the media. So I thought that if I could purchase a diplomatic title, I could gain access to this very closed realm of African state affairs and politics. It’s pretty much a ‘let’s-see-what-happens’ project. Once we set off to do this, who will we meet? What kind of people will I run into?

Mads Brügger talks with Govindini Murty at Sundance.

Apuzzo: How did you prepare to become a corrupt European diplomat?

Brügger: [Laughs.] I prepared for almost three years, because I wanted to really go into detail with my persona. I would go to receptions, embassies in Copenhagen, especially the Belgian embassy because they have a lot of African diplomats coming there. I noticed all the telltale signs, the do’s and don’ts of how diplomats behave and carry themselves. For instance, when they’re having cocktails they like to fold their napkin into a triangle and then wrap it around the glass. I think it’s because they don’t want to leave fingerprints, but I don’t know for sure. [Laughs.]

The most popular cigarette amongst African diplomats are red Dunhills. The most popular liquor is Johnny Walker Black Label. You know, things of that order. At the same time, I also wanted my ‘character’ to be packed with various archetypes, and characters from comic books: Dr. Müller in Tintin, Bernard Prince (a Belgian comic book hero), even the Man with The Yellow Hat from Curious George. Continue reading LFM’s Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post and AOL-Moviefone: The Most Provocative Filmmaker in the World: A Conversation With Mads Brügger on The Ambassador

LFM’s Jason Apuzzo at The Huffington Post and AOL-Moviefone: With Great Power: A Conversation with Stan Lee at Slamdance 2012

[Editor’s Note: This post appears today on the front page of The Huffington Post and also at AOL-Moviefone.]

By Jason Apuzzo. He’s 89 years old, and his career is hotter than ever.

With hits like Thor, Captain America and X-Men: First Class dominating the box office in 2011, and upcoming films like The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man looking to light up the summer in 2012, you’d think that a man whose career in comic books began just prior to World War II might want to slow down.

Think again – because this 89 year-old dynamo is named Stan Lee.

This year’s Sundance Film Festival offered a smorgasbord of art-house delights, but its competitor across the street – the scrappy Slamdance Film Festival – presented one of Park City’s best events last week when it hosted comic book legend Stan Lee for a 2-hour master class associated with Slamdance’s screening of the new documentary, With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story. Just two days after receiving the Vanguard Award from the Producers Guild of America, Lee breezed into Park City to spend a special two hours with filmmakers and journalists prior to the With Great Power screening, discussing his extraordinary career as the creator of iconic characters like Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four.

And if anything was clear at the end of the master class and screening, it was this: the keys to Stan Lee’s ongoing success are his earthy humor, humanity, and incredible vitality. The man simply doesn’t know how to slow down. As Lee says in With Great Power about being the impresario of today’s comic book cinema: “I’m having fun! Don’t punish me by making me retire.”

Stan Lee at the Slamdance Film Festival.

A flinty and funny raconteur with a baritone New York accent, Lee spent much of his time at the Slamdance master class describing his colorful early days in which he was alternately a rebellious office boy for a trouser manufacturer (he made a mess of his store after being fired two days before Christmas), an obituary writer (he found the job morbid), and even a Broadway theater usher (he once tripped and fell flat on his face while escorting Eleanor Roosevelt to her seat at the Rivoli Theater in New York).

Lee finally got his big break in late 1941 when he became interim editor at Timely Comics, which would eventually evolve under his leadership into Marvel Comics. Then known as ‘Stanley Lieber’ (his name at birth, as the son of Romanian-Jewish immigrants), Lee was first given the chance to provide text filler for a May 1941 edition of Captain America Comics – and he hasn’t looked back since.

The language of "Thor" inspired by Shakespeare.

A passionate reader, Lee described in detail how literature fueled his imagination as a young person. “I read everybody when I was young – Charles Dickens, H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, [Edgar Rice] Burroughs’ Tarzan. I read everything I could get my hands on.” Lee also cited Shakespeare as an influence on the style of language for Thor, drily noting that Thor “was supposed to be a Norse god – I couldn’t have him talk like a guy who was born in Brooklyn. I loved Shakespeare, and I read Shakespeare when I was young. I probably didn’t understand most of it, but I loved the sound of it.” Lee’s fascination with Shakespeare continues to this day, with Lee and 1821 Comics collaborating on the new graphic novel Romeo and Juliet: The War, a sci-fi retelling of Shakespeare’s classic love story which debuted last week.

Lee also developed an early love of the movies. When I asked Lee what movies had influenced him, he was quick to cite Errol Flynn’s adventure films of the 1930s and ’40s. Continue reading LFM’s Jason Apuzzo at The Huffington Post and AOL-Moviefone: With Great Power: A Conversation with Stan Lee at Slamdance 2012

LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: A Conversation With Werner Herzog, Part II: Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Avatar, & The Hostility of Nature

[Editor’s Note: the post below appears today on the front page of The Huffington Post.]

By Govindini Murty. In Part I of my interview with Werner Herzog, we discussed his new movie Into the Abyss and its searing exploration of evil in human society. Now in Part II we turn to the world of nature, which Herzog sees as even more dangerous. In Les Blanks’ documentary Burden of Dreams, Herzog famously spoke out on the “obscenity” of the jungle, its “harmony of overwhelming and collective murder.” In Herzog’s documentary Encounters at the End of the World, he expressed skepticism toward “tree huggers and whale huggers,” while in Grizzly Man, he documented the fate of a man literally killed by his unhealthy obsession with wild nature. Herzog has even criticized the romanticizing of nature in Avatar, calling the film “an abomination because of its New Age schlock and bullshit.”

Obviously Werner Herzog has strong feelings about the proper relationship between humanity and nature. One sees this, for example, in Herzog’s stunning documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, released this week on DVD. Cave of Forgotten Dreams offers an extraordinary look at the 30,000 – 32,000 year-old Paleolithic cave paintings inside the Chauvet Cave in southern France – currently considered to be the oldest cave paintings in the world. As Herzog told me in Part I of our discussion on the concept of “the abyss,” “I’ve always tried to look deep inside of what we are – deep into the recesses of our existence, of our prehistory – like in Cave of Forgotten Dreams. So it is some sort of a theme that runs through quite a few of my films.”

2011-12-02-CaveofForgottenDreamsLions.jpg
The Paleolithic cave paintings of Chauvet.

In Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Herzog speaks eloquently of the Paleolithic cave paintings of Chauvet and their relationship to the surrounding landscape:

“These images are memories of long-forgotten dreams. Is this their heartbeat, or ours? Will we ever be able to understand the vision of the artists across such an abyss of time? [Camera shows a massive natural stone arch in the landscape.] There is an aura of melodrama in this landscape. It could be straight out of a Wagner opera or a painting of German Romanticists. Could this be our connection to them? This staging of a landscape as an operatic event does not belong to the Romanticists alone. Stone Age man might have had a similar sense of inner landscapes …”

And yet despite these poetic sentiments, Herzog vehemently denies being a Romantic; rather, he defines his approach to nature as being similar to that of the artists of the late Middle Ages.

Ultimately, if one were to search for a theme that unites Werner Herzog’s diverse body of work, it would be that respect for human life and its limits is what holds us back from the brutality of amoral nature – the abyss into which humanity’s natural instincts might otherwise plunge. As Herzog told me, he is concerned above all with civilizational breakdown – with how humanity can abandon its own heights to descend into unfathomable depths of madness and annihilation. Equally importantly though, Herzog’s love of art, of literature, of joyful exploration of the world and its peoples points to a hopeful way out of the abyss and into the light of day.

Klaus Kinski treks into the Amazon in Herzog's "Aguirre: The Wrath of God."

Thus, in Part II of this interview, we tackle such colorful subjects as Herzog’s anti-romantic views on nature, why he can’t help ranting about Avatar, his excitement over his Rogue Film School (in which he teaches such crucial skills as “lock picking” and “neutralizing bureaucracy”), and his belief that Wrestlemania and reality TV offer vital clues to understanding civilization. The interview has been edited for length.

GM: There is this sense in all of your films, whether they’re historical dramas or contemporary documentaries, that you wish to explore the extremes. You go from examining the molecular world in scenes from Encounters at the End of the World to these broad vistas of Antarctica or the desert or the Himalayas in your other documentaries. Do you feel that you’re part of what could be termed the German Romantic tradition in terms of having this approach to nature – seeing it both as a place of danger and a place of inspiration?

WH: I think that’s a common misconception [that] I had an affinity to romantic culture – no I don’t. I do not feel much affinity with it. I don’t feel at home with it. I’m much closer to poets like Heinrich von Kleist, Georg Büchner who wrote Woyzeck – in the early 1820s he wrote literature that belonged to the early 20th century, that was almost like Expressionism. Or Hölderlin the poet, and he’s not a Romantic poet either. He’s somewhere completely unique. He’s like a continent of his own – not really comparable to other Romantic writers of his time…

And when you look at how I depict nature – wild nature for example in Grizzly Man, it’s quite evident that it’s a completely anti-Romantic view. Timothy Treadwell who was protecting bears and who was killed and eaten by a grizzly bear together with his girlfriend, he has this kind of watered down Romanticism … that’s what I’m completely against. I would stop the course of the film even and in my comment I would have an ongoing argument with Treadwell: “Here I differ from Treadwell.” I do not see wild nature as something benign and beautiful and the bears fluffy like little pets. No, they are dangerous and aggressive and nature itself looks rather chaotic and hostile. You look at the universe – it’s very, very hostile out there.

For example in Les Blanks’ Burden of Dreams I deliver a speech/rant about the jungle and you’ll never see anything so clearly against Romanticism and the romanticizing of landscapes, romanticizing of wild nature. … It’s funny because being a German everyone immediately thinks yeah yeah he must have an affinity with Romantic culture. No, I don’t.

GM: I think I see multiple sides to Romanticism. It’s such a complex movement. What I was thinking of was not so much the warm, romantic with a small ‘r’ approach to nature but the approach that sees it as terrifying and overwhelming. For example, even going back into 16th century German art I think of Albrecht Altdorfer with his landscapes towering over very small figures, or of Bruegel’s Landscape With the Fall of Icarus with the human figures very small in the distance, on through Caspar David-Friedrich’s work [in the early 19th century] where you have the two extremes – you either have humanity dwarfed by nature, as in The Monk on the Seashore or you have humanity standing titanic over nature, as in The Wanderer over the Sea of Clouds. So it was in that sense I was asking about nature. Your quote was very striking [in Burden of Dreams] where you mention the jungle as being “full of obscenity … nature here is vile and base.”

From Herzog's "Fitzcarraldo": Kinski in nature.

WH: Yeah. Obscenity – that was because Kinski kept saying everything is erotic. And he would hug a tree and fornicate with it. [Laughs] Which is really against my inner convictions.

GM: But this comment about the ‘harmony of overwhelming and collective murder’ – setting aside Kinski’s comments, is that how you would see that particular jungle, or nature in general?

WH: No, you would have to be a little bit cautious. It’s a rant ‘against’ the jungle, but it came at a time of enormous strain on me – weeks and weeks and weeks where there was every single day a major disaster. And when I speak of major disaster I mean disasters like two plane crashes. Two consecutive plane crashes, and on and on and on. So, yes you have to see it in the context. But otherwise, thinking about the jungle, it’s not completely wrong what I said. But the ferocity of the rant is in a way a result of enormous pressure of disasters one after the other. … And it’s OK, I still like my rant.

GM: It’s achieved a cult status on-line. People enjoy it a great deal.

Continue reading LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: A Conversation With Werner Herzog, Part II: Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Avatar, & The Hostility of Nature

LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: A Conversation With Werner Herzog, Part I: Into the Abyss

Werner Herzog directs "Into the Abyss."

[Editor’s Note: the post below appears today on the front page of The Huffington Post.]

By Govindini Murty. Few directors are as willing to venture into the abyss as Werner Herzog. His prolific body of work has ranged from intense dramas like Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Woyzeck that plumb the depths of the human soul to documentaries like Encounters at the End of the World and Grizzly Man that examine humanity’s fragile place in the miraculous and terrifying world of nature. The astonishing breadth of Herzog’s filmmaking conveys the humanist’s sense of wonder at the world – what he describes as the “ecstasy of observation.”

Herzog’s latest film, Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life (opening this Friday, November 11th) is a compelling look at the contentious issue of the death penalty. Producer Erik Nelson has stated that the film is intended to inform the current Republican presidential debate over the death penalty, in particular with regard to the candidacy of Texas Governor Rick Perry. Herzog himself has issued a Director’s Statement expressing his opposition to capital punishment – though in keeping with his lifelong aversion to political interpretations of his work, he has also asserted that Into the Abyss is not a political film. These apparent contradictions point to the enigma of Werner Herzog himself – on the one hand a sensitive humanist with strong moral convictions, yet on the other hand an artist who resists being defined by political activism or party ideology.

Into the Abyss embodies these contradictions. The film tells the true story of a brutal triple murder committed in Conroe, Texas. Michael Perry and Jason Burkett, intending to steal two cars owned by Sandra Stotler, killed Stotler in her home and then lured her son Adam and his friend Jeremy Richardson into the woods and executed them. Perry and Burkett subsequently went on a joy ride in the cars, before winding up in a bloody shoot-out with the police. Perry and Burkett were convicted of the murders, with Perry receiving the death penalty, and Burkett receiving a life sentence.

Herzog interviewed Michael Perry just eight days before his execution, and also interviewed Jason Burkett in prison. Other interviews include those with Burkett’s wife Melyssa Thompson-Burkett, who contacted Burkett while he was in prison and subsequently married him; Fred Allen, a prison captain who worked in the execution chamber and who assisted in over 125 executions before resigning in moral crisis; and most significantly, the relatives of the victims themselves: Lisa Stotler-Balloun, the daughter of Sandra Stotler and sister of Adam Stotler, and Charles Richardson, the brother of Jeremy Richardson. Stotler-Balloun and Richardson in particular provide the most heartbreaking testimony of the film, as Herzog does not shy away from depicting the shattering effect of the murders on their lives. As a result, Into the Abyss exists in a complex tension between Herzog’s avowed position against capital punishment and his impulse as a storyteller to depict both sides of the story and allow readers to make up their own minds.

I had the opportunity to meet with Werner Herzog in Los Angeles recently and discuss with him Into the Abyss and his extraordinary body of work. Part I of this interview appears below.

Documenting the crime.

GM: I’d like to ask you about the title of your movie, Into the Abyss, because I’ve seen you refer to the concept of ‘the abyss’ quite a few times in your work. In Woyzeck you have a line “Every man is an abyss, you get dizzy looking in,” and in Nosferatu you have a line “Time is an abyss profound as a thousand nights.” This is a concept you keep referring to – what does ‘the abyss’ mean to you?

WH: It’s a good observation, and when I came up with the title Into the Abyss – it dawned on me that it could have been the title of quite a few other films. Like Woyzeck could have had that title, or The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner or even the cave film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, because I’ve always tried to look deep inside of what we are – deep into the recesses of our existence, of our prehistory – like in Cave of Forgotten Dreams. So it is some sort of a theme that runs through quite a few of my films.

GM: I want to ask you about the relationship between humanity and the universe. There was a wonderful quote at the end of Encounters at the End of the World where Dr. Gorham asks, and I paraphrase, “are we the means through which the universe becomes conscious of itself?” This reminded me of a quote from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées:

“A reed only is man, the frailest in the world, but a reed that thinks. Unnecessary that the universe arm itself to destroy him: a breath of air, a drop of water are enough to kill him. Yet, if the All should crush him, man would still be nobler than that which destroys him: for he knows that he dies, and he knows that the universe is stronger than he; but the universe knows nothing of it.” (Trans. A.J. Krailsheimer)

This seems to apply to Into the Abyss and its depiction of human beings within this world. In the film you go driving down country roads and you show the trailer parks, the run-down stores, the boarded up gas stations, the bars. It looks like a wasteland that God is somehow absent from, and there are these people in the midst of it who are in a terrible state of pain and confusion – in an apparently indifferent universe.

WH: Let me address Pascal first. Yes, I like him very much. I even invented a quote for the film Lessons of Darkness. It starts with a Pascal quote “The collapse of the universe will occur like the creation in grandiose splendor,” and underneath it says Blaise Pascal, but I invented it – and of course Pascal couldn’t have said it better. [Laughs.]

But, it’s interesting. The wasteland, this forlorn landscape, has become fascinating for me – this lost kind of Americana. And one of the death row inmates with whom I spoke – not in this film but in another film I’m already finishing – he said to me how he saw on his very last trip forty-three miles between death row and the death house where they are being executed in Huntsville. And in this cage in the van he sees a little bit of an abandoned gas station, he sees a cow in the field, and all of a sudden for him, everything is magnificent, and he says: “It looked like Israel to me, it all looked like the Holy Land.” And I immediately grabbed my camera and I did this voyage of the forty-three miles and indeed the most forlorn landscapes all of a sudden look like the Holy Land. So I look at these forlorn landscapes all of a sudden with fresh and different eyes. Continue reading LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: A Conversation With Werner Herzog, Part I: Into the Abyss