It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive (34 page)

Unfortunately, all I could think of at first was
Caligula
, which frankly didn’t help matters. In fact, my gut reaction was to leap into a heated defence of director Tinto Brass (of
whom Mirren has spoken fondly) and thence to an earnest attack upon producer Bob Guccione for cut-and-pasting all that hard-core sleaze into the movie. But somehow, this did not seem like the right time or place to speak of such things.

What
was
required was a polite but well-argued defence of my line about
The Queen
being an essentially televisual enterprise (it
did
start life as a TV movie) mingled with a willingness to accept that the tide of public opinion was against me, and topped off with a fulsome appreciation of Dame Helen’s flawless performance and a fence-building complaint about Michael Sheen being overlooked in the Oscar nominations. Flattering, then, but also firm on the issue of small-screen versus big-screen on which point I would remain immovable. Claiming that I ‘hadn’t really meant it’ was out of the question, because clearly if I was going to say that
The Queen
‘wasn’t a real movie’ on the radio and in the newspapers then I damn well ought to be able to say it to Dame Helen’s face. And the fact remained that I wasn’t having a go at
her
, but at the film – or rather the ‘not film’, as the case may be.

Whatever happened, I knew that this was an ‘important’ moment and if I wasn’t up to the challenge then frankly I should get out of film criticism forthwith. As I had discovered with the Broomfield episode, you can’t
lie
about your opinions just to avoid a potentially awkward encounter, although that’s exactly what every atom of my being wanted to do right there and then.

But I didn’t. Instead I took a deep breath, gathered myself (think Kate Winslet, minus the posh head-girl charm), tried to expel all thoughts of
Caligula
from my mind, failed,
tried again, failed again, tried a third time, did rather better, took another deep breath, and began to speak – slowly, calmly, clearly.

If you’d been there with a tape recorder, you would have been proud of me. Because despite the temple-crushing pressures of the moment I did
not
deny having said that
The Queen
was not ‘a real film’, but rather offered an explanation of my opinion which was at once firm but fair, critical yet kind. I conceded that other opinions were available, and that my complaint was clearly a minority view. I praised the cast of
The Queen
for their sterling work, and congratulated Dame Helen for the awards which she had already won and for those which were undoubtedly to follow. I finished by conceding that ‘not all films need look like
Pan’s Labyrinth
’ (a phrase which Dame Helen had whipped out of thin air – she’d clearly done her homework) but that many very fine screen stories were perhaps best enjoyed from the comfort of one’s armchair. I even suggested that this might be a blessing, and that ‘televisuality’ may simply be another word for the ‘intimacy’ we share with films which we would wish to invite into our homes, like old friends.

Like I said, if you’d brought a tape recorder you would have been impressed.

A video camera, however, would have told a very different story. Because even as my mouth said one thing (‘these are my opinions and I am proud to stand by them’) my body – traitor that is – began to say something altogether different. As I concentrated all my energies on making my lips move (harder than it sounds) my knees took the opportunity to
mount a royalist revolt and, without telling my head, started to buckle and bend beneath me. Like the mutinous crew of a ship, the rest of my body swiftly followed suit – my neck bent, my head started to droop, and I began to sink in slow motion toward the floor, virtually genuflecting as I went. By the time I’d finished saying whatever it was I had to say I was pretty much down on bended knee, head bowed in supplicant reverence, presumably awaiting prompt separation from my body.

If I’d had a forelock, I would surely have tugged it. I think I may have tried doffing my quiff. I’m really not sure – I was looking at the floor at the time.

It was pathetic.

After a few moments, I regained my composure and struggled to my feet just in time to hear Linda leaping to my defence by telling Dame Helen, ‘Well I’m a film professor and I really loved
The Queen
!’

Oh great. Thanks for that.

‘Really?’ said Dame Helen, wryly.’I’d love to be party to the arguments that must go on in your house.’

‘Ha ha ha,’ said Linda, sounding a bit mental.

‘Ha ha ha,’ said I, wondering how much more of this I could manage without descending into screaming panic.’Please God,’ I thought, ‘please make this end. Please let me crawl away with at least
some
of my dignity still intact.’

In the end I pulled the conversational equivalent of a handbrake turn by shaking Dame Helen firmly by the hand and announcing incoherently that ‘I’m sure you have much more famous matters to attend to …’ before grabbing Linda by the arm and heading straight for the nearest door.

I didn’t get very far. Roger Alton, then editor of the
Observer
, bounded up to me and said excitedly, ‘Hey Mark, did you just get handbagged by Helen Mirren?’

Oh great. So
everyone
saw it, and everyone
knew
. Now it would probably be in the papers. I was going to go down in history as the man who went down on one knee to beg forgiveness for his critical indulgences from Dame Helen Mirren. Terrific.

I decided not to say anything.

‘Yes he did,’ chirruped Linda breezily.’She asked him what he meant by saying that
The Queen
wasn’t a “real movie”.’

Thanks again.

‘God,’ said Roger.’Was it scary?’

‘Oh yes!’ declared Linda again.’Yes, he was definitely scared. He pretty much went down on one knee. It was funny.’

‘It wasn’t
that
funny,’ I mumbled, disgruntledly.

‘Oh yes it was,’ retorted Linda, clearly enjoying the moment.’It really was
quite funny
…’

And from somewhere in the back of my mind I heard the spectre of every film-maker whose work I have ever insulted cackling heartily, enjoying the joke, delighting in my public comeuppance, smirking at my humiliation.

Ha bloody ha.

So there we were, up by Lookout Mountain, on the outskirts of LA, when Werner Herzog’s trousers exploded.

It was, as I mentioned before, a small explosion, as if a firecracker had gone off in his pocket – a phrase which would later come back to haunt me thanks to the sinister miracle of the internet. But it was an explosion nonetheless, followed by silence broken only by Herzog’s morosely Bavarian observation that ‘Someone is shooting at us. We should leave …’.

Exactly what happened next is something of a blur – although unflattering video footage of myself hanging off a wire fence whilst attempting to scramble ungainly round a precipitous overhang suggests that I did not proceed in an orderly fashion toward the nearest exit whilst taking care to remove any sharp objects or high heels. I
do
remember experiencing a profound sense of urgency which seemed strangely absent from Herzog’s own response. I put this
down to deeply ingrained cultural differences: Herzog grew up in exciting Germany, whereas I grew up in Barnet – a place so dull that a decapitated chicken once made the front page of the local press. In short, I had no frame of reference for the seriousness (or otherwise) of the drama now unfolding less than a mile from the site of that infamous eighties drugs-and-porn bloodbath the ‘Wonderland Massacre’. All that was clear was that Herzog had been shot (in the pantular region) and befuddled panic was top of my list of possible responses.

For Herzog, however, this was business as usual. As the maker of such rugged classics as
Fitzcarraldo
and
Aguirre: Wrath of God
, Herzog had long held a reputation as modern cinema’s most fearless foot soldier. Popular folklore had it that working on Herzog’s movies was all but indistinguishable from being
in
them, an idea crystallised in Les Blank’s brilliant documentary
Burden of Dreams
which found Herzog literally dragging a steamboat over a mountain in pursuit of his elusive cinematic vision. Whereas Lucas or Spielberg would have used models or blue-screen special effects, Herzog simply went upriver into Peru where he introduced a
real
boat to a
real
mountain and filmed the resulting grudge match for
real
.

‘It was a necessity because of the story,’ he told me by way of explanation.’I have to accept it and I subject myself to the story. I had no one to learn from because
never
had an object of that magnitude –
never
in
technical history
– been moved over a mountain. Now, I was aware that with a pulley system it was theoretically
possible
to move a ship over
a mountain. And yes, the pyramids have been built. But if you give me 300,000 disciplined men and give me thirty years, I could build a
bigger
one!’

Go Werner!

A central motif of Herzog’s movies is the image of an obsessed (and often deranged) anti-hero going to extremes to achieve an impossible goal, and it doesn’t take a critical genius to find a powerful autobiographical bond between the man and his work. Time and again the madness of Herzog’s on-screen adventures has been matched by perilous off-screen antics as the director searches for those rare moments of ‘ecstatic truth’ which have become his signature.’I live my life, I
end
my life with this project,’ he famously said of
Fitzcarraldo
¸ and he wasn’t kidding. Among the life-threatening on-set adventures which haunted the movie is the story of the extra who got hit in the neck by an arrow which Herzog had to help remove on a kitchen table. Other key Herzog legends involve a crew member hacking his own foot off with a chainsaw after being bitten by a poisonous Peruvian snake.’It was very wise,’ Herzog dead-panned.’The man survived …’

Nor has Herzog himself escaped the wrath of the movie gods. In Africa he was thrown into jail after being suspected of organising a military coup (‘it was another man they wanted whose name was Hertz – like the hire car’) and more recently he was handcuffed at an airport after the producers of
Rescue Dawn
pissed off the famously inflexible Thailand authorities.’Two of the producers are actually in jail right now,’ Herzog admitted.’But that’s fine; what was wrestled away from that situation was a film. And the film is good!’

The zenith of Herzog’s life-or-death approach to film-making came when he legendarily used a gun to prevent leading man and ‘best fiend’ Klaus Kinski from walking out on the odd couple’s greatest movie. According to Herzog, the story (which has entered the annals of extreme moviemaking history) has been blown out of all proportion because ‘the gun wasn’t ever actually pointing at Kinski. I just explained to him, very quietly, as he was packing his things, that if he tried to leave he would have eight bullets through his head before he reached the next bend of the river. Which was probably an exaggeration – I would have missed at least three or four.’

Was he joking? Would he really have shot Kinski?

‘I said it very quietly so he understood that it was not a joke. But the story then took on a life of its own, until today you can read that I directed him only at gunpoint from behind the camera! That’s baloney. It never happened like that. When I talked to him, I did not have a gun in my hands. However, I
did
have a gun …’

All of which puts a rather more intense spin on every actor’s favourite question: ‘What’s my motivation?’

Despite such wild tales, Herzog insists that ‘I’m cautious about taking risks – I prefer to be alive. And contrary to what rumours say and what the media report about me, I’m a very circumspect and prudent person. I eliminate danger as far as it can be done. And as proof, I can say that in fifty-eight films, not one of my actors got injured! Not one!’ Yet when I suggested to Herzog on stage at the BFI Southbank that ‘Most film-makers would not go to the lengths you went to
make
Fitzcarraldo
’ he replied assertively, ‘That’s not correct. It’s not “most”. It’s “no one”!’