Tuesday, April 27, 2010

AIR at Malibu Film Festival




Come see my film Air (starring Andrew Garfield) this Friday night April 30 2010 at the Malibu Film Festival! (http://www.malibufilmfestival.com/)

Films start from 7pm. Air (20 minutes) is in the 10pm slot (final slot for the evening), with two other shorts. I'm going to make sure I'm there by 9, because the film Fiberglass & Megapixels, about surfers and photographers on Oahu's North Shore, looks pretty cool.

Tickets for the evening are $10. Address is: Malibu Lumber Yard, 3939 Cross Creek Road, Malibu, CA 90265.

If you're coming down Malibu Canyon Rd, it's less than a mile south of where that hits the Pacific Coast Highway at Pepperdine University. Turn left on Cross Creek Road. If you're coming from Santa Monica direction, it's 11 or 12 miles north of Santa Monica on the PCH. Turn right on Cross Creek Road, about a mile after you've passed the Beach Comber Cafe on your left and the Malibu Inn on your right.

See you there! Hope some of you make it!

Also, if anyone is in Marfa, Texas, the following week, it's screening at the Marfa Film Festival, http://marfafilmfestival.org/ . Cool town, great festival.

Friday, April 23, 2010

Rogue Film School - some feedback

I've had some really nice responses to my Werner Herzog/Rogue Film School blogs, and just want to share a couple. My friend Delia Falconer, a wonderful novelist (The Service of Clouds, which she's probably better known for, but my favourite is the exquisite, deceptively simple The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, which I've linked to here), wrote this:

"I can't claim serious cinephilia, but, my god, WH has had a huge impact on me as a fiction writer, so I really responded to your piece. I remember walking past the Valhalla one afternoon, stopping in to see The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (never heard of Herzog, just thought at 20 the title sounded like the sort of serious thing I ought to see): I was bored and confused for the first 20 minutes, then -- what a revelation. I've thought a lot about why I love WH's films so much and I think much of their power for me is in their avoidance of close-ups. I love the distancing, the lack of movement in a lot of his medium and long-shots, as if I'm almost watching a different medium, something pre-Renaissance, from before humanist traditions, let alone film, which I find enormously exciting: it's something that I've tried to capture in my second book.

"I also love his juxtaposition of narrative strands, (Bells from the Deep being a personal favourite), and his balancing of those strands with the long shots of that frozen lake; and his use, at the risk of sounding pretentious, of the "filmic-ness" of film itself. There is that extraordinary moment in Grizzly Man, where he just runs Treadwell's set-ups of a sun-struck Alaskan glade, which becomes unspeakably haunting. He says something quite fantastic in his voice-over, which I think is: "Sometimes things have their own magic, their own mysterious stardom." That seems right to me for poetry, and also, at times, for prose-poetry..."

Lost Thoughts of Soldiers link:

http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Thoughts-Soldiers-Delia-Falconer/dp/1582435286/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272007892&sr=8-6

Another friend, the artist Emma de Clario, had this startling and beautiful revelation back in January when I first posted about the weekend:

"mmmm... he had a relationship with my mum when I was eight or so, he was in melbourne making a film with paul cox and I remember him reading my sister and I stories at bed time.......I remember because he read fairy tales in the old fashioned way, they were terrifying and magical, he was too."

In a message this week Emma added, when I asked for permission to recycle her January post:

"it was 1980... in melbourne, nth fitzroy...mum met him through paul cox when they made that green ant film in the desert... she saw him for a year or so I think... most of it long distance... I remember her saying that he was too german!"

(Emma link: http://www.marsgallery.com.au/view-artist.php?id=67&gid=118&s=2 )

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Rogue Film School - Day Three



"If you misjudge something, fine: accept the imperfections of the frame."

The three-day seminar was intense, and exhausting, but somehow it - or rather, Herzog - always held your interest. On regular occasions it blossomed from the "simply" interesting to the suddenly exhilarating. It was regularly inspiring. By the Monday, Day Three, everybody was tired; it takes physical effort to sit straight-backed in a chair for eight hours a day, but Herzog demanded a mind on High Alert too. God knows some of it must have felt like a hallucination for some of the other attendees, who had flown in for the three days from all over the world, from places like Colombia, Korea, Canada, England, Iran, Greece, and who must have been experiencing some serious jetlag.

Herzog spoke of America's propensity for a kind of narrow world-view that can border on a national narcissism. "Three million Americans say they've been abducted by aliens, 300,000 women that they've been gang-raped by them," he pronounced. "In Ethiopia, not one woman has been gang-raped by aliens."

He called such beliefs a "manifestation of collective psychosis"; such beliefs, he said, are in a category with, say, conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination.

He told us the entire plot of a movie he wants to make, loosely based of twin sisters in England who were not quite right in the head, and spoke in unison. As soon as he finds the right actors to play the twins, he said, he will start shooting the film.

I've not as much to report about Day 3, since most of the afternoon was spent looking at our short films and extracts, with Herzog giving specific feedback and criticism at times. Through it all, of course, his quotable quotes kept on coming. "I make you familiar with an image that has been dormant inside of you," he said. "As a film maker, I'm the one that can articulate it."

What was lovely about the weekend was how left-of-field everything was. The seminar, I suppose, was ultimately about the mind: about cinema as an artifact, a by-product, of the mind at its most exciting. Elsewhere Herzog has said that the Rogue Film School is not about technical film-making advice; for that, you should go to a traditional film school. No, what it was really about, in a sense, was attitude. What attitude might get films made? What attitude might make good films? At some other level, too, there was always this sense of what attitude, what set of attitudes, might best enable one to live a good life, engaged to its limits?

(For what it's worth, here's the only couple of moments of specific technical advice Herzog gave that I can find in my notes. He insists on very little sound on his set; he wants his crews to be quiet and focused. He insists that no one is ever in the sight-lines of his actors. "The climate on the set translates into the climate of what you see in the film.")

A couple of random quotes or notes from my notebook:

"The axioms of our emotions: that is what you find in opera."

On Brigitte Bardot, when he met her 40 years ago: "The only thing that radiated from her was high-decibel stupidity." (She was, he said, like a little grey mouse in real life.)

On persistence: "Beyond raving and ranting, there's something like prudent aggression."

On his strange film Wild Blue Yonder: "I was fascinated by found materials, and I just forced it into the narrative." (But it shows! The film is weirdly forced, and a kind of one-beat repeat trick. Rarely, for a Herzog film, it gets boring quickly.)

He praised The Ascent, a film by the Ukrainian film maker Larisa Shapitko, who died in a car crash in 1979, aged 41. (Criterion have released this film, and I've ordered it and look forward to seeing it.)

Of his role playing himself in the odd but funny Zack Penn documentary (mockumentary, really) Incident at Loch Ness: "I think it does good once in a while to exhibit some self-irony."

Of his bizarre, hypnotic but beautiful Lessons of Darkness, a film in response to which people's complaints at the Berlin Film Festival included the very visceral complaint of spitting at him, he said that he felt they were probably simply objecting to his particular version of the "aestheticization of horror." It made me think that, yes, there's an accepted aestheticization all around us, but that what Herzog did in Lessons of Darkness was different: people felt that its subject matter, the surreal aftermath of the first Gulf War in the Iraqi oil fields, demanded some kind of verité treatment, so that when Herzog created his deleriously bent mytho-poetic voice-over running over the extraordinary images, he had somehow stepped outside the bounds of polite political discourse.

What makes Herzog such a fine rogue and rebel is his willingness to step outside all sorts of boundaries. We were asked to write some kind of brief testimonial for possible inclusion in the Rogue website. This is the full text of what I wrote:

"Many things make Herzog great, and anyone applying for this seminar already has their own personal concepts of what some of those things are. But here's what stands out about the seminar itself: the apparent vastness of his mind, his curiosity and hunger, his ability to link together wildly disparate trains of thought, from wildly disparate fields, and make them both exciting and inspiring. His aversion to cookie-cutter simplifications of art reminds us of our own duty, as artists and in our lives, to strive to separate the essential from the inessential, the primary from the inane. He's funny and generous. He gives good guest. There are very few people in the world who can just talk for three days and hold your attention; Herzog is one of them."

If it's not already obvious: I'd recommend contact with this big-hearted, courageous, free-thinking man.

If you're reading this and don't know much, or anything, about him, here's a brief Herzog primer I'd recommend. (And remember: he has a big body of work, and there are some notable fails in there. Yet he's never done anything that's without interest. Also remember: many people talk about Fitzcarraldo. Sure it's good, but it's not nearly as good as his masterpiece Aguirre.)

Anyway, the primer. (And remember: this is only my opinion. Other Herzog enthusiasts would recommend entirely other films.)

First, watch the sublime Aguirre, Wrath of God, the great megalomaniacal masterpiece, which may be as good a fable as any about madness, power, imperialism and entropy (i.e., "history").

Secondly, watch the heartbreakingly beautiful Stroszek. Yes, possibly the best Great American Dream film might made by an outsider, a German. Afterwards, read this article about Bruno Schleinstein, who starred in the 1977 Herzog film (as Bruno S):

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/25/arts/design/25abroad.html?scp=1&sq=bruno%20schleinstein&st=cse

Watch the video in the article of Bruno singing his song "Mamatschi". When I read this last year, I remember there was a link to a translation of the "Mamatschi" lyrics, but I couldn't find it this time.

For dessert, I was tossing up between Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World, but I'm going to plump with Encounters. One of those lovely, joyful, poetic Herzog experiences about which the less said before you watch it, the better. Watch and enjoy. Here's a still from it:


Happy Herzogging, everybody. For you film makers, budding or otherwise, here's a final Werner quote from the seminar:

"You will never be independent, because independent cinema only exists in your home movies. But try to be self-reliant."

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Rogue Film School, Day 2


"I've never consciously gone after aesthetics," Herzog said. "Aesthetics creeps in by itself. Aesthetics is like your handwriting - when you write a passionate love letter or a beautiful, compelling letter, the aesthetics is your handwriting, your longhand. But it is not the central issue."

Day Two was off and running. We were told to expect visitors. We began the day with the Fred Astaire clip I mentioned in the previous post. "No one has a more insipid face than Astaire," said Herzog. "The dialogues are beyond stupid. But I just love his films. Nothing is simpler: light, shadow, movement."

Herzog believes the lifespan of film makers is not often more than fifteen years. (Obviously he considers himself an exception.) He spoke of his own artistic origins: a moment of epiphany at thirteen, seeing a book in a shop window about the cave paintings at Lascaux, working furiously as a ball-boy at a tennis court for six months in order to buy this talismanic book. I related on two levels: firstly, that archaeology had been my passion and obsession from a young age, perhaps around eight or nine. Secondly, that my own first great epiphany - the second was the Aguirre, Wrath of God moment at sixteen - came at thirteen, when I discovered Cannery Row in the school library shelves, and "entered" the universe of real writing, a kind of infinite palace the rooms of which I feel I have been exploring ever since. So the notion of your head suddenly becoming aflame with passion for a world both revealed and hinted at resonated strongly with me. It happened at that instant - the first page of Cannery Row - and it's been with me ever since. Similarly, Herzog spoke of "this deep turmoil in my heart [which is] still reverberating in me. It's like a distant echo still out there."

Herzog talked about his dislike for the cinema verité documentary style; it posits that "facts" constitute "truth", he says, but this is simply not the case. "We should depart from the postulates of cinema verité. Cinema verité is the axiom of the 1960s. It is fifty years later."

He doesn't feel obligated to explain when he does fabricate things in his documentaries, because then "the charm of fabrication is gone." ("I have absolutely no problem with being a magician who doesn't explain to the kids how he does every one of his tricks.")

Nonetheless he was happy to reveal to us a couple of his "tricks". In his beautifully bizarre "documentary" Bells From the Deep, about religion and superstition in Russia and Siberia, there is recounted the legend of the lost city of Kitezh, from which the bells at the bottom of the lake are said to ring out. The footage shows two men, one dragging himself along on the frozen lake, stopping to pray every ten feet or so; the other laid out prostrate, as if in deep prayer. But in fact, the two men are not real religious "pilgrims". Rather, they are two drunk guys Herzog found in the local inn who were willing, for money, to drag themselves around on the ice for a while.

During the day Herzog brought in the composer Klaus Badelt, who talked largely about the "trade-off" between creating "emotional space" (whether through minimal music, or sound design, or silence) and deciding when and where to put the grander music in. In the opening scenes of Rescue Dawn, for instance, with the archival footage of the napalm bombing, the beauty of the music obviously plays off against the violence, so that "you create a layer of abstraction."

Herzog spoke about music as following or leading, depending on circumstances. "Sometimes a person with their gaze pulls the music in. Sometimes the music pulls the image in." Nonetheless, a guiding rule is that you can't let music "emotionalize" something whose emotion is not rendered in the actual scene in the first place.

Herzog commented that sometimes a scene is better as naked as it can be, if the drama is strong enough. He played a Tim Roth scene from his film Invincible, first a version with music, then the music-less version he went with once he realized how much better it was. The musical version was all a bit busy. The naked scene was powerful. The two were markedly different.

Badelt said that as a composer, one must "always think in big arcs." He spoke of how simple and repetitive melodies "create a big arc and create unity and coherence within the big arc. Study for example Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, and how very early on, Wagner establishes the Tristan motif, which has a strange kind of dissonance."

Herzog said that, just as he would never talk to an actor about "motivation", so he would never talk to a composer about "music"; rather, he tries always to talk in terms of space and emotion. Nor, he says, would he talk to the cinematographer about very specific styles and angles - though he might answer a cinematographer's questions about "styles" and "stylistic aims" by giving him a piece of music and saying, "It should look like this."

Badelt said, "What I don't like is massaging the audience about how they're meant to feel. Or telegraphing everything." He's right about how telegraphing is basically the Hollywood disease - I just saw Clash of the Titans the other day, an extraordinarily bad film in pretty much every conceivable way - but I must say, I thought Badelt himself was guilty of this very thing in the closing scenes of Rescue Dawn, which felt in all its rah-rah-with-a-hint-of-bombast as if the film had suddenly been hi-jacked by Top Gun.

One comment gave me pause for thought, since in my first short film Air I had done exactly what he suggested not to do: "If you know you're not going to record with a real orchestra, don't try and imitate a real sound, such as the violin in an orchestra."

An interesting fact from Bardelt: there is twice as much music, on average, in an American film as in a European film (60-90 minutes on average in an American film versus 30-40 minutes on average in a European film). "There's way too much music in American films. It lessens the impact. It waters it down. Believe in the scene."

It was heartening to learn, since I have my own bad-TV guilty pleasures, that Herzog watches shows like Forensic Files and Wrestlemania (with its "strange barbaric drama") to wind down sometimes.

In the afternoon we were visited by the theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, who wrote the book Hiding in the Mirror: The Quest for Alternate Realities, from Plato to String Theory (by way of Alice in Wonderland, Einstein and the Twilight Zone). An affable-looking little guy who seemed filled with joy and wonder, all channeled through this permanent big grin, he reminded me of my friend the Israeli writer and film maker Etgar Keret, who I've always thought is the only real genius I actually know as a friend, or perhaps have ever met. Maybe that big smile, a kind of curiosity mixed with joy, is the smile of genius.

Krauss couldn't stay long, but watching the chat that unfolded between him and Herzog, one couldn't help but be struck by the deep affection the two shared for each other. They spoke of all sorts of matters, including but not limited to Klein bottles (see image below; look carefully), four dimensional space, and the elasticization of time.



"I suspect every one of you has had a moment where an instant seemed like forever," said Krauss. I had indeed, and so had Yeats:


My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table top.

While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessèd and could bless.


Herzog, meanwhile, would throw out with great regularity those beautiful, lilting sentences that after a day and a half we were all now beginning to soak up like a sponge. Most of the time I was just listening, rapt, but every so often I'd remember to write one down. "I've always been fascinated," he said to Krauss, "by the algebraization of unthinkable curves and spaces." Krauss had a good stab at trying to explain how to imagine four-dimensional space: each face of a four-dimensional cube is a three-dimensional cube, for example. Admittedly, this was a little easier to imagine conceptually than visually.

Herzog talked about his idea to create a three-dimensional chess set. "You would need more players," he said, "because with only sixteen, you could evade ad infinitum in three dimensions."

In a digression that moved into yet another dimension, Herzog spoke about how he had once hypnotized an audience and screened for them Aguirre, Wrath of God. People claimed afterwards that they had travelled around - as in a mini-helicopter - the back of Klaus Kinski's head, and seen the characters he was talking to off-screen.

Another Krauss/Herzog moment:

Herzog: How many ropes would you need in order to fix yourself in an absolute fixed space in the universe?
Krauss: [pause; grin] But there is no fixed space.

Then Krauss left, and the Herzogologue turned to other matters. He spoke of the circumstances - the psychic circumstances, really - behind his walking from Munich to Paris in 1974 to visit the ailing film critic (and archivist at the French Cinémathèque) Lotte Eisner, a walk which he recorded in his "diary/narration" Walking On Ice. Eisner had had a stroke; it was said she had not long to live. Herzog set off, ill-prepared, riding that fine line between whim and compulsion. "I'm not a superstitious person," he said, "but walking to Paris was - I put out a force. I thought I would push her out of hospital if I walked to Paris. She was out of hospital, in fact, by the time I arrived, and she lived another eight or nine years. Eventually she said, 'Take the spell off me now; I want to die.' I said, 'Okay, the spell is lifted.' She died two weeks later." That mixture of maniacal glint and mischievous twinkle in his eye again, behind a poker face.

Someone asked a question about persistence, about the creative compromises one might make in order to get things done. "My advice is contradictory," said Herzog: "Follow your dreams no matter what; abandon you dreams if you are smart enough in some situations to see that it is not do-able."

He has always been used to making good films leanly. He was dismayed at the layers of middlemen that became involved as his films started becaming bigger. During the Rescue Dawn negotiations and deliberations, he'd suddenly had enough, he claims. He asked all the attorneys and all the agents to step out of the room. He wanted to speak only to the producers, "man to man."

The agents and attorneys left. He said to the producers: "I will ask you a very high price now, but I guarantee you I will be worth it. I guarantee you I will deliver on budget as I have fifty-eight times before. Only five times have I not delivered on budget - and those five times, I came in under budget. Never have I gone over budget."

To do this, though, he asked for daily access to the finances, to keep an eye on everything.

During the shoot, one day the completion bond guarantor came to set, as they do, for their friendly check-in. To the completion guarantor, he announced, "Hello and welcome, but you are a parasitical presence here. You charge half a million to guarantee this film will be completed, and it is completely unnecessary." He tapped his chest proudly as he recounted the story. "I am the guarantee."

"This overabundance of contracts you are facing," said Herzog, of film-making in general these days, "is an abomination and an outrage."

The subject of final cut approval came up. Herzog said that very few people in Hollywood have it, and that he was a director with neither the power nor the desire to demand final cut. And it doesn't bother him in the slightest; he's happy to listen to what the opinion of the masses. (Not that I can imagine him having anything other than de facto final cut on his earlier films; I assumed he was talking of his recent, "Hollywood" efforts such as Rescue Dawn and The Bad Lieutenant, and I assumed that meant he has been willing to undergo test screenings.)

"Final cut belongs not to the director, not to the producers, not to the attorneys, but to the audience," he said.

Nonetheless: "I try to be a good soldier of cinema. I hold the ground. I try to hold the terrain that has largely been abandoned."

That was it for Day 2; I'll get back to Day 3 as soon as I can.

Rogue Film School



I've been meaning to get around to writing about the excellent three-day Werner Herzog "Rogue Film School" seminar which I took back in January. Herzog has been a hero for me ever since the day I saw Aguirre, Wrath of God at sixteen, and my life changed entirely. It changed, I think, in the fundamental sense that I became a fully-fledged cinemaphile at that instant. I saw how completely exciting great film could be, and I understood, as a burgeoning poet, that great poetry need not only be verbal.

What follows is a little of my experience of the seminar, which took place in a nondescript hotel conference room near Koreatown in LA, with forty participants. The first thrill was the meet-and-greet on the Friday night. I had not particularly thought about what to expect, or what the other attendees might be like. But suddenly, my laminated Rogue Film School ID badge around my neck, chatting to clusters of fellow-attendees, I realized the glorious truth: we were dweeby, nerdy Herzog enthusiasts at the ultimate Herzog-nerd convention! Suddenly I could say, "you know the scene in La Soufrière where....?" and my new friends would know what I was talking about. Or someone would talk about the correspondence between the driverless truck turning circles in Even Dwarves Started Small and the driverless truck turning circles in Stroszek and....well, it was just nice to be among people who not only thought about these correspondences, but who could somewhat navigate the minutiae of Herzog's extensive body of work.

Day 1 began with Herzog, presumably somewhat tongue-in-cheek, talking not just about how lock-picking is a good skill for a budding film-maker - since you never know what you might need to break into - and not just telling us anecdotes about when such a skill was necessary in his own past, but passing around, for all of us to inspect, his own lock-picking kit. You have to assume it's not part of his carry-on luggage.

He spoke of length too of the benefits of forging shooting permits and other documents, when circumstances dictate. He told us an anecdote about Phillip Petit, the subject of the wonderful documentary Man on Wire: at a certain moment in his attempts to get his trapeze wire up to the top of the Twin Towers, Petit was about to be busted by security guards. Instead of freezing or fleeing, Petit started shouting at his offsider, like an angry employer: You're doing a lousy job! What's the matter with you! and so on. He marched towards the guards, livid with anger at the man, screaming near-incoherently at him. The security guards pressed up against the wall, to let the fighting men pass. "No one wants to interfere with people in the middle of a fight," explained Herzog.

What followed was largely three days of anecdote: of a man standing in front of forty people, pretty much just talking. There are probably few people in the world who can pull this off; Herzog is passionate enough, erudite enough, charming enough, captivating enough, to do it. He may at times seem a little crackpot in his driven-ness, but he's never not interesting, and beautiful turns of phrase pop up at the oddest moments: "...they found half the interior minister hanging in the cool room," is a quote in my notebook, from a long and florid tale about the Emperor of Cameroon.

Herzog spoke of being in prison (possibly in Cameroon?) and how the seemingly "completely insignificant" moments in a filthy prison cell crowded with forty other men were also the worst. There was a single bucket, and whenever anyone shitted, all the others crammed into the cell would shout and sing obscene songs. But when Herzog needed to shit, when he sat on the bucket, the whole place went silent. He thinks it's because he was the only white man in the cell. "I would fervently pray for them to shout or sing," said Herzog.

When he wasn't regaling us with anecdotes, he showed clips: sometimes our own clips that we had sent as part of the application process, at other times delightfully random clips whose sole reason for being included in the seminar, I suppose, was their weird beauty: Fred Astaire dancing, scratchy 35-mm anthropological film shot in Indonesia in the 1920s.

He told the oft-repeated tale about stealing a camera from the Munich Film School, an apparently staid place whose conservative trustees didn't much like the idea of the school's equipment being out on loan too often. "I simply enjoyed the camera in the work for which it was meant," said Herzog, explaining the "loan". "When you have a story to tell, by dint of destiny or God knows what divine providence, you gain the right to do such things."

He spoke of his discovery of the Petaluma chicken farm in California, the largest in the world. It also has Ralph, the world's largest chicken. (I don't have a fact checker; I'm just relaying the facts as Herzog spoke them.) Herzog's idea was was to film a midget, riding the world's smallest horse, being chased around the world's largest tree (in northern California), by Ralph, the world's largest chicken.

He didn't speak too highly of "this slavish adherence to some sort of demented school of screenwriting," to Robert McKee-style screenwriting courses or books, which ask, "'What is your motivation,' or some such insipid thing. Why do you do that? Because I love to do it, that's my answer; and it looks great!" (When Nicholas Cage asked for "motivations" - why exactly is his character so bad? - during the recent shooting of The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans, Herzog replied, "Nicholas, let's not discuss that. Let's just experience the bliss of evil.")

He likes the word "insipid". "By page 19, the hero must understand his mission," he said, again speaking of screenwriting courses. "What kind of insipid nonsense is that?" He described the entire plot of The Verdict, which starred Paul Newman, ending with a dramatic pause and a disdainful, "What kind of shit is that?"

"You should always feel free to do the wild stuff," he went on. "But prepare it, embed it. You must allow the audience to follow the safe ground of narrative progression. Then they follow you to the wild places." Of stylistic tricks he said: "You cannot do them on a whim and you cannot do them as circus gimmicks - the soil must first be planted in dialogue."

(Side track: I did the McKee seminar about eight years ago. There's good basic clear-headed information, and he is charismatic and captivating and wonderfully opinionated, albeit in a bit of a senior-white-male-bully kind of way; but there are two hilarious things, and I wonder if they are still part of his course, or if he's moved with the times. The first was, many of the films he held up as paragons of film virtue, that illustrated his theses, cluster around the mid-to-late seventies, as if he brought them up when he was first devising his seminar. Some are good, but many have simply not weathered the storms of time all that well. And that Japanese film he loved so much, In the Realm of the Senses, is just goddamned tedious, dumb and dated.

The other thing was, McKee was very belligerently "my way or the highway" - he had no time for narrative structures other than the classic three-acter. He was basically telling us that all other forms were bullshit. From memory Being John Malkovich was out around this time, and you could see it made him a little uneasy. God knows how he copes with the flood of multiple-strand narratives and so on that have arrived, and succeeded, since then. I'd love to know if he pays them heed, or if Kramer V Kramer is still the kind of film we should all be making.) (Oh, I'm not specifically picking on Kramer V Kramer. From memory it's a good film. I'm just specifically remembering how much McKee loved it.)

"Blind motifs," Herzog went on, "you can always put them in the film as long as you prepare the ground. And the ground is always the audience. How do you suck the audience in, and never release them?"

One of the most heartening and validating points Herzog made - and he made it again and again, over the course of three days - was about reading. "That's why I always say read, read, read, read if you want to be a film maker." More than that, he kept coming around to the point that reading poetry, in particular, was vital. (I remember the quote, though no longer the source of it, "Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divine in man," and it seems to me that great film does that too: connects us to the transcendent, which is really just time stripped of its flesh.)

So we read books, we read obsessively and urgently (as urgently as a man whose head is on fire would seek a body of water in which to dive, to paraphrase Campbell), and we learn, through that, what might make good films. Herzog also said he learns from bad films: that is to say, he learns what not to do. But "from good films I've never really learned much, because I'm mystified, for example, by how Kurosawa made such a perfectly balanced film as Rashomon.

He told us was reading poetry, Virgil's Georgics in the translation by David Ferry, on the way to Antarctica to shoot his absolutely beautiful, absolutely batty documentary Encounters at the End of the World. He had no idea what he was there to shoot, or how the film would turn out. "Virgil talks about the glory of the beehive and the glory of this and that and the world. 'Let's just do that with Antarctica,' I said to myself. 'Name the glory. Don't just desperately try make sense of what I see there.'"

But while, according to Herzog, addiction to books and poetry can never be problematic for a film maker, he thought addiction to films can be counterproductive, as in the case of Scorcese. His films, said Herzog, can become "overburdened with film knowledge." I love Scorcese, but I have to admit it's a good while since he has made a truly great film. The excellent Dylan documentary aside, you have to go back now to Goodfellas and Casino for good ones, and though I've not seen it yet, it sounds like Shutter Island is more than anything a compendium of film referencing from the film universe that is Scorcese's brain.

For Herzog, Tarantino's Asperger's-like addiction to films, too, has resulted in movie stylizations. The dialogue in Kill Bill, for instance, or the set-ups at the beginning, "could only come from someone who reads only comic books or who works in a video store for five or seven years."

In any case, I'm sure there's one thing all three could agree upon: "You are a storyteller. You are not a historian. You are not an accountant of events that took place."

"The storyboard is the instrument of true cowards," he said, "is the instrument of those who have no confidence on set in their own fantasies." I don't know that I would entirely agree with that point; personally I would consider a storyboard a pretty handy tool in certain situations. But Herzog insisted that with storyboarding, "every member of the crew becomes the marionette of an architectural design."

"Don't zoom; move close."

"The quickest pan is a cut." (Actually, Herzog didn't say this; it's what his early editor Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus told him once.)

The flow of the narrative: you must establish it in the shooting, not the editing. You can't create it in the edit room if it's not there in the first place. We all sense patch-up jobs. On the other hand, a good editor knows to "follow the surprises that come at you."

"Shoot each scene as if this scene will be edited and screened in public in half an hour. Take control in the shoot - post-production won't fix things. The emphasis today - on shooting so much coverage, for example, as a kind of safety net, means that film makers are delegating everything towards post-production."

"America is culturally claustrophobic," he said. It's very hard for example to get Americans to see, say, an Iranian film. (Close-up and Where Is the House of My Friend were mentioned as two must-see Iranian films. Oh, that reminds me, the wonderful Korean fellow rogue Ju-Young Yoon recommended two Korean documentaries as being excellent: Repatriation by Kim Dong-Won and Lineage of the Voice by Back Yuna. Must get hold.)

Herzog told about being at a documentary conference once. Someone in a panel was going on and on about "honesty" in documentary making. "We should be the fly on the wall," this person was saying. "No," screamed Herzog, grabbing the microphone. We should be the hornet! We should move in and sting!"

"Happy New Year, losers," he shouted, storming out of the auditorium.

He certainly likes to portray himself as "me against the world". How much of this is gilding the lily is hard to tell. There's an intensity and a seriousness, at times a kind of messianic passion, behind all he does. And on the other hand, one senses a great amount of mischief and humour, a twinkle in the eye, behind his public persona.

"The nature of the market is that it does not want you," he said.

"The financing of films has always been difficult," he said. "However, I'm not in the culture of complaint." (Coppola, whom Herzog seems to have great affection for, is always up there complaining from the vineyard.)

"If you have a story that is urgent and powerful to tell," he went on, "money will folow you in the street like the common cur with its tail between its legs. I start with a little bit of money, but other money always gathers towards it. The Bavarians have a saying, 'The Devil always shits on the pile already there.'"

"If the system doesn't accept what you are doing, create your own system," he said.

"Form rogue cells around you," he said. "If you don't, then it's really tough."

And yet, one of the fundamental truths about being an artist: "There will be quite a lot of solitude in it. But it doesn't really matter. You have to have the nerve to be alone."

Well. It's late, and I've realized that's all just my notes so far from Day 1. I'll continue with Day 2 and 3 as soon as I can.