Werner Herzog
Agony and Ecstasy
Nov 18, 2011
Web Exclusive
Assuming an audacious timbre few filmmakers since Stanley Kubrick have dared to explore, the recent works of Werner Herzog have jarringly stemmed from singular obsessions. Be it the atavistic wilderness drive towards self-destruction of Grizzly Man, the mercurial relationship Herzog forged with his late friend and actor Klaus Kinski in My Best Fiend, or the cave painting explorations as a glimpse into universal yearnings and transcendence in Cave of Forgotten Dreams, his films are laser-focused glimpses into fragile psyches and motifs of mortality, always grounded with an overriding thread of the cosmic mystery and ineffability endemic to the human condition. His latest, Into the Abyss, is no exception.
Although the film has been branded as Herzog’s “Death Penalty” exposition, Herzog shrugs his shoulders at such fatuous labeling. “It’s not a death penalty film. It’s about a senseless crime,” he says. “It’s a tale of death, a tale of life. One man was executed [Michael Perry], while a co-defendant [Jason Burkett] found guilty of the same crime, got away with life in prison. So I would be cautious to call this a film about the death penalty, because it’s equally as much about families of victims of violent crimes for example. I tried to avoid to narrow it down, so that people might not think it was a movie arguing against the death penalty.”
Herzog in the film grapples with a triple homicide, ostensibly motivated by the theft of a red convertible, which he clearly finds revolting, yet views the state’s reaction to the crime with a commensurate level of contempt. “What makes this crime so interesting for me as a filmmaker and a storyteller is a staggering amount of senselessness,” he reveals. “Let’s assume that both perpetrators had gotten away with life in prison [Jason Burkett received life in prison]—I would have been equally fascinated by it and made the same film. But foreclosure would be life in prison without the chance of life of parole. Even Lisa [Stotler-Balloun], who lost her brother and mother in the crime, she even admits that it would be an alternative.”
When the topic of songwriter/actor/activist Steve Earle is broached, who became close with a death row inmate Jonathan Nobles in 1998 after working with anti-death row advocacy groups, even attending his execution, and later claiming it was the last time he’d cried, Herzog is dismissive. “Well, I’m suspicious about public emotions,” he claims. “Number one, he shouldn’t be there. Just stay out of it. And don’t publicize how much you cried. I respect them [death row inmates] as human beings, but I’m not chummy, and I’m not trying to make heroes out of them, outlaw heroes.” He pauses briefly, seemingly contemplating what he’d just said, and continues, “No, but let’s face it, you have to deliver and get your conversation on camera, and I had very little time. Later in editing when you’re facing the footage and not the man, it hits you. I didn’t cry, but to give you a mild indication, both the editor and I started smoking again [Laughs]. And both of us, we’re eight hour a day guys, but this was the only film we’d ever made where it was five hours and we were spent. Just spent. Like we were run over by a truck. So it was best to quit and go home and let things go home as they are. So two small indications that it didn’t leave unaffected. It doesn’t leave audiences unaffected either.”
Into the Abyss also chronicles a marginalized, largely ignored dark corner of America, one where guns and ammunition are identified by subjects like Eskimos examining snow, yet many are incapable of reading or writing. They’re given little chance of succeeding given childhoods riddled with absent parents, who often are serving time in prison, and abject, destitute levels of poverty.
“I had no idea what was going to come at me,” admits Herzog. “What I found was something very, very essential, and essential about not only the perpetrators, but looking into us as well. With Delbert [Burkett], the man who saved his son [Jason, via trial testimony], he talks about bringing up children. I thought Hollywood values belonged in Hollywood movies, and how small family values always prevail there. And now I look at it much more seriously.”
Herzog even gets philosophical while recounting a scene excised from the film, yet one which had a profound impact on his worldview, in line with the filmmaker’s uncanny capacity to find beauty in the mundane. “One death row inmate being transported 43 miles from Huntsville, he sees the world from this van from the cage of this van, and he was 23 minutes from execution and got a stay,” he reveals. “And it was as if he had seen the world for the last time or for the first time in 17 years, and he told me, ‘It all looked like Israel to me, like the holy land.’ So I instantly made the trip with my camera and saw a forlorn, average Americana out there, an empty gas station, or a ramshackle little hut next to the road where it says ‘Happy Worm Bait Shop.’ But all of those things become magnificent. Just the shittiest little suburb. It changes your perspective. You all of a sudden appreciate it. It’s like the holy land. You asked about the effect it had on me. And it was a sharpened perspective, a new perspective. But not that I cried over it. More serious business than the singer [Steve Earle] you mentioned.” (www.ifcfilms.com/films/into-the-abyss)
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