Werner Herzog and The Rogue Film School

Over the last few days, something exciting has been taking place in an unnamed LA Hotel, something that won’t be captured on video, through audio or by the lens. Those that have been lucky enough to make the cut will filter in to Los Angeles from around the world, with $1450.00 clutched in a sweaty grasp and traumatised but open minds alert to the opportunity their good luck and hard cash has delivered them in to.

When Werner Herzog, the notorious German film director with a savage reputation for pushing the boundaries of safety (his own and his crew) to heart-stopping limits of borderline insanity, announced the launch of his Rouge Film School last September, he threw open the doors of his legend.

Now 67 years of age, Herzog is at a point where he’s ready to let a younger generation of filmmakers in to his twisted psyche, to run them ragged through the boot camp of his inspirations and to reveal the thundering motor that has driven him to the depths of despair and the ends of the earth, in pursuit of his unique cinematic visions.

"The Rogue Film School is not for the faint-hearted, it is for those who have travelled on foot, who have worked as bouncers in sex clubs or as wardens in a lunatic asylum, for those who are willing to learn about lock-picking or forging shooting permits in countries not favouring their projects. In short: it is for those who have a sense for poetry. For those who are pilgrims. For those who can tell a story to four-year-old children and hold their attention. For those who have a fire burning within. For those who have a dream.”

Herzog has planned a course in guerrilla filmmaking, the tricks of the trade for the outlaw auteur, eschewing the technical in favour of the practical, with subjects like “...the art of lockpicking. Travelling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy. Guerrilla tactics. Self reliance.”

Anyone familiar with the legacy of the German director would have expected that once he was ready to open up to the aspirational new breed, his unconventional journey would make for unconventional teachings. Born in Munich in 1942, at the age of 14 young Werner found an entry on filmmaking in his family encyclopaedia, inspiring him to steal a 35mm camera from the Munich Film School and set off on a journey to project his visions on to the world.

Some would say that Herzog’s penchant for quixotic lead characters was a reflection of his own struggle to jump the boundaries of conventional film making. No better example of this was his work on 1982’s ‘Fitzcarraldo’, which saw a deluded European enlist the natives of the Peruvian rain forest to pull his paddle steamer over a mountain in order to harvest an untouched expanse of rubber trees on the other side, before navigating the giant vessel through a savage gauntlet of rapids and back to the city of Iquitos, where he planned to cash in his bounty and build an opera house from the profits.

Herzog decided that the only way to truly capture the mania of the plot was to mirror it, by actually enlisting the local natives to haul the 3 story, 320-ton steamer over the 40° hillside. The problems of achieving this terrible feat were compounded by Herzog losing his lead and main supporting actors, Jason Robards and Mick Jagger, after 40% of the film had already been shot. In a move that would throw fuel on the inferno, the director scrapped the footage and started again, recasting the lead with the notorious German actor Klaus Kinski, who caused so much tension on the set that the leader of the Peruvian tribe enlisted to pull the steamer kindly offered to murder Kinski for Herzog. The director himself would later personally threaten shoot his lead dead if he tried to walk off set.

A strong subplot in the story of Herzog’s journey was his complicated relationship with the maniacal Kinski. Their families had shared a house in Munich when they were teenagers, and Herzog tells how in a fit of rage, Kinski smashed every piece of furniture in the home to smithereens over and explosive 24 hour freakout. Kinski brought this madness to everything he ever did, building a fearsome reputation for insolence, depravity and unconventional behaviour which seemed to produce an almost universal loathing for the actor. Herzog would star Kinski in 5 of his features, as well as a documentary ‘My Best Friend’, which was based on their personal and professional relationship.

It would seem that Werner Herzog was not quite content with just putting his movies on the screen, but the story behind them also. There exist several documentaries chronicling the making of his films, including Les Blank’s ‘Burden of Dreams’, which followed the troubled production of ‘Fitzcarraldo’. Blank would also direct the bizarre documentary ‘Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe’, in which our hero valiantly delivers on a bet he lost with filmmaker Errol Morris, where Herzog offered to eat his own shoe if Morris ever completed the film ‘Gates of Heaven’.

Although Herzog had large elements of control over such documentaries, there exists a bizarre piece of footage from an LA based BBC interview with Mark Kermode, where during the interview, Herzog is shot in the stomach with an air rifle by an unknown gunman. To Kermode’s surprise, Herzog waves off the whole thing by declaring "It is not a significant bullet." Check it out.

A few days earlier, the actor Joaquin Phoenix laid stuck in his overturned car on a mountain road overlooking Hollywood following an accident. Phoenix tells how Herzog appeared from nowhere to pull him from the wreckage before disappearing in to the night before the emergency services arrived.

You get the sense that in a twisted polar reversal, the stories actually follow this director, with his movies, at times, becoming the by-products of a bigger picture. Now, as the first class enters into Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School, the true mechanisms of one of the great cult directors are revealed for the first time by the man himself. They will already know his story; Herzog will show them his truth.