It was a great joy to make this film, and there was a feeling of something hilarious at the same time. Whenever we started a scene, we kind of knew deep inside that it was going to be hilarious.
I had the feeling while I was shooting that finally here was a film where audiences would recognize that there’s a lot of sometimes very dark humor in my movies. When you see the film with the audience, there’s more laughter than in an Eddie Murphy comedy.
In the phone conversation [with Nicolas Cage], he was in Australia, and we were in business in less than 60 seconds. It was clear he wanted to do the film, but only if I was on board, and I said that I will only sign if he was on board, so there was a relationship of mutual trust before we had even seen each other. Both of us found it some sort of an outrage that having looked at each other’s work, it had never occurred to us that we should work together. [Laughs.] So it was kind of outrageous. It dawned on us suddenly that we had to do this. And then of course… what was your question? I lost it a little bit, sorry.
You see, with actors, normally I don’t like to have any conversation about background and about motivations and all this. I think on the first or second day of shooting, Nicolas, who is a very shy man, came to me and said “Werner, I know you hate these kind of Lee Strasberg Actors Studio questions about motivation, but what makes him so bad? Is it the drugs? Is it Katrina? Is it his injuries?” And I said, “Yeah, well, let’s not discuss that. But there’s such a thing as the bliss of evil. Let’s go straight for that. Enjoy yourself as much as you can, doing the worst thing, the most debased and vile things, but enjoy yourself, because the audience will somehow, I hope, be in a secret conspiracy with you that sometimes we love to be vile and debased.” It’s a secret joy, and that makes it so hilarious, I think.
And then we had moments—and some of them are the most remarkable in his performance—where I understood he needed to be like music, and I had to give him the space and the time and the possibility of playing out wild facets. For example, when he intimidated two elderly ladies with his gun, that was only halfway scripted. It ends in wild improvisation.
You have to sense where an actor needs a lot of space, and I would tell him, “Nicolas, this scene is written like this. We know the dialogue, we know the movement, but this is a scene where you must turn the hog loose.”
Oh yes. I turned the hog loose when I filmed the iguanas.
| — | Still can’t tell whether Werner Herzog is in on the joke or not. |
