Interview

Adventuring filmmaker Werner Herzog has been lots of places; until recently, on a film set with the likes of Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendes was not one of them. His latest project, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, stars Cage as one of the most messed-up cops you've ever seen. It's a gonzo film noir, a hallucinatory dispatch from the post-Katrina gutter–a movie that is, like most of Herzog's work, best described simply as a Herzog film. I talked to the veteran provocateur about what he's learned from disastrous shoots in the jungle, "the bliss of evil," and the importance of Anna Nicole Smith.

DARRELL HARTMAN: You've been making movies for almost 50 years. Any particular reason you decided to try your hand at film noir now?

WERNER HERZOG: I think there are specific times where film noir is a natural concomitant of the mood. When there's insecurity, collapse of financial systems–that's where film noir always hits fertile ground. The whole thing was conceived and done before the financial collapse, so it was a premonition.

HARTMAN: Watching this film, you can almost read Katrina as a foreshadowing of the financial collapse.

HERZOG: Sure, but the project was not originally written for New Orleans. It was written for York, and all of a sudden the three main players–the producer wanted tax incentives; I said this is the ideal place, New Orleans after Katrina and the collapse of civility; and at the same time, unbeknownst to either of us, Nicolas Cage was pushing for New Orleans. It's a very important place for him. He always liked the fluidity and the kind of music, and always hoped he could work there in a film like this and have it as an influence for his performance.

HARTMAN: Did you see cop movie clichés as an obstacle?

HERZOG: No. I think in this case we have a different step in film noir, where what is dark and pointing at an abyss in the human heart and in society is not an oppressive thing. It's almost getting so vile and so debased that it's hilarious. And that will come across. There's something like a secret conspiracy between the audience and the leading character, and I truly like that audiences [seem to] understand the humor.

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Twilight, for all its heat, takes no pleasure in flesh or fluids. (The Village Voice got it right when it called it "the vampire movie for vegetarians.") Thirst, a Korean vampire flick that comes out on DVD today, three days before New Moon hits theaters, has a good time with both. (PHOTO: KIM OK-VIN IN THIRST, COURTESY OF FOCUS FEATURES)

After volunteering for a risky inoculation experiment, a Catholic priest (Song Kang-ho) discovers he's not the man he was before: sunlight hurts, and the smell of blood gets him salivating. He also discovers a sexual appetite for the unhappily married girl next door, Tae-joo (Kim Ok-vin).

Upon learning his secret, Tae-joo begs him to make her a vampire. The priest has fewer qualms about biting a friend than Robert Pattinson's porcelain-cool Edward does, and soon finds himself trying to restrain his reckless lover from killing her next meal. (He prefers to get his blood from comatose hospital patients.)

A master of visual and audio shocks, director Park Chan-wook–best known for Oldboy, the most sucessful film in his so-called "Revenge Trilogy"–prefers wet scenes to dry ones, and uses long shots to emphasize squishy sound effects the way Herzog did in his 1979 Nosferatu.

This is a movie with an oral fixation, to say the least. If the sight of blood makes you squeamish, be advised that the vampires drink it chilled, chug it out of Nalgene bottles, and (more often) use a sharp object to slurp it straight from the source. There's also an amazing tailor-shop sex scene, the kind those abstaining Twilight protagonists can only dream of! These are vampires of drinking age, after all.

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Images of ponytailed angels patrolling a library, reading the thoughts of scholars; Rilke-inspired interior monologues; Henri Alekan's gorgeous black-and-white cinematography; a glorious score, rich with cellos and angsty choral music–Wim Wenders mixed these ingredients together for Wings of Desire, his 1987 arthouse classic about heavenly creatures keeping grim watch over late-communist-era Berlin. (PHOTO: BRUNO GANZ; COURTESY OF THE CRITERION COLLECTION)

Wenders made it after an eight-year stint in America, during which he'd scored a hit with Paris, Texas. "I had to rediscover this country of mine through the city of Berlin," he explains in a 2003 documentary that is one of the extras on the new Criterion Blu-Ray edition.

Wenders wanted the main characters to be people who traveled around the city on a daily basis. He considered mailmen and firefighters before settling on the more poetic idea of angels. Watching the film, you get the sense that Cassiel (Bruno Ganz) and Damiel (Otto Sander) are being punished as they watch over Berlin, and the prologue Wenders wrote in his original script treatment–reprinted in the Blu-Ray notes–confirms this:


"When God, endlessly disappointed, finally prepared to turn his back on the world forever, it happened that some of his angels disagreed with him and took the side of man, saying he deserved to be given a second chance. Angry at being crossed, God banished them to what was then the most terrible place on earth: Berlin."

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Precious, which opens at the end of this week, redefines "crowd-pleaser." The only film ever to win audience awards at both Sundance and Toronto, it's about a Harlem teenager who's so deep in the gutter–poor, illiterate, obese, sexually abused, pregnant, and then some–that it's almost impossible to imagine her crawling out. "When she's in the red carpet fantasies, that's her," director Lee Daniels said of newcomer Gabourey Sidibe, who plays the film's title character, after a screening at last month's New York Film Festival. (PHOTO: MARIAH CAREY AND GABOUREY SIDIBE IN PRECIOUS)

Though he was skeptical at first, Daniels let casting director Billy Hopkins persuade him to reach out to some big names for the supporting roles: "He said, you're doing a movie about a 300-pound black girl! Anything's game," Daniels recalled. And since Daniels "didn't even bother to start going to studios" for funding, getting Carey, Kravitz, and (in an astoundingly thankless and demanding role) Mo'Nique involved undoubtedly made it easier for him to sell the film to Lionsgate.

Daniels' past credits include Monster's Ball, which he co-produced, and, less successfully, Shadowboxer, which he co-produced and directed. His latest is a fusion of arthouse texture and mainstream uplift. "I brought that world I knew into the world of urban," he said, adding,  "I'm proud that we were able to marry those worlds, and show black art in a new way."

In the process, Daniels and screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher made a few highbrow tweaks to Push, the brutal, best-selling novel on which their film was based. One horrendous domestic scene evaporates into an imaginary feast inspired by Vittorio de Sica's classic Two Women, which Precious and her mother have been watching on TV. A fanciful connection, perhaps, but Daniels defends it. "If we staged it in the reality, as the book does, it would have been X-rated. And I found that when bad things happened to me [as a child] I would pretend to be somewhere else," he said. "The argument on set was, would these women be watching Two Women? Well, I am the women, so shut up."

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