More than 700 people filled Iowa City’s Englert Theatre on Sunday night to hear the legendary voice of Werner Herzog. The German filmmaker and author was greeted with nearly a minute of applause, and received two standing ovations before the night was out.
The event concluded both FilmScene’s second Refocus Film Festival and the 15th Iowa City Book Festival. Wrapping up both festivals was Herzog’s appearance, during which he accepted the fourth Cinema Savant award — this one a sculpture made of stacked video cameras, created by Iowa City artist Jay Schleidt — bestowed by FilmScene.
As FilmScene co-founder Andrew Sherburne said at the start of the event, this award is given to those who come through the community “whose notoriety and influence warrants, if not absolutely necessitates, that we mark the occasion.”
Born in Munich, Germany during World War II, the 81-year-old Herzog’s long career in film includes thought-provoking and awe-inspiring dramas and documentaries (Stroszek, Fitzcarraldo, Nosferatu the Vampyre, Grizzly Man and many more), shot in and around active volcanoes, frozen tundra, warzones, remote villages and death rows. He’s become something of a cultural icon himself, making guest appearances on The Simpsons, Parks and Recreation and The Mandalorian. On the Englert stage Sunday, Herzog joked that he was once approached to lend his distinctive Bavarian voice to a GPS system, but ultimately turned the offer down.
Herzog is also a prolific writer, whose books include The Twilight World, Walking on Ice and his most recent release, Every Man for Himself and God Against All. Every ticketholder on Sunday received a copy of the new memoir, which bears the title originally intended for Herzog’s epic film Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Iowa City was one of five stops on Herzog’s U.S. book tour; the other four were New York, Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
“I carried my life in me now for 80 years, so it’s in me,” he said. “So it was all articulate already. Voices come back to me and images come back to me and much of it is not really, how shall I say, biography … it’s origins of ideas. All of a sudden the text is interspersed with five ballads of ‘The Little Soldier’ because I was with child soldiers in Honduras and Nicaragua. … I write about them, it’s not biography, it’s literature.”
After reading one of the child soldier stories, Herzog noted, “It shouldn’t be made into a movie at all. There are things that are literature, never touch it. Never, ever, ever, ever, ever touch it for making it into a film. You just don’t.”
Leading the conversation with Herzog was Andrei Codrescu, a NPR contributor and poet whose latest release, Too Late For Nightmares, collects his pandemic-era poems and musing “on the human condition and the passage of time.”
Herzog’s best known for his work on film, but he told the audience he primarily thinks of himself as a wordsmith.
“I’m here to make something clear,” he said. “I’m a writer who incidentally also makes films. … I’ve always had the feeling — and I’m still convinced after my last books — that [my books] will live longer than my films. I have a very simple way to explain it: My films are my voyage, and writing is home.”
Over the course of the evening, Herzog recalled his early childhood, hypnotizing the cast of Heart of Glass, the essence of God and more, including his love of the Midwest.
“I wouldn’t say Midwest,” he clarified. “I refer to it differently, the Heartland. … Which actually includes Pittsburgh for example.”
He recounted being a homeless traveler in his youth, walking on a road outside of Pittsburgh when a mother of six picked him up.
“I became part of the family in two minutes flat,” he said. “I’ve seen the very, very, very best of America.”
He praised “great writers” from the Midwest, like Ernest Hemingway and Bob Dylan, and of the Deep South, including Flannery O’ Connor and William Faulkner.
“They come from here. They never come from San Diego!” Herzog said to laughter and applause.
Towards the end of his appearance — ahead of a Q&A session and a book signing limited to 200 audience members — Herzog advised anyone interested in filmmaking to read as much as possible. Over the course of the evening, he made particular mention Virgil’s Georgics, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote and A.J. Baker’s The Peregrine as essential reading material.
“I do not watch a lot of films, but I read,” he said. “Young filmmakers come to me and ask ‘What should I do?’ I have a simple answer, ‘Read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read!’ [Without reading] you can become a filmmaker, but a mediocre one at best.”
During the Q&A, an audience member asked Herzog what other recommendations he has for creatives. Herzog recalled his Rogue Film School, admitting the 2009 program didn’t teach filmmaking, per say.
“The only two things I teach is lock picking … and the forgery of documents. When you make films, you have to develop a certain sense, a certain amount of criminal energy. Or you cannot make the films that I do. Fitzcarraldo was only possible with a very elaborately forged shooting permit.”
