Anchorage Daily News Flashback: Herzog: A Little Risk Keeps Life Interesting for Director

In 1986, my mom, Doreen Ransom, interviewed Werner Herzog for The Anchorage Daily News. 

I don't recall that she had done any other film writing, before or since, though she certainly enjoyed going to the movies regularly, often with her only child. The following year, she won an Alaska Press Women award for the piece. 

In 2021, after being diagnosed with dementia in 2019, she moved to an assisted living facility in Anchorage. Her symptoms include aphasia, which has greatly reduced her ability to communicate with any cohesion.  

Mom's journalism career was relatively brief--she spent more time working for the State of Alaska Department of Corrections as an institutional counselor and pre-sentence reporter--but this is one of the best things she ever wrote, and she worked hard on it. Getting things right was very important to her; I would like to think I inherited the same trait. The interview isn't archived at the Daily News site, so I have reproduced it here.

Right: candids of Mom, probably from sometime in the 1970s.  

In 2005, I also got to see Herzog in person, presenting four of his documentaries--or documentary hybrids in the case of that year's The Wild Blue Yonder--at the Seattle Art Museum, in his inimitable style. It was a real treat, though I regret that I didn't get to meet the filmmaker, let alone to have a sit-down conversation with him.

Note: I have reproduced this piece exactly as published with the exception of the images and the captions. I was unable to find a copy online of the original Michael Penn portrait of Herzog that accompanied it, so I found another I liked (above), though it's from 1977 rather than 1986.

HERZOG: A little risk keeps life interesting for director

by DOREEN RANSOM

Daily News correspondent

    Seeing his early movies again, according to internationally acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog, is "like looking back on my own childhood."

    Herzog was in Anchorage last week to speak about his recent offering, "Ballad of the Little Soldier," the 1984 documentary about the Miskito Indians and their rebellion against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

    Growing up in Nazi Germany, the maker of "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" and "Fitzcarraldo" didn't see his first movie until the age of 11. The film industry at the time was suffocating in the repressive atmosphere of the Third Reich.

    "I had to invent cinema for myself," he says, explaining how he developed his unique cinematic vision, incorporating intense personal themes and hypnotic visual images.

    Herzog, who is vacationing in the Alaska bush, spoke at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art. Here are excerpts from an interview.

HERZOG: Director's career has thrived on calculated risk [Continued from Page D-1]

Do you write all your own scripts?

    Yes, I have done that all my life. I am also producer of my own films. I became producer out of necessity. I have never found anyone who would have produced the kind of films I wanted to do.

You received a strong reaction to "The Ballad of the Little Soldier."

    I didn't expect the reaction to be that strong. But of course, there is a tendency, particularly among the dogmatic left, to (treat) the Sandinista movement like a sacred cow. There must not be anything negative said about them or shown about them.

    It is evident that the minority of the Miskito Indians have an enormous cultural problem in their own country and that the Sandinistas have never understood these people. You can read it in the government statements from the Sandinistas -- they admit they committed grave and dramatic mistakes.

    Unfortunately, the tragedy is still going on. There is so much military pressure from outside on the Sandinista government. As long as this pressure continues internally, they will only find military answers to the challenge of the Miskito Indians. And that's a tragedy of big proportions.

Right: journalist Denis Reichle, co-director of Ballad of the Little Soldier.

Did you have an anti-war film in mind before you arrived in Nicaragua?

    No. I didn't know too much about the situation beforehand. I went with a friend of mine, Denis Reichle, a French reporter who spent eight months with the Miskitos. He advised me to join him with a movie crew. He is a very trustworthy man. He has spent his last 35 years doing intimate reports on oppressed minorities all over the world. He was in Timor, in Cambodia, in Angola, in Lebanon, and I just trust in his competence.

    Many of the things were a big surprise for me, in particular that there are such young kids fighting in the war. When you read about Iran and Iraq -- the war there -- everyone is upset that there are very young soldiers, 13, 14, 15, 16 years old. But they are already in puberty and halfway grown up. In Nicaragua you find soldiers who are kids age 9, 10 and 11. They are real children, and that's very upsetting and disturbing.

Is this your first trip to Alaska?

    No, I was here a year ago. I spent a few weeks west of the Alaska Range on Lake Telaquana.

You have mentioned in other interviews that the landscape is a character -- a character you can direct. In your movies, you have focused on very extreme landscapes, such as the jungle and the desert. Is this on your mind during your visit here?

    Oh, it's not an extreme landscape. It's how landscapes should be It's exactly like God wanted the Earth to be.

The films you've produced are often shown in art-film theaters in this country, while "Rocky IV" draws long lines. Are German audiences so different?

    It's like everywhere else in the world. People would rather see "Rocky" than one of my movies. I don't worry too much about it. Some of my films have become more successful over time, even in the United States. In the third re-release of "Aguirre," the film became successful at the box office. A film like "Rocky" is used up as a consumer good and then it's gone. But some of my films will be seen 20 years from now. I have no doubt about that.

You've taken many personal risks. But you've said most of these risks have been calculated.

    Yes, actually. I have to emphasize that I am a professional worker. For the sake of professionality, you try to avoid difficulties. You have to look for the safest solutions you can find. There's only one exception, "La Soufrière," which was a sheer gamble because nobody knew whether the mountain would explode. It was a situation like Mount St. Helen. We stayed on the crater and shot the film. In this case -- and it was the only one -- it was sheer roulette.

You said that Western society is over-concerned with safety and that this makes our souls sterile.

    Yes, I see that danger. I sense it everywhere. Every single one of us has to make his own decision -- how far to go, where to limit the risks, when to put it on the shoulder of an insurance company. But something like life insurance sounds scandalous to my ears because there's only an assurance of death. That's the only sure thing. I have an attitude that's a bit against this over-insurance kind of life. It becomes sterile, boring, inhuman and uninspired.

I understand you were disappointed you couldn't continue to work with Mick Jagger in "Fitzcarraldo."

    Yes. The problem with Mick Jagger was that he went overtime in my production. Jagger at the time had signed contracts for a world tour with the Rolling Stones. In the second round of shooting, we decided that it wouldn't make sense to shoot around him for eight days. It would have been insane. So I decided to let him go, which was very sad. It was so sad that I wrote the entire part out of the screenplay. I didn't want to replace him.

In your 1982 Rolling Stone interview, you said of the late director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, "He was like a sweating, grunting, fat and nasty wild boar who would just run through the underbrush and open a path behind him that was passable for everyone else." I thought that was great writing. Do you do other kinds of writing?

    Yes, I have published some poetry and have written prose books like "Of Walking in Ice," which was released here in the U.S. It's a book almost like a diary, when I walked once from Munich to Paris in the winter. I walked because a very good friend of mine, Lotte Eisner, an old lady, was dying. Out of protest and despair, I walked on foot for three-and-a-half weeks in a straight line as quickly as I could. I somehow knew if I came on foot she would survive and be out of hospital. And she was actually out of hospital. It was a pilgrimage, and I wrote the book, which I like better than all my films together.

Images: Rolling Stone / Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty ("The film-maker Werner Herzog giving a press conference, Stockholm, Sweden, January 27th, 1977"), the IMDB (Ballad of the Little Soldier), MUBI (Denis Reichle), Harvard Film Archive (Klaus Kinski in Aguirre, the Wrath of God), and Goodreads (Of Walking in Ice: Munich-Paris, 11/23 to 12/14, 1974).