Rescue Dawn, Werner Herzog's most recent feature film (as a directors; Werner the part-time actor can be seen on-screen, imaginatively cast as a character called "The German", in Zak Penn's comedy The Grand is just now coming out on DVD in England, which means that, as water to a man just having crossed the desert, we can turn to the British papers now to be refreshed and refortified with that most wonderous of all things, Werner Herzog interviews! Will he profess his newfound enthusiasm for working in the Hollywood system or damn the whole of cinema as a fraud and a humbug? Will he discuss his latest hobby, whether it's butterfly collecting or grave robbing? Will he he recall those carefree days when he killed him a bear when he was only three? Talking to Marc Lee of the London Telegraph, Herzog decided to go for the set'
em-up-and-knock-'em-down approach, a Teutonic, Klaus-Kinski-flavored variation what we in the States used to call "the ol' bait and switch." He told his interlocutor that he not only hadn't seen any movies before he was eleven but that, up to that point, he hadn't been aware that the form existed. Lee, hearing what in a normal Q & A would be an obvious set-up, ventured that "it must have been a shock to encounter these magical, bright, flickering images for the first time." "No!" replies Werner, transported back to that magical time when he and the art to which he would devote his life first caught each other's eye. "It was not a shock. There was a travelling projectionist who came to this tiny little village in the mountains and showed a couple of films in the school, and they didn't impress me at all. It was not a shock; it was just very disappointing. The films were so lousy. One was about Eskimos building an igloo. And I could tell - because I had grown up in the mountains and in snow - that these 'Eskimos' had hardly any idea about how to shape something with snow. They were just doing a lousy job. Then there was a cut, and suddenly the igloo was built perfectly." And don't get him started on how fake it looked when the Eskimos pulling their steamboat up a mountain.
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