Adventures on the set of Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu

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The scene is recollected like a dream: I am standing barefoot in the middle of a poor Czechoslovak farmer’s hut, dressed in a nun’s robe of white silk, surrounded by gypsies. Next to me is Dominique, the very serious make-up assistant, playing a doctor and next to him is a real actor, Bruno Ganz, perspiring and ashen. He is supposedly ill, having fallen from Count Dracula’s castle while escaping, and indeed he looks rather ill. Across from us are the farmer and his wife, looking like a portrait by Thomas Hart Benton, and in my mind are passing images already committed to celluloid: Klaus Kinski running across a square, his emerald green cape fluttering behind him like the wings of a primeval insect; Isabelle Adjani staring sadly from a window; Jacques Dufilho, strapped to the wheel of his death-boat, floating mysteriously into harbour.

A cathedral-like silence has seized the room, and the lights are so bright and definitive that I feel caught in space and time. Activity outside the illuminated rectangle is barely perceptible: everyone moves very slowly, as if under water; the faces are opaque and grave.

This pre-shooting preparation was eerily like the rushes I had seen of the film we were finishing, Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu, and the ensuing day’s work provided more insights into the creation of this dark fairy tale than all the preceding weeks of watching this unorthodox production unfold from behind the camera.

A new reading of the Dracula legend, Herzog’s film is both an homage to and loosely based upon F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent classic, Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror, the film which began the vampire genre. Both in turn draw on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula. But except for the plot skeleton and a preoccupation with the wages of fear, Herzog’s film is quite different from Murnau’s and, indeed, from all those in between. Calling it ‘a new version of the subject,’ to be seen, ‘in the same respect as various works about Jeanne d’Arc and Jesus Christ,’ he continues the dissection of bourgeois complacency begun in earnest with The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974). The basic story line has been used countless times: a real estate agent sends his employee to Transylvania to sell Count Dracula a house. Imprisoned by the ‘undead’ monster (‘nosferatu’ is a Romanian word meaning ‘undead’), he finally escapes, but arrives back home too late to prevent catastrophe. His wife, in an ultimate act of sacrificial love, destroys the vampire.

Starring Klaus Kinski as the count, and Isabelle Adjani and Bruno Ganz as the couple destroyed by him, Nosferatu is something of a turning point for the 36-year-old director. For the first time, Herzog has an adequate budget and the backing of the film establishment. Made in English (and, secondarily, German), the film will be distributed by 20th Century Fox, currently America’s most adventurous studio. Herzog is producing it himself and has complete artistic control and production autonomy, a rare if not unprecedented privilege for a director whose austere vision has yet to connect with the broad-based (American) public. But Fox is well aware of his standing in Europe, and with critics and many young filmgoers everywhere, and agreed to participate in the project under his precise conditions. They did not even see a script until two weeks before filming began in the Netherlands.

The scene in which I took part was taking place in the High Tatra, the mountain terrain on Czechoslovakia’s Polish border, serving the film as the Carpathian Mountains. We are nearing completion after two tortuous months in Delft (Holland), Lubeck (West Germany), Pernstein and Telc (Czechoslovakia). Kinski and Adjani have left, and the remaining scenes involve Bruno Ganz, a former German stage star who became a major cinema actor with his fifth film in four years, Wim Wenders’ The American Friend. I am here to assist with the English dialogue, and like almost everyone else on the ‘team’ – one rarely hears the word ‘crew’ – I now find myself in front of the camera.

These cameos are ‘treats’ awarded to Herzog’s helpers like the Toblerone chocolate he proffers at special moments, a small but telling manifestation of his genius for bringing everyone into his particular universe. They also provide his work with a singular continuity and, at least for himself and those involved, blur the distinction between process and result. The roles are eagerly sought as a sign of his approval, and each one seems uncannily apt because Herzog relies almost entirely upon a performer’s persona in casting. He says he first became interested in Isabelle Adjani from the poster – not the film – of The Story of Adele H. (1975), and he cast several roles in Nosferatu from photographs. (He cast himself as a monk.)

Herzog’s repetitive – and conscious – use of the same actors in different films has often been noted. Walter Ladengast and Clemens Scheitz, the two elderly gentlemen from Kaspar Hauser, are in this film (Scheitz was also in Stroszek, 1977); Klaus Kinski was, of course, the volatile star of Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972) and also of Woyzeck (1979), the film Herzog began on the heels of Nosferatu. The current scenario of Fitzcarraldo, his next project, includes roles for many major performers in previous films; but of equal significance is the utilisation of his highly individual team. After watching the filming at Pernstein Castle, a young Czech woman said, ‘I think they make this film for just themselves.’ It was an astute observation.

Though the Nosferatu group included French, Dutch and Czech technicians in the respective locations, as required by co-production and other legalities, the core of Herzog’s unit are young Germans who have worked with him for some time. Jorg Schmidt-Reitwein, the cinematographer of La Soufriere (1977), Kaspar Hauser and Heart of Glass (1976), among other films, has known him for ten years and actually lived with the Herzogs for three of those; executive producer Walter Saxer has managed all his productions since Aguirre. Others, notably Henning von Gierke and Gisela Storch, the production and costume designers, and their assistants, have been with him since Kaspar Hauser and have never worked on anyone else’s films. Von Gierke is a successful painter and Storch works at Schaubühne Berlin, the theatre where Bruno Ganz reached his apogee as an actor. Their assistants included a professor of political science, another of rarefied mathematics and a painter/collagist who has a workshop for children in Munich.

It is a unique and gifted group whom one would never find on a ‘normal’ production because of union regulations. (Germany has no film unions except for actors.) They are Herzog’s collaborators in the most profound meaning of the term; indeed, it is obvious that they have definitively influenced the look – if not the theme – of his films. Kaspar Hauser, Heart of Glass, Nosferatu and Woyzeck are of a piece, reflecting the refined and painterly sensibilities of the Schmidt-Reitwein/von Gierke/Storch triumvirate – very different from Aguirre and Stroszek, shot by Thomas Mauch. They are a kind of ‘family’; protective of Herzog and of their relationship to him; fiercely loyal to each other; convinced of their importance to his work and monumentally uninterested in the exigencies of film as an industry. ‘We do not like stars and we do not like these press people because they only come for the stars,’ one of them said adamantly, and she was merely echoing prevailing sentiments. They were openly sceptical about the film’s American connection, and the reception to anyone perceived as representing those interests could be quite frosty.

Additionally, it was almost impossible for an ‘outsider’ to apprehend either the interior creative dynamics or the production logistics. Communication was largely in German – even to Adjani, who speaks the language fluently – and decisions also tended to be made via private asides, oblique signals and tacit understandings. An example of this ‘sign language’ was given by Jorg. He is filming Nosferatu in shimmering pastels and does not want any bright, ‘pop’ colours – not even one red flower sticking in a window box. When he tried to remove one for a certain scene, Herzog objected and put it back. Jorg then spotted Henning von Gierke, nodded very slightly towards the offending blossom and, when Herzog’s back was turned, von Gierke replaced it with a yellow one. Like loyal but independent cardinals to Herzog’s Pope, Jorg, Henning and Gisela are constantly consulting each other and making critical visual decisions without reference to Herzog.

Obviously Herzog likes what he gets, for taking suggestions is not one of his strong points and he is genuinely devoted to these people. But for those trying equally hard to assist him, it could be an exceedingly difficult situation. Like Nosferatu’s theme, the production always seemed to be teetering on the brink between tyranny and chaos—except before the camera, which was sacred territory. There, the atmosphere became intensely pure and intimate, a phenomenon I never really perceived or appreciated until I experienced it myself.

As we waited within the illuminated rectangle for lighting refinements, Herzog began bringing the players under his spell. He does not speak privately with anyone nor does he play director’s tricks, but he does create an extraordinary ambience, aided and abetted by his filmmaking family’s intuitive grasp of the moment. His own belief in the sliver of life he is shaping is so complete that those participating simply follow. After a brief explanation to the gypsies through a translator, in front of my own eyes they take on the countenance of dark angels – sombre, guarded, inaccessible. True to his penchant for people scarred by society’s neglect, Herzog had become fascinated by the gypsies upon his arrival in the Tatra, and had himself fetched them from their village especially for this scene. In the days to come, he increasingly incorporated them into the fabric of the film. And expressed no sympathy for those complaining of bites from the army of fleas leaping off them. ‘It’s the justice of the flea! ’ he said, immediately placing his loyalties on the side not only of the gypsy, but also of the flea.

We rehearse twice. Herzog’s comments are simple but exactly to the point. When he says urgently, ‘take your time’, I realise that my movement is sharp and therefore out of synchronisation with the pace and mood of the film. Like the activity I observed outside the playing area, life within this film is dreamy and somehow distanced, as if the characters had long ago taken leave of their bodies and are now merely watching themselves, like puppets, from another place. It is perhaps not paradoxical that the film is an attack upon precisely this kind of unthinking mummification and blind obedience.

Though the last rehearsal was full of dialogue mistakes, Herzog assures us that it will be just fine and steps before the camera with the clapboard. He always holds it, believing that he alone should be the last person within the performers’ magic arena before the scene begins. He crouches under the camera as we do the scene, twice fully, twice in close-up. His faith is rewarded: we do it right… somehow. After a break for lighting adjustments, we do another brief scene – ‘quickly, so it will be spontaneous’ – because he has given some lines to a gypsy. Bruno Ganz, an actor with a rare sense of truth, seems extraordinarily good as he departs this last haven before catastrophe with the warning, ‘Evil is on the way.’ Later, he tells me it is his favourite line.

Far from being a detached observer, Herzog is so completely ‘with’ the performers that one feels an enormous responsibility to meet the challenge, and one also feels that the effort is just for him. I remember watching Adjani rise majestically through a trap-door into a room full of two thousand rats. Some were falling over the edge, into her hair, down her dress – but she never flinched. Kinski never lost his composure although he was coping with the most difficult make-up imaginable – false ears, false teeth, four-inch long fingernails and elevated boots. An actor who could not swim none the less plunged into the stormy North Sea waters in the dead of night because Herzog assured him that he’d be right behind him – and was, though the two nearly drowned because the currents swept the boat a half-hour’s distance away.

The intensity in Herzog’s films emanates from the power of his personality and his pristine sense of truth, and its extraordinary force is not explainable or really comprehensible even when one is watching – or participating in – its creation. Sometimes I wondered if this gift was a blessing or a curse. Herzog is by now aware of his ‘visionary’ impact upon audiences, but there was never any evidence during the making of Nosferatu that he consciously tries to achieve this effect. The contrary. He violently refuses interpretation, and his creative triumvirate each told me separately that any type of psychologically or metaphysically charged discussion is strictly forbidden. ‘We must not talk about this,’ he will say, and wander off. The process has mystery even to them. ‘We don’t talk about style or atmosphere,’ says Jorg, ‘but we’re on the same wavelength. Sometimes there must be a dictator to bring about this fusion; we accept it.’ Whether in front of the camera or behind it, one has no choice but to surrender to Herzog’s vision, and though this is sometimes infuriating, it also has a dangerous appeal.

As we returned to our lodgings after filming, I reflected upon the whole experience on Nosferatu. The obstacles had been so enormous that I had sometimes felt the film was cursed – and yet Herzog somehow prevailed. A comment made by Isabelle Adjani some weeks earlier in Delft came to mind. We were discussing the many internal problems which were complicated by the refusal of the city to provide even a modicum of co-operation. Adjani, a perspicacious realist, finally shook her head. ‘But the film won’t be touched,’ she said. ‘It’s like a benediction. You can feel it, pulling the film forward.’

A benediction. Herzog himself had set the tone at a dinner before the start of shooting. Taking the floor, one of the many times he would lecture with righteous fervour, he said, ‘We do not make Nosferatu just for ourselves. We have a responsibility. We have the blessings of Lotte Eisner, a woman who was chased out of Germany during the time of barbarism; she is some sort of spiritual guide for us, and because she has given her blessing, we have legitimacy.’

Legitimacy is a term of import to Herzog. At an early press conference, one of the many held throughout the Delft location to prevent the city withholding all permissions, he said, ‘Before the war, we had great, and what I call “legitimate”, German culture. But this was broken. That is an historical fact.’ Identifying Lotte Eisner, the film historian who has known nearly every great filmmaker of the century, as the first person to call the New German Cinema a ‘renaissance’, he continued: ‘My challenge in doing a new version of Nosferatu is to link the great epoch of Expressionist filmmaking with this renaissance… to create a bridge over this historical gap.’ Finally, he drew upon the memory of ‘Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, a man who died too soon.’ When Lotte Eisner visited the set, she said, ‘I never thought I could be friends with a German again. But here I am… Werner is somehow like Murnau brought back to life.’

For a man who endorses his own line, ‘I only believe what I see with my own eyes,’ Herzog seems to be touched by an amazing grace. Though the ‘fusion’ referred to by Schmidt-Reitwein works brilliantly on a creative level, Herzog’s working methods in combination with his theme came very close to undoing him in the simple matter of surviving and getting the film made.

The catastrophe wrought by the malevolent Count is the unleashing of plague-infested rats into a serene bourgeois city. The provincial 17th century town of Delft was a perfect choice. Though it had some importance three hundred years ago, it has slowly evolved – one might even say ‘atrophied’ – into a museum piece, albeit an exquisite one. Flowers blossom in profusion; the cobbled streets carry as many bicyclists as motorists; the windows of every dwelling are framed by sparkling white curtains. And there are the canals lined by blossoming lime trees, perfectly described in Herzog’s screenplay as ‘going no place but back on themselves.’ Delft’s New Church, in whose shadow Herzog shot many scenes, is the official burial place for kings and queens of the Netherlands. Queen Wilhelmina reportedly used to say, ‘I do not go to Delft because eventually I have to go there.’

Herzog, who often displays a kind of naive candour, told the Dutch press his reasons for selecting Delft. ‘It’s so well ordered, so neat and beautiful, so bourgeois… I don’t mean that in disrespectful terms, for bourgeois culture has made some great achievements. But just because it’s so well organised, it’s interesting for me as a filmmaker to show the disintegration of order, the collapse of public morale.’ He was equally candid about the necessity of filming with rats, the creature which was to become his bete noire. ‘My film is about a community invaded by fear, by an anonymous terror that can hardly be named. The rats are a decisive element because they signify this invasion of fear. I ask this town with all my heart to allow me to make a few shots, in controllable areas, with the rats.’ But a city that provided Johannes Vermeer with a proper tombstone only two years ago would certainly turn its back on Werner Herzog.

The picture of a large rat accompanied the Dutch newspaper’s bold headline: ‘PESTEPIDEMIE OP OUDE DELFT.’ Translated, it said ‘The plague has come to old Delft’, and the accompanying article clarified the hateful metaphor. Werner Herzog, his young and predominantly German team, and ten thousand white rodents from a Hungarian laboratory had dared enter Delft to make a movie.

Like a caravan of old-time artisans, they came by truck, van and modest cars sagging with the weight of material and equipment. Settling communal style into a large house in the old section of the city, they went about their work. Coffins must be built; museums altered; properties constructed; costumes dyed and sewn. This was not like the Lana Turner-Clark Gable movie made in Delft thirty years ago, nor like Joe Levine’s luxuriantly budgeted A Bridge Too Far which had just left. No one could accuse the group of laziness or impropriety, but they were German, free-spirited and passionate – and they were up to something with a lot of rats.

The newspaper headline had the effect of a battle cry. Lines of resistance went up almost overnight; channels of communication were suspended. The Netherlands is renowned for its hospitality and devotion to democratic principles, and Herzog had not anticipated such resistance. True, the local officials had always hedged about the rats, but Herzog was confident he could bring them round – and why not? To a man who has braved the jungles of Peru, the Sahara, a churning volcano, Delft looked like child’s play.

‘We have a serious and dignified project,’ he told a gathering of government officials and journalists. ‘The Murnau film is the most exciting and probably the best film in German history. It was an important film, courageous, and the first to predict the barbarism which came later.’ His eloquence captured the local film enthusiasts, who showed a retrospective of his work, circulated petitions and arranged a series of meetings with the Mayor and officials. ‘We do not come as an invading army,’ he said, mindful of the Netherlands’ long occupation by Germany. ‘I am a guest here, and a guest has some sort of natural right, but a very limited one. Therefore, I ask for clemency.’

The effort was exhaustive, but largely unrewarded. An incident on the first day’s shooting proved a portent: a small graveyard Herzog had himself created on a sand dune the night before was, by six o’clock that morning, destroyed. The sound of ‘Führer’ rang out more than once, and Delft’s Mayor never gave an inch. A ‘safety’ deposit of one hundred thousand dollars was demanded, and the company was further taxed just to film the streets. Extremely limited amounts of time were set for all exterior locations – and permission to film the rats was never given. The company was besieged by Dutch journalists and photographers; a day never passed without an article appearing about the film, always focusing on the rodent. The fear and paranoia of the citizenry mounted in the same way as in the film, through innuendo and rumour. A slow panic set in.

While all this was going on, Herzog continued making the film, altering his needs as necessary. When Kinski returned a few days late because no one had informed him of the schedule, Herzog shot something else. When Bruno Ganz was badly bruised falling off his horse, he shot with a double. If it rained, he bundled everyone into vans and said, ‘We wait for sun,’ and when it was so bitterly cold that everyone was nearly paralysed, he stripped to the waist – and kept filming.

Internally, morale was disintegrating. Delft is an extremely expensive city with few hotels, and a decision was made to rent a large house, put pads on the floor, hire some local girls to cook and live like monks. But this house was also the production centre and there was little privacy. Anyone off the street with nerve could walk through it day or night; hundreds of extras had to be dressed, fed and allowed access to the single toilet. The flying dog, bats, flies and other live exotica needed for the film were stored there; coffins were built in the courtyard flanking the bedrooms, and a huge pig was slaughtered there for use in a scene. After filming at four o’clock one morning, Herzog spent the remainder of the day cleaning the toilet and soothing fractured nerves.

In the midst of all this came news that Gaumont was withdrawing its support. It seemed that the Centre Nationale had to give permission for all co-productions and papers had been filed late. I asked Herzog what he was going to do. ‘I will continue discussions and make the film,’ he said, and left for the location.

It all culminated in a violent scene three days before the completion of filming in Delft. The ten thousand rats had been stored in a barn outside the town, where they were cared for by two young women biologists. But the farmer who owned the barn had not been feeding them properly and they were dying. When the girls reproached him, he kicked them off the farm and then refused to allow the production access to the animals – this at exactly the time Herzog had finally found a means of filming them. Herzog, accompanied by a few members of his team and the two women, went to retrieve them. They were met head-on by the farmer and a dozen workmen wielding all manner of farming tools as weapons. A large van was placed horizontally in the driveway to block their exit, and a truly nightmarish fight followed. Windscreens were smashed, cars were damaged, everyone was badly beaten, scratched and bruised. Herzog himself was almost killed when a workman drove a huge crane straight at him.

However, the rats were retrieved, filmed and later sold to laboratories, and the company moved on to Czechoslovakia. There, bruises and wounds healed; Kinski did work so brilliant that this non-star-loving team applauded him; the Centre Nationale and Gaumont finally sent the money – and Nosferatu at last reached completion. To me, it seemed miraculous, But I had seen the rushes and I knew Adjani was right: the film had not been touched. Something had pulled it forward.