Peter Zeitlinger

[on his collaboration with director Werner Herzog] I have been introduced to Werner in the early nineties by my friend Ulrich Seidl, an Austrian director with whom I worked on Mit Verlust ist zu rechnen (1993), Die letzten Männer (1994), Bilder einer Ausstellung (1996) and Animal Love (1996). Werner is a director who thinks in terms of an inner vision. What he does is setting the general mood, the atmosphere of the film: he creates a scenery by bringing together human beings, animals and whatever else he needs for the story into a space of his choice. He doesn't give "directions" in the traditional sense. He does not tell actors and extras how to create their characters. He simply talks about the things that move him, what is interesting to him and why he is doing the movie, so that a deeper understanding is spread around the set. As far as my job is concerned, Werner and I do not talk much. Actually, he does not talk to me about the film at all. [Laughter] He just tells me: "Read the script, and then you will know what we will do". This is because, as a matter of principle, he never discusses aesthetics and how a film should look. These things are so boring for him, he really hates them. So, when we are shooting, he never tells me "Do a close-up, do a long shot, frame this or that, move the camera here and there." He gives me the freedom to navigate through the scenery he created and capture what I think is important. This freedom is a little frightening but, ultimately, it is what I like most. It is what keeps me interested in working with Werner after all these years.(...)He is always the co-producer of his films, so every big decision goes through his head as well. That said, I decide 90% of framing and camera movement. Werner intervenes only when he gets the feeling that I am doing something too "artistic." If he sees too much sophistication in the shot, he destroys it: not only he hates to talk about aesthetics, he also hates aesthetics in films, so whatever "formal elegance" you might see in his movies has been sneaked in against his will, or it just somehow happened in front of the camera.(...)You must understand that any framing will always be too small for Werner. He simply does not think in "little images." For instance, he is not a director who can imagine a montage like "I see this face, then I see this foot, then I see this hand, then I see the sky." He does not want to break a scene into pieces, single shots that will be later assembled in the editing room to create the impression of a space-time continuum. In his mind, he sees the bigger picture, the scene as a whole: that is why he doesn't like to cut. However, the imago, "the image of the whole," can never be fully achieved in cinema. So my job is to "cut out" a portion of the scenery Werner created in order to present the substance of his vision on the screen. I would say that our work as filmmakers has a lot to do with poetry: you see, in German the word "poetry" [dichtung] comes from the verb "dichten," which means "to compress." There is some truth in etymology, sometimes. [2015]