Film

[owen]

gawdang. another dvd i have to get.

www.thewhomovie.com/

[zilla]

They're playing that Who film on VH1 Classic tonight at 8pm Chicago time, I'm sure it won't have all those extras and whatnot though.

[Cat Stevens]

Owey, you don't need Murray Lerner's shit.

[Cat Stevens]

haha... he even gave up on his "2 complete concerts" bonus DVD... I'm glad I never sent him a single DVD boot when he begged for them on his pathetic forum (which is, surprise-surprise, gone from his site now), but older Islanders remember when I was regularly posting the news from it and the pathetic "director's updates" he used to make once a year, consisting only of more begs for the rare footage.

O'Flahertie's advice: stay away. PM me your home addy instead for couple of kewl 1975 Who DVDs.

[Cat Stevens]

... and instead of the 1000th Who documentary, the cunt should've finally put out "Leonard Cohen at the Isle of Wight", for instance. the useless cunt filmed lenny's complete glorious set and released only "Suzanne" and bit of lenny moaning about moronic hippies.

edit to change the "fucking cunt" to "useless cunt".

[manho]

Herzog shoots (part one)

Things happen on a Werner Herzog set: mutinies break out, actors' lives are threatened, crew members are beaten and thrown in jail in the wildest corners of the world - and all in pursuit of the 'ecstatic truth' about humanity. Daniel Zalewski joins the German director shooting his first Hollywood film in the Thai jungle.

Daniel Zalewski
Sunday November 4, 2007
Observer

Werner Herzog hastily cordoned off a swath of jungle with wooden sticks and yellow tape, like a cop marking a crime scene. 'Nobody will cross this line!' he announced. It was late August, and the German director had travelled to northwest Thailand, a few miles from the border of Burma, to shoot Rescue Dawn amid virgin rainforest. It was his first Hollywood-funded feature, and he was determined to stop what he called 'the Apparatus' - a squadron of make-up artists, special-effects engineers and walkie-talkie-carrying professionals who had been deployed to work with him - from trampling on yet another pristine thicket. Herzog, who typically works with a small crew and a minuscule budget, was pleased to have millions of dollars at his disposal, but he was not so pleased to have been saddled with more than a hundred collaborators. 'I do not need all these assistants,' he complained. 'I have to work around them.'

The enclave he had sequestered was filled with overgrown vines and rotting palm trees, and was partially hidden by a moss-slicked boulder. Herzog, who spent his childhood clambering across the Alpine slopes of southern Bavaria, says that he has an uncanny talent for 'reading a landscape' and could immediately spot the danger: his primeval nook was an ideal place for a bathroom break.

A dozen Thai crew members began setting up equipment at the base of a sharply sloped mountain covered in ancient, absurdly distended trees. The mountain was garlanded with picturesque wisps of mist, but Herzog, who has filmed three documentaries and three features in deep jungle, did not want the terrain in his film to have the groomed, glistening-dewdrop look of so many movies set in frond-filled places. 'The moment anything on this film becomes purely aesthetic, I will stop it,' he had promised.

Herzog, now 65, no longer has the virile brown moustache of his youth, but his face has compensated by acquiring a patina of menace. Gravity has given his mouth a permanent frown. His blue eyes are partially obscured by thick, drooping brows, and they are perpetually rheumy, as if he were harbouring a deadly tropical disease. 'I am always being stopped at airports by drug-interdiction officials,' he said, with satisfaction. 'There is something about my face that is sinister.' The aura is heightened by his sonorous voice, which, in his heavily accented English, suggests a Teutonic Vincent Price. Herzog likes to say that he is 'clinically sane and completely professional', but he is aware that his reputation is otherwise - 'One of the most persistent rumours plaguing me is that I'm a crazy director doing crazy things.'

Herzog has spent his career rushing headlong into new projects - in 2005 he released three documentaries, including Grizzly Man, and each was filmed on a different continent - but with Rescue Dawn he is revisiting familiar ground. The movie, his 52nd, will be his first twice-told tale: a feature-film version of Little Dieter Needs to Fly, his 1997 documentary about Dieter Dengler, a German-American pilot who was shot down during a bombing mission over Laos in the early days of the Vietnam War. After being tortured for six months in a Pathet Lao prison camp - his head was repeatedly covered with an ants' nest during interrogations - Dengler escaped, taking with him another PoW, Duane Martin. Dengler helped Martin, who was sick with dysentery, to trek across the monsoon-swamped jungle. He built a makeshift raft, camouflaged him with branches and guided him westward along muddy tributaries, toward the Mekong River. One afternoon they were attacked by some Lao villagers and Martin was beheaded. Dengler evaded capture and survived for weeks in the forest, on a diet of beetles and snakes, before being rescued by a US Army helicopter. Herzog became close friends with Dengler, who died in 2001. He said of him, 'All that I like about America was somehow embodied in Dieter: self-reliance and courage and loyalty and optimism, a strange kind of directness and joy in life.'

In the documentary, Dengler recounts his escape in a transfixing monologue, vividly conjuring the horror of being lost in the jungle: sudden mud slides sent him and Martin careering down jagged mountains, and he woke up each morning covered with leeches. For him, wild nature was even more brutal and confining than the Pathet Lao prison. To convey the feeling that Dengler's liberation from prison was no liberation at all, Herzog wanted the new film's star, Christian Bale, to spend time forcing his way through forest so tangled that it appeared 'almost unmanageable for human beings'. The camera, Herzog explained, would trail Bale closely, heightening the oppressive mood. 'We are really with him the whole time, trapped in this forest prison,' he said. 'There is no width of perspective.'

A fast-moving cloud unleashed a short burst of rain, and Thai production assistants collected beneath a pomelo tree. Herzog, still drying off from an earlier shower, allowed his T-shirt and khakis to be resoaked as he set up that afternoon's scene, which depicted the frenzied moment of Martin's decapitation. Speaking in German, the director discussed how to choreograph the sequence with his longtime cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger, a burly Czech who appeared on location each day wearing flowing white linen. As they talked, Herzog stood in front of Zeitlinger's camera and mimed a series of rapid actions: kneeling, twisting around, raising an imaginary blade, then running to the area hidden by the boulder.

'Don't you want a stand-in?' Julian White, the chief lighting designer, asked. Like most of the crew, White, a commonsensical Englishman, had not worked with the director before.

'No, no, no,' Herzog said. 'I'm always the best stand-in.'

These days, film directors typically cocoon themselves, setting up shots by watching a monitor that displays a live feed from the cinematographer's lens; this tells them exactly how a scene will appear onscreen. But Herzog refuses to separate himself from the action: he wants to feel what he's filming. His participatory method struck many crew members as bizarre. 'How can you see the way a shot looks if you're the stand-in?' White later muttered to himself. 'You can't see yourself.'

The fact that Herzog has been making films for more than 40 years didn't shake the collective judgment that he was doing it all wrong. The mood on the set was toxic. Josef Lieck, the first assistant director, said, 'For a man of his age, it's a very... raw talent. It's more like an 18-year-old running into the forest.' A costume designer complained, 'He doesn't know basic things about filmmaking, things that simply make it easier to tell a story. He thinks that these things will undermine his vision, but they won't.' Harry Knapp, an assistant director, said, 'There is a silent war on the set. We're all in a state of shock.' Herzog, for his part, politely ignored the crew's complaints. Zeitlinger explained, 'When making a film, Werner tries to pretend nobody is around but him and the actors.'

Bale and Steve Zahn, who plays Martin, arrived at the mountainside - doing so required crossing a rushing river on a bridge consisting of a few wobbly bamboo poles - along with several actors from the local hill tribes. Herzog gave them succinct instructions; whenever he speaks, his hands make fluid, precise gestures, like those of a maestro. First, he said, Zahn's leg would be slashed by a Lao assailant. The beheading would occur offscreen. 'I do not want to show any gory detail,' Herzog said. Zahn would then be replaced by a headless dummy, which would collapse at Bale's feet.

Herzog had exercised a similar kind of restraint in Grizzly Man, which tells of an environmental activist, Timothy Treadwell, who became so enchanted by Alaskan bears that he attempted a trans-species version of going native - living in the animals' habitat for months, and getting close to them, often with a video camera in hand. The sweetly deluded Treadwell could not see the dark truth of nature, Herzog explains in a typically doomy voiceover ('I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony but hostility, chaos and murder'), and Treadwell's experiment ended in dismemberment. The killing was caught on tape - Treadwell's lens cap was on, so the recording is audio only. Any other director would have used it. But in Grizzly Man the viewer sees only the back of Herzog's head as he listens through headphones; facing Herzog, and the camera, is Treadwell's former girlfriend, Jewel Palovak. As she silently gauges his horrified response, her face becomes a cracked mirror of the director's, telling viewers all they need to know. Zeitlinger suggested a way to combine the dummy's fall with an image of Bale rising up in the background, in order to give the scene a more 'balletic' feel.

No, Herzog said. 'If it's too perfect, then I'll hate it,' he explained. The sequence had to be blunt and brutal.

He turned to Bale, and said, 'First you're kneeling, then scream, then look behind you, see the Lao guys, and scream - this way, then this way. An intimidating scream, Christian.' Bale asked various questions as Herzog showed him how to position his body, but he was deferential. The actor, who had just starred in the summer blockbuster Batman Begins, had long wanted to work with Herzog, and he was willing to submit to onerous demands; he had lost 55lb in about four months for the role, becoming cadaverous.

Comfort with discomfort is widely seen as a prerequisite for making a Werner Herzog film. Perhaps unfairly, he is less renowned for his oddly brilliant movies than for the arduous, and sometimes savage, circumstances under which they were made. On the set of his 1972 masterpiece, Aguirre, The Wrath of God, a vertiginous portrait of a Spanish conquistador who unravels during a search for El Dorado, Herzog struggled to control his gifted but mercurial star, Klaus Kinski; at one point, when Kinski abruptly announced that he was quitting the production and leaving by canoe, Herzog threatened to shoot him. ('I said, "You may reach the next river bend, but you'll do so with all the bullets in this gun in your head - except the one for me," ' he recalled. 'He did not get in the boat. I believe that it was the right thing to do. Otherwise, there would be no Aguirre.')

Fitzcarraldo, released in 1982, is a beguiling folly about an eccentric music lover in turn-of-the-century Peru, who is determined to raise money for a tropical opera house. Herzog's hero decides to become rich by harvesting rubber trees, and, one day, when looking at a map of the Amazon, he impulsively concludes that the fastest way to transport his cargo is to push his steamboat over a mountain, allowing it to jump from one river system to another. Fitzcarraldo's quixotic fantasy comes to fruition in one of the most lyrical sequences ever put on film. The episode, unfortunately, is now widely recalled not as a coup de cinema but as a leaden metaphor for the megalomania of film directors - because Herzog insisted on shooting the scene without special effects, a decision that nearly capsized the production.

Bale, whose diet had left him severely enervated, looked wearily at the curtain of foliage into which he would soon run. To buoy his star, Herzog spoke to him about some footage that they had shot a few days earlier. In that scene, Dengler and Martin become ensnared in reeds along a river's edge. Herzog told Bale, 'You have never seen anything like this on film before, Christian. I am so happy. The wrangling with the vines, it's all physical. It's physical what you are doing and what the camera is doing. So you don't sense the camera. It's like another escapee. It really feels like the jungle is swallowing everything, even the camera.'

The river sequence, as filmed, was awkwardly long, but might well appear uncut in Herzog's edit. He believes in the occasional squirm-inducing shot. As he told me, 'Sometimes the beauty or the horror of an image only settles in the mind when it is shown for an extended period.' His previous feature, The Wild Blue Yonder, a wily experiment with science fiction, is anchored by 21 minutes of unyieldingly slow underwater footage in which a scuba diver floats beneath the Antarctic ice shelf. (The hauntingly alien landscape - in which even coral is spined with ice - is meant to represent the interior of a distant planet.)

The rain stopped, and the equipment was ready. 'OK, OK, let's do it now,' Herzog said. Preparing the scene had taken, at most, 10 minutes. 'Action,' he said.

Now it was Zahn's turn to release a terrible, valley-shaking scream. Herzog yelled 'Cut!' and immediately began preparing the shot of the falling dummy. On the ground was a drip-covered canister marked 'sugar-free fake blood'. 'We won't use too much,' he said. (The sight of blood makes him faint: 'It is my Achilles heel.') He walked over to the container, and seized an opportunity to jab back at the crew. Staring into the crowd hunched along the boulder, he asked, 'OK, may I have some blood from the Blood Department?'

One morning that week, Herzog stood amid the charred ruins of a small straw-hut settlement. It was only eight o'clock, but the sun was already bullying; in an adjoining rice paddy, black butterflies hugged the shade. At dusk on the previous day, Herzog had filmed a scene in which Dengler, after making a bed of banana leaves for the delirious Martin, sets a thatched dwelling ablaze in a failed effort to attract attention from American rescue pilots. Herzog had been planning to film a few additional moments at the abandoned village - a genuine ruin, which he had discovered earlier in the summer - and he was not happy to learn that it had been aggressively incinerated by his crew, after he had left. The effects team had apparently deemed Herzog's rendition of the scene insufficiently pyrotechnic and had unleashed their full firepower, filming the village from the point of view of a helicopter, even though Herzog had made clear that he did not want aerial shots in the film. 'The site looks like what you'd see after Gaiseric laid siege to Rome,' Herzog joked bitterly. He is a connoisseur of ancient battles; whenever he makes a film, he takes along Livy's history of the Second Punic War. 'I read it for consolation when times get dire,' he said.

Herzog was having other battles with the production company, Gibraltar Entertainment. Bale's involvement had helped Herzog secure financing, but, compared with the average Hollywood movie, Rescue Dawn had a modest budget - around $10m - and Gibraltar had struggled to raise even this amount. Two weeks into the shoot, many crew members were grumbling that they had not been paid; the producers, they said, had shrugged off their complaints. Worse, Gibraltar had fired Walter Saxer, Herzog's longtime production manager and close friend. In protest, a dozen Thai crew members quit the production. The producers then dismissed Ulrich Bergfelder, a set designer who has worked with Herzog for 30 years, after a dispute over where to build the Pathet Lao prison. One of Gibraltar's principals, Steve Marlton, who was supervising the Rescue Dawn shoot, wanted the set constructed in southern Thailand, near the velvety beaches of Krabi. Bergfelder had argued that it would be cheaper and more authentic to build the prison nearby, in the hill country. But Marlton, a heavy man in his late thirties, was uncomfortable in the heat; crew members said that he visited the set rarely, remaining in an air-conditioned hotel, and speculated that he was desperate to leave the rainforest. Marlton, who made his fortune in the trucking industry, is new to the movie business. He is best known in Los Angeles for a popular night club that he co-owns, Pearl, which features erotic dancers performing inside translucent 'shadowboxes'. Marlton's other film projects include Bottoms Up, a comedy starring Paris Hilton.

Rescue Dawn is a canonical Herzogian tale, in that it portrays a man immersed in a situation of almost surreal extremity. Of course, you could say that of Die Hard. The Gibraltar website characterises Rescue Dawn as an 'action thriller, starring Christian Bale'. Since shooting began, it had become clear that two rival visions had fatefully intersected in the Thai jungle. One group had come to make a Werner Herzog film; another group wanted to make an inexpensive war flick starring Batman.

Herzog's inspection of the burnt village had left the soles of his bare feet black. He raised his hands and told the crew that he had an announcement. After a meeting with Marlton at the hotel, Josef Lieck, the first assistant director, and Edward McGurn, the second assistant director, had emerged convinced that they would never be properly paid. 'This is a very bitter moment for me,' Herzog began. He wore a frayed rugby shirt and mirrored sunglasses; his sunburnt face had developed a magenta tinge. 'Josef and Edward do not have a contract, and they have hung in out of pure loyalty to the film and, to some degree, maybe to me. Today, they have decided that they leave the production.' His voice broke off. 'OK, back to work,' he said, adding a Lutherian vow: 'Here I stand. I have no choice. So help me God.'

The crew dispersed silently. Standing next to Herzog, and squeezing his hands with her own, was Lena, his wife of seven years. (His first marriage, to Martje Grohmann, a homeopath, ended in divorce.) Lena, a photographer, wore a celadon safari suit and had a heavy Leica camera around her neck; her lustrous blonde hair was tied in a ponytail. She has published several coffee-table books - one documents the culture of Spanish bullfighting - and she regularly takes stills for Herzog's productions. 'It's not an exciting assignment for me, but if I didn't do it, I'd never see the man,' she told me. Lena, who is 37, grew up in Siberia, and, in 1990, went to Stanford to do research in archeology; with her husband, she has travelled to places even more inhospitable than the Russian tundra. ..'I remember the time we visited this tribal area, five days by boat from Guayaramerin, Bolivia, which we were told was cannibalistic,' she recalled. 'We spent the night outside, in two hammocks. That night, when I heard a noise near us, I woke up, gasping, "Werner, it's them!" He sleepily replied, "When they come, we won't hear them." He went straight back to sleep. I didn't.'

Spending time with Werner Herzog can make you feel as if you were trapped inside one of those postmodern novels of paranoia, in which a series of ominous-seeming events appear to be linked by more than chance. Why has Herzog's career been so consistently plagued by intrigue, peril, and disaster? Is there no overarching explanation for the pattern of catastrophe? 'My character has nothing to do with it - it's just statistics, abnormal statistics, even though nobody will believe me,' he said during a visit to his home in Los Angeles, a comfortable bungalow in Laurel Canyon. It was hidden from the street by bushes so overgrown that they had knocked over the front fence. 'People who do not know me think that I like filmmaking to be difficult,' he continued. 'I do not. And I do not take unnecessary risks.'

He added, 'I have avoided the undoable things.' In the Nineties, he decided not to pursue a project in Sudan, after enough people told him that he'd get killed in the midst of the ongoing civil war. He also abandoned plans to make a feature film on K2, the Himalayan mountain. The German mountaineer Reinhold Messner - the subject of a 1984 Herzog documentary - assured him that such a shoot would result in many deaths. 'There are just too many avalanches,' Herzog explained, with a wistful shrug.

'Now, I admit, I do not have a perfectly clean record,' he said. 'I did climb La Soufriere when it was in danger of erupting.' In 1977, he shot documentary footage from the lip of the volcano, which is on Guadeloupe, while it was regularly spewing toxic fumes. He emphasised, however, that he wasn't driven by a desire to tempt fate: 'What I had heard was that there was one man who had refused to evacuate. That is what fascinated me - to explore a human being whose view of death is so different, who does something inexplicable.' In the end, La Soufriere never blew up, baffling geologists. 'I loved that,' he recalled, laughing. 'It made my whole project wonderfully embarrassing.' The documentary ends in wry voiceover: he pronounces his film 'pathetic', a 'report on an inevitable catastrophe that did not take place'. (For all his moments of self-seriousness, Herzog enjoys poking fun at his manly escapades; a memoir about the making of Fitzcarraldo, which was recently published in German, is titled Conquest of the Useless.

Herzog was sitting in his living room, a skylit space lined with books. On one shelf, near a copy of Martin Luther's Bible, is a framed photograph of his youngest child, Simon, standing next to a very large boa constrictor in the Amazon. (Simon, then nine, is now 16; Herzog's older son, Rudolph, a magician and filmmaker, is 34; his daughter, Hanna, an art student in Amsterdam, is 25.) Herzog took the picture himself, during the filming of a 2000 documentary, Wings of Hope, about Juliane Koepcke, a female counterpart to Dieter Dengler; in 1971, as a teenager, she survived a jetliner crash in Peru and made it out of the jungle alone. Simon was his 'co-combatant' in the jungle, Herzog recalled fondly. 'He found some airplane parts that had been completely covered up by the forest.' At one point, he said, Simon got very sick - 'from food poisoning or something, it was never clear' - but he 'had a great time'.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

[manho]

Herzog shoots (part two)

In the centre of Herzog's living room is a vintage Deardorff camera, set up on a tripod. He stole his first movie camera, he told me, when he was a student at the University of Munich, in the early Sixties. Herzog's directorial career was tumultuous from the start. His first full-length feature, Signs of Life - a satirical precursor of Aguirre, in which a German paratrooper becomes unhinged while stationed in the Aegean - was nearly upended because of what Herzog calls 'a confrontation with the Greek military'. He said, 'It was 1967. Three weeks after we started shooting in Greece, on Kos, there was a coup d'etat in Athens, and the new regime didn't like the tone of my script.' His shooting permits were revoked. Herzog told a local army officer that he would continue filming illegally, issuing a threat worthy of Pushkin. 'I will not be unarmed tomorrow,' he said, and the first officer who touched him, he promised, would be shot dead. It was a ruse, and it worked: soldiers hovered but did not interfere. 'After all this, my lead actor fell six feet or so and fractured his heel bone,' he continued. 'The production was shut down for six months. Six feet, six months! It was as if I somehow attracted bad luck.' Herzog can always point to some external force to explain his calamities. 'When I was shooting Fitzcarraldo, did I cause the drought that left the boat stuck on the mountain-top for months?' he asked me. 'Did I invent that coup d'etat in Greece?' Perhaps not, but in 1970, while making Fata Morgana, a fantasia on scorched African landscapes, Herzog went to Cameroon a few weeks after a coup attempt took place. The police arrested him, Herzog says, after misidentifying a crew member as a wanted criminal. He and several crew members were beaten and thrown into a cell with '60 other men'. Herzog contracted bilharzia, a blood parasite.

Herzog was born in Munich in 1942. The disaster of Nazism, he said, informs his brooding world view. 'I try to understand the ocean beneath the thin layer of ice that is civilisation,' he said. 'There's miles and miles of deep ocean, of darkness and barbarism. And I know the ice can break easily.' When he was a few days old, he says, he was nearly killed after Allied bombs caused a skylight in his nursery to shatter; the shards fell around his cot but somehow did not injure him. (The image seems suspiciously apt - chapter one in a life story defined by near-misses - but he insists that his mother, Elisabeth, 'talked about this many times'.) Elisabeth, a biologist, feared more bombs, and she moved the family to Sachrang, a remote village near the Austrian border. His father, Dietrich, also a biologist, was conscripted into the German army, and eventually abandoned the family. Herzog does not like to speak of him.

Herzog adored his mother, who died in the Eighties. Elisabeth was 'very courageous', he said. 'She raised three boys on her own, in desperate circumstances.' They had no money for mattresses, so she made pallets by stuffing linen sacks with dried ferns. When Herzog developed a fascination with guns after discovering an old cache of Nazi weapons in the forest, she demonstrated how to shoot a pistol. She understood his impatience with traditional schoolwork - as a teenager, Herzog, an enthusiast for American matinee fare such as Dr Fu Manchu and Zorro, had already begun writing screenplays - and secured him an apprenticeship at a photographer's lab, in Munich. Later, she gave a German newspaper a quote that Herzog considers the most precise summation of his talent. 'Everything goes into him,' she said. 'If it comes out, it comes out transformed.' Herzog remains close to his siblings: Tilbert, his older brother, a finance executive, who now spends much of his time on a yacht off Spain; Lucki, his younger brother, who lives in Germany and has produced many of Herzog's films; and Sigrid, his sister, an acting teacher, who also lives in Germany.

Herzog recalls his childhood with a curiously anthropological cast, as if he were the Alpine equivalent of a Trobriand Islander. He loves to say that he never made a phone call until he was 17, did not see a banana until he was 12, and did not watch a movie until he was 11. The film was a documentary about Eskimos, shown at school; Herzog was appalled by their inept igloo-construction technique. Like many children in Sachrang, he played winter sports and wanted to be a champion ski jumper. He gave up the sport, however, when his best friend fractured his skull while they were practising alone on an isolated ramp. 'I thought that if I moved him an inch, his brain would spill out, he was so badly injured,' he recalled. In 1973, Herzog made a documentary about the sport, The Great Ecstasy of the Wood-Carver Steiner: in it, he clips off the landings from his slow-motion footage, creating an uncanny sensation of human flight.

Growing up in Sachrang, Herzog developed a passion for wandering; as he grew older, he sometimes roamed so far that he had to spend the night in an empty chalet. (He says he's great at picking locks.) In the Minnesota Declaration, a whimsical manifesto that he presented at a Minneapolis film festival eight years ago, he says, 'Tourism is sin, walking on foot virtue.' Herzog believes that modern life has disconnected humans from their most elemental pleasures. His films, accordingly, attempt to connect modern cinemagoers to their prelapsarian selves: the emotions are always primal, and landscape is integral to the drama. 'You will never see people talking on the phone, driving in a car, or exchanging ironic jokes in my films,' he said. 'It is always bigger, deeper.' He avows that his films expose 'the ecstatic truth' of mankind.

He is gently messianic in his anachronistic habits. In 1974, upon hearing that the film critic Lotte Eisner, a friend, was gravely ill in France, he walked from Munich to Paris to visit her. (She survived the three weeks that it took him to get there - and lived nine more years.) Four years later he published Of Walking in Ice, a celebration of his travail. As always, he is an astute observer - crossing a field, his feet 'immediately collect pounds of heavy sticky clods of earth' - yet the book feels overwrought and musty. ('A cornfield in winter,' he intones, 'is a field called Death.') Werner's brother, Tilbert, has said his sibling 'will openly declare that he writes the best prose since Kleist', but cinema serves Herzog better: it forces his Romantic sensibilities into a modern frame.

Things rarely turn out well when the swashbuckling side of Herzog takes over. Several years ago, he returned to the Alps to ski with some friends. One day, he sped down a notoriously treacherous run; when he boasted about it that night, nobody believed him. The next day, he insisted on doing it again - and, predictably, he wiped out. 'I nearly died,' he told me, and he still has difficulty turning his neck.

Why does he do such things? Herzog does not want to know the answer. 'I think that psychoanalysis is one of the great evils of civilisation, even worse than the Spanish Inquisition,' he told me. 'At least the Inquisition was about keeping something together. Analysis is only about taking a person apart. I would rather die than see an analyst.'

Herzog's accidents and misfortunes have been widely catalogued, yet a complete concordance seems impossible: that afternoon in Los Angeles he revealed that he once jumped out of a third-floor window in Pittsburgh - no fire, just fooling around! - and recalled that, during a recent visit to Spain, Tilbert had, on a lark, set his shirt on fire with a cigar. (He was saved 'by a pitcher of lemonade', he added triumphantly.) Not surprisingly, Herzog has been accused of being a serial fabulist. He hasn't helped matters by admitting that he 'intensifies' his documentaries. Lessons of Darkness, his spectral 1992 film about the apocalyptic fires that raged after the Gulf War, begins with a bogus epigraph, allegedly by Pascal: 'The collapse of the stellar universe will occur - like creation - in grandiose splendour.' (The 'pseudo-quote,' he has said, elevates the film from 'mere reportage' to 'the realm of poetry'.) He frequently supplies his subjects with dialogue. In The White Diamond, which came out in 2004, a Guyanese villager, interviewed on the edge of a clamorous waterfall, establishes his mystical temperament when he says to the camera, 'I cannot hear what you say for the thunder that you are.' Herzog swiped the line from Cobra Verde

Herzog says that he 'stylises' his documentaries only when the subject agrees that an invention illuminates his character. Grizzly Man, made after the death of Timothy Treadwell, contains no fictions: 'there was no possibility of collaboration'. Yet Herzog's insistence that there is no meaningful difference between his features and his documentaries - 'In both cases, I am a storyteller,' he likes to say - offends advocates of cinema verite and may explain why Grizzly Man, despite receiving terrific reviews, was snubbed by the Academy Awards. Herzog, of course, relishes tweaking the traditionalists. 'There is just a very shallow truth in facts,' he told me. 'Otherwise, the phone directory would be the Book of Books.'

Weird things happen to Herzog even when he's at home in California. One day this February, he left a voice message. 'I have something amusing to tell you,' he said, teasingly. When I called back, he announced, 'I was shot today!'

He tore into his latest tale: 'A BBC television crew came to see me in Laurel Canyon. They wanted to interview me for the British premiere of Grizzly Man. I didn't want them to film right outside my house, so we went up to Skyline Drive. In the middle of the interview, I was shot with a rifle by someone standing on his balcony. I seem to attract the clinically insane.' A rifle? 'Well, it must have been an air rifle or something. I was very slightly injured; it was a very small-calibre thing, I suppose. Also, I had a catalogue in my jacket pocket, which protected me. The bullet hit my abdomen, right next to the belt, but it did not penetrate into my intestines. I thought the camera had cracked and burnt me. I flinched for less than a second and continued my thoughts, and the BBC people started to duck and run away. I was bleeding into my underwear! Quite often, I have the feeling that when I tell about some strange incident, people don't believe me. But here it is, documented on camera. Proof!'

Two days later, an article appeared in the Los Angeles Times. The actor Joaquin Phoenix had flipped his car on a drive down the serpentine roads of Laurel Canyon. 'I remember this knocking on the passenger window,' Phoenix told the Times. 'There was this German voice saying, "Just relax." . . . I said to myself, "That's Werner Herzog!" ' Phoenix, who was unharmed, went on, 'I got out of the car and I said, "Thank you." And he was gone.'

As the Rescue Dawn shoot neared its end, Herzog sent notes via email; they were invariably stippled with words like 'brink', 'precipice', and 'abyss'. Crew members confirmed that the set had grown increasingly troubled. Stuntman Chris Carnel burnt his face in a scene depicting Dengler's plane crash. Although American and British crew members were finally given money, many said that they had not been paid all they were promised, and the producers evidently infuriated Thai contractors by ignoring bills. The entire production crew got turned away from a hotel in Krabi, after the proprietors got wind of these complaints. (Steve Marlton claims that the hotel had suddenly raised its rates, and that all other bills had been paid.) An accountant arrived on the set, then immediately quit, shocked by the financial mess. Midway through the shoot, 30 Thai crew members quit en masse, citing the production's 'cash-flow problems'.

A few days before shooting was scheduled to end, Thailand's governor of tourism revoked the production's work permits. Marlton had refused to pay the fee demanded by a contractor who had arranged the rental of military equipment and provided the local crew, claiming he was being overcharged. In retaliation, the contractor successfully petitioned the government to close the shoot. Over the next few days, Marlton and eight crew members were prevented from boarding planes at Bangkok airport. Marlton was informed by the Thai police that he would be allowed to leave only if he paid $500,000 in taxes that the production supposedly owed. Herzog, however, eluded capture: 'I had two valid passports, and juggled them at a critical moment,' he told me.

Marlton paid a substantial sum and flew home, leaving the other crew members behind. After a week-long stand-off, Gibraltar agreed to pay the Thai authorities more money, and the others were allowed to go home. Soon afterwards, Knapp was arrested in Bangkok, on the ground that Rescue Dawn had violated work-permit regulations; he spent eight hours in a detention centre, and criminal charges were filed against him. Marlton posted his bail, but Knapp is still facing legal proceedings.

Meanwhile, Rescue Dawn remained in a precarious state. In November, Herzog spent two days in Alameda, California, shooting the final scenes. He then asked for 10 weeks to edit the film. He would present his cut, and the producers would decide whether to release it or demand changes. On the second day of editing, Herzog was kicked out of his small editing suite, in West Hollywood. The editing studio required payment upfront, and Gibraltar didn't have the money on hand.

In April, Gibraltar secured post-production money, and Herzog was finally paid his director's fee. Herzog resumed editing, and he was joined by Knapp. Although Knapp said that Rescue Dawn was 'Herzog's movie' and that his primary role was to 'lend support', he would also remind Herzog that certain choices - such as trimming action sequences in favour of dialogue-heavy scenes in the prison camp - would likely displease the producers.

Herzog was cautiously optimistic. He had realised too late that, as he told me, the producers 'would have rather put me out of the project if they could have'. But he wasn't altogether naïve about Hollywood politics. He reminded me that the powerful Endeavor Agency, which represents Bale and Zahn, was on his side. 'Christian wants a quality film, not an action movie,' he said. 'And the agency wants their client to be happy.' Endeavor, he implied, could make life difficult for Gibraltar if it tried to release a bastardised version of Rescue Dawn

He was also heartened by what he had seen in his brief visit to the editing suite. His footage was 'very, very strong', he said. In a scene in which Bale appears to eat a live snake, a single-take shot made clear that the emaciated actor had struggled heartily with a writhing beast. The sequence shot in the river was excitingly disorienting, bobbing the viewer up and down. Shots of the Thai jungle felt palpably constrictive - at one point Bale and Zahn, after clambering up a steep hill, get their first glimpse of a wider view. The vista before them, partially obscured by branches, is an Edenic blanket of green, but the effect is deflating: this prison cannot be escaped.

The sequence was shot the day after the decapitation scene. Herzog had discovered that there was nothing pending on the shooting schedule, and he seized the chance to flee the Apparatus. He got in a silver van with his wife, Bale, Zahn, Zeitlinger, and a camera assistant. The van's driver had decorated his vehicle in a weirdly apt style: its exterior and interior were plastered with Batman logos.

Herzog told the driver to start driving 'toward Burma'. The driver, looking a bit unsure, set off down the highway. The sound engineer and a few Thai crewhands followed in a small car. Herzog had explored the border area earlier in the summer, and he had pinpointed a splendid spot to shoot the vista scene. He hadn't, of course, marked it on a map. 'I am just following my own geographic instincts,' he explained.

An hour-and-a-half later, Herzog had still not found his spot. We passed steep hills terraced with corn plants. Nobody commented on the cheery rainbows glowing over the misty valleys; in a Herzogian world, rainbows would not exist. At one point, Bale asked quietly, 'Werner, does the driver speak English?'

'No,' Herzog said, unperturbed.

'He has a GPS in his head,' Zeitlinger whispered to me. 'Do not worry.'

Herzog was savouring the hunt. He propped his muddy bare feet on the bench where Bale was sitting, put on some mirrored glasses, and stared out the window, studying the landscape. We drove for two hours more, looking for Herzog's vista. The sun was getting low. 'We just need a little bit of luck,' Herzog said with excitement. 'I think that 10 minutes away there is a spot where we may have some luck.'

Half an hour before sundown, a towering escarpment came into view. 'Here,' Herzog said. The Batvan stopped, and Herzog began walking up to the summit. 'We must go quickly,' he urged, disappearing in the trees.

The crest was densely forested, but there was a thin opening that showed a ribbon of mountains receding into the distance. Herzog began giving instructions to Bale and Zahn, who listened in silence. 'A storm is coming,' Herzog observed, pointing toward distant clouds. 'There is no time to waste.'

Zeitlinger wanted to set up a tracking shot; the faraway terrain might look blurry in an unsteady handheld shot. Herzog humoured him for a few minutes, until he noticed a mountain that was backlit with a penumbra of golden light. 'It's a high-intensity landscape,' he said. 'We must do it now.' The dolly track was left unfinished.

The sound engineer hadn't yet carted up his heavy equipment. 'We will dub it in later,' he said. 'These conditions will last for five minutes at most.'

'It's sublime,' Lena said, while taking photographs. 'It's very Caspar Friedrich.'

Bale and Zahn walked 50ft down the hill, hiked up again, and said a few lines that Herzog improvised. 'I'm going to get you out of here, Duane,' Bale said to Zahn. Then they stared out at the impossibly vast view, and their faces crumpled. 'Have the camera plough past them, through the trees, and into the distance,' Herzog told Zeitlinger.

At the end of several takes, Herzog cried, 'Cut!' He smeared the sweat off his brow with his arm. He grabbed Zeitlinger's shoulder, and pointed to the dark horizon. 'Thank God, I forced it,' he said. 'Look. The glowing mountain is gone.'

· Rescue Dawn is released nationwide on 23 November

Body of work: key moments from the Herzog canon

Even Dwarves Started Small (1970)

One of Herzog's earliest films, it remains his most hardcore, as the inmates of an unspecified institution - a jail or possibly a mental home - start to rebel, causing havoc as their society spirals out of control. Cast with real-life, shrill-voiced dwarves, it's as absurd and chaotic as it sounds, not to mention extremely hard on the ears.

Nosferatu the Vampire (1978)

A milestone in the New German Cinema of the Seventies, this remake of FW Murnau's silent classic features regular collaborator Klaus Kinski in the lead. Bald, pale, weak and cursed with a lust for blood, Kinski's vampire is a pathetic but sympathetic figure - a trait common in many of Herzog's protagonists.

Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Herzog's signature film stars Kinski again as an crazed impresario named Fitzgerald, with a burning desire to build an opera house in the jungles of South America. To do this, he must first carry his 320-tonne steamship up the side of a mountain, an insane feat that Herzog chose to replicate - at great cost to both financiers and bullied crew.

Lessons of Darkness (1992)

Herzog's documentaries, as exemplified by Grizzly Man, are extraordinary, personal affairs, but this 1992 project is perhaps his most powerful. Shot at the tail end of the first Gulf War, with retreating Iraqi soldiers setting fire to the oil fields of Kuwait, it is at once beautiful and harrowing, relying on visuals alone to tell its story.
Damon Wis

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

[manho]

Rebel with a cause

In the Eighties his brawls with the paparazzi and stormy marriage to Madonna earned him a bad-boy image. These days he channels his anger into his films - and political activism. Here the Oscar-winner tells Sean O' Hagan why it might be time to give up acting for the director's chair
Sean O' Hagan
Sunday November 4, 2007
Observer

In the few seconds it takes Sean Penn to amble across his hotel room to shake my hand, I have the distinct feeling that he has already sized me up. It's the way those sleepy blue eyes seem to take everything in, and give nothing back. He is smaller than I expected, compact and self-contained, but there is no denying his presence. After the briefest of greetings, he steers me to a nearby sofa and waits, without uttering a word. Sean Penn, you suspect, does not do small talk.

He is here to promote Into the Wild, the fourth film he has directed, and the first to be based on a true story. It's an adaptation of Jon Krakauer's bestselling book about Christopher McCandless, a disaffected and impossibly idealistic young man who walked into the Alaskan wilderness in the summer of 1992 to test himself to the limits of his endurance, and died there of starvation 112 days later.

'I still have one foot in California,' he says as I sit down. 'It may take me a while to get going.' It does. In fact he doesn't really get going, become affable and animated, until our conversation shifts from film-making to politics. Though he won a Best Actor Oscar for Mystic River in 2004, it is directing and political activism that really engage him now. 'I'm an optimist, basically,' he says at one point, grinning. 'I think we can turn things around. To do that, you got to get involved.'

Sean Penn is someone who tends to get involved. Not getting involved is never an option. The commitment that now fuels his activism has long underpinned his acting and, of late, his directing. He has left behind the bad boy image that lingered for years after the break-up of his brief and stormy marriage to Madonna in the Eighties.

These days Penn's anger is primarily directed at the White House. He is Hollywood's most high profile liberal-left activist, a title he has stolen from his friend and fellow actor, Tim Robbins, who directed him in Dead Man Walking. In the last few years, even with that Oscar under his belt, he has become as famous - and, to the American Right, as infamous - for his outspoken opposition to George Bush as for his acting. In October 2002 he placed a three-quarter page advert in the Washington Post in the form of an open letter to Bush, castigating him for his policy on Iraq and his 'systematic destruction of civil liberties'. It cost Penn $56,000, and earned him the opprobrium of the Right, who view him as the epitome of limousine liberalism. He incensed them further in August when he travelled to Venezuela to meet Bush-baiting President Hugo Chavez.

'I take a lot of flak,' he says, grinning, 'but truth is stubborn. I ain't going to say it don't annoy me but, if the intention is to make me do it less, it's really going the other way.'

Does the flak just come from the right-wing media or does he get it from the public as well? He looks momentarily fazed. 'OK. Well, yeah. Sometimes it does. But mostly not. There's been about four incidents compared to the hundreds that are positive. The flak I do get is pretty violent. People just don't know what to do with themselves,' he shrugs. (When American Esquire profiled him in September, calling Penn a great American, the readers' response was overwhelmingly vituperative. They called him instead: 'the ultimate American hater', 'Communist scum' and 'a traitorous un-American bastard'.)

He stares at the wall for a moment or two, shaking his head. 'I'll tell you something, when I got back from Baghdad the first time, I went straight to Memphis, Tennessee, where you might think I'm going to get trouble. But you know what? The guys I came up against who didn't share my views were just like, "We respect your right to disagree". Same with the soldiers in Baghdad. They said, "That's what we're doing here. We're fighting for the right and the ability to disagree".' Another pause. 'Most of the time it's people telling me to go for it, though. It's heartening, you know.'

Penn has visited Iraq twice since the war started, and wrote about his experiences for the San Francisco Chronicle. 'I don't know if this is true,' he says, 'but I may have written the first published piece in mainstream journalism that actually explained what these contractors were up to over there. I went back and looked for information on this, and the word I kept hearing was "oversight". Why weren't we finding out that people were building up these private militias out of the Pentagon with tax payers' money? Oversight? In the media, nobody's watching this stuff, and it's eating away at our democracy.'

Essentially, Sean Penn is not so much a radical as a romantic idealist. The single-mindedness that drives the work also drives the politics. He believes in the ideal of a democratic America, where politicians must be held to account. 'The way I see it,' Penn says, calmly, 'if you believe in democracy, you got to do something. We have people running the country now who really should be in prison for what they are doing to democracy. If you define our country by the constitution, we have enemies of the state in the White House, the defence department and the state department. That's where we are now.'

Where Penn is right now is intriguing, too, though. His most dramatic role in the last few years was the real-life drama he literally waded into when he headed to New Orleans on a one-man rescue mission straight after the levees burst and the city was flooded. Several residents owe their life to his intervention, and he became a hero of sorts when he appeared on television, mud-splattered and exhausted after his efforts, and castigated Bush and his government once more for their failure to respond quickly and determinedly to the crisis.

'That was slightly different,' he says now. 'I had spent a lot of time down there - I had a lot of friends down there. It was just an instinctive reaction, you know, to just head down there and help. I didn't think about that too much.'

According to his wife, Robin Wright Penn, he doesn't tend to think too much about anything important before he does it. In Richard T Kelly's recent oral biography, Sean Penn: His Life and Times, she recalls her husband's sudden decision to visit Iraq for the first time in 2002. 'The idea came from nowhere, pretty much. But then I'm used to that with Sean... He's not one to just sit back and let things happen... It's that part in him of his dad, and I back it all the way.'

Leo Penn, who died in 1998, is an abiding presence in his son's life, a key determinant not just of his fierce integrity as an actor and director but of the idealism that underpins his radical politics. Alongside his wife, Eileen Ryan Penn, a gifted actress and now painter, who starred in many long-running dramas, including Bonanza, and whom Kelly describes as 'a strong, shrewd, humorous, exuberant woman', Leo belonged to the old bohemian Left that flourished in California in the Forties. A decorated Second World War hero, he was blacklisted because of his radical politics, and his refusal to testify against his friends during House Un-American Activities Committee investigations.

I ask Penn if he has inherited his father's ideals. He pauses, as he does every time the talk turns towards the personal. 'It would make sense, right?' he replies, in that defensive way of his, then immediately softens. 'I mean, I would certainly be proud to attribute it to that but it's not a conscious thing.'

Sean, too, has had his run-ins with the government. For the last five years he has been under investigation by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, an Orwellian-sounding body connected to the US treasury department. 'It's what they do to bicycle tourists who pass through Havana,' he says, shrugging. 'The standard kind of threat. Cost me a lot of money, though. That's what they do, jack it all up, but I think I am out of the woods.'

In a recent New Yorker profile he revealed how friends of his in the Los Angeles Police Department tipped him off that he was under surveillance. I wonder if he ever feels threatened or scared. 'Well, at any point in time, all somebody has to do to shut you up is to dump a few kilos of heroin in the back of your car, and then mention to a cop that something might be there.' Does he honestly think that sort of thing could happen? 'I know cases where it has happened. Look at Geronimo Pratt . He spent 27 years in prison before he was exonerated by their own surveillance evidence.' He falls silent. 'You ask, could they do that to me? I think the reason they don't is that I haven't been a threat. I haven't been productive. I think they have won, and continue to win. For the moment I am a minor figure, and there has not been a major figure come up who has made a difference.'

For all that, there is little sense that he will stop trying to make a difference. When I contact Bono, who has been friends with Penn for more than 20 years, for a quote that might sum up Penn's character, I receive back by email a eulogy that, among other things, says, 'Sean Penn has a comedian's face that turns to flint when important stuff is at risk, like family, friendship, art, America... He is one of danger's great journalists, great company for an uphill hike. And he has a brain the size of Alaska and a bigger heart than he'd like you to know.'

The Oscar Penn won in 2004 for his role as Jimmy Markum in Mystic River was a belated acknowledgement by the Hollywood establishment that he is an actor of singular talents, perhaps the only one of his peer group who stands comparison with the likes of Nicholson and de Niro.

'I think there is no one better of his generation,' says biographer Kelly. 'His contemporaries look up to him as the man who sets the standards, and the giants who went before him regard him with the utmost respect. In every way he's an actor's actor.'

It is Penn's other career as a director, though, that has brought him to the UK. Into the Wild is an unapologetically romantic account of Chris McCandless's ill-fated Alaskan odyssey. It is a role, you suspect, Penn's younger self would have fought tooth and nail to play, a character whose wanderlust and extreme attempt at self-determination he identifies with wholeheartedly. 'Chris was a kid in search of a place to belong,' he says, 'a place that would accept him as he was. His quest was a quest for goodness and purity. It woke up some stuff in me, for sure. I totally support his decision to go outside the comfort zone, even with all the risks he took. The way I see it, whatever it takes for you to be truly alive in this life, short of intentionally hurting someone else, you have to do.'

Penn first approached the McCandless family about dramatising their son's fatal adventure over 10 years ago, and stayed in contact with them while he worked on other projects. 'They were just not ready back then,' he says. 'I told them then that I would never lose interest in the story. I think that's what I shared with them ultimately - even though it took them more time to arrive at it: the sense that this is a story that it is necessary to share with the world. I truly believe that.'

It is this tenacity coupled with an undimmed idealism that has made Penn a director whose films hum with a heartfelt intensity that is rare in American cinema these days. In the three films that preceded this one, The Indian Runner (1991), The Crossing Guard (1995) and The Pledge (2001), the austerity of his directorial vision was sometimes as gruelling as it was compelling. With Into the Wild, though, you sense he is becoming the great director he has willed himself to be since making the notoriously tricky leap from one side of the camera to the other. Whatever you may think of the film's often overwrought romanticism, it is an intensely cinematic experience, full of often visceral images that stick in the mind for days afterwards. And he has pulled a performance of such sustained intensity out of the 22-year-old Emile Hirsch that it makes you wonder if the young actor must not be altered in some way for having come through it.

'That was something I both warned him of and seduced him with,' says Penn, smiling. 'It was even tougher than I had imagined though. Eight months of filming on location with no creature comforts. Miserable, really. He just stuck it out. I'm not exaggerating - I think he went into it as a boy and came out a man.'

You do not have to spend too much time around Penn to detect what Richard Kelly calls his 'purity of purpose'. In an age when actors, like everyone else, tend to compromise their integrity if the cheque is high enough, Penn has consistently chosen often demanding roles purely on the strength of the script. In Dead Man Walking he played Matthew Poncelet, a doomed killer on death row; in Casualties of War, the unravelling, war-damaged Sergeant Tony Meserve; in All the King's Men, the corrupt southern governor, Willie Stark. All these roles, alongside his chilling turn as Markum in Mystic River, drew on the fabled Sean Penn edge, that mixture of suppressed aggression and tentativeness that he still exudes, but not to anything like the degree he did when he was younger and struggling to define himself in Hollywood.

Back then, his on-set rows with directors were the stuff of legend, and when not working he seemed intent on redefining the notion of the Hollywood hell raiser. Or, at least, that is the reputation that has dogged him ever since. 'I think he has been treated unfairly in that regard,' says Kelly, who spent a considerable amount of time with Penn while researching his biography. 'The clashes he had with directors were always arguments of principle about the script. Then, unfortunately for him, the whole shroud of his first marriage fell over everything.'

Penn's tumultuous marriage to Madonna pitched him into a maelstrom of media attention and paparazzi intrusion that he seemed utterly unprepared for, and reacted against with a rage that landed him in jail twice. During the shooting of Shanghai Express, in which the couple co-starred, he famously dangled a press photographer from his ninth-floor hotel balcony. Later he was jailed for a month by a Californian court after he failed to keep to the terms of a probation order imposed on him for whacking an overzealous fan who harassed his wife.

Kelly says: 'I don't think anyone else has ever felt the white heat of media attention in the way those two did in the Eighties when the whole aggressive celebrity culture that we are almost used to today was just starting. The paparazzi would constantly taunt him, or insult her in order to get a reaction from him. Most men would agree that there is a correct way to respond when someone insults your wife, and that's what he did.'

In 1996 Penn married the actress Robin Wright. They have two children, a daughter, Dylan Frances, and a son, Hopper Jack. They family home is in Ross, California. Last year his brother, Chris, an actor who shone in Short Cuts and as Nice Guy Eddie in Reservoir Dogs, died after taking a mixture of prescribed and proscribed drugs. 'It was a natural death, Sean Penn said later, 'but a natural death brought on by hard living.'

Penn makes it clear without saying so that his personal life is out of bounds. It is tempting to conclude that the anger that fuelled the younger Penn back in those tumultuous days is now channelled into his activism. When I suggest this, albeit in a roundabout way, he stiffens. 'You know what?' he says, after a long pause, 'Who cares? It's like, whatever it takes to get me to do the right thing at the time is fine by me, whether that is anger or whatever. Anger can be a problem but it has tremendous potential too. It's just figuring out what to do with it.'

Last year John Lahr wrote a long, and positive, profile of Penn in the New Yorker. When I mention it, Penn fires me a black look. 'Oh, he was fulla shit. I spent time with him, and he was bright, and it came over as a pro-Sean Penn piece, but it was really the autobiography of John Lahr. Let's just say, he's a whole lot more interested in Freud than I am, and you'd have to assume that he knows me a whole lot better than I do to go along with the thrust of that piece.' Point taken.

There is something essentially old-fashioned about Penn, about the idealism, the romanticism, even the machismo and the anger. His commitment to whatever he believes, and willingness to put his head above the parapet, sticks out at a time when celebrity culture is dominant, and materialism and cynicism the norm. It comes as no surprise to hear that his close friends include the writers Sam Shepard and Cormac McCarthy, both also cut from a different, older, cloth, and whose writings, poetically dissect the great American myths. In writing and directing, Penn has found a way to do the same.

Towards the end of the interview I ask if his heart is no longer in acting the way it once was - if directing has become his prime vocation. 'Oh hell, yeah,' he answers, without hesitation. Which begs the inevitable question: could the greatest American actor of his generation walk away from the spotlight at the height of his game? And, even more intriguingly, could he then become one of the great American directors?

'Let's just say I'm going to do two more movies, one with Gus Van Sant this year, and one with Terry Malick after that - because, you know, you can't say no to Terry Malick - but then I'm going to take a long, long time to think about stuff. Let's just leave it at that.' We do, but I really hope he doesn't. The cinema would be a less exciting place without him up there, lighting up the screen with his intensity. Long may he simmer and burn.

· Into the Wild opens on Friday

Fast times & past times

Early life

Born on 17 August 1960 to actor and director Leo Penn and actress Eileen Ryan.

Studied at Santa Monica College along with future actors Emilio Estevez, Charlie Sheen and Rob Lowe.

Film career

Came to prominence in 1982 in his second film, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, playing slacker Jeff Spicoli.

Has starred in over 40 films and received a best actor Oscar in 2004 for Mystic River, as well as three other Oscar nominations.

Personal life

Married Madonna in 1985. They divorced in 1989 after a stormy relationship.

Was jailed for 32 days in 1987 for assaulting an amateur photographer on the set of his film Colors.

Began a relationship in 1989 with actress Robin Wright, whom he married in 1996. The couple have a teenage son and daughter and live in California.

Penn's younger brother, Chris, an actor who played Nice Guy Eddie in Reservoir Dogs, died in 2006 of heart disease and the effects of a mix of multiple medications.

Political engagement

Took out an advertisement in the Washington Post in October 2002 calling on George Bush to abandon plans for an attack on Iraq. Penn also criticised the Bush administration for its erosion of civil liberties.

Visited Iran in June 2005 to report on the country for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Met Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez in Caracas in August and praised him for his opposition to the Bush regime.

Ally Carnwath

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

[Cat Stevens]

hey conk, great news.

best IMDB user in the history of IMDB is back:

www.imdb.com/user/ur7163957/boards/profile/

we can once again relax and enjoy the top comedy of the great wind up artist and moronic cries of "OMG, you're a moron/troll/is this a joke?" from the usual IMDB dorks.

[david]

He's right though. Oliver Stone should direct a teletubbies movie . . .

[owen]

comedy genius.

thanx for the link fingy.

[Cat Stevens]

no prob, owey.

the guy was banned at least 5-6 times, thanks to some humourless dorks complaints; this is actually his longest staying, 2 years now... what he usually did was post a moronic thread title in caps lock, then when you'd think "wtf?" and click on it, in there he'd post a brilliant, lengthy review of a film (usually the latest release) or some actor's/director's work; and just when you'd start to really absorb it, he'd start... "and now I'd like to explain how Dipsy the green teletubby influenced Robert De Niro's work." Haw haw!

[Cat Stevens]

hey! my IMDB bud Jarrod - "moviedork" ( www.imdb.com/user/ur4962533/boards/profile/ ) finally made it! He was actually the first guy I've "talked to" when I joined the IMDB, which was also the first forum for me on the Internet - I remember him telling me about this idea for a movie 3 years ago; he was on about making this piece on ontological existentialism, right, of course it was a disaster, so there was me, innit, going "no Jarrod me old mucker, here's how you should do it..................... and don't forget the hungry giant chicken."

voilà:

tinyurl.com/2rf67x

[cripes]

I saw the Tarantino Grindhouse feature 'Death Proof' the other night. I liked it well enough. Kurt Russell was hilarious. Tarantino is good at giving actors I really never cared about (Travolta, Bruce Willis) really cool roles.

It was a bit of a conceit for Tarantino to think he can write dialog for women but...it's just a fucking movie, right? Still, I got the feeling I get from watching later Woody Allen movies, like 'yeah, I know the routine......zzzzzzzz.' He's already homaging himself.

Maybe we should just have a long ass thread--Guys we like a lot starting to suck.

[mr pissed off]

how long ya got?

[Steve]

Travolta and Willis. Bingo. Two of the worst actors out there.

[owen]

they might be pretty bad actors but they were perfect for their roles in PF

[dino]

also a great singer

youtube.com/watch?v=K14_yaGc_Ss

[Cat Stevens]

shit, my fav Python right after the late great dr Chapman was here, and I missed it:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoWywqvUgL4

[manho]

Daniel Day Lewis gives blood, sweat and tears
It's the acclaimed actor's fourth film in 10 years. And Paul Thomas Anderson’s making-of-America epic is set for Oscar gold

Christopher Goodwin
The Sunday Times
November 25, 2007

When I walk in, Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Thomas Anderson are out on the balcony of the hotel room, sharing a joke and quick hits off a cigarette. The affinity between the 50-year-old British actor and the 37-year-old American director is unlikely but palpable. They’re picking up where they left off when they finished shooting There Will Be Blood more than a year ago. They haven’t seen much of each other since – Day-Lewis lives in rural Ireland, Anderson in Los Angeles – but you sense their shared exhilaration after almost rapturous previews of the film. At the screening I’d seen the night before at the Writers Guild of America, the industry audience had given the film a standing ovation, a rare occurrence. One person said: “It feels like the first great American film of the 21st century. It tackles all the big themes about America: blood, oil, religion.”

It’s a harrowing, visceral, epic drama about the early years of the oil boom in California, and some drew comparisons to Giant, starring James Dean, which was shot at the same location, Marfa, in the southern Texas desert; others alluded to Citizen Kane, because of its focus on the corrosive effects of the pursuit of wealth. As the audience poured into the lobby, the talk was not of whether the film would be in the running for Oscars, but of how many nominations – including certain nods for Day-Lewis as best actor and Anderson as best director – it would get.

Loosely based on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, There Will Be Blood is about the forces that created the wealth and power of industrial America, and those destroyed by it. But it is told as the microscopically intimate character study of one man: Daniel Plainview, a miner and oil prospector, played by Day-Lewis. His obsessive pursuit of wealth devours those closest to him and whatever there once was of his own soul. Like much of Anderson’s work, it is also about the relationships between sons and fathers. Here, he explores those Shakespearian themes through Plainview’s heartbreaking relationship with his own young son,played by a newcomer, Dillon Freasier, but also through his relationship with his young nemesis, a small-town preacher, wonderfully played by Paul Dano, last seen as the awkward brother in Little Miss Sunshine. The feverishly unsettling score, by Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead, also plays like a character in the film, clawing into your bones.

The savage power of the film, however, really derives from Day-Lewis. He plays the brutal, ruthless oil prospector with such ferocious intensity and demonic relish that, as the reviewer for Variety wrote: “It’s difficult to imagine him emerging between takes as just an actor playing a part.” According to people on the film – adding to Day-Lewis lore – the actor remained in character throughout the three-month shoot, on and off the set. Which, once you’ve spent 160 minutes in Plainview’s company, is a truly scary notion.

Luckily, as we talk today, Day-Lewis is back in his own skin. The actor, son of the late British poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, is tall and sinewy, always slightly pitched forward, his broken nose pulling to the left, ear lobes hung with thick gold hoops, lank hair now spotted with grey under a pork-pie hat. He has circular tattoos running down his forearm, and the tattooed handprints of his children on his upper arm. In person, he is a gracious, courtly and attentive man, quick to laugh. It’s hard to see where his reputation for dark moods might have come from.

Anderson, sitting nearby, is more tentative, almost boyish, his brown hair cut close to the sides of his head. Their closeness seems surprising. Where Day-Lewis’s conversation has an instinctually rich and poetic lilt, Anderson’s more awkward phrasing betrays his upbringing in the very different world of the San Fernando valley of Los Angeles, where most of his films have been set. Yet, as well as a taste for illicit nicotine, the two men share a seriousness of purpose, which is why they both work sparingly. Anderson has made only two films since he burst onto the scene 10 years ago with Boogie Nights, which was set in the crazed world of the valley’s porn industry: the sprawling Magnolia (1999), which starred Tom Cruise; and Punch-Drunk Love (2002), a comedy with Adam Sandler.

The first stirrings of There Will Be Blood came when Anderson bought a copy of Oil! in London because he was feeling homesick and liked the cover illustration of a California oilfield. “I was frustrated by the things I was writing, and had gotten sick of my own voice, and would sort of transcribe the book to see how it looked,” says Anderson, twice Oscar-nominated for best original screenplay, for Boogie Nights and Magnolia. “The book’s genesis was that Sinclair’s wife owned a plot of land in Signal Hill [just south of LA], where they found oil, and he got to witness this explosion, how the town fell apart.”

“Paul wrote it with Daniel in mind,” says JoAnne Sellar, the British producer behind all of Anderson’s films since Boogie Nights, “and we approached him when the script was about three-quarters done.” Day-Lewis, usually reticent about taking on new film projects, quickly agreed to come on board. Since 1997, the actor had made only three films: The Boxer; Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, in which he played Bill “The Butcher”; and, in 2005, The Ballad of Jack and Rose, which was written and directed by his wife, Rebecca Miller. Day-Lewis and Miller married in 1996 and have two sons, aged nine and five. They met when he starred in the film version of The Crucible, by Miller’s father, the late playwright Arthur Miller.

Asked what spoke to him in the script, Day-Lewis says: “Paul, in the voice of Daniel Plainview... I know when I feel irrevocably drawn to something. Sometimes I take a step backward to try to assess whether I genuinely can be useful in telling that story – and sometimes I really feel I can’t be. But, once drawn in, I have no option but to follow that path, and I really don’t question why it is I need that at that particular moment, or why it needs me.” He admits that one of the reasons he doesn’t work more is that he needs “to believe in the inevitability of the piece of work that you cannot avoid doing” to be prised from home. “For me, from beginning to end, it was about 31Ž2 years of my life invested in telling this story, so it had to be something I felt a pretty compelling need to be involved in.”

It’s also true, however, that, more than any other screen actor, he needs to inhabit his characters so completely that the prospect of such immersion must be daunting. “The intention is always the same,” he says of the way he works. “To try to discover life in its entirety, or at least create for yourself the illusion that you have, which might give you some chance of convincing other people of it. It’s the same thing each time, but it requires totally different work in the process of achieving that. You are set on a path that’s strewn with obstacles, but getting over them is the joy of the work. So it’s impossible to think in terms of difficulty: it all seems utterly impossible, but the pleasure is in trying to forge ahead anyway.”

As a man who nearly became a cabinetmaker rather than an actor, and has intermittently been apprenticed as a cobbler, Day-Lewis’s craftsman-like preparation is celebrated. Playing Christy Brown, who suffered from cerebral palsy but became a painter and writer, in the 1989 film My Left Foot (for which he won a best actor Oscar), Day-Lewis spent two months with cerebral-palsy sufferers, and remained in his wheelchair even in pubs and restaurants at night. For The Last of the Mohicans (1992), he learnt how to hunt animals and build a canoe. For Bill “The Butcher”, he worked cutting meat at a butcher’s shop and spent months learning how to throw the knives his character used to kill people. The director Martin Scorsese understands his need for immersion: “He’d rather not be distracted from his focus.”

For Daniel Plainview, as he does for most of his characters, Day-Lewis started with the voice. He asked Anderson to send him recordings of voices from the era: the huge canvas of the film stretches from the late 19th century to 1927. “I have a little old-fashioned recorder I use when I’m working,” he says. “I talk to myself a lot; I live in a rural place, and there’s not much else to do during the winter. So I would send Paul sample tapes of me talking to myself.” Anderson had also sent Day-Lewis a copy of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, directed by John Huston, an important influence on the film, and documentaries on Huston, whose rich voice seeps into the character-isation, as if Plainview were a prototype for the sociopath Huston played in Polanski’s Chinatown.

When they started shooting, Anderson admits: “Daniel’s attack on the role was quite intimidating at first. But it became clear to me that it wasn’t anything outlandish or strange. He’s still in there, to the point where we can communicate. The misconception would be that it makes it harder to work with him, as a director, but it’s actually much, much easier. You always think, ‘My God, it would be great if that person could leap off the page and be right there and I could talk to him’ – and then you have it.”

There Will Be Blood differs from Anderson’s earlier films in that it’s an adaptation, it’s not set in the familiar world of the San Fernando valley, and it doesn’t include his usual troupe of actors. In addition, it took a long time to set up, because, Sellar says, it was hard to finance. “We did it on an incredibly small amount of money, though it was more than the average for an art film. The studios didn’t think it had the scope of a major picture.” That meant Anderson and Day-Lewis were working together for a long time before shooting started, so it became a far more collaborative process than Anderson was used to. As the film nears release, he feels uncomfortable about comparisons to Citizen Kane, but he’s pleased people feel it has the same tragic intensity. “One of the great things about Citizen Kane is that it just goes downhill,” he says. “There’s such satisfaction in watching that.”

Day-Lewis tries to brush aside suggestions that the film should primarily be read as a critique of America and American values, although that’s clearly part of its thrust. He prefers to see it in more personal terms: “What it takes to get power, as you sacrifice yourself, little by little, in pursuit of the thing you thought you needed, or felt you couldn’t live without, and then you only understand too late that you can’t retrieve your soul – it’s gone, it’s torn.

“I suppose, if I had anything in common with Plainview, it would be ‘the fever’ he has. With me, it just happens to be for my work – which is a kind of mining work, dark and sometimes unrewarding, but absolutely compelling.”

There Will Be Blood is released on February 8