Werner Herzog Has Never Seen Taxi Driver, So No He’s Not Talking to You

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December 7, 2009

If you haven’t caught a whiff of the hubbub surrounding Werner Herzog’s latest film Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, that might be because you’re not much of a cinephile, which it turns out, neither is Herzog.

His latest movie starring Nicholas Cage is essentially, maybe, sort-of, a very slight non-remake remake of Abel Ferrera’s 1992 movie Bad Lieutenant.

Why do I hem and haw and call it a non-remake remake? Well, because Herzog has never even seen Bad Lieutenant and has no idea who Ferrera is, and is it even possible to remake a movie you’ve never seen by a filmmaker you’ve never heard of? But don’t be mistaken, Abel Ferrera knows exactly who Werner Herzog is, and he’s pissed. He said at Cannes: “I wish these people die in Hell. I hope they’re all in the same streetcar, and it blows up,” which apparently didn’t phase Herzog, because he replied with, “I have no idea who Abel Ferrara is. I don’t feel like doing an homage to Abel Ferrara because I don’t know what he did — I’ve never seen a film by him. I have no idea who he is. Is he Italian? Is he French? Who is he?”

In this Salon interview Herzog also confesses to other gaps of film knowledge such as NEVER HAVING SEEN TAXI DRIVER!!!!! I have to admit that there’s something slightly endearing about a filmmaker who isn’t much of a cinephile (or at least is pretending not to be), and has happened to missed some of the most iconic films that people somehow feel should be informing his latest cop drama.

To add to your Herzog fix, here’s an amazing little conversation between Errol Morris and Werner Herzog that navigates through their respective filmographies and also touches down on their visits to a serial killer in prison and that time that Herzog almost dug up someone’s grave. And down the rabbit hole we go.

s never seen most of those films. I mentioned “Taxi Driver” and “Chinatown,” and suggested that they were relatively well known pictures, and might strike some viewers as morally, tonally and visually influential on “Bad Lieutenant.”

You could pretty much hear Herzog scratching his head on the other end of the line. It emerged that he wasn’t sure what “Taxi Driver” was or who had made it. “Chinatown” rang more of a bell, and I reminded him that it was directed by a European auteur even more notorious than Herzog himself. He admitted he’d probably seen that one, but didn’t really remember it. American crime films from the ’40s and ’50s, though? Sure, he had seen them while growing up in postwar Germany.

Given that background, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Herzog has never seen Abel Ferrara’s 1992 “Bad Lieutenant,” which is nominally the basis for this film but has very little to do with William Finkelstein’s screenplay and almost nothing to do with Herzog’s finished product. For Herzog, making movies is about exploring the world and adventuring into unknown philosophical and artistic terrain. His relationship to film genres or cinema history or the other things critics love to talk about is minimal. So “Bad Lieutenant,” with its memorable lead performance by Nicolas Cage as a charismatic, agonized, drug-addicted and possibly schizophrenic New Orleans homicide detective, is, as Herzog puts it, a crime movie refracted through a demented prism.

BSKY

Anisse Gross

Anisse Gross is a writer, editor, artist and question asker living in San Francisco. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Believer, Lucky Peach, Buzzfeed, Brooklyn Quarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She openly welcomes correspondence, friendship, surprises and paid work.