Werner Herzog’s “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,” which had its North American premiere at TIFF ’09 was… ahem, interesting…
But whether it was entirely successful or not, Herzog is always a filmmaker worth paying attention to so we stuck around after the film for the Q&A with the German director.
Warning, there’s some spoilers in here, but there’s really nothing too major. Excuse our camera work, usually we’re as rock solid with hand-held as Janusz Kaminski (who incidentally we learned married an old co-worker of ours) but this week we were a little tired.
“I never went overtime and I delivered the film two days under schedule and $2.6 million dollars under budget,” Herzog boasted proudly of the production. He also discussed insisting with the film’s producers that they needed to change the title somewhat to the subtitle of ‘Port Of Call New Orleans.’ “I can live with it,” he said of the final title,” but it led to an misunderstanding with Abel Ferrara.
Herzog still insists that he’s never seen the original ‘Lieutenant’, any Ferrara films and still says he doesn’t know who he is, but seems to appreciate him nonetheless. “I’ve heard he’s a very fine filmmaker, very bold and vociferous, which I like.. that’s what movie making’s all about. If dust is kicked up that’s fine… If you have a hockey game and there’s no big brawl on the ice, it’s not worth the money.”
There’s a scene in the film (mild spoiler, unless you’ve seen those rejected ‘Lieutenant’ posters going around) where Cage’s Terence McDonagh, drug-addled homicide detective goes character off the rails and threatens a woman for information about her MIA eye-witness child by cutting off the oxygen supply of one of her elderly clients while also pulling a huge weapon out on them. Herzog called the scene a “defining moment” of the film and said much of the scene was improvised, especially the moment where Cage contemptuously spits at them, saying, “you’re the reason this country’s going down the drain,” which delighted the filmmaker to no end. His acting direction to Cage in the scene was simple: “let the wild boar loose.”
“It’s not really a crime drama… it’s something much wider than that,” Herzog said about the film. He also noted that he and Nicolas Cage had been observing each other’s career for about three decades and then realized right around the same time that it was “an outrage” that they had never worked together. “We were in business within 60-seconds of a phone call and that was a wonderful challenge.” When Cage asked Herzog one day about backstory, Herzog’s retort was, “C’mon, we’re not going to discuss this bullshit of motivation” and again he brought up the mantra, “release the wild boar.” “Those were the really wonderful moments,” he said, though noted the wild improv was always within “the strictures of a situation, it wasn’t completely wild improv without knowing where we were going.” The filmmaker also says he deviated from the script quite a bit (the writer was OK with it) and apparently they even CUT scenes of Cage’s character snorting drugs (which caused quite a few laughs from the audience considering there are a lot of drug scenes). Essentially all the crazy stuff in the film, the “dancing soul” scene seen in the original trailer, the now-notorious iguana scenes, the crocodile moments and every other batshit loony moment was unsurprisingly invented by Herzog.
The moderator noted that there are animals in many of his film (iguanas and crocodiles in ‘Lieutenant’ and flamingos and ostriches in “”My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done”). “I don’t know where it comes from but I love to cast animals in important parts,” Herzog said. “The iguana and alligators, I insisted they had to be something completely different in style, something completely and utterly demented.”
Mission accomplished, sir. “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans” is allegedly coming out in November, but we haven’t heard anything official about this yet. The movie also stars Val Kilmer as another homicide detective, Eva Mendes as Cage’s call-girl girlfriend, Xzibit as a drug lord, and Fairuza Balk as a state trooper, ex-girlfriend of Cage’s character. Read our full review of the film.