Examining the 'Grizzly' Details

Part of an artistic generation that grew from the ashes of Nazi Germany, Herzog said he came from a culture that knew no fathers.

"I grew up in a very remote mountainous place in Bavaria," he recalled, "so I had an environment of some sort of wilderness around me. I did not know that cinema existed until I was 11. And we had to invent our own toys, our own games. We had no fathers to teach us what to do. Our generation is all self-taught, so there is a certain innocence or a wildness, quote unquote, in me. So most probably because of that, I respond easily to characters like Aguirre and Timothy Treadwell."

Herzog sees Treadwell as a fellow "illiterate of filmmaking, and yet a great filmmaker with no training. What he shot in these tapes is unique and unprecedented in its beauty. And no Hollywood studio could ever create some of the footage he did."

Herzog learned about Treadwell and his camera footage, more than 100 hours in all, when he met producer Erik Nelson at a wildlife festival in Jackson Hole, Wyo. When Nelson told Herzog he was planning to produce and direct a feature documentary about Treadwell for Discovery, something clicked.

"I stared at him and instantly, without missing a beat, with my heavy, thick German accent, I said, 'No, I vill direct this movie,' " Herzog said, cracking a rare smile.

"You don't come between Werner and a film project," said Nelson, recalling the encounter. "That's the one thing he shares with 1,000-pound grizzly bears and their salmon. You either get out of the way or you get steamrolled."

If Nelson was a pushover, Jewel Palovak certainly wasn't. Treadwell's former girlfriend owned the rights to his tapes and had her own ideas for the movie. It made for heated debate.

"We had some ranting about the meaning of nature," Herzog remembers. "And Jewel is more defending Treadwell's position, that there is harmony in the universe and the only disturbing element is human beings. I don't see it that way."

Herzog, who was here in June to attend the Silverdocs festival, relived that running argument (which echoed his narration in the film) for a festival audience.

"There's no music of the spheres," he thundered from the stage, his brow furrowed in a sort of Teutonic darkness. "And there's no harmony, and the common denominator in nature, as we find it out here among wild bears, is hostility, chaos and murder. . . . Bears kill bear cubs sometimes, to stop the female mothers from lactating, so they have a partner for mating again. But I like to say that male bears kill the cubs to have the females ready for fornication. I say 'fornication' as an insult to all the New Age people on purpose. ['Grizzly Man'] is a definitive anti-Walt Disney movie. I think we need it."

Palovak, who listened with amusement to the forum and has become close friends with Herzog, acknowledges she had a starkly different agenda for the movie.

"I wanted more of the educational slant," she says. "I wanted a little bit of issues facing wildlife. I wanted teachers and some other things. . . . [Herzog's] ranting came about nature. He said, 'It's murder and it's fornication.' No, it's the food chain. Unless you're talking about the higher apes, animals don't murder each other."

Herzog's criticism that Treadwell humanized his grizzlies by giving them names and speaking to them as if they were people seemed to Palovak like hypocrisy.

"By attributing those [murderous] aspects to the bears, Werner's doing exactly what he criticizes Timothy of doing. He's anthropomorphizing the animals and making them murderous."

Whatever its motivation, a grizzly certainly killed Treadwell and his girlfriend. In the confusion, it seems, a camera recorded the event but only the sound. And those terrible moments, by Herzog, Palovak and Nelson's mutual consent, are evoked in a moving, subtle manner. In "Grizzly Man," Herzog listens to Treadwell and Huguenard's deaths on earphones as a grief-stricken Palovak looks on. At no point does the audience hear what's on the tape.

That scene, among others in the film, fulfills Herzog's need for ecstatic truth, the director said, because it "reveals insights into our own wild nature. It's a truth which ultimately illuminates us." As New Yorker film critic David Denby described it in his review, "In a way, 'Grizzly Man' is the ultimate nature documentary, for it chronicles the nature of man as well as the nature of animals."

Herzog's next documentary, "White Diamond," about airship engineer Graham Dorrington, who embarks in a miniature helium dirigible on a dangerous trip over the rain forests of Guyana, has already opened in New York, with plans for wider release. And this month Herzog is scheduled to begin shooting a dramatic feature about Dieter Dengler, an American fighter pilot in the Vietnam War whose plane was shot down over Laos. "Rescue Dawn," starring Christian Bale and Steve Zahn, is a fictional version of his 1997 documentary about the real-life Dengler, "Little Dieter Needs to Fly." And he's talking with producer Nelson about another Discovery-funded film, this one a fictional story set on the high seas.

"I'm a storyteller," Herzog declared. "And that's what my life is. . . . I see myself like the man you would find in the bazaars of Marrakech in Morocco. And people are crowding around as he tells stories to them. And they give him money. That's a wonderful profession. And if I could not make movies, I'd choose to be a storyteller in that marketplace."