I was very lucky because the French minister of culture, Frédéric Mitterrand, turned out to be a great fan of my films. Werner Herzog: Let’s say it was a quest of some complexity, because the French are usually territorial when it comes to their patrimony.
Samuel Wigley: How did you go about persuading the French government to allow you access to the Chauvet Cave, where others had failed? His third dimension gives a reach-out-and-touch physicality to the contours and cavities of the stony canvases, bringing us as close as we’ll ever be allowed to get to works that – as Herzog reasons – evince the awakening of the soul of man. Herzog hasn’t exactly kept to that pledge: one scene involving a spear sends up the tawdry tactics of 3D cinema even as it has us dodging it in our seat.īut Ebert was right to be optimistic that Herzog would also light out for less banal territory. Last spring, film critic Roger Ebert wrote a polemic in Newsweek entitled ‘Why I Hate 3D’, in which he nonetheless conceded interest in what a filmmaker of Herzog’s vision might do with the format, adding that Herzog had promised him that in Cave of Forgotten Dreams “nothing would ‘approach’ the audience”. By unique arrangement with the French government, Herzog and a crew of three were granted access to Chauvet – a privilege denied even Judith Thurman, the journalist whose article in The New Yorker first piqued the interest of Herzog’s producer Erik Nelson. All of which sounds like a red rag to a bull for a director like Herzog, whose reputation for filming in far-flung and insurance-policy-voiding conditions needs no introduction – and who claims to have been so possessed by a book he saw at the age of 12 featuring a Lascaux cave painting on its cover that he got a job as a ball boy solely to save up for it. Even now, its rarefied atmosphere is too fragile to allow public access the cave hosts an ultra-exclusive private view to which only a select few scientists are invited. Sealed off by rockfall, this prehistoric gallery survived unseen and untarnished for millennia. With typical perversity on the part of Werner Herzog, his first (and likely only) foray into 3D forsakes the pulsing immensities of ocean and cosmos – the bread and butter of three-dimensional documentary-making – for the restrictive murk of a cave in the South of France.ĭiscovered in 1994, the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave contains the oldest known artworks in the world – pictures of bears, cattle, lions and bison painted on to the cavern walls by early man some 32,000 years ago. As his first 3D film Cave of Forgotten Dreams reaches our screens, Werner Herzog talks to Samuel Wigley about primitive man, albino crocodiles and the ethics of 3D
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