When the news came out that Werner Herzog planned on remaking Abel Ferrara's 1992 cop drama "Bad Lieutenant," the film community was collectively befuddled. Why would a veteran of the German New Wave bother with a gritty New York City noir that has limited appeal in the first place?
As it turns out, Herzog never saw the original movie, nor did he care about it. Producer Edward Pressman originally got the idea for a remake, but Herzog's new movie -- which stars Nicolas Cage as drug-addled investigator and premiered at TIFF earlier this week -- shares almost nothing other than the title with its predecessor.
Still, Herzog felt the need to speak out against skeptics of the project in the press notes for his production, titled "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans." In the notes (excerpted below), Herzog decries "the pedantic branch of academia" that "will be ecstatic to find a small reference to that earlier film here and there."
On Tuesday, I sat down with Herzog and asked him why he felt compelled to issue an official statement on the matter. "In the speculation preceding the release of the film, before anyone had seen it, there were already complicated comparisons between Ferrara and me," he said in his distinctive baritone. "I've never seen any of his films and I don't know who he is. That kind of academic thinking is foreign to me. These parallels do not exist."
I pointed out to him that it sounded like he was complaining about a media problem rather than an academic one. "So be it," he said. "It's not my problem; it's their problem. It got out of control very easily, but it will die away as the film hits the screen."
When Ferrara was fuming to the press about his disdain for Herzog's production, he wondered aloud if Herzog would mind him remaking the German filmmaker's classic "Aguirre: Wrath of God." So I asked Herzog about that, too. "Let him do it," he said. "He would never manage to do it. No one would ever manage to do that one."
An undeniably unique storyteller, Herzog also has an infectiously self-centered manner of speaking about his own work. With his four-decade career of unforgettably strange and philosophical narratives, he has earned the arrogance, but it's still a wonder to behold: He claimed to have written all the memorably strange moments in "Port of Call," including a scene in which Cage's character has a vision of iguanas on a coffee table and another in which a dead man's soul rises up to break dance (oddly, the dancer is played by the credited screenwriter, William Finkelstein).
He also boasted about managing to collaborate with infamously difficult producer Avi Lerner. "He never read the screenplay," Herzog said. "Everybody warned me: 'Oh my god, you can't work with a man like him. I was the only one to ever invite him to the set." Herzog said he finished the production two days ahead of schedule and $2.6
