There was one earlier version of this hunger for transcendence. I call it the moment of my spiritual awakening; I feel no hesitation about using such a high-flown phrase for it. It was the moment when I first began to think and feel for myself without school or upbringing. I was twelve or had just turned thirteen, and we were newly arrived in Munich. I walked past a bookstore, not looking at the display, but something there caused me to stop. I walked back to look. What I had spotted out of the corner of my eye was the picture of a horse on a book jacket, but it was not like any picture I’d ever seen. It was a book about cave paintings, and the picture was one of the celebrated wall paintings from the caves at Lascaux. I looked more closely and saw from the subtitle of the book that it contained paintings from the Upper Paleolithic made some 17,000 years ago. That made my spine tingle. I had to have the book, though it was completely unaffordable. I started to earn money as a ball boy at some tennis courts. Every week I snuck past the bookstore to check whether the book was still there. I had a terrible fear that someone else could have seen it and snapped it up. I was in the grip of panic. I surely thought the book existed in just the one copy. At the end of two months, I had enough money, and the book was still there. The shiver I felt when I opened it and turned the pages and saw the illustrations has never left me. Many decades later, I had the good fortune to make a film about the Chauvet Cave. This cave was only discovered in 1994 and was perfectly preserved, so that its paintings looked as though they had been painted yesterday, and not 32,000 years ago. There was intense competition to film it, particularly from French directors, all good, serious candidates, and I didn’t think I was in with much of a chance because the French think very territorially when it comes to their patrimoine. All the experts who had explored the cave were French, and my first hurdle was to gain their approval, then that of the regional government of the Ardèche. The third hurdle was the French minister of culture, who received me very graciously and declared quite unexpectedly how much he as a young man had been impressed and delighted by my films. Before entering politics, he had been an actor, author, and director, and had seen my films as a critic. He was just about to go into his well-prepared “but unfortunately” when I interrupted him. I simply said that I knew I had the chops, as did several other directors, but I also had had a fire within me since my thirteenth year. I told him about my experience of awakening. Thereupon the minister leaned right across the table and shook my hand. “Not another word. I’ve heard enough. You’ll make the film.” His name is Frédéric Mitterrand; he is a nephew of the former president. For form’s sake, and presumably also to protect the interests of the French Republic, I had to enter into a contract with the French state. “What is your idea of an honorarium?” asked Mitterrand. I replied: “One euro, and I will donate it to the state as soon as I get it.” Cave of Forgotten Dreams from 2010 remains my only work in 3D. For me, it was the fulfillment of a dream.
The constraints on filming were severe. Because the hundred thousand annual visitors to Lascaux had contaminated the cave with their exhalations, they wanted to do the thing properly in Chauvet. In Lascaux a fungus had settled on the paintings that ate away their colors whereupon Lascaux had been closed, just like a series of other caves like Altamira in Spain. The cave at Chauvet had been blocked off by a rockfall for some 28,000 years and sealed airtight; the atmosphere in it had remained unaltered since. The heavy foolproof steel door at its entrance should be opened and closed as little as possible. When filming, we were allowed to open it briefly once when going in and then open and close it when finally leaving. We were to take with us only what we could carry. Myself included, there were to be no more than four persons working in the cave at any time, and then for no more than four hours a day. The filming was to take less than a week. One could move about only on a metal grid that was two feet wide, and our lights were not to create any heat—all of these perfectly reasonable requirements. There was no possibility of support from outside, because that would have meant opening and closing the steel door. We therefore built a very small 3-D camera, which consisted of two cameras in parallel that were no bigger than matchboxes. At the time, miniature equipment didn’t yet exist, and the digital storage of the data was very difficult. I say all this because the circumstances required that we have a team of extraordinary quality, where each member was ready to take on the work of another at a moment’s notice if required. With me were cameraman Peter Zeitlinger; his assistant, Erik Söllner, both Austrians, resolute and strong and experienced; and the Estonian digital guru Kaspar Kallas. Kaspar had made his own films, developed important parts of the software on James Cameron’s Avatar, and was also an excellent cameraman. Sometimes, instead of him, my extraordinary sound man Eric Spitzer-Marlyn would come along. He started a career as a pop singer at age seventeen and performed for full stadiums in Austria. His early records show him as a teenie heartthrob, lonesome with his only friend, his guitar, at the side of a road. Now he is a composer and runs his own sound studio. I generally did the lighting with a portable flat panel when we filmed conversations with experts. Minutes before we went down into the cave, we tested all the equipment the way pilots of passenger aircraft do before takeoff, but on one of our filming days on the steep descent to the cave’s lower level, one of the batteries for the data storage broke. It had an unusual voltage that nothing else could replicate. What to do? Climbing back up to the surface would have meant opening the door. That would have meant the end, after a few minutes, of an entire filming day. The three men on the team came up with a plan. Kneeling on the narrow iron grid, they disassembled a battery charge belt. The only tools we had were a fine screwdriver and a Swiss Army penknife, and I, as an extra here, held the torch while the three of them worked. In the space of an hour, they had built a new battery, and we were able to start filming. I go into such detail because I always had incredibly highly qualified technical teams that were always ready to cope with whatever obstacles were put in their path. Conditions in the cave were touch and go. Ideally, we would not so much as breathe, and a sneeze might have blown away fine deposits of carbon from the partly black paintings. In one place on the sandy ground, there was the print of a child, or really there were two because parallel to it were the marks of a wolf. The great entrance to the cave had been used in prehistoric times by people and large mammals, especially by a now-extinct species of cave-dwelling bear that hibernated there. We were unable to investigate the prints, but I am still haunted by the speculation: Had a wolf pursued the child, had they walked companionably side by side, or had the wolf left its traces hundreds or even thousands of years later? The bewildering thing about some of the cave paintings is that you sometimes come upon the picture of a mammoth or a woolly rhino that was completed at a much later date. Carbon dating has shown us that a painting begun by one painter was completed more than five thousand years later by another, which is as though a painting begun before the time of the first pharaohs had been recently completed.
I was always fascinated by the way collective memory is sometimes evinced from the depths of time. Why do we say “Bless you” or “Gesundheit” or “Santé” when someone sneezes but never when they cough? It’s probably a hangover from the plague, of which sneezing was an advance symptom. Why are cemeteries in so many cultures fenced in? Maybe from archaic times when they wanted to confine evil spirits? Why is it that in many cultures a man carries his wife over the threshold? I assume it’s a reference to olden days when men went out to steal women, as in the rape of the Sabines in the early history of Rome. The great Finnish epic, the Kalevala, which goes back to the oral traditions of very old times, describes such a theft. In the cave at Chauvet, I saw references to two fascinating traditions. There is the picture of a galloping bison in which the paleolithic painter wanted to show dynamic movement. The bison has eight legs. Thirty thousand years later, in the Icelandic Edda, we find a description of the chief of the gods, Odin. His horse, Sleipnir, is the swiftest of all because it gallops on eight legs.
Then, deep inside the Chauvet Cave is a pendulous piece of rock in roughly the form of a pine cone. On it is the only depiction of a human in the cave: the bottom half of a naked woman embraced by the hooves of a bison. Thirty thousand years later, Picasso made his series of lithographs of Femme et Minotaur, every bit as though he had been inspired by the cave at Chauvet. But Picasso—of whom I have no great opinion—had been long dead when the cave was discovered. I ask myself, though, is there something like buried memory within families? Or, to put it differently, are there images that slumber within us and are sometimes set free by some sort of jolt? I believe so, and somehow all my works have pursued such images, whether it was the ten thousand windmills of Crete in my first feature film, Signs of Life, or the steamship that is lugged over a mountain, the central metaphor of my film Fitzcarraldo. I know it’s a wonderful metaphor, but what it means I am unable to say.