I was deeply convinced that I wouldn’t live to my eighteenth birthday. Once I had safely passed it, it seemed out of the question that I would ever be older than twenty-five. The result was that I began making films of which I could assume they would be all that was left of me. Why not dare to find forms that had never existed? Last Words, a short in modern Greek from 1967, with its endless, compulsive repetitions; Fata Morgana, from 1970 in which I filmed mirages in the Sahara; stories like Even Dwarfs Started Small, also from 1970, probably my most radical work, in which all the actors are little people. It was also clear to me that—in almost complete ignorance of the cinema of others—I would have to come up with a cinema of my own. The world of the Alps at Sachrang was, after all, one we’d partly made up. We grew up with our own games and our own toys. For instance, there was a type of slingshot we called the Thunderbolt. We cut a flat slice out of a big beech log and carved it into a dart about twenty inches long and two or three inches wide. It was flat on the underside and slightly convex on top, which gave it dynamic lift, a little like the wing of an airplane. Of course, we didn’t know anything about aerodynamics. At its center, the dart had a hook, but we didn’t use a bow to shoot it; it was far too short. We whipped it from us with an eye on the end of the rope that held the hook of the dart. It wasn’t possible to aim the thing; the Thunderbolt just flew off anywhere, but it stayed in the air a long time, almost like a Frisbee. Our Thunderbolt flew farther than any arrow from a bow.
The first two films I saw, projected onto a bedsheet in the schoolhouse at Sachrang, didn’t impress me. The first was about Inuits building an igloo, but I could straightaway see that they didn’t have much of a clue on how to work with ice and packed snow. Perhaps they had actors playing the part of Inuits. The second one was much more interesting; it showed Pygmies, in Cameroon, I believe, building a hanging bridge from lianas across a jungle river. Their construction was impressively woven, a piece of art, in effect. Later too, unlike my brothers and my friends, I didn’t find films especially impressive when I started to go to the cinema in Munich. When I understood what life had in store for me, shortly after my fourteenth birthday, the time I converted to Catholicism and began traveling on foot, I just knew I would have to make films. Only it took a while before I was ready to take on the job, because I sensed it would be a difficult life. My knowledge of films was also severely limited. We sometimes watched films like Zorro or Dr. Fu Manchu, of which there were several sequels. Most likely I saw a western in Heilbronn when I was twelve with my friends Zef and Schinkel. Zef, the colorblind one, then replayed the showdown at the end, because I refused to believe that the hero, an ordinary cowboy who only wanted to protect his herd from the rustlers, could deal with eight villains encircling him with revolvers drawn. It would only take one of them to pull the trigger and lay him out cold. Zef set us up in a circle around him, and threw himself horizontally into the air so as not to offer a target, and at the same time fired two imaginary Colts at us, whirling around and around. His reenactment, I thought, was impressively wild but not quite convincing. In spite of that, we believed implicitly that what we saw on screen was real. We talked to the screen too. When feather headdresses loomed over a horizon in the Munich cinema, we would warn the settlers in their covered wagons: “Watch out, the Apaches are coming!” Then in one of the Dr. Fu Manchu films, I noticed something the others hadn’t seen. In an exchange between goodies and baddies, one egregious villain on Dr. Fu Manchu’s side was picked off on a rock. He tumbled down into the depths, turning over and over. Twenty minutes later, something peculiar happened: in another fight, we saw all kinds—good and bad—meeting their ends. A few had taken refuge in a gulch between rocks, and I saw the same villain plummeting to his doom. It was maybe done a little quicker and took only a couple of seconds this time, but the man took off into the air in exactly the same way, with one foot out. No one else saw it, but I was convinced it was the same shot. For me, that was the moment I understood there were shots and cuts in a film. From that time on, I watched differently. How was a story told, how was suspense created, how was a film constructed? To this day, I can learn only from bad films. The good ones I watch in the same spirit in which I watched when I was a kid. The great ones, even when I see them many times, are just an enigma.
My mother always had her doubts about me making films. In her view, I was too shy and introverted. But there was something in me that the Catholics call certainty of salvation. She wrote to me when I was on the road somewhere that I should find a solid basis for my wild plans and apprentice myself to a photographer; that way I could get a job in a film lab, and that might give me the chance of becoming someone’s assistant director. There was as yet no such thing as film school, otherwise I’m sure she would have recommended that. From her time in Geiselgasteig in the Bavarian film studios, she knew a props man, whom she persuaded to get me into the studio for a day to see what the profession looked like. On the day of my visit, a TV show for a New Year’s special—still months away—was being recorded, with a host in white tails and top hat. He was the emcee for the whole thing and did some song and dance numbers as well. I watched as he filmed the final shot accompanied by a ballet of elves, they too all in white and sprinkled with glitter. As the final music played, they all turned away from the camera and danced on tiptoe to the back of the set, where the number of the new year was beginning to flash on and off. While waltzing away, the emcee was supposed to turn back to the onlookers, then blow a kiss to the camera. He lost his step. The scene was repeated a dozen times, then there were about a dozen more takes, for what reason I wasn’t sure. The self-importance of everyone involved—behind the camera as much as in front of it—was insufferable. It was clear to me that this was not what I had in mind.
A few years later, when I was thinking of making short films, there was the question of whether I should start my own production company. For me, the answer was clear. I would never find a producer for my kind of films, so I would have to do everything myself. That’s why I started earning money while I was still at school. There was one moment that is fresh in my memory in all its detail: a film producer had reacted positively to an outline I sent, but I knew I mustn’t on any account show myself. I was fifteen at the time but physically still a child, a growth spurt and puberty came late. The negotiations took the form of an exchange of letters, then there was a phone call. I think it was probably the first phone call in my life; I was desperate not to be seen. Today, it’s hard to imagine. But finally, all the procrastination had to end. I was summoned to their Munich offices. In the anteroom stood a heavy quasi-antique camera from the thirties on a mighty tripod. The secretary looked at me in surprise. I was ushered into a large splendid office. Leather chairs, a heavy walnut table, two men at it, the two producers. Both looked past me into the anteroom, craned their necks; it was as though someone had visited them and brought his kid and hadn’t personally shown up yet. But there was no one behind me. It took them a few seconds to understand. I was about to introduce myself, but I didn’t get a chance because one of the producers started laughing aloud and slapping his thigh. Then the other stood and laughed in my face: “Oh, they want to make films in kindergarten now!” Without a sound, I turned on my heel and walked out. I didn’t waste a second feeling sorry for myself. I just thought: These people are cretins and don’t have a clue about anything. My resolve only strengthened inside me. Looking back, I am nothing but grateful that nothing came of the meeting. Hard to imagine where it might have got me, plus my project was completely half-baked. I was like a funambulist with abysses on either side, but I strode on as though I was on a wide road and not a narrow wire.
There seemed no alternative to starting my own firm. My mother viewed the prospect with concern. Finally, she suggested I consult the husband of one of her friends in Aschau and get his advice. This man was one of the great financial bosses in the early history of the Federal Republic. His name was Professor Wagner; he had held posts in government and was now, as far as I remember, a big wheel in the Montanunion, which eventually became the European Union. He was a man of great personal authority and a financial mover and shaker, no doubt about it. Wagner listened briefly to what I had to say, then gave me a lecture in his booming voice on the complexity of the film industry. I was surely not in my right mind; I needed to go away and study economics and probably law as well, and then learn something about the operation of finance, ideally by working in some big company. I remember the bearskins on the walls of his drawing room, trophies from hunting expeditions he’d gone on in the Carpathians with the leader of Romania. My ears were still ringing when I left. I still went ahead and founded my company. My father too had got wind of my plans. He wrote me a closely argued letter, giving me his views on the state of world cinema; was it worth getting into an industry that produced so much crap? He also told me plainly that I didn’t have the assertiveness that was required in such a line of work.
There was an institute for film and television, where I found people my own age and with a similar outlook. We were determined to support one another in our projects. The institute was a predecessor of the Munich Film Academy, and I was drawn to it because it had cameras, sound equipment, and cutting tables. If you were accepted, you were given the equipment for free, but all my applications were turned down, and I had to look on while clearly talentless individuals kept getting cameras. Not one of the people I knew there ever made it to anything, with one exception, Uwe Brandner, who started off as a musician, then made a few films, and ended up as a writer. I learned the basics about cinema in about a week from reading the thirty or forty pages on radio, film, and TV in an encyclopedia. I still think that’s about all there is to know. Studying literature won’t make you a poet; being able to type won’t either. I grasped the workings of a camera, how the film moved, what an optical soundtrack was. From there, I could deduce how to do a time lapse or slow motion. I still needed a camera, though. These were still the days of celluloid and mechanical cameras. I stole my first one. There has been a lot of talk about that, and various versions of the story are out there. I wasn’t blameless. But the deed was relatively straightforward. I was in the storeroom of the institute, where there was always someone present, working on maintenance. One day, though, I was all alone there. At first I didn’t even realize it. Then after some time, I noticed the quiet and looked around. There was a shelf that had four or five cameras on it, and I picked up one I liked the look of. Then another. I looked through the lenses. Because there was still no one around, I walked outside and tried adjusting the focus on one or two faraway objects. Then, since I was outside, it occurred to me that I might just walk off. It was a Friday. I could film all weekend and return the camera on Monday. Then, come Monday and Tuesday, I was still filming, and I ended up just keeping the camera. I don’t think the institute ever noticed. It felt to me more like expropriation than theft, or to put it differently, I was exercising a natural right to put the camera to its intended use. With it, I made my first short films: Herakles, Game in the Sand, The Unprecedented Defence of the Fortress Deutschkreutz, and Precautions Against Fanatics. The odd one out in that series is Game in the Sand. It’s about a few village boys who drag after them a rooster in a cardboard box. I never had sufficient control of that film, and it remains the only film of mine that I never allowed to be released. I learned a lot from making it. I kept the camera for a long time, but in an interview once, I babbled something about having gone on to make a lot of subsequent films with it as well. That story acquired a life of its own, as is apt to happen in the media. I did my bit too, confirming or rejecting the more colorful versions as the fancy took me.
At about that time, my brother Lucki finished school, and like my older brother, started working in a timber company. He too made a rapid ascent, but he moved to Essen, then to Northern Germany. Because he was five years younger than Till and I, he had never taken part in our soccer games and other episodes. In his time in Munich, he sang in a celebrated boys’ choir and briefly thought about going into music. At the age of nineteen, he was a little freaked out because he could see his business career so clearly mapped out ahead of him all the way to eventual retirement. So he decided to quit and see the world instead. He had a VW Beetle and planned to drive to Turkey. I urged him to be more ambitious and range farther afield, and he ended up driving from Anatolia on to Afghanistan, then over the Khyber Pass to Pakistan and India, and from there to Nepal, and finally to Indonesia, where he got a job teaching English at a private school. This, to him, was an unforgettable time of independence and adventure. However distant we were physically for large parts of our lives, he eventually joined me when I was busy with the preparations for Aguirre, the Wrath of God in Peru. From Indonesia, he came through Mexico to Lima. He became a pivotal figure in my work and enterprise, providing organization, collaboration, and initiatives. Without his intercession, I would probably never have directed an opera, and without his far-sightedness, there would not be the charitable foundation that today administers all my films and literary works. He and I complemented each other extremely well. I think he was a splendid counterbalance to me over the decades, acting strategically while I was putting out fires. I was on the front line checking all the advance outposts; he was the calm presence, cleverly pulling strings in the rear. For anyone who felt broken, hopeless, or desperate, he was always the last resort.