For a feature film project that was offered to me, a movie that was based on J. M. Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians, we were together hunting for locations in Kashgar in the autonomous region of Xinjiang in China; from there, we went into the mountains, heading toward the clustered borders of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. I wanted to look farther in the Hindu Kush and the northern Pamirs. There, in Tajikistan, I had once played the role of a fanatical prophet in Peter Fleischmann’s science fiction film Hard to Be a God (1989) who is killed off after twenty minutes, treacherously murdered by a spear. I quickly had a good understanding with Coetzee, but the finances for the film never came together. Since that time, everything to do with Kashgar and the situation of the Uyghurs has deteriorated rapidly, but in those days, there was still a weekly market attended by 200,000 Uyghurs from all around. It was like a thousand years ago on the Silk Road, bearded men speaking a Turkic language, Muslims in long robes and fur hats. I remember one little section of the bustling market where some three thousand men were selling nothing but roosters; every man had one under his arm. I remember a completely hopeless traffic jam of eight hundred donkey carts, everything tangled up with everything else and the donkeys braying. I remember how, as though on a signal, a crowd parted and a long lane opened up and a splendid horse came galloping in my direction ridden by a barefoot six-year-old with no saddle. The horse reared up in front of me as if at some ghostly phenomenon, turned on its rear hooves, and galloped away again. The lane closed up like a sea after it had been parted. The horse was snapped up on the spot. For my film My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, I went back to Kashgar for a dream sequence with Lena and my lead, Michael Shannon. In a dream, Michael’s character finds himself completely at sea in some strange past life. He walks through a crowded livestock market, and everyone, absolutely everyone, turns to stare at him as though he were an apparition from another world. We fixed a large wooden breastplate to Michael’s upper body with three arm’s-length tripod legs mounted on it that radiated out from him. On them was a camera focused on his face. As he walked through the crowd, I was completely confident that everyone he walked past would turn to look at him. Michael was fully in agreement with this improvised scene in the exotic location provided I stayed with him at all times. Since we had neither a work permit nor permission to film, which, given the political situation there, we would have stood zero chance of getting, Michael didn’t want to be arrested on his own, but if it had to be, then he wanted to be arrested with me. It seemed a reasonable wish to me.
Outside the huge market area was a broad entrance gate with a strong presence of Han Chinese police. We decided to go up to the police and through their ranks just as we were, with that bizarre structure on Michael’s chest. I had learned that from Philippe Petit, who had learned his trade on the streets of New York as a tightrope walker, juggler, and magician. When the World Trade Center was almost finished, he had brought in some equipment under some canvas sheeting for tightening his wire and was on his way back down the stairs with a coconspirator—the elevators weren’t hooked up yet. It was three in the morning, and suddenly he heard a squad of security police going up the stairs toward them. Then, on an impulse, he did exactly the right thing. He accelerated and started calling out his collaborator, cursing him for his shoddy work, so irresponsible, not up to scratch, he would sue him for nonperformance, he demanded damages. The four-man security party pressed themselves against the walls and allowed the furious shouter to pass. I didn’t start yelling at Michael in Kashgar, but we did go up to the very kernel of the police, and I was talking animatedly in my Bavarian dialect at an imaginary person on the other side of the police cordon because you must never make eye contact, and I asked into the imaginary distance if anyone had seen my friend Hartmut. Here too the officials stood aside and we were able to do our work. Any attempt to avoid them would have aroused their suspicion, but drill into them—this is almost a kind of law of groupthink—and each person tends to think that if there was anything amiss someone else would intervene, so in the end, no one does.
The fact that I dared to take out the diaries I kept during Fitzcarraldo is again something for which I have Lena to thank. There are several notebooks where my script, which is usually normal size, grew smaller and smaller and finally microscopic. It can now only be deciphered through a jeweler’s eyepiece. Also, I wanted to keep some distance from this very difficult time in my life. Four or five years after the events that occurred between 1979 and 1981, I opened my records and transcribed maybe thirty pages of them, but it was terrible to confront all that again, and I was convinced I would never touch it again. More than two decades later, though, Lena said to me that it was time to think about those notes again as they did exist, otherwise some idiot would get to work on them when I was no longer around. After hesitating for a while, I thought I’d at least try to look at them again, and all of a sudden, it was easy. All the upset, all the oppressiveness, was gone. That went to make my book Conquest of the Useless. Similarly, again many years later, and in response to Lena’s urging, I went back to my accounts of my meetings with Hiroo Onoda. That gave me The Twilight World. What I am writing now also proceeds from Lena’s encouragement. My most unusual work, called Hearsay of the Soul, I made in 2012 for the Whitney museum in New York. This was a spatial installation with several projections of prints by Hercules Seghers with music by Ernst Reijseger, who has collaborated with me on many recent films. One of the Museum’s curators called me to ask about possibly contributing to the upcoming Biennal, but I refused right away, because I have problems with contemporary art. “Why?” the curator asked me. I referred broadly to the art market and its manipulations and its preference for conceptual art over actual exhibits, but the curator refused to be shaken off so easily. Would I not be interested as an artist? I said that I didn’t think of myself as an artist and that this term was better applied to pop singers and circus performers. If I wasn’t an artist, then what was I? I said I was a soldier and hung up. Lena, in the room with me, asked what that was about and reminded me that I had a whole series of projects that were neither films nor books but a kind of “interzone” between other forms. She was right, and I called the Whitney back the next day.