I don’t see the things that fascinate me as esoteric. They are all bound up with fundamental questions about our identity; the twins would be one example that runs counter to our assumption that all individuals are unique. The reading of the world, the reading of signs like Linear B, is only seemingly exclusive because it’s so restricted. What does my average day look like? Who are my friends? What sort of life do I lead? I have trouble describing myself because I have a vexed relationship with mirrors. I look in the mirror when I shave so I don’t cut myself, but that shows me my jawline, not my person. To this day, I couldn’t tell you what color my eyes are. Introspection, navel-gazing, is not my thing. But some daily things are known to me and I could name them. Like Freda and Greta, I have an uncompromising spatial sense vis-à-vis other people. I notice that especially when I have many people looking at me. In public events, I can speak and argue clearly only when the person I am speaking with is on my right. If he or she were on my left, I would continually feel as if I were craning my neck. It’s the same in the cinema. If I’m seeing a film with someone, they have to be right of me, otherwise watching something on screen together would be a torment. I see best when I’m placed slightly left of center, at a slight rightward angle, in other words. Admittedly, I don’t go to the cinema much, no more than three or four times a year.
I live in Los Angeles. Lena and I had to decide where we would live in the United States, and the answer was clear right away—in the city with the most substance. LA is associated with the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, but it’s in LA that the internet was born, and all the big painters are no longer in New York but here, same with the writers, the musicians, the mathematicians. The number of Mexicans has greatly enlivened writing and music. Electric cars are being designed here; reusable rockets are built on the southern outskirts of the city. The mission control center for a number of space enterprises is just north of Los Angeles in Pasadena. A lot of banal phenomena are from here as well: aerobic studios, inline skating, weird sects. I could go on.
Los Angeles has its dark sides too. Once, while I was being interviewed by the BBC, I was shot at and slightly wounded in front of the camera. To me, it felt like a bit of local folklore. A few days later, I rescued Joaquin Phoenix, who had happened to crash on the highway right in front of me, from his upside-down car. I think he was in withdrawal and presumably shouldn’t have been driving. Hanging upside down between fully inflated airbags, he refused to hand me the lighter he was trying to light his cigarette with. He didn’t notice that there was gas leaking everywhere. I never mentioned it, and only when Joaquin reported it in the media did I confirm it.
I’m a slow reader because I often depart from the text in front of me to picture scenes and situations and only then return to the words on the page. There are some books, like Thomas Bernhard’s Walking, that took me two weeks to get past the first paragraph. The opening lines of that book are so stupendous that I never got over my amazement. I can really only read lying down. Presumably that’s to do with the way that when I was growing up with my mother and brothers there was never space at the table for me to read, but there was lots of room on the floor with my head on a cushion. I work briskly, without endless retakes. My shooting days are usually over by 3 or 4 p.m., even though I could go on until 6 p.m. I can’t remember ever doing overtime. I deeply dislike night shoots because I’m not a night owl. I write my screenplays once I can see the entire film in front of me, and I’ve rarely taken more than a week to complete one. I don’t need silence or special conditions; I can write on a crowded bus or surrounded by noisy children in a playground. The screenplay as a literary form has always been important to me. My screenplay for Cobra Verde begins in the heat and drought of the sertão in Brazil: “The light garish, lethal; the sky without birds; the dogs lie vanquished by heat. Demented with anger, metallic insects sting glowing stones.” It’s not your traditional filmscript.
I like to sleep in whenever I can. I have no dreams. Some people may tell you that everyone dreams for so and so many hours and minutes per night, but I’m living proof to the contrary. No matter how I’m woken up, I wasn’t dreaming. I dream maybe once a year, then always banally, that I had a sandwich for lunch, for instance. I do have daydreams when I’m hiking. I walk entire novels sometimes but never go off course. Sometimes, when I wake up, I feel bad that I didn’t dream, and maybe that’s why I compensate by making films. When I was growing up, I had some wild episodes of sleepwalking. I was in a big army tent stuffed with cots because the youth hostel was overcrowded, and I shook my brother Till awake, telling him that he needed to pole the barge on the Neusiedler See. He then shook me back so hard that I awoke. It was pitch-dark, and I was still up to my chest in my sleeping bag, bopping around aimlessly because I didn’t know where my sleeping place was. I woke up the sleepers by banging into their beds. Sometimes I had similar episodes in later life as well. I have never taken drugs. The culture of drugs has always repelled me. I also believe they wouldn’t have done me any good; there’s so much turmoil inside me anyway.
I avoid contact with fans. Occasionally, I watch trash TV because I think the poet shouldn’t avert his eyes. I want to know what others aspire to. I’m a good but limited cook. My steaks are excellent, but they’ll never touch what you can get on any street corner in Argentina. Tree huggers are suspicious to me. Yoga classes for five-year-olds—which in California are a thing—are suspicious to me. I don’t use social media. If you see my profile anywhere there, you can be sure it’s a fake. I don’t use a smartphone. I never quite trust the media, so I get a truer picture of the political situation by going to multiple sources—the Western media, Al Jazeera, Russian TV, and occasionally by downloading the whole of a politician’s speech. I trust the Oxford English Dictionary, which is one of mankind’s greatest cultural achievements. I mean the one in twenty massive volumes with six hundred thousand entries and more than three million quotations culled from all over the English-speaking world and over a thousand years. I reckon thousands of researchers and amateur helpers spent 150 years combing through everything recorded. For me, it is the book of books, the one I would take to a desert island. It is inexhaustible, a miracle. The first time I visited Oliver Sacks on Wards Island northeast of Manhattan, I had mislaid the house number but knew the name of the little street. It was evening, wintertime; the slightly sloping street was icy. I parked and tiptoed along the icy pavement looking into every lit-up home. None of the windows had curtains. Through one window I saw a man sprawled on a sofa with one of the hefty volumes of the OED propped on his chest. I knew that had to be him, and so it was. Our first subject was the dictionary; for him as well, it was the book of books.
There is perhaps only one other candidate when it comes to the desert island: the Florentine Codex in the English translation by Arthur Anderson and Charles Dibble. When the Spanish invaders laid waste to the Aztec Empire, there was one single man who tried to rescue as much as he could of the dying civilization. His name was Bernardino de Sahagún, a Franciscan monk. He ordered that everything known about the history, religion, agriculture, medicine, and education of the Aztecs was to be collected. The texts were in Nahuatl but were assembled in bilingual form, with one column in the original and one in Spanish translation. I was allowed to take the codex in my hands in the Laurentian Library in Florence and record a few pages of it for my film The Lord and the Laden. The English translators, Anderson and Dibble, were two wonderful scholars at the University of Utah. Utah is a center of research into pre-Hispanic culture because the Mormons believe the Aztecs are one of the lost tribes of Israel. Their text has the force and power of the King James Bible. At that time, I had an unfinanceable project on the conquest of Mexico seen from the point of view of the Aztecs, and for that, I had studied the basics of classical Nahuatl with a grammar book and a dictionary. I went on a pilgrimage to Salt Lake City to see Charles Dibble, who was then eighty-four and retired. Professor Anderson had already died. Dibble, who was a wonderful, quiet, profound gentleman, was surprised to have been sought out by a German filmmaker who was in awe of his work. The Florentine Codex appeared in a bilingual Nahuatl and English edition of twelve volumes from the University of Utah Press after thirty years of work. In the course of our one long day together, we became friends, though we never saw each other again. Charles Dibble died shortly after our meeting.