Wild Film-makers: Introduction

Article by Ian Cottage

“I am looking for people who have worked as bouncers in sex clubs or wardens in lunatic asylums. That is the spirit you have to have to be a wild Film-maker.” - Werner Herzog

The great Bavarian film director Werner Herzog recently held the Rogue Film School in London, a two day master-class on how to make low-budget feature films. The sessions which were attended by an audience of aspiring film-makers covered a number of practical topics, including forging shooting permits and picking locks. Herzog has a history of making low-budget features against the odds, working in remote corners of the world with small crews. His early features (Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970)) were shot using a 35mm camera stolen from the Munich Film School. He later went onto film Fitzcarraldo (1982), the story of a man who pulls a 320-ton ship over a hill in the Peruvian jungle to reach a different river. The film was shot using false documents signed by the President to gain access through military-controlled areas. Herzog’s pragmatic approach to film-making is typical of low budget film-making in Europe. There is long and rich history of low budgeted feature films going back to the films of Jean Vigo, Jean Renoir, Bergman and the emergence of the French New Wave, New German Cinema, Czech New Wave and the Dogme 95 movement.

What is interesting is how much this has been overlooked by aspiring film-makers in the UK who have tended to look to American independents for inspiration rather than their European counterpart.