Have you seen “My Son, My Son What Have Ye Done”? It’s a new Werner Herzog film that came out quite recently. I watched it over the weekend. I mostly don’t bother with DVD extras, but because I am such a geeky fan of Herzog’s I had to watch him talking about the film. One thing he said has really struck a chord…
In discussing casting, he said that a big mistake younger directors often make is to go for star names in their films without thinking about whether or not those actors will work together as a cohesive whole. He spoke about it in terms of creating an overall “texture”.
Texture’s a really helpful way of thinking about collaboration. Thinking back over the film with this notion in mind, Herzog’s idea is reflected not only the way the actors look, but also in their acting style, their speech patterns, voice tone and so on. The texture needn’t even be a comfortable one: Herzog speaks of “friction” as being as valid a texture as any other.
Looking back over my previous/ongoing collaborations, I can indeed now identify an overarching texture for most of them and it’s not something I’ve noticed before: for example, Tenneson and Dale appears to me as a cold, shiny, bright object… for some reason I am reminded of an oversized, yellow, plastic hedgehog pencil sharpener I had as a child….but I have to take this on board – colourful, playful and spiky is indeed what T&D are; it’s why we work.
Herzog’s films always make me feel uncomfortable, but it’s worth the difficulty because he makes me think about things differently, which is what I like art to do.
