Paul Cronin

Are you an adventurer?

Anyone who labels himself an “adventurer” today is a disgrace. I have never done anything adventurous for the sake of a film. There is a myth that I purposely make things more difficult for myself; it’s the wrongest of wrongs. I would rather have made Fitzcarraldo in the middle of Central Park, the only problem being there’s no jungle in the neighbourhood. I would have directed the film from an apartment window on Fifth Avenue, just as a few years later I would rather have made Scream of Stone in Munich, where I could have slept in my own bed. Mountaineers might be motivated to seek out the most difficult routes, but not me. I would never have finished a single film if I purposely sought out trouble. Filmmaking is difficult enough, and it’s plain bad luck I’m drawn to characters like Fitzcarraldo, whose mission is to pull a boat over a mountain. I never seek adventure. I’m not irresponsible about things. I just do my job.

There is a difference between exploration and adventure. I’m a curious person, forever searching for new images and dignified places, but though often given the contemptible tag of “adventurer,” I categorically deny the label. It applies only to men and women of earlier times, like the mediaeval knights who travelled into the unknown. The concept has degenerated since then, and today it is an ugly, pitiful embarrassment. Local mountain people, like the Sherpas, the Baltis and the Swiss, traditionally never climbed the peaks that surrounded them, thus robbing them of all dignity. They left the splendour of the mountains intact. There is a foul philosophy behind those bored English gentlemen who started climbing for the sake of it, then scampered off to make sure they were the first at the South Pole. There’s nothing that interesting about the place; it’s just water and drifting ice. The whole thing suggests dead fish – white, rotten, bloated, belly up – floating in dirty water, and since then the self-promoters have run the show. Modern-day adventurers speak about their travels in military terms, like “We conquered the summit,” or “We returned victorious over Mount Everest.” I can’t stand such talk. What a big shot you were in 1910 when you came back from Africa and told the ladies how many elephants you had killed! Do the same thing at a party today and you’ll have a glass of champagne tossed in your face.

I particularly loathe pseudo-adventurism, where the mountain climb becomes about exploring your personal limits. I had arguments with Messner about this because he stylised his media persona on the concept of “The Great Adventurer.” I’m bracing myself for the first barefoot climber on Everest or backwards sprinter through the Sahara, the kind of nonsense the Guinness Book of World Records is full of. You can even book an “adventure holiday” to see the headhunters and cannibals of New Guinea. It’s the kind of absurdity pervading the degenerate concept of “adventurism” that I find so feeble. On the other hand, I love the Frenchman who crossed the Sahara in reverse gear in a 2CV, and people like Monsieur Mangetout, who ate his own bicycle. I think he also tried to eat a twin-engine aeroplane. What a guy!

He’s dead.

Really? Ah, well. There will surely be another like him.

Of course, California is also where some of humanity’s most astonishing stupidities started, like the hippie movement, New Age babble, stretch limos, pyramid energy, plastic surgery, yoga classes for children, vitamins and marijuana smoking. Whenever someone wants to pass on “good vibes” to me, I look for the nearest empty elevator shaft. There are a lot of well-educated people doing very silly things in Los Angeles, like a man in my neighbourhood who one day casually mentioned his cat was in some sort of a frenzy, so he called the cat psychic. He put the receiver to his pet’s ear and for $200 the animal’s problems were solved. I would rather jump off the Golden Gate Bridge than visit a psychiatrist. Self-scrutiny is a strong taboo for me, and if I had to stop and analyse myself, there’s no doubt I would end up wrapped around the next tree. Psychoanalysis is no more scientific than the cranial surgery practised under the middle-period pharaohs, and by jerking the deepest secrets out into the open, it denies and destroys the great mysteries of our souls. Human beings illuminated to the last corner of their darkest soul are unbearable, the same way an apartment is uninhabitable if every corner is flooded with light. The Spanish Inquisition was a similar mistake in human history, forcing people to disclose the innermost nature of their religious faith. It did no good to anyone.

But ranting about cultural decay isn’t very useful. The poet must not avert his eyes. When you look at the cultural shifts that have taken place over the centuries in the representation of female beauty, for example, someone as uncouth as Anna Nicole Smith becomes fascinating. The earliest representations of females are small statues from forty thousand years ago, like the Venus of Willendorf, with no face but a massive belly and breasts; this is apparently an idealised version of fertility and fecundity. Greek antiquity has its own well-known Venuses, and in late-mediaeval paintings we see fragile Madonnas, with porcelain-like skin and small breasts. Rubens’s Three Graces, by comparison, are real porkers. With Anna Nicole Smith, the ideal of femininity was transformed into comic-book proportions. When combined in one person, breast enhancement, Botox and lip augmentation make for a walking art installation. However vulgar she was, there was something of great enormity and momentousness about Anna Nicole. I wish I had made a film with her.

To be a filmmaker you need to know the heart of men. [...] Rally every ounce of humanity from within. [...] Look into the deepest recesses of the soul.

The most effective response to the chaos in our lives is the creation of new forms of literature, music, poetry, art and cinema.

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