Like every discussion about Werner Herzog’s new movie, the one we’re having involves the iguana too.
“Everyone who has seen the film speaks about the iguana,” says the filmmaker during an interview last TIFF. “You are not the only one. It is literally everyone. So it must have been good.”
It is a good iguana, come to think of it. It nearly steals Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans away from Nicolas Cage when the actor — in a swinging-for-the-fences performance as Terence McDonagh, a cop injured during Hurricane Katrina who now spends his days blasted on assorted substances — has a hallucinatory encounter with the reptile. The scene epitomizes the spirit of lunacy that fuels the best moments of Herzog and Cage’s unorthodox take on the police procedural — which, in case you hadn’t heard, bears no relation or resemblance to Abel Ferrara’s 1992 cult fave Bad Lieutenant besides its recycled title and unflattering portrayal of a law enforcement official. Plus, this one has an iguana.
“I love to cast animals in important roles in my movies but there was no plan to do that here,” says the 67-year-old filmmaker. (The best moment in the other new feature he presented at TIFF — My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? — happens to involve an ostrich.) “A few days before we shot the scene, I said, ‘There has to be an iguana on the coffee table and he is the only one who sees it, as if it was a demented vision under crack cocaine.’ ”
When I tell Herzog that its presence fit the moment, he disagrees. “If it only fit the moment, it wouldn’t have significance,” he says with his trademark air of Bavarian bemusement. “It would not stick to you. There is something very, very big and significant about it — what is so significant, I cannot tell you, but I can say that everyone with whom I’ve spoken about the film immediately starts to talk about the iguana. And the dancing soul!”
Ah, yes, the dancing soul. But let’s not get into that — we must preserve some element of surprise. Actually, such instances of wiggy brilliance are not quite as abundant as they ought to be here. The rest of the movie, which concerns McDonagh’s efforts to ensnare a murderous drug kingpin played by Xzibit, is often schlocky and shambling enough for this Bad Lieutenant to be mistaken for a straight-to-video thriller that would’ve starred Armand Assante in 1986.
Even Herzog suggests the plot is somewhat irrelevant. “The crime story is uninteresting. It is a marginal event in the film. It is more about an attitude of evil — or the bliss of evil, as I call it.”
As haphazard as the results may be, it’s compulsively watchable thanks to Cage’s performance and the abundance of local colour. Herzog explains that he didn’t know New Orleans when he arrived there before shooting the film in July of 2008. “Within three weeks I had to establish 40 locations and cast 35 speaking parts,” he says. “I could not dwell and linger. However, you can see that New Orleans has entered the film in a non-cliché way. You never see the French Quarter, you never see jazz musicians, you never see voodoo. And yet the city is a leading character in the film.”
While Hurricane Katrina is seldom mentioned beyond the prologue, the director notes that “the scars are still visible — and the scars are inside the human beings as well.”
Herzog recalls how the producers were “almost embarrassed” to ask him to set the film in New Orleans due to the massive tax incentives, yet he was happy to embrace the opportunity. (He was less successful in his bid to change the movie’s name: he still claims never to have seen Ferrara’s film.)
While Cage has credited the city’s influence on his performance, the director stresses that Cage was not entirely possessed by the spirit of jazz. “It was always embedded in the very clear structure of a situation,” he says.
Yet when the situation involves a lead character with an inexhaustible appetite for pills and powders, clarity is not necessarily possible.
“You can’t drag me into this discussion because I am the one who has never ever had any experience with drugs!” Herzog laughs. “I always had to ask Nicolas and people on the set, ‘How does someone behave under cocaine?’ Nicolas looked so convincing that I thought he was really taking cocaine. I asked him, ‘Nicolas, what the hell was in this vial?’ He laughed and said it was some sort of saccharine.”
Herzog says he wasn’t interested in using the film to show the moral implications of drug abuse. “The film shows how appalling it is, but I personally do not like the culture of drugs. I said, ‘Let’s limit it to the necessities of the story.’”
I float the theory that McDonagh’s bizarre encounter with the iguana suggests that the chemicals have eroded his brain so badly, he’s tapping into his own reptile self.
“Whatever you want to read into it is your privilege,” he says. “That is the nature of the movies and the beauty of what I am doing. I knew the iguana would be significant. Why, I cannot answer. But the reaction of audiences is proof.”