The bizarre reason Werner Herzog made ‘Queen of the Desert’
Queen of the Desert was German director Werner Herzog‘s first narrative film since his 2009 drama, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?. At the vanguard of New German Cinema, his movies often chart the stories of people battling nature and, indeed, fighting their own nature as they wrestle with impossible dreams and obscure careers. Queen of the Desert was a blend of all three.
Starring Nicole Kidman as Gertrude Bell, the film follows the pioneering actions of Bell, who was an English writer, traveller, political officer, and archaeologist. Alongside T.E. Lawrence, Bell helped craft today’s Iraq because of her influential hand in English foreign policy as she helped map the Middle East.
The idiosyncratic Herzog sat down with Indiewire to explain why he wanted to tell her story, saying ideas simply came to him with “great vehemence”.
“I have never planned my career thinking: ‘What should I do next?’,” he said before building a surreal metaphor. “It’s like burglars in the middle of the night. You wake up at three in the morning, and something is stirring in your kitchen. And there are five burglars. And one of them comes with great vehemence at you, so you better deal with that one first. That’s how my films come at me.”
When asked to elaborate on this burglar theory – more specifically, what made this work one of the intruders waking him up – Herzog explained it was the letters and diaries of Gertrude Bell that let him know this was a “big” project. “It was so big that I had to accept this challenge,” he said. “And the vehemence in which this great figure came at me was what decided everything.”
Herzog credits Kidman for bringing Bell’s story to life, although not all the viewers thought she was the most natural choice, at some points having to play someone far younger than her. But the age difference didn’t bother the director, who empathically said she delivered an “unprecedented” performance. “I have not seen anything like this at least in a whole decade from any actress in any film, so it’s of a phenomenal calibre,” he said.
Almost as strange as his burglar comment was his take on actors with no chemistry or texture on screen. “It’s easy to say you take a star that has a certain market value, [but] it’s not like that,” he argued. “There has to be chemistry. If there is no texture between actors, you end up with a stillborn baby.”
Ultimately, despite the high praise for Kidman’s performance, the film was not considered a commercial success. For all of Herzog’s midnight inspirations – it was a staggering financial disappointment, only grossing $2million against a $36m production budget.
