Short Visits with Three European Masters

Abstract

The body of this chapter is made up of three interviews conducted at the New York Film Festival with major European filmmakers. The French director, Eric Rohmer, discusses his medieval-set Perceval, based on a 12th century poem about King Arthur and the Round Table. Rohmer explains that he wanted to do this film as if cinema existed in the Middle Ages. The German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder talks of his screen adaptation of Nabokov’s Despair, a story of a man who is convinced he has met in the streets his living doppelganger. Fassbinder decided to set his film in the Weimar Republic with Nazis in the background, and concedes that there is a “homoerotic” motif in his movie. The German director Werner Herzog discusses his Nosferatu the Vampyr, a remake of the famous silent. He speaks of other earlier Dracula movies, not always with approval, but admits that he is not a committed filmgoer. “Herzog is my reference,” he says.