Cheer the Idiot On!
The Right Mentor
“When I finally walked into their office I saw two men sitting behind this huge oak desk. I vividly remember the moment second by second. I stood there, totally humiliated as they looked beyond me, waiting, as if the father had come into town with his child. The first one shouted something so abusive that I wiped it from my memory while the other slapped his thigh and laughed, shouting, ‘Aha! The kindergarten is trying to make films nowadays!’ The whole encounter lasted fifteen seconds, after which I simply turned around and left the office knowing full well that I would have to be my own producer. The meeting was the culmination of many setbacks and humiliations and proved to be a pivotal point for me. I knew there and then that until the end of my days I would always be confronted by this kind of attitude if I went to others to produce my films.”
– Herzog on Herzog
A certain intuition, perhaps the witch who lovingly blessed me upon my birth, or the wrath of another witch who cursed me many years later, I cannot explain how they do but books come to me. After I endure the painful walk, they come to me at every turn. They do not want me to choose which; but the right mentor always comes to me at the right time.
CUT! CUT! No serious talk. Remember? OKAY!
Well, I have this bad habit of adding a cool ‘ji’ behind each and every name irrespective of their rank in our crew. (Abhi abhi guard ko ‘Sir ji’ kaha toh kasam se laat padney wali thhi! “Gaali deta hai be**h**d?” “Keley waley ko ‘thank you’ nahi boltey, samjhey!”) Of course, this is my less-known sense of humor. Only great people think alike, you know. They are convinced by now that I’m really acting like a newbie. So this dumbo is trying hard to dump his decency. 
Besides amusing stories, the man who rode Anurag in his Qualis during the Black Friday days, tells me I remind him of another simpleton! That Mr. Sombody was just like me (read ‘a complete fool.’) when he came to this ‘fakiri line’. But within two weeks after they first met, my friend tells me that the dude suddenly changed. No, no, this transformation had nothing to do with c-grade and alco-hole. The truth is “this ‘line’ teaches you everything.” Right now my only wish is to see my line producer relieved. I wish this line could teach him to smile every other second. We’re here to entertain, right?
They all just loved to cheer the idiot on!
“I spent a couple of weekends as a rodeo rider in charreiadas. The way it worked was that they would have three cowboys or charros in the ring who would catch the bulls, usually very fast animals. They would use lassos to bring the bull to the ground and then tie a rope around its chest. You have to squat on the animal and grab the rope while he is on the ground. They release him and immediately he explodes in rage. I have seen bulls jumping clear over a six-foot stone wall. Every single week I was injured and one time had to fix up my bad ankle one time with two rulers I got from some schoolkids. I could not even ride a horse, something that soon became patently clear to the spectators, so I appeared under the name El Alamein, which after Stalingrad was the biggest defeat of the German forces in the Second World War. They all just loved to cheer the idiot on!
One time I was in the ring with a bull who got on his feet and just stood there staring at me. I screamed, ‘Burro! You donkey!’ I can still hear the cheers of the young women in the crowd. Of course, it was pretty angry at me and tried to pin me to the stone wall. I caught my leg between the animal and the wall, and sustained an injury that was so bad I quit the job there and then. Today it all sounds quite funny and I do see it with a certain humour, but my time down there was quite banal and partially miserable too. It was ‘pura vida’ as the Mexicans say, ‘pure life’. But I thank God on my knees that after America I did not go straight back to Germany.”
Excerpts from Herzog on Herzog
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Please drink before writing!
Dude! seriously…what was that…..n Vinay u hav the most logical comment for the Guy…
At a Landmark bookstore, there were like four-five copies of Herzog on Herzog. Initially, I thought Herzog on Herzog was a bestseller. But later I realized that wasn’t the case.
All other books in this series are a hit. Only Herzog waits, but people don’t come for him. They don’t know what they could learn from him. If you know what the book is all about, you will be high anyway.
@ Salik Shah : The post is like a david dhavan film… nonsensical except this doesn’t have humor!!!! huhh….
@ Salik : on second thought, why didn’t you write in your post, what you had to comment later on…
@ Bhavesh, yeah, even I am wondering why did I try to pull of a Herzog-ian trick! Perhaps, this will make sense later on.
There are enough hints, only if you can crack it.
@ Bhavesh, thank you for at least telling me DD does this… There’s no humor in this, you’re absolutely right about it.
“I had the feeling I should be on equal terms with them — a director should not be safe and sound behind the camera while the actors are feeling all alone out there — so that same day I told them all, ‘If you all get out of this film unscathed, if you are unhurt at the end, I am going to jump in the field of cacti.’ Some of them were seven feet high. I said, ‘You can take your 8 mm cameras and I am going to do the big leap into the plant for you.’ So I put on some goggles to protect my eyes and jumped from a ramp. And I can tell you that getting out is a lot more difficult than jumping in. Any idiot can do the leap in; it takes something else to extricate yourself from something like that. The spines were the size if my fingers. I don not think I have any left embedded in me. It seems that the body absorbs them eventually.”
you still don’t make any sense!
what is your point dude?? do u stammer of what??