24 Life Lessons for Young Architects stolen from Werner Herzog

Or why is important to get what you want out of this business as long as you can deliver the goods on budget and on time.

On the back cover of "Werner Herzog — A Guide for the Perplexed" by Paul Cronin, you'll find 24 rules from the one-and-only Werner Herzog—master of existential dread and uncanny bear anecdotes.

Werner Herzog is probably one of my favorite filmmakers, right up there with Houston, Welles, Coppola, and Tarkovsky. I also think Chloë Sevigny is a very good filmmaker, but I’m biased because my daughter Edie starred in Kitty, Sevigny’s first directorial debut, which went to Cannes.

I never liked Larry Clark’s work. He is a creep. Spielberg and Lucas are good workers but the films have never transcended the medium. THX 1138 and American Graffiti were pretty good but I prefer The Last Picture Show by Peter Bogdanovich, anything by Brian de Palma, George Miller, or Kathryn Bigelow. The Titanic Guy is okay and Avatar 1 wasn’t bad, just highly derivative. Schindler’s List is great except for one failed scene, the brief use color kills the premise.

Yeah, I wanted to be a filmmaker.

I studied film theory and history for two semesters at UCSD in the fall of 1987 and spring of 1988, French New Wave stuff, and Italian Neorealism.

The problem is I was good at the theory part but I was not a very good filmmaker, my stuff sucked. I wanted to be Antonioni or Truffaut or make the American versions of Ladri di biciclette, Le Mepris, or Stalker.

I think if I ever had made it to film school at USC or UCLA I probably would’ve ended up making something like Encino Man or Biosphere, you know that guy, maybe one of your clients who made 1990’s popcorn films, made a bunch of money and the married that blonde trophy wife from Texas, the one with the toothy grin, and the great gams, Miss America from little old Port Arthur down by Shreveport, that cute swamp thing. Yes, that wife, the one that took you to the cleaners when she figured out the scene in Los Angeles, got herself a slick Brentwood Lawyer and found herself a younger lover.

Boo hoo.

I like Jan de Bont a lot, Speed 1 is excellent.

Did you know that he grew up with Rem Koolhaas and the two of them made a go of getting to Hollywood and ended up writing for The Rockford Files and working for Roger Corman?

True story you can look it up.

I’ve always thought that Rem’s cinematic buildings are like 3D films or like architecture on Speed. I think there was a connection between that movie and Rem’s magnum opus, S, M, L, XL, for sure.

They’re both big budget, spectacular productions, and they are both easy to fast forward through, but they pack a punch, and they changed the culture.