Werner Herzog’s My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done focuses on a young man who kills his mother while two of the main actors, Chloe Sevigny and Michael Shannon, above, play out a difficult relationship. Werner Herzog’s My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done focuses on a young man who kills his mother while two of the main actors, Chloe Sevigny and Michael Shannon, above, play out a difficult relationship.
The screenplay for the film on Mark Yavorsky took four and a half days to write, reports Philippa Hawker.
HERBERT Golder is a professor of classics at Boston University, and since the 1980s, he's also been a friend of the director Werner Herzog. As a long-time admirer of his films, he had thought about writing a book on him. When they met and talked for a while, Golder recalls: "Herzog said, 'Forget about the book, you're destined to make films, so start working with me today'.''
So Golder went to Frankfurt to record the cry of the hammer thrower at the German national athletics championships for a film called Les Gaulois. It was the first of nine Herzog films he has worked on in various capacities, from assistant director to researcher to actor.
In My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, which screens at the ACMI then has a season at Cinema Nova, he wrote the script with Herzog. It is a strange and haunting movie that grew out of Golder's longtime fascination with the story of Mark Yavorsky, a young man who had played the role of Orestes in a production of Aeschylus's Oresteian trilogy and taken the same dreadful step his character was compelled to take - he had killed his own mother.
It's a work of surprising quietness, in the face of its subject matter and heady combination of elements. There is murder and a hostage drama, flashbacks that take place in Peru and Kashgar and at an ostrich farm, there are scenes from Greek drama and the sound of a recurrent gospel song. Udo Kier, making his first appearance in a Herzog film, plays a theatre director. Chloe Sevigny is the man's bewildered fiance, Willem Dafoe a considerate police officer.
Golder heard the story at a drama conference many years ago and used a private detective to track Yavorsky down. He found him living in a rooming house in San Diego and wrote him a letter asking if they could talk. He said he was not coming from a clinical or law enforcement perspective but from that of a student of the Oresteia. "I was especially interested in the poetry of his madness," he said.
Golder spent many years speaking to Yavorsky and people who knew him. Herzog became convinced that they could make a film and that they could write it quickly. They went to a house in the Austrian countryside: Herzog set a week's deadline and within 4½ days they had their screenplay.
Brad, the troubled young man - played with a striking mixture of recessive and authoritative intensity by Michael Shannon - is not closely modelled on Yavorsky. The man Golder recalls was "a published poet, an award-winning actor, with a prodigious IQ", who could be "riveting, even mesmerising" to talk to. After the murder, he had been in a maximum security institution for the criminally insane for seven years, before being released into a halfway house. He wanted to avoid being medicated and kept under observation so he went on the run. When the police caught up to him, 18 months later, he'd been about to start a job as the opening act at a stand-up comedy club.
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done is, to Golder, a story about a gifted young man who is overcome by "what he perceives as the artificiality and superficiality of the world around him and he finds instead a much more intense world of myth. But instead of being apotheosised by the latter, he falls tragically between the cracks". This is, he says, in essence "true to Mark's story", even if the details don't correspond.
"The story of Orestes is a very problematic one, even for the Greeks," Golder says. "It's both the founding myth of Athenian justice, but there's always a very pervasive sense that the shadow cast by the story is one that humanity never quite crawls out from. So even to the Greeks, it's a story about redemption, but it's tinged with madness."
And to him, Herzog's works are clearly linked to Greek tragedy. "His films are man in extremis. Extreme power, extreme pain, extreme degradation, extreme solitude, extreme courage, extreme daring. Those are the kinds of conversations we had; we were speaking the same language, even though he was talking about Stroszek and I was talking about Sophocles."
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, ACMI, August 19-22, then at Cinema Nova from August 25.