‘I immediately knew the iguana would be significant’ — Werner Herzog

Like every discussion of Werner Herzog’s new movie, this one involves the iguanas. “Everyone who has seen the film speaks about the iguanas,” says the filmmaker during a recent interview. “You are not the only one. It is literally everyone. So they must have been good.”

They are good iguanas, come to think of it. They very nearly steal The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call — New Orleans away from Nicolas Cage when the actor — giving a swinging-to-the-fences performance as Terence McDonagh, a cop injured during Hurricane Katrina who now spends his days blasted on assorted substances — has a hallucinatory encounter with the reptiles.

The scene epitomizes the spirit of lunacy that fuels the best moments of Herzog and Cage’s unorthodox take on the police procedural — which, in case you hadn’t heard, bears no relation or resemblance to Abel Ferrara’s 1992 cult fave Bad Lieutenant, besides its recycled title and unflattering portrayal of a law enforcement official. Plus, this one has iguanas.

“I love to cast animals in important roles in my movies, but there was no plan to do that here,” the 67-year-old filmmaker says. “A few days before we shot the scene, I said, ‘There has to be an iguana on the coffee table and he’s the only one who sees it, as if it was a demented vision under crack cocaine.’”

When I tell Herzog that its presence fits the moment, he disagrees. “If it only fit the moment, it wouldn’t have significance,” he says with his trademark air of Bavarian bemusement. “It wouldn’t stick to you. There’s something very, very big and significant about it — what is so significant, I can’t tell you, but I can say that everyone with whom I’ve spoken about the film immediately starts to talk about the iguanas. And the dancing soul!”

Ah, yes, the dancing soul. But let’s not get into that — we must preserve some element of surprise. And to be accurate, such instances of wiggy brilliance are not quite as abundant as they ought to be here. The rest of the movie — which concerns McDonagh’s efforts to ensnare a murderous drug kingpin played by Xzibit — is often schlocky and shambling enough for this Bad Lieutenant to be mistaken for a straight-to-video thriller that would’ve starred Armand Assante in 1986.

Even Herzog suggests the plot is somewhat irrelevant. “The crime story is uninteresting,” he says. “It’s a marginal event in the film. It’s more about an attitude of evil — or the bliss of evil, as I call it.”

As haphazard as the results may be, it’s compulsively watchable thanks to Cage’s performance and the abundance of local colour. Herzog explains that he didn’t know New Orleans at all when he arrived there before shooting the film in July of 2008. “Within three weeks I had to establish 40 locations and cast 35 speaking parts,” he says. “I was just on the run from the first day on — I could not dwell and linger. However, you can see that New Orleans has entered the film in a non-cliché way. You never see the French Quarter, you never see jazz musicians, you never see voodoo, you never see Cajuns. I avoided all the clichés. And yet the city as it is is a leading character in the film.”

While Hurricane Katrina is seldom mentioned beyond the prologue, the director notes that “the scars are still visible — and the scars are inside the human beings as well.”

Herzog recalls how the producers were “almost embarrassed” to ask him to set the film in New Orleans due to massive tax incentives, yet he was happy to embrace the opportunity. (He was less successful in his bid to change the movie’s name — he still claims never to have seen Ferrara’s film.)

Herzog also speaks of how Cage has credited the city’s influence on his performance, encouraging a certain fluidity in approach. When asked whether it was challenging to keep track of how all of the specific drugs would affect McDonagh’s behaviour, Herzog laughs. “You can’t drag me into this discussion because I’m the one who has never ever had any experience with drugs!” he exclaims. “I always had to ask Nicolas and some people on the set, ‘How does someone behave under cocaine or this or that?’ Nicolas said to me, ‘Just let me do it.’ And it looked so convincing that I thought he was really taking cocaine. I asked him, ‘Nicolas, what the hell was in this vial?’ He laughed and said it was some sort of saccharine. Of course, I had to rely on people who knew much more than I would.”

Yet it’s hard to argue that the movie glorifies drug use given how unhappy McDonagh is to see those iguanas. Indeed, I float the theory to Herzog that McDonagh’s bizarre encounter may suggest that the chemicals in his system have eroded his brain so badly, he’s tapping into his own reptile self. The director is open to all interpretations.

“Whatever you want to read into it is your privilege,” he says. “Probably the next person will read something else into it. That’s fine. That’s the nature of the movies and the beauty of what I’m doing. I immediately knew the iguana would be significant. Why, I can’t answer. But the reaction of audiences is proof.”