10 legendary moments of Werner Herzog

By Dr. Garth Twa
21 August 2014

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Werner Herzog is a mystic, a provocateur, a madman who’s seeking ‘certain utopian things… landscapes not yet offended, planets that do not exist yet, dreamed landscapes.’ His films explore the boundaries of human endurance and are less films than grueling rites of passage he sets for himself. ‘It’s not worth it,’ he said, ‘if you don’t just about die making it.’

Grizzly Man

(2005)—At one point, Timothy Treadwell turns on his camera, and exits the frame in order to make an entrance. Herzog uses this footage. Indeed, it is the essence. When the camera is left unattended, Herzog’s voices comes in, ‘Look at the grass,’ he tells us, movement that wasn’t planned, or even seen, by the director, but footage that had nothing to do with the maker’s presence or intention, ‘This is pure cinema.’ A Herzog moment more Herzog than anything he’d actually filmed.

Heart of Glass

(1976)—A film about a town whose specialty is making ruby-coloured glass, but when the only man who knows the secret of its creation dies, the town is thrown into despairing madness. It was shot in Wyoming, Alaska, Utah, Bavaria, Switzerland, and the Skellig Islands, and every morning before shooting Herzog hypnotized (yes, HYPNOTIZED) the entire cast. He did it, he said, to get that ‘magical view of reality to mirror that of the middle ages.’

Fitzcarraldo

(1982)—For this story of a quixotic effort to bring culture to the heathens, the titular hero attempts to introduce opera to the Amazonian Indians by hauling a 340-ton riverboat over a mountain. Instead of using false fronts, or miniatures, or fiberglass, Herzog insisted on hauling an actual ship over a mountain, leaving a swath of severely wounded natives in its path.

Phoenix from the flames

When Joaquin Phoenix span off the road and flipped his car, there was a knock on the window to see if he was ok. “Just relax” said the man. Phoenix replied “I am relaxed”. The man said “No you’re not” and pointed out that gasoline was leaking from the vehicle. The man confiscated the lighter and crushed the back window to get Phoenix out. The man was, of course, Werner Herzog. Recalling the experience later, Phoenix said “I got out of the car and I said thank you…and he was gone.”

Cactus Needles In the Knee

During the filming of Even Dwarves Started Small (1970), a fable about an abortive revolt at a correctional facility with a cast entirely made up of dwarves and midgets, Herzog accidentally set one of the dwarves on fire. In order to make amends, he threw himself into a large cactus. Needles, he says, are still embedded in the cartilage of his knee.

The Miracle of Lotte Eisner

Lotte Eisner was a critic who was indispensible in her support of the young filmmakers of the New German Cinema (notably, Herzog, Wenders, Fassbinder, and Kluge). When she fell ill in Paris, Herzog knew that he had to walk from Munich to Paris, with a copy of his latest film, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, under his arm in order to cure her. When he arrived, she had gotten better.

‘It was not a significant bullet’

During an external shot in the Hollywood hills for an interview, Mark Kermode and Herzog were cut short, mid-sentence, by a sharp whizz, the sound of a bullet. ‘Well,’ Herzog said, ‘actually it’s not really very friendly towards filmmaking.’ They drove back to Herzog’s home and, when Kermode brought it up, Herzog only laughed: ‘It was not a significant bullet.’ Kermode insisted he check to see if he had a wound, and Herzog lifted up his shirt. There was blood and a hole. Kermode flipped out, Herzog was blasé; ‘It’s not an everyday thing,’ he said, ‘but I’m not surprised to be shot at.’

La Soufrière

(1977)—For this documentary Herzog travelled to the island of Guadeloupe on the news of an impending volcano. The island is evacuated, except for one peasant who refuses to leave. And Herzog and his camera team. Instead of seeking safe shelter he travels to lip of the caldera to get close shots of the sulfurous steam and, with luck, the eruption and end of the island. Contrary to scientific predictions, the volcano did not erupt.

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe

(Les Blank, 1980)—Herzog made a bet with documentary filmmaker Errol Morris that if he, Morris, ever finished his film (Gates of Heaven) he would eat his shoe. Morris finished the film, and Herzog ate his shoe. On stage. And not just any shoe—that would be cheating—but one of the heavy boots he wore in the Andean mountains when he was filming Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972).

Klaus Kinski

Not even all of the previous moments combined could compare with Herzog’s internecine relationship with his greatest collaborator, Klaus Kinski, possibly the only man who could ever make Herzog look sane. On Aguirre, Wrath of God, Kinski arrived in the Peruvian rainforest having just come off of his ‘Jesus Tour,’ where he wouldn’t act Jesus, but was Jesus, and repeatedly smote his audience. He refused to get out of character, and hurt the Indian extras, viciously attacking one with a sword, and shooting off another’s finger. On the set of Fitzcarraldo, Kinski tried to walk off the film, even though he was in the middle of the equatorial rainforest, and Herzog directed him for the rest of movie from behind the barrel of gun he kept pointed at his head. ‘He exaggerates,’ Herzog says of Kinski’s claims of danger, ‘the gun wasn’t loaded.’ On another occasion Herzog tried to firebomb his house after Kinski had called him a talentless, incompetent madman in his autobiography, but was stopped by Kinski’s Alsatian.