July 12, 2011

I’ve long considered writing a Wall of Paul piece on just how shit-crazy the acclaimed German movie director, Werner Herzog, can be when he puts his mind to it. But I’ve repeatedly discarded the idea because I’m sure many of my readers have never even heard of Herzog, and I’d be required to write a dissertation on the kinds of pictures he makes, as well as the often unhinged situations that can arise both while he makes them and while he thinks about making them.

So those of you who are big Herzog fans, please take a chill pill while I try to condense the guy’s driving obsessions into a handful of paragraphs that don’t reference every foot of film he’s ever shot. I’m far more concerned with examining the aura that surrounds Herzog, the peculiar combination of existential dread and pitch-black humor that seems to rise out of him like spiritual musk. Say what you want about his movies, there’s simply never been another filmmaker quite like Herzog, because there’s never been another human being quite like him.

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Herzog has been making movies since 1970, and, unlike most directors, he’s started cranking them out at a much faster clip in his old age (he’s now 68.) Virtually all of his many features and “documentaries” - the latter being in quotation marks because they contain secretly staged scenes that Herzog insists get at a “deeper truth” - focus on obsessive personalities, and contain morose meditations on the battle between man and nature.

The death-pall that hangs over Herzog’s work likely comes naturally to a person who was born in Munich and spent his childhood stumbling through the shattered haze of post-War Europe. The war might also be behind Herzog’s tendency to orchestrate his movie shoots as grueling, often dangerous ordeals, as if doing it the easy way (in a studio, with air conditioning, special effects, and a full cast of sane, professional actors) would be tantamount to cheating God out of the fun He gets from torturing Werner.

Understand that I’m just guessing about this stuff, and so is everybody else. It’s also possible that Herzog has no interest whatsoever in WWII, and just enjoys whacking himself in the head with a plank. Either way, I think several of his movies are fascinating, and his ability to mate arresting images with washes of vaguely unnerving indigenous music is truly masterful— there is a sort of genius about him; suffice it to say that Coppola couldn’t have envisioned “Apocalypse Now” in the manner that he did had he not seen Herzog’s “Aquirre: The Wrath of God” first. And that’s a fact.

But virtually all of Herzog’s movies contain glaringly weak passages, usually in the form of glacial pacing, script incoherence, and amateurish performances from actors in supporting roles. You get the distinct feeling, though, that Herzog would make the exact same movies then throw them in a river if nobody wanted to watch. And he’d probably film that, too.

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The only certainty about Herzog is that he’s on his own wavelength, and it generates outrageous incidents like they’re so much bratwurst. There’s simply no way for me to turn all the wacky anecdotes concerning Herzog into a narrative…which, come to think of it, is exactly the problem with many of his movies. I have no choice, then, but to relate my favorite Herzog stories in sequence, with video when I could dig some up.

I recognize there are a lot of clips here, but they’re mostly quite brief, and believe me when I say you’re in for a whackadoo treat:

1.) Herzog dove into a cactus when he twice harmed a midget.

I’ll keep this one brief, since Herzog recounts the tale quite nicely in the following clip. This one concerns an event that took place in 1970, while Herzog was filming his exceptionally nightmarish debut feature, “Even Dwarfs Started Small,” which was cast entirely with dwarfs.

That’s classic Herzog right there— dead earnestness in support of blatant crazy shit. (He was “giving them some fun,” by the way, as if there was no possibility of taking everyone bowling.)

2.) Herzog willingly made five movies with Klaus Kinski.

Klaus Kinski is to Werner Herzog as Robert De Niro is to Martin Scorsese, except that Kinski, rather than opening a restaurant down in Tribeca, was a stark-raving lunatic who repeatedly threatened to kill his director and key cast and crew members. Kinski also falsely stated in his autobiography that he slept with his actress daughter, Nastassja. She actually had to sue him when the book came out.

As convincing an actor as he could be when he was firing on all 97,000 pistons, Kinski was what the kids like to call a wild-eyed, scary, dangerous motherfucker. Not many filmmakers would even try to work with Kinski, but Herzog not only worked with him, he took him out in the jungle a couple times to shoot for months on end while an entire film crew slowly lost all hope and-or developed dysentery. Kinski died in 1991, and, eight years later, Herzog released a terrific documentary about their time together, called, rather cleverly, “My Best Fiend.” Watch it with your jaw hanging open.

Here’s Kinski during the uber-grueling, jungle-locked shoot for “Fitzcarraldo,” plying his charms on a production manager who’s obviously had enough of this ranting, self-absorbed asshole.

How’s that for a bad day at the office?

Things got so rough on “Fitzcarraldo” that Kinski attempted at one point to climb on a boat and leave the production for good. Herzog, who needed his lead actor, remedied the situation by pulling out a revolver and telling Kinski there were two bullets in it— one for Kinski and one for Herzog. Kinski later said he was utterly convinced Herzog would have killed him then turned the gun on himself. So Kinski got out of the boat.

3.) When a script called for the crashing of a huge ship, Herzog climbed on a ship and waited for it to crash.

Kinski did, too. This was also during “Fitzcarraldo,” but the crash isn’t half of it as far as the ship is concerned. The movie is based on the true story of a man whose fittingly pointless dream was to bring Caruso to the Amazon, so he attempted to build an opera house in the jungle. But he needed a ship on the other side of a mountain in order to do it, so he broke one down and forced the locals to help him drag the pieces over.

Herzog, however, didn’t think this was cinematic enough, and hates when directors use miniatures in movies. So he hired the locals to drag an entire 300-ton steam ship over a mountain side, a brutal, absurdly risky process that, along with such incidents as the Indians offering to kill Kinski and an escalating turf war between local tribes, turned the making of the film itself into a far more compelling narrative than the one in the script. Thus Les Blank’s documentary, “Burden of Dreams,” which is about the making of “Fitzcarraldo” and is far more intense than “Fitzcarraldo” itself!

Let’s watch that ship get banged-up now, shall we?

I’m no expert, but it seems like there would be a better way of doing that.

4.) Herzog was shot during a TV interview.

This is self-explanatory. A British TV crew was trying to get a word in with Herzog in the Hollywood Hills, when, because he’s Herzog, crazy shit happened. Right there on camera.

It just wasn’t a significant bullet.

There comes a point with Herzog where you have to wonder if there’s some weird Andy Kaufman thing going on. Could he have possibly had someone shoot him for no good reason? He’s made entire movies for no good reason, and their filming probably hurt more than merely digging a pellet out of his gut, so let’s assign that one a “maybe.”

5.) Herzog stopped Joaquin Phoenix from blowing himself up, and he doesn’t even know Joaquin Phoenix.

Once again, here it is, in Herzog’s own words.

Just think— if it hadn’t been for Herzog, the world never would have gotten “I’m Still Here.” There’s even a streak of darkness in Herzog’s heroism.

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6.) Herzog hypnotized his cast for one of his movies.

“Heart of Glass” is about an 18th century Bavarian village that makes its money by blowing and selling a particularly impressive type of ruby-colored glass. But the man who held the secret to this process suddenly dies, and the rest of the villagers collapse into madness now that they have no way to earn a living.

In order to make his actors appear to be wholly unmoored, truly lost in their despair, Herzog had a hypnotist put the cast under a spell before each scene, then allowed the actors to generate their own rhythm while he filmed. As a movie, this is often close to unwatchable— the last thing Herzog needs is a bunch of sleepwalkers telling him to slow it down. However, as the single weirdest experiment ever performed by a major filmmaker, it’s endlessly absorbing.

In the following action sequence, two men make their dislike for each other known over a couple of beers.

And here’s a farmhand stumbling upon the corpses of the same two characters.

Herzog, I’m sure you’ll be surprised to learn, has never shot a Beyoncé video.

7.) Werner Herzog ate his shoe.

As ridiculous as it sounds, this is easily verifiable, because Blank made a short documentary called “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.” In it, we see Herzog boiling his shoe with lots of garlic and other spices, in preparation for chowing down on it in front of a film class at UCLA. He did this “because” (there’s no real reason to do this) he told his friend, Errol Morris, who at that point had never made a film, that if Morris would finally shoot the documentary he had long planned, Werner would…you know…eat his shoe.

Then Morris made the movie (it was the much-heralded “Gates of Heaven,” if you wondering.) We’ll let Werner take it from there.

The Barefoot Contessa’s got nothing on this guy.

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So there you have it, and I'm certain Herzog doesn't care what we think.

However, if you’re now interested in Herzog the tortured artist, but haven’t seen any of his pictures, I’d suggest starting with “My Best Fiend,” then jump into “Aquirre: The Wrath of God,” “Fitzcarraldo,” and maybe “Nosferatu the Vampyre,” in which Kinski delivers the most horrifying “dying vampire” scene in the now-extensive cinematic history of dying vampires. It ain’t “Twilight,” that’s for sure.

Paul Tatara