This week's newsletter is an exciting one. It's a topic that can span an entire book (which, indeed, it has) and still never run out of interesting moments. It’s about the swashbuckling, singular, utterly absurd, larger-than-life, "filmmaker" in every sense of the word, Werner Herzog. He is the only director to have filmed on all seven continents and across his longer than 50-year career has more than cemented his place and legacy in the world of cinema. The film critic, Roger Ebert correctly stated that Herzog "has never created a single film that is compromised, shameful, made for pragmatic reasons, or uninteresting. Even his failures are spectacular." And truly enough, each of his films is suffused with a dream-like quality yet is utterly clear about what it wants to be.
However, what I want to talk about in this edition is not his films, but his life, which itself seems far grander and more fantastical than most films out there. I was introduced to Werner Herzog's films last year during the lockdown after watching Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Family Romance, LLC. Soon after, while checking out the rest of his filmography, I also stumbled upon the book "Herzog on Herzog" by Paul Cronin, which is essentially a series of interviews with the German director spanning the length of most of his career. During these interviews, he talks about his life, philosophies, anecdotes from behind the scenes, and each one had me googling the story to see whether it actually transpired the way he said it did (spoiler alert: it did!).
He probably has the most unique and refreshing approach to life than any public figure I can think of. Here are, in no particular order, some of the most bizarre things he's ever done.
1) That Time He Ate His Shoe
No, this isn't clickbait, even though for his sake I wish it was, but the story goes like this. Back in 1979, Werner Herzog was in Berkeley dining with his friend and fellow filmmaker Errol Morris. Errol, who at the time was a graduate student, was complaining to Werner about how badly he wanted to make his film Gates of Heaven but was finding it difficult due to lack of funding from producers. Herzog, who described Errol as a very talented man that started so many projects but never finished them, said to his friend "Stop complaining about the stupidity of producers, just start with one roll of film tomorrow. And the day I see the finished work I am going to eat my shoe".
Werner Herzog, ever a man of his word, showed up to Berkeley on the film's premier, wearing the same pair of shoes he wore when he made his bet, cooked his shoe, cut it down into tiny fragments, and swallowed it down with a whole six-pack of beer. He then stood up there and said that
"Eating your shoes should be an encouragement to all of you who want to make films and who are just too scared to start".
His philosophy is that a grown-up man should eat his shoes once in a while or do certain things that make equal sense. He later said that he knew that eating a shoe wouldn't cause him any harm as he had survived so many Kentucky Fried Chickens before.
This story was the subject of a short film by Les Blank titled, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.
2) That Time He Got Shot
In another turn of events that seemed like it could only really happen to Herzog, in a 2015 interview with BBC, a random bullet strikes Werner right in the middle of an interview when he utters the words "No one cares about my films anymore". And in iconic Herzog fashion, he carries on as though nothing happened, stating that it was just "an insignificant bullet".
3) That Time He Walked From Munich To Paris
Werner Herzog is a man who loves walking, which he describes as "travelling on foot". Throughout the book he advocates for the benefits of walking and how every person who wants to be a filmmaker must walk long distances and document their journey. This particular journey, however, wasn't the result of some masochistic urge he felt like undergoing, but happened when his friend and mentor, the film critic Lotte Eisner suffered a stroke and fell ill. He refused to fly to Paris to meet her because he couldn't accept that she might die, and undertook this pilgrimage because he believed that doing so would delay her death. He says in the book
"I walked against her death, knowing that if I walked on foot she would be alive when I got there"
And by some miracle that is just what happened. Lotte lived until about the age of 90 when she was nearly blind and could not walk or read or watch films, at which point she said to him "Werner, there is still this spell cast over me that I am not allowed to die. I am tired of life. It would be a good time for me now" He jokingly agreed to take the spell away and three weeks later she passed away. He wrote about this voyage in his award-winning book "Of Walking In Ice" and claimed that his prose would outlive his films.
4) That Time He Jumped Into A Cactus
Another story of Werner being Werner. During the shooting of his 1970 film, Even Dwarfs Started Small, there was an accident on set where where a car drove around without no one at the wheel, and resulted in an actor being run over. Later on, for one of the scenes, he filled flower pots with gasoline and lighted them, resulting in the same actor catching fire. After these incidents, he felt that he should be on equal terms with them, and that "a director should not be safe and sound behind the camera while the actors are all alone", so he made a deal stating that if they all came out of the shooting unscathed, he would jump into a field of cacti to show his solidarity. He later said about the incident:
"Getting out is a lot more difficult than jumping in. Any old idiot can do the leap in; it takes something else to extricate yourself from something like that. The spines were the size of my fingers. Some are still sticking in my knee sinew. It seems the body absorbs them eventually".
5) That Time He Rescued Joaquin Phoenix From A Car Crash
In another turn of events that can only be described as "Herzogian" at this point, the Bavarian director found himself at the scene of a car crash in 2006, with none other than actor Joaquin Phoenix in the wreckage, who had apparently flipped his car and instead of climbing out, decided to light a cigarette, which would've been fine except there was gasoline all around. Herzog then proceeded to smash a window before pulling him out of the wreckage and disappearing.
6) That Time He Hypnotized A Bunch Of Chickens
Werner Herzog seems to have a very niche hatred for chickens, which he has mentioned quite emphatically in his book. In a perhaps unjust and scathing review of the birds, he says:
"Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity. The enormity of their stupidity is just overwhelming. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in this world"
(really brings more meaning to calling someone a chicken as an insult)
He claims to have hypnotized chickens for one of his films and later clarified his methods in a Reddit AMA where he told users to "put its beak on the floor, and then, with determination, draw a line of chalk away from it. Release the chicken, and you will see it will be hypnotized"
7) That Time He Threatened To Kill Klaus Kinski, And Then Himself
Directors are expected to shoot their actors, but there's the underlying assumption that said shooting must always be performed with a camera and not with, say, a gun. Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog were frequent collaborators, with Klaus having starred in 5 films directed by him. Klaus, however, was notorious for his on-set antics and was known to routinely throw fits and fly off the handle, with Herzog being one of the few directors ever capable of managing him. He even said that every gray hair on his head he calls Kinski. During the shooting of "Aguirre: the Wrath of God", Kinski seemingly lost his cool when an assistant cameraman grinned during shooting, and was all but ready to abandon the project and walk off set. Werner's account of the story is as follows:
"I went up to him, very composed... and said 'You can't do this. The movie is more important than our personal emotions... even more important than our persons and this can't be permitted. This simply will not be!' He said: 'No, I'm leaving now.' I told him I had a rifle ... there'd be eight bullets in his head and the ninth one would be in mine. He instinctively knew that this wasn't a joke anymore... he was very disciplined during the last days of shooting."
The Indians living in the Peruvian area where they were filming approached Herzog and offered to murder Kinski for him. Herzog claims he definitely considered the offer, but ultimately decided against it, because he needed him to finish the movie.
He also released a documentary titled My Best Fiend, which is a sort of retrospect about his collaboration with Klaus Kinski and their various bust-ups.
These are just stories from his personal life. His choice of characters and stories in his films and documentaries are reflective of the kind of person he is and are no less grand in scope or stature than the story of his life.
I'll end this article with Mr. Herzog's famous Minnesota Declaration, where almost exactly 22 years ago, he laid down his 12-point manifesto for documentary cinema, where he explains his theory of "ecstatic truth"
By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.
One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. “For me,” he says, “there should be only one single law; the bad guys should go to jail.” Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.
Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.
Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.
There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures of ancient ruins of facts.
Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.
Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: “You can’t legislate stupidity.”
The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.
The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn't call, doesn't speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don´t you listen to the Song of Life.
We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.
Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.
Updates this week:
I celebrated my birthday last week (24, hooray!) which was very similar to the way I spent it last year, which is to say, in lockdown, at home, and not really celebrating it anyway. Still, I am thankful to my sister for baking me a cake and making the day feel special, and to my friends for the video calls and for me getting me a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle, whose completion, hopefully I will be announcing in subsequent editions
(Shout-out to my tweet from over a year ago for manifesting this into existence)
I finally finished reading "Death's End", the third and final book of the "Three Body Problem" trilogy. If you're looking for hardcore science fiction that leaves you thinking about its possible implications long after you've finished reading it, I couldn't recommend this trilogy enough. Each of the three books was unputdownable.
Links of the Week:
Werner Herzog's Minnesota Declaration and his 6-point addendum almost 18 years later in light of the proliferation of alternative facts
Nihilist Penguin by Werner Herzog: This scene from his 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World, where he deduces that penguins too are prone to existential crises (featuring his trademark sublime voice-over)
Herzog on Herzog by Paul Cronin: The book is available for free in multiple formats on archive.org
Posts of the Week:
This comic I wrote about a particular scene from Michael Haneke's Happy End
It was Wes Anderson's birthday yesterday, so naturally it's a great time to revisit this post of all of his feature films so far (looking at you, French Dispatch)
That’s it for this week. Until next time,
Raef