Werner Herzog and the Insignificant Bullet

He may or may not be crazy, but he sure is entertaining.

By now, millions of Americans are aware of the often comically grim German filmmaker Werner Herzog without having seen any of the pictures he’s directed, and they’re probably better off that way. Herzog’s work is not for everyone, to say the least. That would go double for those 21st-century film buffs who only know him as the nemesis of Baby Yoda in The Mandalorian.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a lunchbox or a set of bedsheets with images depicting Where the Green Ants Dream or My Son, What Have Ye Done on them. That sort of thing has nothing whatsoever to do with Herzog’s goals as a director.

If Herzog were to invent a knock-knock joke, he’d wait for the knock, then enter into a monotone discourse on the death shrieks of rhesus monkeys. He’s just too unremittingly German, in the “post-war guilt” definition of the word, for most people to take.

But somewhere along the line, Herzog realized he could finally make some money by playing an over-the-top version of himself on TV and letting everyone snicker at him, if that’s what they want to do.

He has, in effect, become a much darker version of William Shatner, although, thankfully, he took a pass on the lousy toupee.

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Say what you want about Herzog’s movies, good or bad, but a unique combination of Teutonic dread and pitch-black humor rises from him like a rancid spiritual musk.

He’s been making pictures since 1970, and, unlike most directors, he started cranking them out at a much faster clip in his old age (he’s now 82). Virtually all of his many features and “documentaries”—he” often inserts fictional scenes into them without telling anyone he’s done it—focus on obsessive personalities and contain morose meditations on the battle between man and nature.

World War II might also be behind Herzog’s tendency to orchestrate his movie shoots as soul-sapping ordeals, as if doing it in an air-conditioned studio with a full cast of sane, professional actors like everyone else does would be tantamount to cheating God out of the fun He gets from torturing Werner.

On the other hand, it could be that Herzog just enjoys whacking himself in the head with a plank.

Virtually all Herzog movies contain glaringly weak passages, usually in the form of downright glacial pacing, script incoherence, and amateurish performances from actors in supporting roles. Still, his third film, 1972’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, is a certifiable dreamlike masterpiece, one of the greatest films ever made, and Herzog’s work consistently benefits from his ability to mate arresting imagery with washes of unnerving music.

You get the feeling that if literally nobody wanted to watch Herzog’s movies, he’d shoot them anyway, painstakingly edit them, and toss them in a river. Then he’d move on to making the next one.

The only certainty about Herzog is that he’s on his own wavelength, and it very much permeates his day-to-day life. Outrageous stories about him abound.

There’s simply no way for me to turn all the wacky anecdotes concerning this guy into a coherent 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 videos to illustrate, when I could dig some up for you.

I recognize there are a lot of clips here, but they’re mostly quite brief, and believe me when I tell you they’re worth watching.

1. Herzog purposefully jumped into a large cactus when he twice harmed a dwarf.

That’s classic Herzog right there—dead earnestness in support of blatantly crazy shit. (Note that he was just “giving them some fun,” as if there was no possibility of taking everyone bowling).

2. Herzog chose to make five movies with Klaus Kinski, who was totally, 100% bonkers. Herzog recounts the tale quite nicely in the following clip. This one concerns an event that took place while he was filming his surreal, nightmarish debut feature, Even Dwarfs Started Small, which, for some reason, was cast entirely with dwarfs.

Klaus Kinski is to Werner Herzog as Robert De Niro is to Martin Scorsese, except Kinski, rather than getting fat and opening a restaurant down in Tribeca, was a stark-raving lunatic who repeatedly threatened to kill his directors, not to mention occasional journalists, extras, and crew members, then dropped dead from a heart attack one day.

As convincing an actor as he could be when he was firing on all 97,000 pistons, Kinski was also a very frightening human being, bouncing as he did between bouts of megalomania—he once went on a speaking tour during which he seriously claimed to be an abusive reincarnation of Jesus Christ—and screaming wild-eyed profanities at anyone who got too close to him or asked him outrageous questions like, “Can I get you a glass of water?”

All things considered, Kinski had a surprisingly lengthy career, but it didn’t take too long for directors to learn what they were getting themselves into if they hired him, which is how he made the trajectory from David Lean’s Dr. Zhivago in 1965 to Will Tremper’s The Naughty Cheerleader in 1970.

But Herzog not only worked with Kinski; he actually took him out in the Amazon a couple of times to shoot for months on end while an entire film crew cowered from Kinski, slowly lost all hope, and/or developed dysentery.

Kinski died in 1991, which surely engendered some relief for his agent. 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 asshole. (Sorry about the poor quality of this clip, but it was the only one I could find. You’ll certainly get the idea).

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 badly 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 shot him dead and then turned the gun on himself.

So, reconnecting with his senses for once, Kinski got out of the boat.

3. When a script called for the crashing of an old steamship, Herzog climbed onboard an old steamship 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 Carlos Fermin Fitzcarrald, a rubber baron whose fittingly pointless Herzogian dream was to bring Caruso to the Amazon; thus, he attempted to build an opera house deep in the jungle. Fitzcarrald needed a ship on the other side of a mountain in order to do it, which led to him breaking one down and coercing Indian tribesmen to help him drag it over the mountain in pieces.

He never managed to build his opera house, let alone convince Caruso to drag his chassis all the way out to the Amazon to perform in it.

Herzog, of course, didn’t think this was cinematic enough, and he hates when directors use miniatures in movies. So he hired indigenous extras for pennies a day to drag an entire 320-ton steamship over a mountainside, a brutal, absurdly risky process that turned the making of the film into a far more compelling narrative than the one in the actual script.

And that’s not even counting the violent turf war between a couple of tribes that kept interrupting the shoot, some tribesmen thoughtfully offering to kill Kinski for Herzog, and a guy who was bitten by such a deadly snake during filming that he cut off his own foot with a chainsaw rather than let the venom spread!

Fitzcarraldo was almost certainly the most difficult movie production in history. It makes Apocalypse Now seem like My Dinner with Andre. Les Blank’s documentary, Burden of Dreams, about the making of Fitzcarraldo, is vastly more interesting and intense than Fitzcarraldo itself.

Let’s watch that ship—and some of the people onboard it—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 got shot with a pellet gun during a TV interview.

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

Get a load of this.

“It’s not 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 hired someone to shoot him for no good reason? He’s made entire movies for no good reason, and their filming probably hurt a lot more than merely digging a pellet out of his gut, so let’s assign that one a hard “maybe.”

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

Here’s a short little animation of Herzog telling the story in his own words.

Just think—if it hadn’t been for Herzog, the world never would have gotten Joker: Folie à Deux. There’s even a streak of darkness in Herzog’s heroism.

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

Heart of Glass (1976) is about an 18th-century Bavarian village that makes its money by blowing and selling a particularly impressive type of ruby-colored glass. But when the man who held the secret to this process dies, the rest of the villagers suddenly have no way to earn a living and collapse into group madness.

Herzog knows a thing or two about group madness.

In order to make his characters appear to be truly unhinged and lost in their despair, Herzog had a hypnotist put the cast under a spell before each scene and then allowed the actors to generate their own rhythms while he filmed.

As a movie, this is often close to unwatchable. The last thing Herzog needs is a bunch of sleepwalkers encouraging him to slow it down. As the single weirdest experiment ever performed by a major filmmaker, though, it’s endlessly absorbing.

You can’t find any complete scenes of the movie online. You’ll have to settle for the trailer.

7. Werner Herzog ate his shoe.

As ridiculous as it sounds, this is easy to verify because the previously mentioned documentarian Les Blank made a short film 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’re wondering). We’ll let Werner take it from there.

You see him do it, too. He sits down and eats his boiled shoe...or, at least, chunks of it.

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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 jumping into Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, and maybe Nosferatu the Vampyre, in which Kinski delivers the most brilliantly ghastly “dying vampire” scene in the now-extensive cinematic history of dying vampires. It honestly seems like he’s suffocating on camera.

There is no truth to the rumor, though, that Herzog drove a stake through Kinski’s heart at the end of filming.