Who is the world’s biggest badass, the Ayatollah of awesome, he who bestrides our universe as a colossus? Just a couple of years ago, a lot of people thought it might be Chuck Norris, but it turned out that the kickboxing Mr. Potato Head couldn’t even get Mike Huckabee elected. Meanwhile, filmmaker Werner Herzog was turning out some of the best work of his career at a dazzling rate. One of these, the documentary Grizzly Man starring the tragic naturalist wackadoo Timothy Treadwell, was recently selected by the Times of London as the fourth best movie of the past decade.
Having resurrected Treadwell via the power of cinema, Herzog will next attempt to resurrect Nicolas Cage’s career with Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a Gulf Coast noir that Werner wants you to know is neither a sequel to nor a remake of the 1992 Bad Lieutenant. Herzog also has a book out, Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo, and in December, the IFC Center in New York will premiere his other new movie, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, about a San Diego graduate student who murdered his mother with a sword (possibly due to an overdose of classical Greek tragedy).
So the sixty-seven-year-old director is a busy man. But Herzog brings more than industry to the table. Here are five reasons Herzog is more badass than Norris will ever be:
1. Stole His First Camera. Threw Himself Into a Bed of Cactus. Ate His Own Shoe.
Herzog was fourteen when he decided he wanted to be a filmmaker and stole a camera from the Munich Film School, reasoning that it was okay because he had the moral right to lay claim to the tools he needed to fulfill his destiny. Some might see this kind of thinking as self-serving, but Herzog also believes in personal accountability. When a cast member on the desert set of Herzog’s Even Dwarfs Started Small was accidentally lit on fire during a scene, Herzog paid penance by throwing himself into a bed of cacti. (Asked later if it was hard to do, he replied that the hard part turned out to be getting back up.) The same fellow who had to be treated for minor burns had already been run over by a van during filming, so Herzog then told the cast and crew that if they’d all be very, very careful from that point on, he’d let them film him throwing himself into the cacti.
In the same spirit of fellowship and extreme literal-mindedness, Herzog once told his friend, fledgling director Errol Morris, that if Morris ever completed a movie, Herzog would eat his shoe. Herzog made good on his vow by boiling his shoes with garlic and herbs and consuming one of them at the premiere of Morris’s first feature, Gates of Heaven. The event was recorded by documentary filmmaker Les Blank in a twenty-minute short, prosaically titled Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, thus enabling Herzog to transform an off-the-cuff remark into a publicity stunt for two of his colleagues.
2. Made Films on Seven Continents. Dragged a Steamboat Over a Mountain.
You want to talk about your global viewpoints? There are seven continents on this planet, and Werner Herzog is probably the only director to have made a movie on every damn one of them. From the start of his career, he’s been a master at not just photographing exotic locations but practically turning them into characters in his movies. In his 1972 masterpiece, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, the mad conquistador played by Klaus Kinski seems to have moved beyond fighting against the people around him — unworthy opponents — to waging war against the very air he breathes, which in turn seems more than happy to meet him in the parking lot.
Back then, Herzog was renowned for the extraordinary physical demands he placed on himself and his crews, often in remote locations, with the locals hired for such labors as the dragging of a steamboat across a large hill in the Peruvian jungle for Fitzcarraldo. Les Blank’s feature documentary Burden of Dreams, which is about the making of that movie and includes indelible footage of Herzog standing in the jungle railing against the vileness of nature, was released at the same time as Fitzcarraldo and so gave the director the rare opportunity to upstage his own movie. Herzog’s ever-shifting attitude towards the surrounding world might be best summed up in a recent quote: “I love nature, but against my better judgment.”
3. Got Shot During an Interview and Insisted on Finishing. Once Threatened to Shoot His Leading Actor.
While promoting Grizzly Man, Herzog was being interviewed by a BBC reporter when he laconically pointed out that someone was shooting at them with an air rifle. Herzog was struck by a pellet but insisted on finishing the interview, noting of his wound that “it is not a significant bullet.” By then, all the years spent trying to hold unstable, underfunded productions together on some far corner of the Earth had left Herzog with a veneer of unflappability, and the fact that he had actually steered the notorious Klaus Kinski through five leading roles and lived to tell about it had made him seem immortal. (He also immortalized their, for lack of a better term, friendship, in the documentary My Best Fiend.)
Kinski was notorious for undermining weakling directors with his tantrums and stunts, but when he threatened to walk off the set of Aguirre, his first film with Herzog, the director, citing “the higher duty” they both had to their muse, urged him to stay and then promised that if he didn’t, “I would shoot him. He understood this was not a joke. He screamed for the police. The nearest police station was forty kilometers away. And for twenty dollars flat they would have testified to it being a hunting accident.” It must have been like when Harry met Sally. The two were made for each other, even though by the time of Cobra Verde (made in 1987 but not released in the U.S. until last year), Kinski’s favorite pet name for his fellow German was “Adolf Hitler.”
4. There Is a Very Real Possibility That He Might Sort of Be in on the Joke
With guys as weird as this, you hope that you’re laughing with them, but you can’t always be sure. When you see Chuck Norris in Dodgeball or Jean-Claude Van Damme in JCVD, you get an uneasy feeling that they’ve heard of this thing called “irony” and that it’s been explained that it’s supposed to be kind of funny to see them this way and that they’re happy to do whatever it takes to extend their fifteen minutes but don’t really grasp why anyone would find them funny. In recent years, as Herzog has begun to spend more and more time in front of the camera, he’s become a more openly comic figure, and while no one could call him the deftest comedian since vaudeville died, there’s something endearing about his willingness to make fun of himself in movies like Zak Penn’s Incident at Loch Ness (in which he played himself, hot on the trail of the elusive sea serpent) and the comedy The Grand (as a scarifying gambler called The German, stalking the halls of his Vegas hotel with a bunny rabbit tucked ominously under one arm).
There’s also been an element of humor creeping into his performances both as ringmaster in his own recent documentaries and in his interviews, where he sends up his image as an intensely cranky old motormouth. He seems quite a bit different from the ascetic, fiercely mustachioed young man in Burden of Dreams, who only seemed a few ranting minutes away from spontaneous combustion, or at least a plaque in the Ulcer Sufferers’ Hall of Fame. Maybe Kinski’s death — in 1991, at sixty-five, from a heart attack that he’d been rehearsing for since John Kennedy was President — was a real “there but for the grace of God” moment for Herzog.
5. So Badass He Can Make Even You More Badass
Next January, the man who taught himself to be a major world director will officially begin preparing the next generation to take his place with the inauguration of Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School. The RFS, in the form of “weekend seminars held by Werner Herzog in person at varying locations and at infrequent intervals,” announces itself as “not for the faint-hearted; it is for those who have travelled on foot, who have worked as bouncers in sex clubs and wardens in a lunatic asylum, for those who are willing to learn about lockpicking or forging shooting permits in countries not favoring their projects. In short: for those who have a sense of poetry. For those who are pilgrims.”
Well, for those who’ve gotten laid off from their jobs in sex clubs and lunatic asylums and have nothing else going on in what’s traditionally a pretty slow month anyway. Just keep in mind that “The Rogue Film School will not teach anything technical related to film-making. For this purpose, please enroll at your local film school.” Or better yet, just go steal a camera, you wussies.