The Holy Mythmaker

In the storied case of Werner Herzog eating his own shoe, the distance would seem to be nonexistent. He had promised the filmmaker Errol Morris that he would eat his shoe when Morris, a notorious ditherer, finally finished his first movie (which became the documentary "Gates of Heaven"). And that Herzog did, sitting with knife and fork on stage before a full house in Berkeley, the shoe nicely sauteed in duck fat. Les Blank recorded the meal for posterity in a film aptly enough called "Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe."

It has also been rumored of Herzog that he pledged to the accident-prone dwarf cast of the 1970 film "Even Dwarves Started Small" that if they survived the rest of filming without any further incident, the director would throw himself into a cactus. Imagine getting to write the previous sentence about Steven Spielberg, by the way. This story has been around for at least 25 or so years--I heard it from a film buff back in the '70s. It also appears to be true. "A director should not be safe and sound behind the camera while the actors are feeling all alone out there," Herzog says. "So I put on some goggles to protect my eyes and jumped from a ramp. And I can tell you that getting out is a lot more difficult than jumping in ... The spines were the size of my fingers. I do not think I have any left embedded in me. It seems that the body absorbs them eventually."

Getting out is a lot more difficult than jumping in ... A fair description not only of cactus-diving but of moviemaking, as well. Yet Herzog is an exemplar of true faith. He comes across in this collaborative self-portrait as one of the canniest holy fools around. Canny in that he knows how to wrestle the most unlikely of film projects through to conclusion, movies that required the conviction of saints to even launch. Winch a boat over a mountain in the middle of the jungle, as he did in "Fitzcarraldo"? He finds the way to do it. Build a Spanish galleon and put it in the trees, as he did in "Aguirre"? He constructs an actual ship and lifts it up there. Hypnotize an entire cast to give a film the feeling of collective sleepwalking, as he did in "Heart of Glass"? Herzog learned hypnosis and literally mesmerized his actors--a skill that he also must have used on the various brave souls who had the fortitude to invest in his ventures. He often put his own money into his pictures, and sometimes began films without having the resources to finish them. Inevitably, providence (and sometimes German TV) came to the rescue.

In fact, "Herzog on Herzog" ought to serve as a required text for every film school in the country (or better, for every unattached aspiring director, if there are any) as it enshrines the value of independence, of getting work done without the sponsorship of large studios. Filmmaking is more than anything an athlete's endeavor, says Herzog. "It does not come from abstract academic thinking; it comes from your knees and thighs." Physical courage is required. He recommends that future directors learn boxing, juggling, magic tricks, that they walk, for example, from Madrid to Kiev, notebooks in hand. Herzog himself was a cagey club soccer player and is famous for his long treks on foot. He downplays the amount of technical knowledge needed. He denigrates storyboards as "the instruments of cowards." Sound is every bit as important as the visuals in a film, he says, citing the French director Robert Bresson as a master of the varieties of silence. It is in the editing room where a film "has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character." "You must let the material escape the clutches of the script," the director argues. Herzog's dicta are the illuminations that come not from developing a career, but from pursuing a vocation, a calling.

And above all else, that vocation has rested on the premise that fiction trumps fact, and that faith placed in the imagination as the agent of story will be rewarded by the wild gods. "The deep inner truth inherent in cinema," he tells Cronin in the course of an attack on the relative literality of cinema verite, "can be discovered only by not being bureaucratically, politically, and mathematically correct." There is a paucity to mere fact, Herzog insists. "Through invention, through imagination, through fabrication, I become more truthful than the little bureaucrats." To this end, the director even invented a Blaise Pascal epigraph for his movie, "The Lessons of Darkness": "The collapse of the stellar universe will occur--like creation--in grandiose splendor."

The little bureaucrats are everywhere these days, it seems, which may be one reason Werner Herzog seems to have disappeared from the increasingly junky center of the culture, a place he occupied so spellbindingly in the '70s. But if you can't see Herzog's glorious films in the theaters with any regularity these days, you can at least read about them in this tart, wondrous book (or even see a few classics in Anchor Bay's DVD series) and be happy that the director is still out there, on some ice floe or mountain top, turning the weightlessness of dreams into the gravity of great movies.

Will Blythe is the editor of "Why I Write" (Little Brown). His last piece for Arts & Opinions was on the Weather Underground

© 2003