Werner Herzog once cooked and ate his own shoe to settle a bet
To goad the documentary maker Errol Morris into finishing a film about pet cemeteries, Werner Herzog vowed to eat his shoe if Morris ever completed it. When Gates of Heaven premiered in 1978, Herzog kept his word, boiling the shoe and eating it in public, an act Les Blank turned into a short documentary.
Grand gestures came naturally to him. When his mentor, the film writer Lotte Eisner, fell gravely ill in the winter of 1974, Herzog walked from Munich to Paris, convinced she would survive if he made the journey on foot. The trip took three weeks, and his diary of it became the book Of Walking in Ice. Eisner recovered and lived another eight years.
His childhood was unusually bare. Born Werner Stipetić in Munich in 1942, he was two weeks old when a bomb destroyed the house next door and his mother fled with him to Sachrang, a remote Alpine village with no running water, flush toilet or telephone. He did not know cinema existed until a travelling projectionist visited the one-room school. He made his first phone call at 17. Later he took his absent father's surname, Herzog, which means duke, because it sounded grander for a filmmaker, learned filmmaking basics from a few encyclopedia pages, and helped himself to a camera from the Munich Film School, which he insisted was not theft but a necessity.
Alongside Fassbinder, Wenders and Schlöndorff, he helped launch the New German Cinema. He avoids storyboards, favours improvisation, and often mixes professional actors with locals. His five films with the volatile Klaus Kinski, including Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, produced some of his best work and a relationship turbulent enough that he later made a documentary about it. While scouting Aguirre in Peru in 1971, he missed a flight only because his booking was cancelled; lightning destroyed the plane, and years later he filmed the lone survivor, Juliane Koepcke, in Wings of Hope.
François Truffaut called him the most important director alive, and Roger Ebert argued that even his failures were spectacular. Younger audiences may know his deadpan voice from The Simpsons or The Mandalorian.
Source: Werner Herzog
