When I was living in Germany, a local acquaintance related an anecdote about Werner Herzog. As a child, he’d supposedly witnessed a horrific hit-and-run: a man playing chicken with an automobile on the streets of Munich to the tune of ghastly decapitation. More than his own lived experiences, this event bore the trajectory of the filmmaker’s vision. I now believe my friend to have been mistaken. It seems more piecemeal from Herzog’s many elusive encounters with death, which I’ve attempted to stitch together below:
His 1972 feature Aguirre, the Wrath of God included a brutal beheading scene. Klaus Kinski, as Lope de Aguirre, remarks, “That man is a head taller than me. That may change,” before his henchman Perucho performs the deed. Likewise, in the course of production, Kinski himself became the director’s mortal enemy. As remembered in his documentary My Best Friend, when the star threatened to walk before the picture had wrapped, Herzog threatened back. “I had a rifle, and by the time he’d reach the next bend, there’d be eight bullets in his head and the ninth one would be [in] mine.”
Later, in 2006, he rescued Joaquin Phoenix after the actor’s car flipped weaving in front of him along a road in Laurel Canyon. Herzog recalled, “He was upside down… squished between airbags that had deployed and wildly trying to light a cigarette. I knew he must not light his cigarette because there was gasoline dripping, and he would have perished in a fireball.” He pulled Phoenix from the wreckage and drove off.
In 2013, he directed a gruesome PSA produced by AT&T on the perils of texting while driving. As for chickens, Herzog has long been an outspoken adversary to their cause. As part of a 2014 Reddit AMA, he noted, “Chickens are living manifestations of death, bred only to be domesticated and killed. When we look into their eyes, we see the part of ourselves of which we are most afraid—our ultimate destination, death.”
My two cents, Werner? Be a man and quit that moody brooding. Thanks!
-David Fishkind