Why do people hate werner herzog

I thought the camera had cracked and burned me. I flinched for less than a second and continued my thoughts, and the BBC people started to duck and run away. I was bleeding into my underwear!

But here it is, documented on camera. Two days later, an article appeared in the Los Angeles Times. The actor Joaquin Phoenix had flipped his car on a drive down the serpentine roads of Laurel Canyon. One afternoon in Thailand, Herzog sat with his wife on a slab of granite that jutted into a swift, rock-crowded river.

Just another day at the office! He had refused her repeated offers of a bandage. A week or so later, the toenail fell off, and Herzog began covering it—with yellow duct tape. Herzog looked a bit unsteady in the water, which reached the belt on his khakis. As he stretched his arms out for balance, Lena informed me that her husband was unusually low on energy that day. By the end of the shoot, in October, he had lost almost thirty pounds.

It was an ethic for Herzog: anything he asked the actors to do, he volunteered to do as well, including eating maggots and handling snakes. The crew members, by and large, saw this credo less generously. Herzog, they felt, was unwilling to accept the fundamental paradox of filmmaking: creating a gripping movie often requires weeks of boredom. In their view, Herzog was intent on undergoing his own survivalist drama. This is the only thing I try to maintain, for this would disturb even this documentary reality.

It makes everything onscreen seem real. Zeitlinger peered into an Austrian tripod camera that he had set up on the shore. It was connected to a digital monitor. A crew member glanced at the monitor and shook his head. Harry Knapp, who replaced Josef Lieck as first assistant director, developed various ruses to distract Herzog, in order to take footage that he deemed unnecessary. Later, Knapp told me that ten per cent of the footage that Herzog would view in the editing room—closeups, backup takes, establishing shots—had been filmed on the sly.

A few minutes later, he was helping the stunt crew guide the raft to various starting positions. Herzog and the stunt people tromped around the riverbed until they found a deeper path for the raft to follow.

Some crew members worried that the sequence would still look slow on film, but Herzog was content. Bale and Zahn were dispatched downriver from the new starting point, and the sequence worked better. He waved his hands at Zeitlinger.

Herzog was now going to shoot some closeup footage while flowing downstream with the actors. He stripped off his shirt and tossed it on the riverbank. His right deltoid had a faded black tattoo of a smiling skull. Bale is as polite as Kinski was rude, but fissures were developing. Zeitlinger turned off the tripod camera and prepared to join Herzog. He wants an adventure.

The two men attached themselves to a rope that had been suspended in the water, parallel to the shore; they would hook themselves on to the rope and head downriver with the Lucite-covered camera, alongside the raft. Knapp, who kept muttering to other crew members on his black headset, was annoyed by the spectacle.

Lena could sense the contrary mood on the set. Pursued by police, he escapes to an empty amusement hall, where he drops coins in a glass cage containing a live chicken; colored lights start blinking furiously, causing the bird to skitter back and forth. Stroszek leaves with his gun, presumably to kill himself, but Herzog returns the viewer to the cage. The film ends with a mercilessly long shot of the horrifying, hilarious chicken. The metaphor may be ham-handed—Stroszek is a helpless creature trapped by capitalism!

He now considers the sequence one of the strongest he has ever shot. The scene called to mind something that Lieck had said the morning that he quit. But I think he will have his grand, poetic death in a different way. I think he will live to be a hundred and five. After half an hour, Herzog and his crew dragged themselves out of the water. The director was in a merry mood. I was behind him and helped him to reorient himself, but it was too late.

We capsized together. After Zeitlinger dried off, he offered his own account of the shoot. Although American and British crew members were finally given money, many said that they had not been paid all they were promised, and the producers evidently infuriated Thai contractors by ignoring bills.

The entire production crew got turned away from a hotel in Krabi, after the proprietors got wind of these complaints. Steve Marlton claims that the hotel had suddenly raised its rates, and that all other bills had been paid. An accountant arrived on the set, then immediately quit, shocked by the financial mess.

I told them to get fucked and they walked. In the scene, Dengler is hallucinating with hunger. Knapp felt that Herzog needed to respect his screenplay. Marlton had refused to pay the fee demanded by a contractor that had arranged the rental of military equipment and provided the local crew, claiming that he was being overcharged. In retaliation, the contractor had successfully petitioned the government to close the shoot.

Over the next few days, Marlton and eight crew members were prevented from boarding planes at the Bangkok airport. Marlton was informed by the Thai police that he would be allowed to leave only if he paid five hundred thousand dollars in taxes that the production supposedly owed. Marlton paid a substantial sum and flew home, leaving the other crew members behind. After a weeklong standoff, Gibraltar agreed to pay Thai authorities more money, and the others were allowed to go home.

Marlton posted his bail, but Knapp still faces legal proceedings. Kinski is one of the most notorious actors of all time, and he was arguably more difficult to work with than all of the jungles Herzog trekked through, combined. Strangely, Herzog was able to tame this beast, at least for long enough to get a tremendous performance out of him.

Kinski was more like a force of nature than a person, similar to an avalanche or a tornado. He did not possess many civilized restraints. Herzog has stated that at disparate times, Kinski showed startling bravery, allowing himself to be filmed on a precarious raft amidst fast-moving rapids for the sake of a great shot.

In this sense, Kinski was a figure as variable as the landscape itself, sometimes willing to cooperate, and sometimes not. Herzog claims he definitely considered the offer, but ultimately decided against it. The director did, however, pull a gun on the actor during this shoot, threatening to shoot him and then kill himself after Kinski tried to walk away from the project.

This kind of ultimatum seems to have worked well for Kinski. There is only one exit hole, and then the impenetrable ceiling of ice, so that these men might become easily trapped or lost. The movie epitomizes many Herzogian qualities, as it features a ski-flyer careening boldly through the skies, ignorant of all inhibiting rules of sanity.

This is a dangerous athletic feat, in which a skier flies down an enormous ramp and into the snowy void below, gliding through the air with nothing to stop him, until he hits the ground and must land on his two feet.

He wins prizes, able to stay air-bound for longer than anyone else. He becomes scared or nervous sometimes, and feels hesitant to perform the jumps; he falls from time to time and injures himself, at one point hitting the ground so hard, he temporarily loses his memory.

These ski-jumpers do not carry poles as they fly to help steady themselves upon impact, nor do they wear helmets unbelievably. Without such protection, their bodies presumably are lighter, can fly farther. Walter mentions that if they were to admit the fear they feel before making these jumps — to themselves or anyone else — they would probably never do it.

Herzog opposes the death penalty himself, but his film is not political or activist in tone; instead, he simply spends time speaking to the criminals, their families, and the families of the victims, about what happened and how they feel.

He also interviews Captain Fred Allen, a former Death Row warden, who personally oversaw over executions. We can't take this man a minute longer'. I don't like the term wild man, but Dennis Hopper was in the kindergarten compared with Klaus. I remember scenes where Klaus was attacked, and how the other actors used to take such pleasure in punching and kicking him. He was often quite badly hurt.

Kinski's film star daughter, Nastassja, did not attend the screening. She was estranged from her father, who died in , and threatened to sue him after he used his memoirs to insult his friends and family and boast of thousands of sexual conquests. Many of the 'revelations' in Everything I Need Is Love were contested as 'vindictive, libellous fantasies' by women he failed to seduce or had slighted him. Second, how to fake a film permit convincingly enough that you won't get caught.

All the rest is dialogue and examples from film, music and literature. Lately, I've been focusing on giving workshops in which participants have to direct a very short film within nine days — without a previously written script, because they do not know ahead of time the general topic I will be assigning. They're allowed to do anything they want; I only set the narrative frame. I did one recently in the Peruvian Amazon jungle.

The theme was "Fever dreams in the jungle. Great movies came out of it. Your own filmmaking work, whether documentary or drama, has always embodied extreme cinema: extreme landscapes, extreme situations, extreme characters. What drives you to keep looking for these extremes?

Actually, I'm not looking for extremes but rather for what I see as normal. People keep saying that it's extreme to shoot in the Amazon.

But look, it's just a forest. That's nothing special. In Fitzcarraldo you created one of cinema's most iconic sequences with this ship in the middle of the jungle that's being carried over a mountain at the demand of an obsessed opera lover, played by Klaus Kinski. The actor's outbursts of rage were just as legendary as the love-hate relationship between the two of you. How do you look back at this today? Kinski worked with me on five feature films, and I describe how I see him in the documentary My Best Fiend Kinski was a singular figure, in a way.

But he wasn't the best actor I worked with — that was Bruno S. I've worked with the best actors in the world, including Christian Bale, Nicolas Cage, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, but none of them has ever come close to depth, charisma, loneliness and truth of Bruno S.

How was it to embody the bad guy? Completely effortless work. I knew I'd be good, too. The director and Tom Cruise wanted me, and I didn't need to do any screen tests either. I just did something similar in The Mandalorian , the Star Wars spin-off series. You have been living in Los Angeles, the center of the dream factory, for many years. You have often said that you didn't feel you belonged to the German film scene. But in the US you enjoy cult status, as a "Bavarian in Hollywood.

You'd better used the "cult status" term with a pinch of salt. All hell breaks loose when I go there with a film. And even though I live in Los Angeles, I don't really belong to the "dream factory. To me, that's a false categorization. I belong to something way more regional. It's Bavarian cinema — based on its fundamental character, its baroque style and mores.

That's why I sometimes say that the only other person who could have made Fitzcarraldo would have been Ludwig II of Bavaria, the 19th century Bavarian kind. Werner Herzog, born in in Munich, is currently the world's most famous Bavarian filmmaker.

Ever since "My Best Fiend," his documentary about his favorite actor Klaus Kinski, Herzog has mostly directed in the US, combining fiction and documentary films, and charming the world with his unmistakable Bavarian accent. In Hollywood he has worked with stars such as Nicole Kidman.