I keep coming back to the idea that Werner Herzog is one of the purest creatives we have, in the absolute, unqualified sense of what an artist is supposed to be. Not a stylist, not a brand, not a guy managing a filmography like a stock portfolio. Herzog treats the making of a thing as inseparable from the risk of the thing, and he has spent sixty years proving it in ways that would end most people's careers or their spines. He does not perform eccentricity for the press. The eccentricity is load-bearing.
It starts, depending on how generously you want to phrase it, with a theft. At nineteen, unable to get the Munich Institute for Film Research to lend him equipment, Herzog broke into an unlocked cabinet and walked out with a 35mm Arriflex that would become the camera he shot his first films on. He has never called it stealing. He's called it a natural right, the position of a man who'd already decided the work was going to happen whether or not anyone gave him permission, and that decision is really the whole engine behind everything that follows.
Start with 2006, a BBC Culture Show segment, Herzog on a Los Angeles street talking to Mark Kermode about Grizzly Man. Mid-sentence there's a crack, and Herzog glances down the way you'd glance at a fly. He'd been shot with an air rifle, pellet lodged near his stomach, and his entire reaction amounted to lifting his shirt, confirming the bruise, and saying it wasn't a significant bullet. Then he kept talking. No ambulance, no reshoot, no framing of the moment as anything other than mildly interesting weather. This is a man who spent years in the Amazon shooting Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo through dysentery, mutiny, and a lead actor in Klaus Kinski who was, by every account including Herzog's own, a legitimate danger to the crew, so a stranger's air rifle barely registers as an event worth flinching at.
Then there's the shoe. In the late seventies Herzog told a young, stalled Errol Morris that if he ever actually finished the documentary he kept talking about and not making, Herzog would eat his own shoe. Morris finished it. Gates of Heaven premiered at UC Berkeley in April 1979, and Herzog showed up, boiled his boot for five hours in duck fat, garlic, and stock with help from Alice Waters at Chez Panisse, and ate a portion of it in front of the audience, dedicating the meal to anyone too scared to start making the thing they wanted to make. Les Blank filmed the whole ordeal as Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, which is now a more widely quoted document than most actual film theory. The bet wasn't a bit. It was a debt, and Herzog does not seem to be a man who leaves those unpaid, however literal the collateral.
A few more, because they earn their place. For Heart of Glass in 1976, Herzog hypnotized almost the entire cast before nearly every scene, sending untrained Bavarian actors through a story of a village descending into collective madness while they were themselves in something close to a trance, memorizing dialogue under hypnosis and improvising gestures no one, including Herzog, had planned. During Fitzcarraldo, Herzog decided the film's whole premise, a man dragging a steamship over a mountain to reach a new river, wasn't worth shooting as a miniature or a matte painting, so he had a real 320-ton ship hauled up a real Peruvian hillside using pulleys, a makeshift railway, and roughly a thousand indigenous extras, with no visual effects standing in for any of it. Kinski's treatment of that same crew got bad enough that one tribal chief offered, in complete seriousness, to kill him on Herzog's behalf. Herzog turned it down, not out of any particular tenderness toward Kinski, but because losing his lead that far into production would have meant reshooting forty percent of the film. And then in 2006, on a Los Angeles canyon road, Herzog happened to be driving past when a car flipped upside down in front of him. He got out, found the driver dangling in his seatbelt and fumbling for a lighter with gasoline dripping around him, snatched the lighter away before asking any questions, and only then recognized Joaquin Phoenix. When Phoenix climbed out and tried to thank him, Herzog was already gone.
The one that gets me most is quieter than either of those. In November of 1974, Herzog learned his friend and mentor, the critic Lotte Eisner, was dying in a Paris hospital. Instead of flying, he took a compass, a duffel bag, and a new pair of boots, and walked. Munich to Paris, three weeks, five hundred miles, through a winter storm, sleeping in whatever shelter he could break into, convinced with the kind of certainty that sounds insane on paper that his arrival on foot would keep her alive. He wrote it all down and published it as Of Walking in Ice, and it reads less like travel writing than like a man negotiating with death using his own legs as collateral. He got to Paris. Eisner was still alive. She lived another nine years.
What makes all of this harder to file away as pure showmanship is that the work itself refuses to sit still long enough to be a brand. Herzog has directed something like seventy features and documentaries since the early sixties, and there is no single Herzog thing the way there's a single Wes Anderson thing or a single Kubrick thing. Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo are hallucinatory colonial epics shot with Kinski screaming through the Peruvian jungle, dragging an actual riverboat over an actual mountain because the metaphor wasn't worth making if it wasn't also physically true. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Woyzeck are quiet, interior studies built around outsiders and the mentally fragile. Lessons of Darkness turns the burning Kuwaiti oil fields after the Gulf War into something closer to science fiction than reportage, almost no commentary, just fire treated as landscape. Grizzly Man is a documentary that quietly disagrees with its own subject's romanticism about nature the whole way through. And then there's Herzog the actor, showing up in The Mandalorian, in Jack Reacher as a villain, voicing a character on Rick and Morty, which sits so strangely next to the man who directed operas at Bayreuth and La Scala and published more than a dozen books that it stops looking like range and starts looking like someone who genuinely does not distinguish between a jungle epic, a puppet show, and a pop culture cameo, because to him they're all just more chances to point a camera, or himself, at something true. That's the part that actually earns the word purest. Not that everything he touches is good, because it isn't, but that none of it is calculated for a lane.
None of this is stunt work, or if it is, it's stunt work in the oldest sense, where the stunt and the belief behind it are the same object. Herzog calls what he's after "ecstatic truth," a truth you can only get to by going further than the facts will comfortably carry you, and everything above is just that idea walking around in the world unsupervised. Most working artists manage risk. Herzog spends it, on purpose, like it's the only currency that was ever real.
He is going to outlive all of us just to see what happens next, and I don't think he'll even mention it.
