Herzog: Subject and Documentarian

Werner Herzog, one of the most interesting characters working in and around Hollywood today, has been both the subject of and the director of acclaimed documentaries. I first became acutely aware of him when he came to IU a few years ago and I went to see a symposium he gave. He's a pretty weird guy.

He has directed big budget movies and tiny, tiny documentaries. And there's a reason he's been the subject of documentaries in the past. He's very, very strange.

The most famous documentary involving him is called Burden of Dreams. The premise behind the doc is a basic making of for a movie Herzog directed called Fitzcarraldo. The story behind Herzog's film is that of a man who wishes to open an opera house in the Amazon jungle. What Herzog did to portray this was go to the Amazon and build an opera house using harder tactics to do so. Where the original man took apart a ship to place it on the other side of the river, Herzog pulled a whole steam ship across the river.

Herzog is what seems to be insane. In his own documentary Grizzly Man, about a man who would live his summers among the wild bears in Alaska and subsequently being killed by one, he films a scene where he is interacting with one of the man's friends who has the tape to the camera that is the sound of the man being mauled. Herzog listens to the tape with the friend in the room as she begins to cry. Herzog tells the friend to never listen to the tape, something she tells him she will never do.

Lastly, one of the weirdest thing Herzog has done, was eat a shoe. Errol Morris, director of The Thin Blue Line, bet Herzog something and as it seemed, Herzog lost. True to his word, Herzog ate his shoe while Morris filmed it. Strange to say the least.