A fascinating portrait of a truly unique Film-making voice
REVIEW: Werner Herzog is the iconoclastic director who has made some of the most memorable movies of the past half-century – such passionate tales of obsession as Wrath of God, Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World. His distinctive voice has not only enhanced his own documentaries, but also graced the pop-culture worlds of Star Wars and The Simpsons.
As his fellow film-maker and compatriot Wim Winders wryly notes in the new documentary Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer, he has not only shaped the modern American perception of Germans like no-one else, but “who else has succeeded in inventing their own accent the world likes to imitate, finds funny and enjoys?”
Wenders is one of many of Herzog’s friends, family and collaborators who contribute to Thomas von Steinaecker’s (whose previous subjects have included composers Leonard Bernstein and Richard Strauss) entertaining and enlightening trawl through the screen legend’s life.
Oscar-winning Nomadland director Chloe Zhao highlights his ability to collect “some of the most rapturous dreams from around the world”, while the late, great
Carl Weathers (who starred alongside him in The Mandalorian) recounts just how awestruck has was when he saw 1982’s Fitzcarraldo: “Moving a ship over a mountain? That’s fresh, that’s new, that’s bad ass, that’s Werner Herzog.”
Herzog’s adventure-drama, inspired by the exploits of real-life Peruvian rubber baron Carlos Fitzcarrald, is one of the many ambitious and sometimes traumatic shoots detailed in Radical Dreamer. You’ll learn about the director’s ongoing battles with star Klaus Kinski across five films, the hell he put Christian Bale through on Rescue Dawn (the former Batman lamenting a
particular incident involving an ants’ nest, being upside down and not having a safety word) that means the actor still can’t go on a rollercoaster today and how helped Nicolas Cage find “the bliss of evil” on Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.
Then there’s the off-screen incidents: being shot at while being interviewed by British film journalist Mark Kermode, enduring an extremely hostile reception to his 1992 post-first Gulf War meditation Lessons of Darkness at the Berlin Film Festival and boiling his own shoe after losing a bet with American film-maker Errol Morris.
Brother Tilbert and half-brother Lucki chime in with recollections from their “anarchic” farming village childhood, while second-wife Lena remembers how he wooed her by claiming to be a stuntman.
However, as you’d expect, the secret sauce really comes from the anecdotes and utterances from the man himself. How can you not love someone who, out of nowhere, declares, “It’s an injustice in my life that I haven’t become an athlete. It’s an injustice in nature that we do not have wings.”