German director remains one of cinema’s finest weirdos

This story might not be true, but it’s alleged that during the filming of Fitzcarraldo in 1982, the great yet insane Polish actor Klaus Kinski, fed up with months of grueling shooting in the jungles of South America, told his director he was escaping by boat up the Amazon and never looking back.

Werner Herzog, the equally psychotic man behind the camera, produced a revolver and promised Kinski that, by the time he reached the bend in the river, eight bullets would be in his back, with the ninth in Herzog’s temple.

Kinski stayed, and together they finished one of Herzog’s finest films. So arised one of the greatest cinematic partnerships of the past 40 years.

Herzog is cinema’s illustrious madman, a poet obsessed with the nature of obsession itself. His career began four decades ago and has been marked by some of the most beautiful and troubling films — both fiction and documentary — ever made.

Herzog’s latest is Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a quasi-remake of Abel Ferrara’s infamous mid-’90s character study, Bad Lieutenant. The generally understated Harvey Keitel has been swapped out in favor of the off-the-deep-end Nicolas Cage, for whom the word subdued carries no meaning.

Cage might be just the actor Herzog has been searching for ever since he and Kinski suffered a falling out in 1987. Herzog’s five-film partnership with Kinski, which defined the German cinema of the ‘70s and ‘80s, was successful because their egos joined together in a chaotic harmony.

It’s possible Herzog saw in Cage an obsession and compulsiveness that Christian Bale, the star of Herzog’s recent Rescue Dawn, could never achieve. From great performances in films like Adaptation to awful roles in a hilarious The Wicker Man, Cage still seems to be stuck in the wild-eyed, strung-out alcoholic role in Leaving Las Vegas that won him an Oscar. It makes him a strange man to watch on screen, but in the right role — such as the drug-addicted, morally bankrupt star of Herzog’s latest film — he exudes an utterly captivating energy.

Herzog has apparently again found his muse, the mirror onto which he can cast his obsessions and obsessive nature. Herzog is such a fascinating figure because his films are deeply personal expressions of the inner workings of his mind. Listen to him argue with a dead man in his great Grizzly Man as his narration openly contradicts the philosophies of his deceased subject.

Or watch 2007’s Encounters at the End of the World — a film whose title carries a dark double meaning — to bask in Herzog’s awe in the face of nature and his terror at the smallest sign of its man-made destruction. Herzog’s films are always about the same obsession that grips him as an artist, and he is never afraid to let his audience know it.

In his quest to make films true to his spirit, Herzog’s documentaries, which have defined the latter half of his career far more than his few fiction films of the period, are fundamentally and openly dishonest in method. When making Little Dieter Needs to Fly — the documentary that inspired his Rescue Dawn — he would try and frighten his jumpy Vietnam veteran subject before takes to achieve more realistic emotion. Herzog, the consummate self-aware artist, has addressed criticisms of his merits as a documentarian with openness and a mild flippancy.

Herzog’s attitude, outspokenness and tendency toward exaggeration for dramatic effect are all the marks of a great storyteller with a self-assured hand. Really, Herzog’s appeal is in his personality. No filmmaker of his generation possesses the same unique nature as Herzog, and the stories of his life are just as interesting as many of his films.

Some of those tales are hidden, while others are documented. Required viewing for both Herzog-enthusiasts and anyone aspiring to become an artist are three documentaries about Herzog and his process: My Best Fiend, which catalogues Herzog’s relationship with Kinski, Burden of Dreams, about the making of Fitzcarraldo, and the self-explanatory Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, made after Herzog bet a young Errol Morris Herzog would never complete his first, best film, The Thin Blue Line.

The legends about Werner Herzog are reminiscent of Fritz Lang, another legendary German director obsessed with the workings of his own mind. Lang was the man behind the cinema’s greatest legend: After Joseph Goebbels offered him to head of the Nazi film industry in 1933, Lang fled the same night to Paris. That story is mostly untrue, fabricated by one of the cinema’s great storytellers to resemble the plot of one of his films.

Gene Siskel once said — as Roger Ebert has endlessly repeated — that no film should be less interesting than a documentary of the filmmakers having lunch.

The best thing about the canon of Herzog — and of course, not all of his films are great — is the way in which his personality bleeds through the screen so vibrantly. Watching a Herzog film is like having an intimate lunch with him — few other filmmakers could stand up to such a claim.

John Wheeler is a senior majoring in cinema-television critical studies and East Asian languages and cultures. His column, “The Multiplex,” runs Fridays.