The director who wanted Werner Herzog to die in hell: “Let him fight the windmills”
Werner Herzog is a folk hero of cinema whose raspy voice alone sets cinephiles’ hearts aflutter.
The German director cut his teeth making independent movies about renegades getting up to shenanigans, whether it was a group of institutionalised little people rebelling against their confinement in 1970’s Even Dwarfs Started Small, or a megalomaniacal conquistador getting well out of order in Peru in 1972’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
In the process, Herzog has found himself dodging death on a pretty regular basis. By chance, he skipped his scheduled flight to Lima in 1971, which later crashed and killed all but one person on board. He got into multiple altercations with his favourite leading man, Klaus Kinski, which became so heated that violence was resorted to on more than one occasion.
He is also known for consistently putting his cast and crew in harm’s way, which has led people to compare him to the dangerously single-minded characters he makes movies about.
Although this attitude has earned him a fawning legion of fans, Herzog is not universally loved, and one of the people who happened to despise him with a passion was a fellow nonconformist filmmaker. Abel Ferrara took a grimier, more urban approach to cinema, making such filthy classics as 1979’s video nasty The Driller Killer and 1992’s Bad Lieutenant. The latter starred Harvey Keitel as the crooked cop of the title who slithers through the streets of New York, misusing his power in grotesque ways while spiralling into an existential crisis.
When Herzog decided to remake Bad Lieutenant in 2009 with Nicolas Cage in the lead role, Ferrara, whose original film was met with both praise and horror, was none too pleased and said as much. In an interview with Filmmaker Magazine, he announced that Herzog and his producers could “die in hell,” a refreshingly unsanitised public remark if ever there was one.
In response, Herzog said, a bit implausibly, that he had “no idea who Abel Ferrara is.” Never one to miss an opportunity at pretension, he also invoked Miguel de Cervantes and his title character in Don Quixote, advising Ferrara not to tilt at windmills. In other words, don’t go attacking imaginary enemies, man.
Ferrara got the last laugh, of course. Herzog might have gotten a bigger paycheck, but he also made a much less memorable film. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is unhinged, thanks more to Cage’s typically mad performance rather than Herzog’s typically mad directing style, but it doesn’t have the irredeemable sleaze and existential torment that makes Ferrara’s film stick to you like whatever that sludge is that lives in the cracks in city pavements.
In the end, the directors made nice, at least for the cameras. At the 2013 Locarno Film Festival, they exchanged a few pleasantries in front of the press and set aside their differences.
Herzog has maintained over the years that his Bad Lieutenant isn’t a remake at all, which is perhaps an admission that even he knows it couldn’t stand in the same league as Ferrara’s.
