How a near-death experience earned Werner Herzog a lifetime ban from an airline
Werner Herzog has a fascination with death. Most of his movies revolve around people pushing the limits of nature and sidling up to the line between living and dying, whether it’s a man determined to push a giant steamship over a mountain in the jungle of Peru or an American soldier during the Vietnam War who is shot down and imprisoned only to escape and find his way through the harrowing wilderness. Often, his characters step over that line, most notably in his 2005 film Grizzly Man.
In his documentaries, Herzog has a habit of pausing for lengthy existential musings. Do penguins become deranged? What might crocodiles think of ancient cave paintings? What is reality? During productions for his movies, Herzog himself pushes the limits of life and death, forging straight into forbidding rainforests with few if any precautions, subjecting his crew to venomous snake bites and illness, and standing on the edge of volcanoes about to erupt.
Herzog has also been subjected to a surprising number of completely random hazardous situations, such as the time he got shot during a live interview or the time he was in a plane that had to make an emergency landing. When he was shot with an air rifle, Herzog was remarkably (if not surprisingly) calm about it. In the middle of speaking about how nobody cares about his films, he was hit in the groin with an air pellet and said softly, “What was that?” There is video evidence of this incident, but it’s hardly necessary. His reaction was exactly what one would expect of him.
The incident on the plane does not have video evidence, but it went down in a similarly Herzogian fashion. The only difference was that the flight attendants were not thrilled with his catatonically relaxed instincts in a crisis.
The issue with the plane was caused by malfunctioning landing gear. When the aircraft was set to descend toward its destination, the landing gear didn’t come down, and the flight attendants prepared the passengers for a rough landing. The ground crew covered the runway with foam to cushion the blow, and emergency services were called to the scene. “We were ordered to crouch down with our faces on our knees and hold our legs,” Herzog remembered years later, “And I refused to do it.”
The cabin crew was not impressed, and the co-pilot emerged from the cockpit to provide reinforcement. Still, the German director refused. “I said, ‘If we perish I want to see what’s coming at me, and if we survive, I want to see it as well. I’m not posing a danger to anyone by not being in this shitty, undignified position.’”
Luckily for all involved, the plane landed without incident. Unfortunately for Herzog, he was banned from the airline for life. He didn’t specify whether he got to stare death in the face that day or whether the landing was simply an anticlimax with nothing more than a few bumps and jolts, but what we do know is that the director got the last laugh. Within a couple of years, the airline folded, giving him the perfect ending to what is, without question, a perfect Herzog anecdote.
