The actor Werner Herzog would have loved to work with: “Give him to me”
It’s really no surprise that some of the greatest filmmakers of all time are extremely eccentric characters. Just take Stanley Kubrick, who was known for pushing actors to their very limits, Lars von Trier, who takes things almost too far on set, or Werner Herzog, the German filmmaker who has the ability to make almost anything seem poetic, bizarre and beautiful.
An icon of cinema who has thrived in the industry ever since the 1960s, Herzog first found proper success in the 1970s, helming such celebrated works as Fata Morgana, Land of Silence and Darkness, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Aguirre, the Wrath of God, where he would work with his longtime collaborator Klaus Kinski for the very first time.
The German actor shared a bizarre and tumultuous relationship with Herzog, with the pair coming to blows several times on the set of Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Starring the actor as a ruthless Spanish ruler who sets out to discover the mythical city of El Dorado, the film was a testing production to be a part of, especially as one-third of the entire budget was used to pay the lead actor’s fees.
Still, Kinski wasn’t happy on set, but when he threatened to leave the set, Herzog violently responded. “I said to him, if you leave the set now, you will reach the bend – the next bend of the river and I will shoot you,” the director shockingly spat, “Will have eight bullets through your head, and the last one is going to be for me. So the bastard somehow realised that this was not a joke anymore”.
Still, despite their hatred for each other on the set of Aguirre, Herzog maintained that Kinski was one of the industry’s greatest performers, putting him in a category with only a few other stars. “Kinski’s so different; we can only say very few in film history who have this kind of presence on the screen and this kind of intensity,” Herzog said when comparing him to other actors, “Maybe early Marlon Brando, Nicolas Cage, Kinski, and you’re almost at the end of naming others”.
Yet, there is another actor Herzog rarely names that he would have loved to have worked with, despite the performer passing away five years before the German ever made his very first movie.
When asked, in a conversation with the DGA, if there were any other actors he would have wanted to direct, Herzog exclaimed, “Oh, Humphrey Bogart, I would love to work with him. Instantly. Give him to me,” as if the actor was still alive at the time of the interview in 2010.
Bogart and Herzog are certainly not two names that go naturally together, with the star of such movies as The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca and The Big Sleep being known for his suave romantic roles.
Take a look at Herzog having a verbal spat with his most famous collaborator, Klaus Kinski, below.
