The one movie Werner Herzog calls “the greatest of great”
Regarding directors who are difficult to work with, German filmmaker Werner Herzog ranks near the top of the list. His film shoots are notorious for being punishing, challenging and sometimes even downright dangerous. Case in point: Herzog’s 1982 movie Fitzcaraldo is about a man (Klaus Kinski) who is determined to transport an entire ship over a steep hill into an Amazon basin. Rather than use special effects, like almost every other director would’ve chosen to do, Herzog had the crew transport a real ship over the hill in question, causing several injuries to the cast and crew.
It is also alleged that during the production of his second film, Even Dwarfs Started Small, Herzog jumped naked into a cactus in order to apologise for a certain actor being injured on set. On another occasion, the director quite literally ate a shoe.
There’s no question that Herzog is a tricky guy to collaborate with, but equally, there’s no question that he gets incredible results. His audacity, creativity, narrative insight and visual bravado really shine through every frame in all of his projects, both his fiction films and his many documentaries. Many of his projects, including Aguirre: The Wrath of God, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and the documentary Grizzly Man, are undeniable classics.
When discussing his five favourite films of all time, Herzog described Nosferatu, a silent horror classic from the 1920s, as the “greatest of great films”. This isn’t a surprising choice for Herzog. After all, Nosferatu – an unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula starring Max Schreck – is arguably the scariest film vampire of them all. The movie is dark, terrifying, visually dynamic and, for its time, very audacious and creative. As such, it does echo Herzog in the best way.
Herzog also made his love for that particular movie clear when he directed a remake of it in 1979 called Nosferatu the Vampyre, again starring Kinski, whom Herzog worked with five times even though the pair had an incredibly volatile and difficult relationship, as the titular vampire.
The other four films Werner Herzog lists are Intolerance by D.W. Griffith, Freaks by Tod Browning, Akira Kurosawa’s brilliant Rashomon, and Where is the Friend’s House? by Abbas Kiarostami.
Regarding the latter film, it is not surprising to see a film by Abbas Kiarostami listed here. The work of the late, great Iranian auteur was well-known for its unique blend of fiction and documentary filmmaking, and Herzog himself has mostly focused on making documentaries since the 1980s and has thus established himself as one of, if not the most acclaimed non-fiction filmmakers in the world.
