“There was some violence”: when Werner Herzog released 10,000 hand-painted rats into the streets
There’s very little Werner Herzog could do that would surprise anyone, with the auteur spending his career indulging in what can best be described as widescale cinematic what-the-fuckery.
After all, his plot to murder Klaus Kinski was thwarted by a dog, he starred in a self-explanatory short film about eating his own shoe after losing a bet, and he brushed off being shot in the middle of an interview and carried on as if nothing had even happened.
He also famously had his crew haul a 360-tonne boat over a mountain for Fitzcarraldo, developed an obsession with WrestleMania, became fixated by chickens to the extent he started hypnotising them, and once forced Roger Ebert to watch Anna Nicole Smith’s reality TV series, which is far from normal behaviour.
It’s only served to burnish his legend, though, with Herzog well-placed to stake a claim to the title of being the single most eccentric auteur in cinema history. With that in mind, then, having 10,000 rats hand-painted and unleashed into the streets of the Dutch city of Delft isn’t all that surprising.
Herzog was never going to do things the easy way when making 1979’s Nosferatu the Vampyre, and after finally convincing the local authorities to grant his wish, which included a promise to seal off “every single gully, side alley, and house entrance” so that his rodent friends wouldn’t wreak citywide havoc, it was off to the races.
Well, almost, once he’d dealt with a potential robbery. “Somehow, the people who got the money for feeding them ran away with the money,” the filmmaker explained. “There was trouble with the farmers, and when we were about to pick up the rats, they were so enraged that they pulled up with a Caterpillar and drove into the truck that we brought. They broke through the windshield.”
How did he resolve the issue? Violently, as it transpired. “There was some violence, actual violence, that I instigated,” Herzog added. “Police finally arrived, and I tricked them into going into the wrong barn.” In order to escape with his quarry with law enforcement distracted, the director and his team rolled one of the police cars into a ditch and “got out with the rats.”
He still had to turn his white rats into grey ones, though, which saw all 10,000 of them hand-dyed in a process that left behavioural biologist Maarten ‘t Hart so shocked that he withdrew his cooperation, with the animals, which had been imported from Hungary, subjected to treatment he absolutely couldn’t condone.
Battles with local councils, tens of thousands of rats, an overturned police car, attempted extortion, and allegations of animal cruelty. It definitely sounds like your typical Werner Herzog production, and after all that, he finally got his wish and let them loose on the streets in the name of cinema.
