The Werner Herzog scene so revolting that it needed to be rewritten: “The crew doubled over with nausea”
Werner Herzog is famously unmoved by the things mere mortals might find unbearable. When he was shot with an air rifle during an interview, he blithely carried on, demonstrating the bloody entry wound later. When he was on a flight somewhere, and the plane was in danger of a crash landing, he refused to go into the brace position despite the flight attendants’ instructions and got banned from the airline for life as a result. Then, there was the time he ate his own shoe after losing a bet with Errol Morris.
And none of that even gets us to the absurd lengths Herzog has gone to get his own movies made. He’s travelled to the ends of the Earth and back to snake-filled jungles and erupting volcanoes. This has led to tragedy and condemnation, particularly with regard to the 1982 film Fitzcarraldo, which led to multiple deaths and one amputation.
According to Herzog himself, however, the one film where he terrified the crew to the point of revulsion was not one that he directed but one in which he was an actor. In 2011, he was asked to play the ultimate bad guy in Christopher McQuarrie’s Jack Reacher, which starred Tom Cruise in the title role. Herzog plays Zec Chelovek, a former Soviet prisoner who is just about as creepy as you’d imagine. In his most dramatic scene, Zec menaces one of his henchmen with a few unforgettable lines about his brutal incarceration.
“I spent my first winter wearing a dead man’s coat,” he whispers in his heavily accented rasp of a voice. “A hole in one pocket. I chewed these fingers off before the frostbite could turn to gangrene.”
“The scene was softened not once but twice to make it palatable to a younger audience.”
werner herzog
Herzog didn’t take the job lightly. In his memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, he revealed that he read the script carefully before accepting it and decided that it was more intelligent than most action movies. “The part of Zec was a challenge for me,” he wrote, saying that while the rest of the villains “lashed out with their fists and stomped about and opened fire on one another indiscriminately with their disagreeably large assault rifles,” all Zec had to inspire fear was his voice.
That turned out to be plenty. During the scene in which he talks about chewing his own fingers off, Herzog realised that he was having a profound impact on the people around him. “I noticed during the filming how the members of the crew doubled over with nausea,” he said, “And how, later on during the cutting, the scene was softened not once but twice to make it palatable to a younger audience.”
Apparently, even the parts of the scene that stayed in were so off-putting that his wife got a call from one of her friends after the film was released, offering to take her in. “I can’t believe you’re actually married to that man,” the friend allegedly said, adding, “We have a guest room; you’ll be safe with us.”
It’s important to note that Herzog is his own greatest mythologiser. No one tells a harrowing Herzog story better than the man himself. However, there is no denying that his brief performance in Jack Reacher is by far the best thing about the film and that if Amazon is serious about being the right custodians for the Bond franchise, they would already be in talks with him to play the next villain.
