Werner Herzog’s one-on-one meeting with Marlon Brando: “He was grateful”
Werner Herzog isn’t the most likely filmmaker to insinuate himself into Hollywood and become one of its most eccentric figureheads, but show business can be unpredictable, and the avant-garde German director has found a way to be both an antidote to mainstream cinema and a hero of it. One week, he’s creeping through caves and philosophising about albino crocodiles for a documentary, and the next, he’s on the set of Jack Reacher with Tom Cruise, hamming it up for the camera as a Soviet villain.
For all the daring, far-flung adventures he’s had in the pursuit of filmmaking, Herzog has also enjoyed his fair share of glitz, glamour, and famous friendships. In his memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, the legendary director recounted how he became close pals with Jack Nicholson after refusing to cast him in Fitzcarraldo. Apparently, the actor would invite him over to his house to watch Lakers games on TV, the two men sprawled on the bed together, occasionally with Anjelica Huston patiently waiting for him to leave.
Another famous connection Herzog made in Hollywood around this time was Marlon Brando. Luckily for Hollywood’s insurance brokers, the two men never made a film together. Given Herzog’s penchant for chaotic and sometimes deadly productions in the middle of the jungle and Brando’s penchant for derailing even the most well-organised film shoot, they would no doubt have wreaked havoc as collaborators. However, Brando was a fan of Herzog’s, according to Herzog, and invited the director over to his place, just a hop-skip-and-a-jump away from Nicholson’s digs.
When the director showed up to the gate estate, he was greeted by several ferocious German Shepherds and signs warning visitors to keep their car windows closed and to remain in their cars until the dogs were sequestered. When he met Brando, Herzog discovered that the actor was expecting him to bring some kind of film proposal. The fact that he had done nothing of the sort could have led to an awkward and brief exchange, but instead, the two got on famously.
“I talked about books and his island in the South Seas,” Herzog remembered. “He was grateful that I was a rare visitor who hadn’t wanted something from him the way all the rest did.”
If Brando had initiated the meeting and was expecting it to be about a potential collaboration, it might have been a little disappointing for Herzog to show up with nothing more than some book recommendations and musings on real estate. However, it is also plausible that an actor of his calibre and elusiveness would find such an encounter to be refreshing.
Herzog didn’t specify when the meeting took place, but in his later years, Brando was reclusive, spending most of his time holed up in his Mulholland Drive estate, conducting the bulk of his relationships over the phone, and churning through friendships. An unexpectedly wide-ranging conversation with one of cinema’s most eclectic and esoteric filmmakers probably would have felt like a breath of fresh air, even if the two never saw each other again.
