Herzog selbst spricht doch oft und gerne auch mit Übertreibungen von den Drehbedingungen seiner Filme.freezer hat geschrieben: ↑Mo 02 Feb, 2026 16:44 Aus dem Buch "Herzog on Herzog" von Paul Cronin:
Most of what you've heard about Werner Herzog is untrue.
More than any other director, living or dead, the number of false rumours and downright lies disseminated about the man and his films is truly astonishing. In researching Herzog's life and work, a process that involved trawling through endless sources, it soon became clear how frequently some would contradict others. And while recently spending time with the man, I confess to having deviously longed to trip him up, find holes in his arguments, uncover a mass of contradictory statements. But to no avail, and I now conclude that either he's a master liar, or more probably, he's been telling me the truth.But nota bene: he didn't direct Kinski from behind the camera with a rifle.
He didn't put anyone's life at risk when making Fitzcarraldo.
He is not insane, nor is he eccentric.
His work is not in the tradition of the German romanticists.
And he is not a megalomaniac.
Rather, he's an extremely pleasant, generous and modest man who happens to be blessed with extraordinary vision and intuitive intelligence. A fierce sense of humour too that can leave you reeling, and as such written interviews with the man can be seriously inadequate.Fitzcarraldo is probably the film you're best known for. Yet most discussions centre not around the film itself, but the circumstances under which it was made. When you started work on the film in the Peruvian jungle, did you expect that the media buzz would be so huge?
What I did not expect were things like walking down the street in Munich a few months after Fitzcarraldo came out and seeing a man running frantically towards me. All of a sudden he leapt up in the air, kicked me in the stomach, picked himself up from the ground and yelled, 'That's what you deserve, you pig!'
The problem was there were very real things going on in the area where we wanted to shoot that had absolutely nothing to do with the film at all. There was a border war building up between Peru and Ecuador and all around us we felt this enormous and increasingly threatening military presence. At every second bend of the river there would be a military camp swarming with drunken soldiers.
There were also the oil companies who were exploiting the local oil fields in the areas of the native Indians and who had - with great brutality against the local population - constructed a pipeline across the Indians' territory and across the Andes all the way to the Pacific.
During construction they had brought in prostitutes and there were frequent cases of rape. When we showed up on location in the jungle with the full permission of the local Indians, all the unsolved problems somehow started to revolve around our presence. The media forgot all about the war and the oil because we had real media appeal for them. As you know, Mick Jagger was scheduled to be in the film alongside Claudia Cardinale, with Jason Robards as the original Fitzcarraldo. I certainly never wanted to become the dancing bear in the circus of the media, but all of a sudden there was a strange concoction of Claudia and Jagger plus the mad Herzog, a bunch of native Indians, a border war and a military dictatorship. Ultimately, it was not difficult to rubbish the claims the press made, not least because a human rights group sent a commission down to the area and concluded that there had been not one single violation. I had the feeling the wilder and more bizarre the legends were, the faster they would wither away, and this is what happened. After about two years of being criminalized by the press, the whole thing just faded away.
Da will er dann eine Kamera gestohlen haben, die ihm aber in Wirklichkeit ausgeliehen worden war - nur mal so als Beispiel.
Man bemerkt recht schnell beim Lesen von Mario Adorfs Büchlein, dass er etwas gegen Herog hat und nicht ganz objektiv ist, aber er ergänzt recht gut den Mythos, den Herzog über sich selbst aufgebaut hat.
Kinski machte das für Herzog, das Jason Robards und Mick Jagger verweigerten.
