The 3 Manliest Things Ever Done by Werner Herzog (Or Anyone)

3

He Got Shot During an Interview and Just Carried On

While being interviewed by the BBC about the impending release of Grizzly Man, Werner was in the middle of delivering a sentence steeped in indecipherable Austrian mysticism when somebody shot him in the fucking stomach:

2

He Ate His Shoe Because He Lost a Bet

The documentary short Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe is a film that spectacularly lives up to the promise of its title (unlike certain other movies). As the previous sentence may have led you to guess, in this film, Werner Herzog eats his shoe (after delivering a bizarre missive against television in which he suggests, with stone-faced sincerity, that we as a people literally kill the cast and crew of Bonanza).

Why the hell is he doing this? Because he bet Errol Morris (another now-famous documentarian) that Morris wouldn't finish his first documentary film, which was about pet cemeteries. Morris did finish his film, so Werner was honor bound to pay up. (Or eat up. Whatever.)

1

He Pulled a Massive Steamboat Over a Mountain

In 1982, Werner made a film called Fitzcarraldo about a fringe-lunatic Irishman who has a 320-ton steamship pulled by hand over the mountains of Peru so he can reach a river on the other side.

Literally the entire movie is focused on this task.

In order to capture this in the most realistic way possible, Werner built a 320-ton steamship and hired a bunch of locals to pull it by hand over a Peruvian mountaintop, because special effects can eat a dick.

"Yeah, right up there. Awesome."

The production wasn't without other difficulties. One of the lumbermen on the crew was bitten by a highly venomous snake and had to make one of two split-second choices: either die in the jungle or immediately cut his own leg off with a chainsaw. This being a Werner Herzog production, the leg had to go. We assume Werner held the chainsaw, or at least tore strips from his purple underpants to use as a tourniquet.