Examining the 'Grizzly' Details

Filmmaker Werner Herzog, Drawn Again to Grand Plans and Brutal Truths

So here he is: the film director who stared down crazy old Klaus Kinski in the Amazon jungle and threatened to shoot the German actor dead if he walked off the set of "Fitzcarraldo." The same filmmaker who insisted his crew shoot on a fiery volcanic island despite an imminent eruption. The one who promised to eat his own shoe if fellow filmmaker Errol Morris ever completed his movie and, when Morris accomplished his task, proceeded to munch. The man who walked from Munich to Paris as a "pilgrimage" to save the ailing critic Lotte Eisner. And the same one who, in the 1960s, smuggled arms across the Mexican border.

The basis for "Grizzly Man" is footage shot by wildlife activist Timothy Treadwell, who spent 13 summers interacting with bears in Alaska. In 2003, Treadwell and a friend were killed by a grizzly.(Timothy Treadwell - Lions Gate Films)

Or so go the rumors, of which there are many more. As Werner Herzog -- in Washington a couple months ago to attend a screening of "Grizzly Man," his documentary opening here Friday -- listened to a quick recitation of these anecdotes, he beamed. It was a strange Sphinx-like smile from one who claims not to understand irony, and whose eyes suggest chilly blue laser beams behind the slits of machine gun turrets. "It's good and comfortable for me to give life to these doppelgangers -- these other [fictional] Herzogs out there," he said in an accent thicker than Bavarian Weissbier foam . "But, of course, all of these things have some factual truth to them. I didn't threaten Kinski with a gun. I had no gun in my hand, but I had it nearby and I would have shot him if he'd left. There was a duty for both of us, beyond our personal feelings" to finish the film.

The volcano incident wasn't really so dramatic, he insisted. He did walk to Paris for Eisner in the 1970s, which he wrote about in his book "Of Walking in Ice." A decade earlier, he smuggled TVs into Mexico as a young man for a short time and, on one occasion, agreed to buy a silver Colt revolver in Texas for a rich Mexican ranchero.

"I was no arms dealer," he said. But the apocrypha, he admitted, fuels the mystique that, in turn, opens wallets for such projects as "Grizzly Man," which he produced with the Discovery Channel and was distributed by Lions Gate Films.

The documentary, which critics have greeted with raves and which won an award at Sundance this year, is about a man whose obsession with wild bears becomes his fatal undoing.

Wildlife activist and bear lover Timothy Treadwell spent 13 summers with the bears of Alaska's Katmai National Park and Reserve, documenting his up-close interactions with them for the last five. This love affair ended in October 2003, when Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, were mauled and partially devoured by one of his beloved grizzlies.

At 62, Herzog has made more than 50 films--fictional and documentary--which often center on uneducated men, visionaries, eccentrics, and the mentally addled. The director, who insists he has never dreamed in his life, chooses subjects filled with driving ambition, visions or one-of-a-kind worldviews that seem to come from some mystical, almost primordial source inside them.

A leading player in the New German Cinema of the 1970s and '80s (which included fellow Germans Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Volker Schloendorff and Margarethe Von Trotta), Herzog exploded into the international circuit with 1972's "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" and 1974's "Every Man for Himself and God Against All" (also known as "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser"), which took the second-place prize at Cannes and other awards in Germany.

Herzog immediately cemented a reputation as a visionary of seemingly limitless energy and, to detractors, megalomania. In all his work, Herzog said, he has been on a quest for "ecstatic truth. I've always tried to strive for a much deeper truth in the images, in cinema, in storytelling, on a screen, so whether I've achieved it or not remains to be seen. . . . There are short fleeting moments when I know that I have achieved it. And to work for that and to strive for it and to try, gives at least some dignity and some meaning to my existence."

His documentaries, which are frequently as mystically charged as his dramatic works, have taken Herzog to many distant locales, including North Africa, Australia, Patagonia and the Laotian jungle. His fictional works have often featured Kinski as some kind of mad, driven antihero -- hardly a stretch for the notoriously difficult, emotionally volatile actor. In "Aguirre," a brilliant study of megalomania that many critics considered a metaphorical spin on Adolf Hitler, Kinski was the demented Aguirre, a 16th-century Spanish nobleman obsessed with finding Eldorado. He also played the animalistic, sensual vampire in Herzog's 1979 "Nosferatu" and, in 1982's "Fitzcarraldo," an obsessive businessman-dreamer determined to build an opera house in the middle of the Amazon jungle.

In the latter film, Herzog forced locals to drag a 320-ton steamship over a hill in the jungle. The stunt (superbly documented in Les Blank's 1982 "Burden of Dreams," one of many documentaries about the Herzog mystique) cost lives and near mutinies. Herzog was less the bad boy than Kinski, whose rants became so obnoxious that one of the Amazonians offered to kill the actor as a favor to the production crew.

"Many of my films have not been easy work," Herzog said without a scintilla of irony.