“You may speculate as much as you want.” (Image by erinc salor.)

As Werner Herzog takes an unlikely step into the world of 3-D with Cave of Forgotten Dreams, he receives a smart profile in GQ courtesy of Chris Heath. The opening of “Mad German Auteur, Now in 3-D!“:

“Today Werner Herzog has chosen to be interviewed indoors. Perhaps it’s for the best. One of the more puzzling and improbable moments in the legendary 68-year-old German director’s career, and there have been many, came when he was doing a filmed interview for a BBC program called The Culture Show in 2006. He was standing a few miles from here on some barren scrubland in the Hollywood Hills, chosen so that the city of Los Angeles would be the backdrop falling away behind him, and he was explaining how nobody seems to care about his films in Germany when an unexpected noise interrupted him. Herzog flinched. Understandably so, because he had just been shot.

It has never been established who was doing the shooting—if it was more than just someone with an air rifle taking a random pop at a stranger for fun, it may have been because Herzog and the film crew were trespassing. Afterward, Herzog refused to call the police, fearing a SWAT-type overreaction, and he also declined, for the same reason, to seek medical help. Still, the pellet made its mark—under his mauve and pink windmill-motif boxer shorts, now blood-blotted, was a seeping entry wound near Herzog’s groin.

This shooting is an event he still chooses to play down—’It was kind of insignificant’—although I get the sense he also quite likes the opportunity to play it down. ‘It was just very silly,’ he insists. ‘I have been shot at, without being hit, much more seriously. What I experienced here was completely harmless.’ Barely worth noting. Though when I persist in challenging him to name one other person who has ever been shot in this way while doing a TV interview in America, he naturally has no answer. ‘The funny thing is, people sometimes believe I make things up, and nobody would believe it if it hadn’t been caught on tape. Nobody would have believed it.’

He is right. It seemed so unlikely, so preposterous, and yet somehow so perfectly Herzog. So much so, I tell him, that I think some people still suspect it was a great stunt he’d somehow arranged.

‘You may speculate as much as you want,’ says Herzog, a man whose own work frequently involves fascinating juxtapositions of fact and fantasy, and who is long accustomed to drawing such suspicions.”

“It is not a significant wound.”

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Other Werner Herzog posts:

• Thoughts on “La Soufriere.”
• Video of Werner doc, “God’s Angry Man.”
• Werner “compliments” Fred Astaire.
• Werner dislikes new technologies.
• Werner directs Nicolas Cage.
• Werner vs. Klaus Kinski.
• Werner on the nexus between science and art.