10 Iconic Directors Who Lived Their Movies Whilst Making Them

1. Werner Herzog (Has Made Being A Madman His Life's Work)

There are directors who take extraordinary gambles. There are directors who have titanic feuds with their collaborators. There are directors who go on insane adventures, who scale mountains and cross rivers, who do the seemingly impossible in order to get their visions on screen. And then there's Werner Herzog. The tales of Herzog's mad desire to move mountains - literally move mountains - in the course of making his films are too numerous to list here. Since the late 1960s, Herzog has just about made a film a year, ranging wildly in terms of subject matter and style: here is a master both of documentary and narrative film. Just the process of getting those films made is sometimes more entertaining than the films themselves; Herzog established a love/hate relationship with his longtime leading man Klaus Kinski (chronicled in a documentary entitled My Best Fiend) that included its fair share of knifes being drawn and firearms being aimed. This is a man who was shot during an interview and barely flinched. This is a man who ate his own shoe on camera. This is, perhaps most famously, a man who, in making a film about the mad Fitzcarraldo's demands to have Peruvian natives carry a 320-ton steamship over a mountain, made mad demands to have actual Peruvian natives actually carry a 320-ton steamship over a mountain. FOR REAL. Truffaut asked whether cinema was more important than life. For Herzog, cinema is inseparable from life - and both must be lived to the fullest.