8 Movie Set Tantrums That Put People's Lives In Danger

4. Werner Herzog Made His Leading Man Act At Gunpoint On Fitzcarraldo

Werner Herzog has a fully-justified reputation for being completely bonkers. From throwing himself into a cactus patch at the completion of a film to shrugging off a gunshot wound so he could continue an interview to even eating his own shoe on film, the German director is no stranger to the strange. And that's just the stuff he did to himself. You might well have heard that Herzog made his cast and crew pull a 320-ton steam ship over a Peruvian mountain for the movie Fitzcarraldo and that he filmed the boat going down rapids from the inside, resulting in several injuries, but perhaps his most notable offences were towards his regular leading man, Klaus Kinski. When Kinski threatened to leave the production of Aguirre, The Wrath Of God (another Herzog film set in the Peruvian jungle), the director swore he would shoot him with a loaded handgun if he didn't complete the film. This was an extreme instance of a regular occurrence between the two, who screamed and fought with each other on every film they worked on together. It happened so much, in fact, that Herzog eventually made a documentary about his experiences with Kinski entitled My Best Fiend.