Werner Herzog has a bit of a wild reputation. He’d like to set the record straight.
“I’m the most organized, the most focused, the most friendly person you will ever see on a set,” the German director says. “Period.” Everything else, he adds, is “the craze of media who want to create a Werner Herzog that is a fiction.”
This is, of course, the man who hauled a 320-ton steamship over a hill in the Peruvian jungle for Fitzcarraldo (1982), and, on the shoot of Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), also in the jungle, threatened to kill his star Klaus Kinski if he walked away from the film [as recounted by Herzog himself in his 1999 documentary My Best Fiend.] This is the man who ate his own shoe after losing a bet to Errol Morris, and who once carried on with a BBC interview after being hit by an air rifle, calling it “not a significant bullet.”
But when Herzog came calling, Kate and Rooney Mara signed up anyway.
The Mara sisters play the leads in Herzog’s Bucking Fastard, as Jean and Joan Holbrooke, Irish sisters who speak, think and move in unison, share the same dreams and love the same man. After their neighbor and former lover Gareth Mulroney (Orlando Bloom) marries someone else, the sisters embark on a campaign of arson, ambush and assorted misdemeanors to win him back, become tabloid fixtures and are assigned a social worker (Domhnall Gleeson) to help them adapt to modern life.
