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"When you look at my films in general, they have to do with the big dream of flying."

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Movies : Werner Needs to Fly

"Rescue Dawn," the story of a Navy pilot captured by the Vietcong, presents another good excuse for director Werner Herzog to make a movie about flight.

By: John Anderson
August/Sept 07 , Page 22

Ten years ago, when Dieter Dengler flew his Cessna to the Telluride Film Festival to see himself in Werner Herzog’s Little Dieter Needs to Fly, he brought his own accommodations. “The first night,” Herzog recalls, “Dengler slept in the cockpit of his plane. That’s where he felt safe.”

This was back when the celebrated German-born film director had just made one movie about the courageous German-born ex-U.S. Navy pilot: a documentary about how Dengler survived being shot down over Laos in late 1966 only to be imprisoned, starved and tortured for months by the Vietcong. Now, Herzog has made his second Dengler-focused movie: Rescue Dawn. Starring Christian Bale as Dengler, the film, which opened July 4, dramatizes Dengler’s crash, capture and eventual escape into Thailand.

Why was Herzog — capable of dragging a ship over a mountain (Fitzcarraldo) and wrangling the notoriously difficult Klaus Kinski into his best performances (Aguirre, the Wrath of God; Nosferatu the Vampyre) — compelled to revisit the pilot’s story? The documentary, after all, is considered one of the better nonfiction films of the ’90s. “It was more the other way around,” Herzog says. “Rescue Dawn was first. When I discussed it with Dengler, we knew this character was bigger than life. It was a huge, epic story that needed a big screen and a feature film. It took quite a while to get the finances, casting and logistics for the jungles in Thailand together. Since there was instant money available for the documentary, we did it first.”

In the film, Dengler’s crash is a harrowing event, with smoke billowing from the wings of the Skyraider, a single-engine prop plane flown in warfare until the late-’60s (and now hangared mostly in museums). Bale did virtually all his own stunts (including eating live maggots in prison), but it was a stuntman who was “propelled by a fireball,” in the director’s words, and wound up suffering some superficial burns. “The stunt was performed by a professional who had actually done a helicopter crash on Black Hawk Down,” Herzog says.

The director, who is not a pilot himself, has dealt with flight in a number of films, including White Diamond, which features lighter-than-air craft (a helium-filled airship): Wings of Hope, about jungle-crash survivor Juliane Köpcke; and Lessons of Darkness, much of which was shot from the air above Kuwait’s massive oil-well fires after the 1991 Gulf War. “When you look at my films in general, they have to do with the big dream of flying,” says Herzog, who sees in that a bond with Dengler, who faced every adversity “in a very manly way” — from the Vietcong to his final challenge, Lou Gehrig’s disease, which took his life in 2001. “It was very courageous how he dealt with his disease,” Herzog says. “He was what you would call a good soldier. ”