Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980) on Netflix
NR198020mDocumentary
Werner Herzog vows to eat his own shoe if Errol Morris finishes his first feature. Morris, a graduate philosophy student, is struggling to find producers. Herzog cooks the shoe in April 1979.
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- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.2/102,932 votes
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Plot summary
Errol Morris, a graduate philosophy student at Berkeley, is struggling to find producers for his first feature, Gates of Heaven. Werner Herzog tells him to stop complaining about producers and start shooting a roll of film, and promises that the day he sees the finished work he will eat his own shoe. Morris finishes the film, so in April 1979 Herzog cooks a pair of shoes with the help of the chef Alice Waters at Chez Panisse, a restaurant in Berkeley, simmering them for five hours with garlic, herbs, and stock. Herzog says the shoes are the ones he wore when he made the bet. Accounts of the vow differ, and Morris has said he does not remember the bet and asked Herzog not to go through with it.
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Herzog said he made the vow to encourage Morris, then a graduate philosophy student at Berkeley who was having difficulty finding producers for Gates of Heaven. In Herzog on Herzog he recalls telling him to stop complaining and start with one roll of film, promising to eat his shoe the day he saw the finished work.
- Filmmaker Tom Luddy, then director of the Pacific Film Archive at Berkeley and the man who introduced Morris to Herzog, recalls the bet in a less encouraging form: "You'll never make a film, but if you do, I'll come and eat my shoe at the premiere."
- Morris has disputed the nature of the vow, saying he does not recall the bet and that it was not what motivated him to complete Gates of Heaven. He also says he asked Herzog not to eat the shoe, and he had planned to appear in the documentary but decided against it after a flight delay.
- It was not Herzog's first unusual promise: after a series of accidents during the filming of Even Dwarfs Started Small in 1970, he had agreed to jump into a cactus patch if the shoot was completed without further incident.
- Assisted by chef Alice Waters, Herzog boils the shoes with garlic, herbs and stock for five hours, then eats one in front of an audience at the premiere of Gates of Heaven at the nearby UC Theater. He does not eat the sole, explaining that one does not "eat the bones of the chicken".
- Clips from the 1925 Charlie Chaplin film The Gold Rush, which features a shoe-eating scene, are interspersed into the film. Unlike the leather shoe eaten by Herzog, the shoe in The Gold Rush was a prop made of licorice.
- When the restaurant Chez Panisse celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2011, a replica of the shoe was created, boiled and eaten as part of the public anniversary celebration.
