Little Dieter Needs to Fly

I realized I hadn't watched any Herzog in a while this weekend, so I watched his documentary "Little Dieter Needs to Fly", which I still hadn't seen yet. The funny thing about this is it was made in 1997, but then ten years later Herzog decided to make a fictional film about this guy's story, which was "Rescue Dawn" (AMAZING, I love it, Christian Bale dropped like 15 pounds for the second half of the movie and looks scary, and whoever said Steve Zahn can't act is dead wrong). So I had seen "Rescue Dawn" already so knew what the story was about, but heard it from the horses mouth.

Turns out the guy was living on Mt. Tamalpais in the Bay Area, too bad I didn't see this documentary until after he died, I definitely would have gone to visit him. His story was incredible, and he had such a positive enlightened attitude about it. Yeah crashing in Vietnam and being held by the Viet Cong for a few months with barely any food was terrible, and then escaping with another guy only to have his head cut off in front of you is traumatic, but this guy had the balls to go BACK to Vietnam and show Herzog what it looked like. They even hired some Vietnamese guys with guns to stand around him so he could show the camera what it looked like, and at one point had them tie his hands and run around the jungle. That poor guy, I don't know if Herzog talked him into it, he seemed ok, but that must have been traumatic to be relieving those memories in near identical conditions.

The most interesting part for me was comparing this to "Rescue Dawn". There were a lot of things that the guy mentioned (like his tough childhood growing up in Black Forest of Germany during the war and having no food to eat) or stories that he told that seemed very elemental to who he was, but that Herzog decided not to include in "Rescue Dawn". One was a really heart wrenching story about his fight to keep the engagement ring he had, refusing to let his captors take it off him. Overall, it was a classic Herzog documentary that got to the kooky, heartfelt core of everyone, and told a story in a very linear and illustrative way, which is different from many other documentarians.