“Can you see me? Can you hear me?” implores Werner Herzog, as we pop up in our little boxes – or don’t – at the start of our video call. I can both see and hear him without distortion: that idiosyncratic German timbre, so familiar from his 60 years of film-making, couldn’t be anyone else. But the problem is with my connection. “You’re frozen,” he sighs, with palpable anguish. “It’s very… disquieting. I see your face and wait for lip movements or some life, but there ain’t any life.”
This (one-sided) exchange is the perfect introduction to the 81-year-old Herzog, who has written and directed more than 60 films and who is, no question, one of the most pioneering documentarians of our age. He also acts, stages operas and is a gifted author. To all of these projects Herzog brings his voice, a searing intensity and a wry humour that he tends not to explicitly acknowledge, which makes it even funnier.
So, as we struggle to resolve our IT issues, it’s a little stressful, but I’m also struggling to suppress a laugh. Eventually, Herzog decides it’s a problem with the Teams video-call platform we are using: he delivers this information like he’s been prophesising this disaster for years but no one’s heeded him. “I’ve had it a dozen times before, it’s very, very frustrating,” he says. “And I keep predicting that if we do not do Zoom, we will lose the conversation. I hang up now.”
Five minutes later – turns out he’s right! – we catch up again on the Herzog-endorsed Zoom. He is holed up in a cabin in Styria in the Austrian Alps. It’s mid-morning and behind him a curtain is pulled to exclude harsh sunlight, which has the effect of making him look as if he’s in a witness-protection scheme. Instead, he’s retreated here from his usual base in Los Angeles, where he lives with his third wife, Lena, a visual artist whom he married in 1999, to record the audio version of his new book. I assume Herzog is referring to his memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, which is released in the UK this month. But no, he’s already completed the next one.
“It’s called The Future of Truth,” says Herzog. “There’s a rural rocker who lives here [in Austria], who has built himself a small sound studio, and when he doesn’t rock, he milks the cows.”
From Herzog’s memoir, I know that he has a history with cows. He learned how to milk them as a child, growing up beside a farm in the Bavarian Alps; he still believes that he can instinctually spot a person who can milk a cow “just as you can sometimes identify a lawyer or a butcher”. This skill came in useful when he was making his 2005 sci-fi film The Wild Blue Yonder and wanted to recruit Nasa astronauts to appear in it. In Houston, Herzog’s pitch was falling flat until he turned to one of the astronauts, Michael McCulley, and bet him that he was able to milk a cow. Herzog, again, was correct, and the astronauts all signed up.
So, this new book he’s just written about the Austrian musician-cum-dairy-farmer combines two of Herzog’s passions then? “Neither is milking cows a great love of mine nor is rocking so…” he replies with an amused smirk. “But I understand. I catch your drift.”
Herzog is probably best known for his documentary films, which include 2005’s Grizzly Man, the tale of bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell in Alaska, and Cave of Forgotten Dreams, made in 3D in 2010 from footage shot inside the prehistoric Chauvet Cave in southern France. Increasingly, though, Herzog devotes his creative energies to writing. In 2021, he published his first novel, The Twilight World, based on the Japanese army lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, who refused to believe the second world war was over and only emerged from the jungle and surrendered in 1974.
“I’ve been a writer from the very beginning,” he says. “And it’s important to say one thing because people are puzzled: films are my voyage, and writing is home. And since 40 years, I keep preaching to deaf ears that my writing will arguably outlive my films, all of them.”
Certainly, Every Man for Himself and God Against All is a joyous, fulfilling read. It tells how he discovered cinema, unimpressed, watching a pair of nature films projected on a bedsheet in his village school. And also how Herzog accidentally ended up supplying the distinctive voiceovers to many of his films. But much of the book concentrates on his childhood and there are some terrific, wild stories: the time when a fight with his older brother got out of control and he ended up slashing him twice with a penknife; and the traumatic experience of watching his best friend crash spectacularly on a homemade ski-jumping ramp.
But when I tell Herzog that he has lived an extreme and extraordinary life, he corrects me. “You shouldn’t look so much about events and stories. It’s the literature of it, the style, that will make it live very long. You see, there is no one who writes like me.”
Why did Herzog decide to write his memoir now? “My wife admonished me: do it yourself because some idiot will come along and do it instead of you,” he replies.
Herzog, though, still has considerable ambitions as a film-maker. One long chapter of the book called “Unrealised Projects” gives a tantalising look at the films he never quite got round to making, on subjects from Mike Tyson to the poet Quirinus Kuhlmann. Herzog hopes that his next feature will be on the British identical twins Freda and Greta Chaplin, who had brief tabloid notoriety in the early 1980s when they became sexually infatuated with their nextdoor neighbour, a lorry driver, who eventually took out a restraining order on them. More interesting to Herzog, who met them on a few occasions before their deaths, is that they are the only known twins who spoke synchronously. The film will be called Bucking Fastard, after a verbal slip the twins made simultaneously when they were in court.
For Herzog, the problem is that there are always more ideas than time to accomplish them. “I name at least 10 projects, there are 20 more behind that,” he says. “It’s like if you walk along a creek and you try to keep abreast with the flow of the water. But it’s always faster than you can walk.”
Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir by Werner Herzog is published by Bodley Head (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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Claudia Cardinale
Actor
Werner, hello! It’s been some time! The film I shared with you [1982’s Fitzcarraldo] remains my craziest adventure! I send you much love. What is your relationship to the sacred?
It’s a deep question. And, of course, I do have a history of looking at the sublime and had a dramatic religious phase when I was an adolescent and converted to be a Catholic. So that distant echo is still there. You see it in titles where God appears, such as Every Man for Himself and God Against All; Aguirre, the Wrath of God; The Lord and the Laden; God’s Angry Man; and on and on. So there must be some echo. And it is a quest that I think every real poet or every real film-maker is pursuing.
And I salute her back with my warmest regards. What a wonderful co-conspirator she was when we did Fitzcarraldo.
Alex Gibney
Film-maker
In a panel I was on with you, you said that a film-maker should not be a “fly on the wall”. Rather, a film-maker should be a wasp, and sting! Could you expand on that idea? And how best can a film-maker “sting?”
We could go on for 48 hours on this, but very brief… The idea of cinéma vérité is a historical mistake. We are not going to withdraw ourselves. We are creators. We are film-makers. We are directors, dammit! Otherwise the surveillance camera in the bank would be the greatest of all cameras. But you can wait for 15 years and not a single bank robbery is going to happen. So it’s not what I want and that’s not what we are made for as film-makers: go out, shape a film, articulate it, stylise it, use music, use your sense of storytelling. Be active, don’t sit back like a fly on the wall. That’s idiotic.
John Waters
Film-maker
I showed your film Even Dwarfs Started Small to my class in a psychiatric prison when I taught there in the 80s and they loved it. What other of your films would be good as a follow-up for the criminally artistic under treatment? Could you even use that title today?
Land of Silence and Darkness [Herzog’s 1971 documentary film], about people who are deaf and blind at the same time… I knew John from the early days when he released his first film at New Line Cinema and I had Even Dwarfs Started Small. We were friends – we are still friends – and he would cry on my shoulder and I would hug him because he was lovesick.
More than 40 years later, at a celebration of an anniversary of New Line Cinema, both of us were on stage. I spoke and then he was in one single spotlight. And I stepped aside and I looked at him and 800 people looked at him as well in the semi-darkness out there. And I was kind of puzzled and when our appearance was over I took my wife aside in the green room and I said to her: “Could it be that John is gay?” Oh, she laughed so hard. You see, I cannot see that. I see a human being. And I don’t care whether gay or not, whatever. It doesn’t occur to me. I only see a person.
As for the title, yes, sure. It’s a film that will outlast many of my films. It’s arguably my deepest film.
Which living actor you’ve never worked with do you admire the most? And for which performance/performances?
Simon Ponsonby, Observer reader
With whom I never have worked? Joaquin Phoenix, for example… [in 2006 in Los Angeles] I took him out of a car that flew through the air and landed on its roof. And he tried to light a cigarette. Gasoline was dripping. So I had to use massive persuasion, to snatch his… no actually, he was not persuadable any more. But I snatched the cigarette lighter away from him. And which performance? Everything, everything!
Nicole Kidman
Actor
I think of you as being like the characters you depict: impassioned, tenacious, subversive and quirky. Is there a character from one of your films you most identify with?
It’s very kind what she says. And it was the most wonderful collaboration to work with her [on 2015’s Queen of the Desert, based on the life of Gertrude Bell], it just warms my heart to think back to our professional work. But it would be dangerous and not right to identify myself with my characters. They are invented. Same thing with characters that I’m playing as an actor. It’s a performance.
But the one with whom I could identify is Walter Steiner, Swiss athlete, the world champion of ski flying [whose story Herzog tells in the 1974 documentary The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner]. Because I wanted to be an athlete in my youth. And I had a dream to become world champion. And only a catastrophic accident, which I describe in my memoirs, which almost killed my best friend, stopped that. It was over from one second to the next.
Then, all of a sudden, I find somebody who is flying instead of me. And he is the real embodiment: somebody you can touch, you can talk to, you can laugh about things with, and who shares his dreams and fears and anxieties and mortal fear with you. And yet he flies. So that’s one.
Asif Kapadia
Film-maker
When did you decide to make the switch from fiction to nonfiction film-making and why? Or is it all the same to you?
I never made a switch. I always did feature films and documentaries in parallel. Early documentaries such as The Flying Doctors of East Africa, in the late 60s, Land of Silence and Darkness. All very, very early on. So there’s no decision. I took on what came with the greatest vehemence at me. I don’t make choices like others who look at the bestseller list of the New York Times and then say: “Ja ja, I should convert this, I should make a film of this novel.” I’m not one of those.
What’s something that makes you feel very happy when you do it or think about it?
Erik Madsen, Montreal
[Pause] I am not that much in pursuit of happiness, that’s why I hesitate. But great poetry, for example. It’s not only happiness, it’s also a deep sense of consolation. We shouldn’t go into names, but I could give you 50.
Ken Burns
Film-maker
Dear Werner – your films all explore the inner lives of your characters, almost as if they are navigating the world in a dream state. How have dreams influenced your ideas about storytelling?
I do not dream. That’s puzzling for everyone, because we are under the idea that every person dreams so-and-so much at night. I do not. I’m the living proof that they are wrong. However, I do have daydreams, in particular when I’m travelling on foot. I live through entire novels, through entire football games, through entire love affairs, it’s just nonstop.
I had an incident at a workshop where young film-makers were with me. I told them they have to make a short film within nine days. They complained: “How can we so quickly invent a story?” And I said to them: “Behind me is an archway. There is a prominent stone in it. Tell me the story of this stone.” And nobody was able to do it right away. They said: “What story would you tell?” I immediately told them a story about this stone. And it comes from a background of dreams and stories and fantasies that are floating around me. I don’t know if it’s a good answer to Ken.
Mark Kermode
Film critic
The Herzog exhibition at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin has a mural depicting you and me getting “unsuccessfully shot” in LA [Herzog was hit in the abdomen by an air-rifle pellet, apparently fired by a “fan”, while being interviewed by Kermode for the BBC Culture Show in 2006 to promote Grizzly Man]. That made me feel very proud; how does it make you feel?
The young Winston Churchill famously said that there is no better feeling for a man than to be shot at unsuccessfully. We share this moment and I won’t miss it. But it’s a folklore in the United States now. And for those who say it was a hoax, let them think so. But, in this case, it was caught on tape.
Do you consider your acting work an equal part of your artistic practice beside your directing? Or is it more something to do for fun or money as a break from your own films? What are some of your favourite experiences acting in projects that are not your own?
Andrew, Toronto
No, I love everything that has to do with cinema. And I like all of my acting experiences. I was very careful to choose. You see, I’ve never accepted a film where there was a stupid story or where I didn’t feel to fit well into it. And I don’t have time to waste my life hanging around in auditions. I want people who know what I’m capable of. And be proud to invite me. So when it comes to play a dysfunctional father who is utterly hostile to his children, like in Harmony Korine’s Julien Donkey-Boy, I know I can do that. Although in real life, I’m totally the contrary. Or to play the bad-ass bad guy in Jack Reacher, I can deliver. And I only had to scare the audience.
And in many of these things like The Mandalorian, it’s not very highly paid. Or The Simpsons, not particularly highly paid. But it’s OK. It’s not a question of money. I enjoy it. And I’m doing it right. I’m doing the real good job, let’s put it that way!
Michael Shannon
Actor
Do you see a continuity to your life? Or do you feel like you’ve lived many different lives within this one?
That’s a wild question. I do believe there’s a lot of continuity and that is continuity of a fundamental vision, continuity of a worldview. Continuity of certain qualities: professionalism, courage, loyalty. And that’s basically qualities of a soldier. And you have to transport it outside of military qualities. Of course, otherwise, it’s been a wild slalom, and that I didn’t crash at 180mph against a cement wall is a miracle to me.
And I salute Michael Shannon because he clearly is the most outstanding actor of his entire generation. Name me the other one who is beyond him? Name him! I give you five seconds: five, four, three, two…
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
Dan Beesley, Leeds
Don’t ever form your own film production company. Because the moment I was outside of the door, I founded my own film company. Exactly the opposite. It was so blatantly wrong as advice that I had to react. But I’m one of those who is open to advice and who is capable of seeing that I am just about to make a mistake. I’m not a stubborn person. And I never engage yes-men in my teams, yes-men and yes-women. My cinematographers, my editors, whoever works with me, they’re not working with me because they’re so-called yes-men.
A couple of the men you interviewed for your On Death Row documentary series, James Barnes and Robert Fratta, were finally executed this year. You interviewed them in 2012. What are your thoughts about this?
David Stokes, Mesa, Arizona
I am against capital punishment. I see both men as human beings. Although everybody tells me they are old, they have to be killed off because they are monsters. I beg to differ. They are not monsters. They are human. However, their crimes are monstrous. And I make that very clear distinction.
Carol Morley
Film-maker
Is there anything you regret in your film-making life? If not, why not?
No, because I always followed my vision. And I was always loyal to it. Always unafraid. I’m proud of every single one of my films. However, every single one of my films has slight flaws here and there. And it’s terrible for me to go to the premiere of a film: I don’t see a film, I only see flaws. But that disappears after a few days and I somehow accept my movies as they are and they are wonderful – like children. And the most flawed I would defend more than the other ones: the child that is squint-eyed, the one that has a limp, the one that has a stutter.
Do you have a preferred beer?
Harry, Edgware, London
I hesitate to name a brand, but I like Bavarian beer. And in particular, all these brands that are brewed by monks. There is one brewery where the monks are at it for more than a 1,000 years: it’s made the same way because there’s the so-called Purity Law of Bavaria [Reinheitsgebot], which exists since the 1500s.
Wim Wenders
Film-maker
Winston Churchill famously said “No sports!” when asked how come he was so fit. How do you feel about any such sport-related activity? Your old pal Wim.
I am not doing sports activities today, but I was very good on skis. And I was pretty good at playing football or soccer. But my career is long over. I was a goalkeeper and I had to give up because I had a collision in a big public game at the Cannes film festival in the stadium with [actor] Maximilian Schell and he dislocated my elbow. It bent forward instead of backwards. So I couldn’t play goalie any more. Then I was centre forward. Everyone in my team was technically better. Everyone was faster, but I would score goals because I could read the game fairly well.
But I’ve always been athletic. My approach to film-making has always been very physical as well. But I think aerobics studios would be an abomination for me. Yoga even worse. Rather dead than sitting in a lotus pose.
So many of your films pit people against merciless, all-powerful nature. But are you an environmentalist? Why?
Karen Thomas, editor, The Environment magazine, London
The question itself is, I feel, too one-sided, because I point out, I have made nine films on death row. And it cannot be more unnatural. All these prisoners are in tight concrete cubicles, they don’t even see the sky out there. Zero. So a more complete absence of nature is not possible.
But nature itself, yes, I’m doing fine shooting out there in the jungle, or in the Himalayas or in the Sahara desert. It’s true. I am, of course, like every thinking human being, for the environment, but I try to do the things not waiting for governments to take action. Collectively, internationally, they are incapable of doing it. What I’m doing is I contain my consumerism. In America, 40% of food is being thrown away. I throw away only 2% maximum. Managing your fridge, there’s a lot every single one of us can do without living an impoverished life. You just watch out what is too long in the fridge, and you better make a meal from that. I drive my car only 10% what I used to do 20 years ago.
But there are two problems with pure environmentalists. One is they look too much about the wellbeing of whales and the great panda bear and the snow leopards and they overlook that we are losing a language every 10 days or 12 days. While we are sitting here probably a language has died out. That means an entire culture, an entire worldview without a trace. And it goes more dramatically than any extinction of mammals, for example.
And secondly, what is not really much in the debate is that there seems to be evidence that we will disappear as a species. Probably fairly soon. And we should look into that as well.
Lias Saoudi
Singer, Fat White Family
With you, I feel like it’s either frothing chaos, the murderous ebb and flow of nature or childlike wonderment, a numinous curiosity with all things living: based on your filmography alone, how are young people supposed to decide whether or not it’s a good idea to procreate?
To have children? I have three and I find them fantastic. And it’s good to be involved in real life. Not only the fantasies of it, but the reality of children, for example, the reality of manual work, the reality of travelling on foot, things like that. Yes, totally. However, the most intense of all problems for the human race is that we are too many on this planet: nine billion or eight billion is too much. So we have to procreate responsibly.
If Klaus Kinski was alive today do you think he would still find work as an actor given the current climate and his somewhat volatile nature?
Simon McGinley, Glasgow
He probably would find work because he was so exceptional. He’s outside of all limits. But he would not find work because his daughter has published a book where she reports about sexual abuse and rape of her by her father. So he would be cancelled; in the cancel culture, he would be out.
And I’m asking myself: do I have to cancel him? Instead of an answer, I’m asking two questions. Do we have to cancel Caravaggio, taking his paintings out of churches and museums, because he was a murderer? Would we do that? Second, would we dismiss the Old Testament because Moses committed manslaughter as a young man? And the manslaughter he committed was, in my opinion, when you look at what the Bible says, it was closer to first-degree murder, pre-mediated with a deadly weapon.
Do we have to cancel Moses? And do we have to cancel the Ten Commandments? So, those questions are my answers.
If you had a question you could ask God, what would it be?
Rui, Portugal
I wouldn’t ask God, but in general: why is there existence, rather than nothingness? It’s the biggest of all questions and it’s not my question. It was posed 2,500 years ago by Greek philosophers. It’s the question of questions and, of course, there’s no answer.
