Werner Herzog is about to turn 80 and is refashioning himself as a writer. He wishes it to be appreciated that this is what he always was – he is, after all, a virtuoso screenwriter as well as one of the greatest film-makers alive. He is talking from LA, where he now lives, about his new book, The Twilight World, a poetic hybrid, somewhere between dream and documentary. The book, which became a bestseller in the US within eight days of publication, is the story of Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who faithfully defended Lubang, an island in the Philippines, for 29 years, believing himself to be under military orders long after the second world war had ended. Onoda could have stepped straight out of a Herzog film – or be about to step into one. Herzog makes no secret of having hoped to make a film about him, the problem being that Onoda, practised at giving the world the slip, would not oblige, although he did volunteer, once the men got to know each other: “If anyone ever does a film about me, it should be you, Herzog san.”
Herzog has the sort of face that ages well – the younger man surfacing in the older man’s countenance. The impression he makes shifts as the conversation moves: he is patient and impatient, serious minded and humorous, overbearing and profound – used to calling the conversational shots. In the end, he persuaded himself that Onoda was better suited to a book than a film: the narrative is more about illusion than action and dominated by fatalism rather than conventional suspense. The prose poetry of the jungle is everywhere – camouflage becomes a psychic quality.
