With pop-culture brand recognition like no other auteur, he walks the walk and talks the talk … in that inimitable voice. Werner Herzog – film-maker, visionary, adventurer and first among equals of the New German cinema – is now the subject of a highly enjoyable new documentary from Thomas von Steinaecker, who has assembled an A-list gallery of interviewees to talk about knowing or working with the great man; these include Wim Wenders, Volker Schlöndorff, Nicole Kidman, Chloé Zhao, Joshua Oppenheimer, Robert Pattinson and many more.
The release of this film happens to coincide with Herzog’s autobiography Every Man for Himself and God Against All (which is also the original German title of his film The Enigma of Kasper Hauser) and I was a little disappointed that Radical Dreamer does not include Herzog’s recollection of a childhood knife-fight with his brother over ownership of the family hamster. (Though it does show us his outdoor TV interview with Mark Kermode, in the course of which Herzog was shot by a distant obsessive fan/enemy/critic with an air-rifle. Herzog later merely pulled down the waistband of his boxers to reveal the seeping wound and said with a shrug that he didn’t want to go to hospital.)
