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.)
The film takes us through his early successes such as Even Dwarfs Started Small, then the folie de grandeur masterpieces such as Aguirre Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, which both starred his tumultuous alter ego Klaus Kinski, and then through to his later documentary work, including the remarkable Grizzly Man. Zhao says all of his films are about the same thing and same person: himself, of course, the lone dissident, the liminal risk-taker, the existential disruptor testing the boundaries of sanity and possibility, whether it’s Fitzcarraldo or the penguin in his nature study Encounters at the End of the World who leaves all the other penguins and troops determinedly off into the freezing interior.
Well, maybe. There’s something almost Wellesian or Hitchcockian in the way Herzog uses celebrity to keep getting pictures made, and his work rate is one of the marvellous things about him. Calling a film-maker a “dreamer” sounds hackneyed, but it does justice to his idealism. Perhaps no other description will do.
• Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer is released on 19 January in UK and Irish cinemas.
