Werner Herzog proposed not to record the interview that follows.
The German director believes that conversations are remembered more without devices.
The suggestion causes a bead of cold sweat on the journalist's back, who considers the filmmaker's gracious ways a wiggle room to refute.
The documentation of the talks with Herzog (Munich, 79 years old) is important.
If a BBC camera had not been filming a talk near his home in the bohemian Laurel Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles in February 2006, it would be impossible to believe that a stray bullet grazed him while he was talking to the journalist.
Much of Herzog's life defies fact checking.
He was a welder before he started making movies.
In 1980 he ate his shoe, stewed in duck fat, garlic and herbs, after claiming that his protégé, documentarian Errol Morris, would not finish his feature debut,
Gates of Heaven
.
He says he is not dreaming and claims to have finished in just 38 days
Grizzly Man
(2004), the portrait of Timothy Treadwell, a lover of nature and bears who occupies a special place in the vast portrait of losers that make up the catalog of his work.
Herzog (on the left), in 1982, together with Claudia Cardinale and Klaus Kinski during the shooting of the film 'Fitzcarraldo'.Rue des Archives (Credit ©Rue des Archives/ AGIP )
Before shooting his first film,
Signs of Life
(1967), Herzog visited the United States on a scholarship.
His visa expired and he crossed into Mexico in 1964 through the Texas border to avoid problems with immigration authorities and earn a few dollars.
Without knowing how to ride a horse, he found work in rodeos in the border city of Reynosa, in Tamaulipas.
"They needed a rodeo clown and he rode wild bulls or steers," says the director.
“It was like going in a car at 200 kilometers per hour.
He every time he ended up hurt.
Once a bull threw me against a stone wall.
It was the end of the fun,” he recalls.
He soon found another job selling things from the gabacho, as they call the United States in Mexico, for wealthy ranchers: electronic gadgets and silver revolvers with mother-of-pearl handles.
The ranchers called him El Alemán because they couldn't say Werner.
He corrected them by asking that they really should tell him El Alamein, a difficult joke to catch at a lost point on the border.
“I had to explain that it was a battlefield in North Africa that, together with Stalingrad, caused a gigantic defeat for the German troops.
And since I've always been a loser — and I looked ridiculous because they needed a clown — well, it was a role I gladly played."
At the origin of this storyteller there is a memory of the war.
Herzog says that he was about two and a half years old.
His mother took him and his brother to see the remains of the bombing of Rosenheim, Hermann Göring's town, about 45 kilometers from where they lived.
“It was the fire from a distance, the city in flames, bombarded until it was erased.
I remember seeing a yellow, red, and orange pulse over the sky that had these colors.
It is embedded in my memory.
It was something that disturbed him, something terrible.
He didn't even know Rosenheim or understand what a war was, but he knew that he was witnessing something very very very important yet unknown,” he notes.
Again there is a war in Europe, a subject that Herzog prefers not to go into detail about.
The talk, at the luxurious Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills, takes place in the first days of the offensive of the Vladimir Putin regime in Ukraine.
The German filmmaker, who has been in the United States for decades, prefers to be cautious.
“I would like to highlight two ideas from Mikhail Gorbachev, with whom I made a film [Meeting Gorbachev, 2018].
He spoke bitterly of all the lost opportunities between the West and Russia after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
So many missed opportunities!
Second, he repeated that without security for Russia there will be no security for Europe.
It is an idea with a vision of the future”, affirms the director.
On a break from filming 'Bad Lieutenant' (2009), with Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendes, in New OrleansCapital Pictures (Image supplied by Capital Pictur)
Herzog is the closest thing to a Humboldt of the cinema.
He filmed in Antarctica, staged operas in Tokyo, was imprisoned in the Congo, wrote books of poetry and has been, at the same time, threatened with death by the German right and branded as a fascist by the left after the premiere of the brilliant, comic and cruel
Also the dwarfs started small
(1970), filmed in Lanzarote with a cast composed of dwarfs.
The controversy caused by this film made him one of the most controversial directors for years.
His detractors even visited time after the shooting of
Fitzcarraldo
(1982), in the Peruvian jungle, to alert the local press and their supporters that the director was turning a production famous for multiple mishaps into a concentration camp.
The welcome to the legendary location was given by a sign that said "film or death".
"Telling a story is carrying an audience in your arms and carrying it," says the director in front of a campari with soda that he drinks with small sips from a plastic straw.
“That's what I do in
Cave of Forgotten Dreams,
which ends with mutated albino crocodiles and has little to do with cave paintings.
I propose a wild burst of fantasy and take the audience to the realm of dream and poetry.
And they love it.
That's what I do".
The man who made a 350-ton ship move over a mountain in order to complete a film about Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, starring Klaus Kinski, who dreamed of opening an opera house in the middle of the Amazon for Enrico Caruso to sing there.
Despite anecdotes like this, Herzog considers himself a director who can take “no” for an answer.
He even has "a couple" of impossible movies that he couldn't find money for (one of them about conquest).
"I don't spend 20 years trying to get the money because in that time I've made 35 movies and written several more," observes the filmmaker, who has learned to work with limits.
“There always will be, even Spielberg and Coppola have them.
Strangely, they complain.
I am not part of the culture of complaint.
It's what I tell everyone, that they should leave her.
You have to roll up your sleeves and get things done,” he says.
During the pandemic, Herzog finished two films and is preparing a third.
He also wrote two books.
Each one for himself
and
God against all
, which will be published soon, is a concise autobiography of only 100 pages that summarizes his vision.
The other,
The twilight of the world
, has been recently published in Spain by Blackie Books.
It is a story about Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier stationed on the remote Philippine island of Lubang along with three other soldiers during World War II, who refused to believe that the conflict ended in 1945 and continued to fight the enemy for 30 more years. .
The story fits the profile of characters for which the filmmaker feels weak.
Herzog tells the story giving it a mysterious realism that has philosophical moments, irony and a sense of humor.
The German filmmaker, at another point in his work on the film 'Bad Lieutenant' (Corrupt Lieutenant). Lena Herzog (Cordón press)
To be able to narrate this story, he had to live a humiliating moment.
On a trip to Japan in the late 1990s, the director was finishing the staging of an opera by a local composer.
He came to a meeting one night accompanied by production collaborators.
He was excited because Emperor Akihito had signaled that he would like to receive him in a private audience.
Herzog said "no" because he would not know how to conduct himself in a meeting marked by protocol.
“I never should have said that.
They all froze.
They turned into pillars of salt that avoided my gaze.
After a long, long silence, a voice was heard: 'Who would you like to meet in Japan if not the emperor?'
And I said Onoda”, he remembers.
The following week, she met the soldier, who died in Tokyo in 2014. The jungle was one of the first topics of conversation, an element that brought them together almost immediately.
“We talked about the feverish quality of it and the absence of time.
He thought about time.
The present does not exist, it is something strange that we do not take into account.
The only thing that exists is past and future.
Everything in between is an elaboration.
Onoda, always aware of this, deconstructed his own reality, his own war.
It's tragic, it's fictional, and it's deeply human,” recalls Herzog.
Onoda incorporated every detail he observed into his story.
When he saw planes flying over his head in 1950, he thought it was the same conflict, but it was already the Korean War.
Seven or eight years later, the military ships that he watched from his island were going to Vietnam.
In his logic, the theater of war had moved west.
Although the figure is disputed, Onoda is responsible for some 30 deaths, mainly of peasants on the island.
However, he was treated with reverence by the Philippine and Japanese governments.
"Neither of the two countries wanted to delve too deeply into the wounds, reconciliation was more important," says the filmmaker.
Onoda's story is touched on with his first feature film,
Signs of Life
, about a military man who garrisons himself in a small fort during World War II and goes mad.
Herzog says that the coincidences are only superficial, but his debut film was based on a scene he saw at the age of 16 and made him think that he had gone mad: “A valley with 10,000 irrigation mills.
I met my grandfather when he was crazy, so the only thing I could think when I was young was: 'It's too soon, I can't go crazy that young.
What I'm seeing is unthinkable."
The image stayed with him for several years and he later connected it with the story of paratrooper Stroszek, who arrives on the island with his wife and two soldiers.
Onoda finally gave up in 1974. That same year, Herzog walked from Munich to Paris as a pilgrimage for his friend Lotte Eisner, film critic and founder of the Cinémathèque française, who was ill (and lived another decade).
The Japanese and the German lived in opposite parts of the planet a solitary experience.
"The world is revealed to those who travel on foot," says Herzog in what he calls one of his life mottos.
“Of course, hardly anyone travels this way.
That walk had a deep meaning because I wanted to prevent the death of my mentor, ”he adds, although he is forced to explain that he does not hike or walk with a backpack on his back.
"That's for the esoteric, for those who hug the trees," he says, despite being dressed in a mountaineering tracksuit for low temperatures.
Herzog talks about his life and his productive period sitting in the Four Seasons hotel in Los Angeles, the city where he has lived for 23 years, a detail that could be an eccentricity that contradicts his character, but that he defends.
“The city is not just the glitz and glamor of Hollywood.
The most important trends that have shaped our world in the last 50 years came from here.
Internet, for example.
Reusable rockets are being built in the city, not in some faraway Wyoming wilderness.
Aerobics studies also originated here along with other stupidities such as sects”, lists Herzog.
He also boasts that he has never stepped foot in the sea in two decades, since he moved to Los Angeles from San Francisco.
The Japanese soldier Hiroo Onoda, who spent 30 years hiding on the Philippine island of Lubang, believing that World War II was continuing.
Herzog has dedicated the book 'The twilight of the world' to him. Jiji press (Afp) (AFP)
About to turn 80, he does not slow down or slow down in vitality.
Approaching this age he perceives a "more intense capacity to produce."
"I'm working on new things, among them, a feature film in Africa," she says.
All this, she indicates, without frenetic rhythms.
"I sleep many hours, I read a lot and I never go to parties," she details.
Herzog hates fame.
“I would like, if possible, to remain anonymous.
It's not healthy for any human being,” confesses a cult filmmaker who has appeared on
The Simpsons
, saving Joaquin Phoenix's life before he won an Oscar (the moment was captured in an animated short).
He has also played villains, which he presumes to do quite easily, in
Jack Reacher
, a thriller starring Tom Cruise, and in
The Mandalorian
, from Disney.
The director remembers the premiere of the story about Boba Fett, one of the Star Wars characters, which was made with one of the fan clubs of the George Lucas universe.
“When the credits rolled and my name came up, I had never experienced anything like this in my life.
About 1,500 young people shouting with joy.
It is unimaginable.
Somehow they knew about me!” He laughs in surprise.
He has guided (he repudiates the term teach) dozens of filmmakers and documentarians from around the world, whom he calls colleagues, in a traveling academy called the Rogue Film School.
Despite his remarkable influence, he rejects the label of genius or author.
He prefers to be called "a good movie soldier."
“Not in military terms…, I'm talking about maintaining an outpost with a banner that means loyalty, courage and sense of responsibility, important qualities that I try to live by.
I have credibility because I back them with 70 movies,” he notes.
One of his main lessons for colleagues at school, apart from how to forge filming permits in public places, was to convey to them the importance of solitude.
This may sound contradictory for such a gregarious profession, but the filmmaker believes that only "tolerating it as a profound source of existence allows you to connect in a meaningful way with others."
Herzog finds in writing a nourishment for his loneliness.
“My written work will live longer than my cinema.
I may be wrong, but it doesn't matter.
Almost all the scripts have been written by me, stories invented by me with a deep poetic sense”.
This, he makes clear, without being a solitary being.
His younger brother works producing movies for him.
He has been married to his wife, Lena, for 27 years.
He has children.
“I don't see too many men like me around.
They all have problems.
I'm a very lucky bastard."
Exclusive content for subscribers
read without limits
subscribe
I'm already a subscriber