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Werner Herzog interview: ‘Our culture of complaint disgusts me’
The director on his childhood fight for survival, Elon Musk’s invitation to Mars, and why Nicolas Cage 'would die' to work with him again
Werner Herzog does not want to compare himself to Ernest Hemingway or Joseph Conrad – the “immortals”, as he calls them – but he is in no doubt about the literary merit of his new memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All. “There’s prose of an intensity that you do not see anywhere in literature nowadays,” he tells me in the solemn, aphoristic tones familiar from the voice-overs of his many documentaries. “No one writes prose like me.”
The great German film director, whose masterpieces range across half a century of cinema – among them, the 1972 drama Aguirre, the Wrath of God and the 2005 documentary Grizzly Man – has chosen to tell his own story on the page. The result (translated into English by Michael Hofmann) is an evocative, shocking encounter with a man who has experienced life at its most extreme. It takes us from the childhood trauma of carrying a friend with horrific head injuries towards safety – “The sound of the collision still shakes me even now” – to smuggling guns across the US border into Mexico. Yet, he insists his choice of medium is no departure: “Forty years ago, I said that my writing, my prose and my poetry, will probably live longer than my films. I’ve kept saying that, to deaf ears.”
Herzog is in Austria, in a darkened room (we’re talking over Zoom), and it feels as if he is admonishing me personally for this collective failure to take heed. I’ve interviewed him before in person, and it is a singular experience; there is nowhere to hide.
Last time, I confessed that I did not know Moses was a murderer. “It’s in the Bible, stupid,” he said, with undisguised scorn. “I really don’t care,” he says this time, when I ask the question he put to the last Communist leader of the USSR in Meeting Gorbachev (2018): What should be on your gravestone? “Hopefully, there will be no gravestone ever for me. Posterity is going to do its thing, anyway. I will not be around.”
Now 81, Herzog appears undiminished by age, as prolific as he has ever been. His most recent drama, the thought-provoking Family Romance, LLC (2019), which he shot in Tokyo without film permits, was, he says, “financed and produced out of my own pocket”. Likewise, for his 2022 documentary Theatre of Thought, “I just rolled up my sleeves, earned money and financed it. I’ve never complained about it.”
In Every Man for Himself and God Against All, he recounts how he and his elder brother Tilbert grew up in extreme poverty in the Alpine village of Sachrang, “surely the remotest place in all of Bavaria”, after his mother, Liesel, fled Munich in the wake of an Allied bombing raid in 1942. She had rescued the newborn Werner from his cradle, where he lay unhurt, “covered in a thick layer of broken glass, bricks and rubble”. In the mountains, he describes his mother’s anger and despair as her sons hung around her skirts, whimpering with hunger. “At that moment, we learnt not to wail,” he writes. “The culture of complaint disgusts me.”
So when he hears “very, very successful Hollywood directors complaining all the time that the film industry does not recognise their genius and is not producing their next project, I keep saying, ‘Roll up your sleeves and do it anyway.’ ”
His father, Dietrich, a German soldier in France during the Second World War, was an enthusiastic National Socialist in the early years of the Nazi movement. His mother, he says, “became disenchanted fairly early on”; knowledge of the Holocaust “was very bitter for [her]; I don’t describe it in the book. That is something which belongs to me and her alone.”
Yet, for years after the war, his father “was still bitter that Germany had been defeated”. When Dietrich chose not to return to his young family, Werner was glad. “I was certainly delighted that we didn’t have a drill-sergeant type in the house, telling us what to do.” This comes as no surprise: as a boy, Herzog was fearless, with little sense of limits. “In general, I was a danger to those around me,” he writes.
He describes a fight with his brother, in which Werner attacked him with a knife, after which “the room was awash with blood”. Where did his violent temper go? “I made it disappear,” he says. “You have to. I don’t want to look deep into me, but it’s simply a question of discipline.”
I ask him if the book deviates from the concept of “ecstatic truth” that he employs in his films, in which “facts” become modifiable in search of deeper truths. In his memoir, he says, “All essentials are fact-checked and verified with my siblings.” (As well as Tilbert, he has a half-sister and brothers, from his parents’ subsequent relationships.) Sometimes, though, his memory, “like with everyone else’s memories, is shaping the past slightly”.
Besides, he adds, of the stories told in the book, “quite a few things were always in public”. He picks out the 2006 BBC TV interview during which he was shot in the stomach with an air rifle, and dismissed the wound as “not significant” on camera. “No one would believe it, but it is on tape. Whether you doubt it or not, I don’t care.”
When Werner was 13, Liesel and her children moved back to an apartment block in Munich, where “the madman Klaus Kinski” was a neighbour. The actor, who died in 1991, is an incandescent presence in the memoir, as he is in Herzog films such as Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) and Fitzcarraldo (1982). We read of him attacking a critic with a hail of potatoes, smashing his bathroom in a rage. Did Herzog find an outlet for his own violence through Kinski’s?
“Kinski wasn’t violent,” he retorts, before admitting there may have been some “performative violence” and, on reflection, genuine violence, too, “only apparently with women, including his daughter. That’s a very, very dark side I learnt about recently.” I mention a report of Kinski being diagnosed as a psychopath by a clinic in northern Germany in 1950. Does Herzog believe it? “I don’t care what he was. I only care what he was on screen. There’s no one who had his presence. And no one who had his intensity, with a very few exceptions, like, for example, the young Marlon Brando.”
Their turbulent relationship was the subject of Herzog’s 1999 film My Best Fiend, in which he described the terrifying battle of wills that began when Kinski played the maniacally driven 16th-century conquistador Lope de Aguirre, in 1972. Herzog revisits the filming of Aguirre in Peru in his memoir. I ask about the infamous incident in which he threatened to kill Kinski and then turn the gun on himself if the actor walked out on the film; had Kinski quit, would he have followed through with it? “Kinski understood that I was not joking,” he says. “It was very quiet – I mean, in a very low voice; he was screaming like a madman.”
Although there are multiple brushes with death in the memoir – in the rodeo ring, for example, or on a frozen mountaintop – “I’m not embracing danger,” Herzog insists. “I’m very prudent. If prudence has a name, it’s mine.” Yet rewatch Aguirre’s staggering opening sequence – in which a group of conquistadors descend a high Andean pass, then navigate the rapids of a vast Amazon tributary on lashed-together wooden rafts – and it’s impossible to imagine Hollywood reproducing such a genuine sense of threat to life today, whatever daredevilry Tom Cruise may pull off in the Mission: Impossible films. “Well, there’s something deeply authentic about it,” Herzog says. “And I would like to remind you that I tested the dangers myself. I clomb this almost vertical cliff, where the whole army comes down in a zigzag.” (He says he uses the word “clomb” for its poetry, as Wordsworth did.) “And I tested the rapids alone, with two experienced oarsmen, and I knew it could be done with cameras and actors.”
Herzog worked with Cruise himself on Jack Reacher, in 2012, in which he played the coldly grim antagonist: “I delivered,” he says. In fact, the memoir’s sole trip into cliché may be when Herzog writes that he was impressed by the actor’s “absolute professionalism” – which is pretty much the only thing anyone ever says about Cruise. What of his Scientology? Does Herzog see what he calls “the distant echo of divinity or transcendence… evident in many of my films” in Cruise’s chosen religion? “Don’t ask me that,” he says. “Like freedom of speech, there’s such a thing as freedom of choice of religion… So don’t harp on about Tom Cruise being in Scientology.”
I ask instead how he deals with the vanity of actors. “I struggle with it, but I keep silent,” he tells me. “The only thing that counts is how do I make them their best on screen.” This, judging by Christian Bale’s reported response to shooting Herzog’s 2006 war film, Rescue Dawn, in the Thai jungle – “I’m not going to f---ing die for you, Werner” – can involve pushing them hard. He and Bale keep in touch, loosely, he says. “We have very deep respect, and Christian would very badly want me to do another film with him. So would Nicolas Cage, he would die to do another film with me. He says by far the best ever, ever he acted was Bad Lieutenant,” says Herzog, referring to his 2009 film in which Cage starred. “I make them their very best. All of them.”
Herzog himself turns up in Disney’s The Mandalorian, as the sinister figure The Client, proof, perhaps, of his enduring cult appeal. There are endless parodies of his voice online; Alexander Skarsgård played a version of him in the starry American spoof series Documentary Now! “Well, let’s face it, when you listen to my accent, it’s justified that I’m inviting parody,” he says. “I’ve easily learnt to live with at least 30 doppelgängers and voice imitators, who even give life advice to the perplexed, so I consider them as my unpaid stooges. Let them do battle out there. I know who I am.”
He laughs. It’s easy to forget that dark humour runs throughout Herzog’s films, from the cop radioing in to say that he “can’t stop the dancing chicken” at the end of Stroszek (1977) to his own much-imitated “But why?” speech as a penguin heads off by itself towards the mountains of Antarctica in Encounters at the End of the World (2007).
That film earned Herzog an Academy Award nomination in 2009, the only one so far in a career of more than 70 films. It startles him when he looks at them all listed in the appendix of his book, he says. “I ask myself, was this really me? Or did I fantasise it? Was it my brother who did it, secretly, and I talked myself into having done that?” His failure to win Oscars doesn’t bother him in the least. “I think you are putting too much weight on the importance of them,” he says. “It doesn’t have much for me.”
He did, however, chair the jury at the 2010 Berlin Film Festival, which controversially awarded the Silver Bear, for The Ghost Writer, to Roman Polanski, still a hugely contentious figure in America, where he is wanted for the statutory rape of teenager Samantha Geimer in the 1970s. “The award did not go to Polanski because he was under house arrest in Switzerland at that time,” Herzog says. “It went to him because the jury, including me, were totally convinced it’s an extraordinary achievement of directing.” He has no truck with cancel culture. It is, he says, “one of the stupidities of our time. We will look back in amazement 50 years from now.”
If we get that far. “I’m more and more convinced that because of our biological fragility and collective behaviour, we may die out fairly soon,” Herzog says. “But Nature doesn’t care about that.” There’s a beauty to the way Herzog writes about the natural world, though he reminds me he has an open invitation to escape to Mars, from Elon Musk, to whom he spoke for his 2016 tech documentary Lo and Behold. He’s suspicious of Musk’s motives. “You should not think about populating Mars with a million human beings. It’s not doable,” Herzog says. “But it’s a marketing trick. And whoever has brains more than a primate would see it instantly.”
Still, Herzog would like to take up his place on any flight to the red planet. He had wanted to be one of the eight civilians on the SpaceX trip around the moon paid for by the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa. “I applied, seriously against the opinion of my wife,” he says. “But I was not accepted.”
For now, he lives on Earth – well, in Los Angeles – with his third wife, the Russian photographer Lena Pisetski, whom he married in 1999. Of the US, he says, “I would not live in a country that I didn’t really deeply like, in its essence,” and admits to a particular fondness for the American heartland, “which has been neglected, disenfranchised, undereducated, underrepresented in the media”.
He likes to watch trash American TV because “television gives a good bandwidth of what engages the mind of the audience… It is vulgar, but it exists, so better to take a good look of what is around you.”
He also watches a lot of football. Has he caught a whiff of Messi mania in the US? “Forget about the mania,” he says, “he is a truly great player.” And what of Harry Kane, the new star back home at Bayern Munich? “I love players – and Harry Kane belongs to them – who can read a game, who can read where to be for scoring.”
Herzog still doesn’t own a mobile phone. It’s not a generational thing, he insists. “Even if I were 18, today, or 17, I probably wouldn’t have a cell phone. Because I think on my own, and I act on my own.” He does, of course, use the internet. Lo and Behold presented a frightening portrait of how tech is changing humanity. What has happened since then that has most unsettled him?
“Well, it has intensified, and we have artificial intelligence now. And we have to deal with it.” He talks of the phenomenal achievements of AI already in biochemistry, “but at the same time, we have to be aware that warfare will change and many other things that are not very pleasant, so we have to be really vigilant”. Does he think it will change filmmaking? “Not mine. And when you look at me straight in the eye, it will never make a film as good as mine. And it will never write a book as I write.” Nor, perhaps, will anyone else.
Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir by Werner Herzog (tr Michael Hofmann) is published by The Bodley Head on Oct 19, at £25. To pre-order, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk