The enigma of Werner Herzog

Strange things happen to Werner Herzog — almost as strange as the things that happen in his haunting, hypnotic films. In 1971, while making a movie in Peru, he was bumped off a flight that subsequently crashed into the jungle. Years later, he made a moving film about that disaster’s sole survivor. In 2006, while filming an interview with the BBC in Los Angeles, he was shot in the belly by some nutter with a small calibre rifle. Most film-makers would have been turned to jelly by this terrifying interruption; Herzog simply laughed it off, cheerfully dropping his trousers to reveal a bleeding bullet wound, and a natty pair of Paisley boxer shorts.

‘He has become a catalyst for extraordinary events,’ says his British producer Andre Singer. He’s done some strange things, too. While filming Aguirre, the Wrath of God (a dark, disturbing film about the conquistadors, shot entirely in the Amazon with a camera he stole from the Munich film school), he promised to kill his leading man and lifelong friend, Klaus Kinski, if the actor left for home before Herzog finished filming. Kinski huffed and puffed, but he could tell the director wasn’t joking. He stayed until Herzog was through.

Filming Fitzcarraldo, another Amazonian epic, also starring Kinski — this time as an opera fanatic who hauls a steamship over a mountain — Herzog insisted on recreating this Herculean feat for real. ‘If I abandon this, I would be a man without dreams,’ he said. ‘It is faith that moves mountains.’ No wonder he describes film-making as a battleground. ‘I think Werner is wired slightly differently to us,’ Singer tells me. ‘Once he has got images and a storyline in his mind, he will go and find them and make them work.’