Filmmaker Werner Herzog writes about his prolific and varied career in new memoir

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: Long recognized as one of the world's leading independent filmmakers, winner Herzog is also an actor, opera director and writer.

And after filming stories around the world, he now tells his own story in a new memoir.

Jeffrey Brown spoke with him at his Los Angeles home for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown: In the 1982 film "Fitzcarraldo," a man is obsessed with building an opera house in the Amazon jungle. At one point, his ship must be carried over a mountain.

It's a famous scene in film history shot without special effects by director Werner Herzog, who decades later still sees it as a metaphor for how life must be lived.

Werner Herzog, Actor/Director/Writer: All of us carry in us some sort of quest. And I think every grownup man or woman should do something like moving your ship over the mountain. It's absolutely natural. For you, it would be something else. But you have got to do it.

Jeffrey Brown: Herzog, who would win the 1982 best director award at Cannes for "Fitzcarraldo," has been doing it his own way for more than five decades in some 70 films, dramas such as "Aguirre, the Wrath of God."

Werner Herzog: It is as if the modern human soul had awakened here.

Jeffrey Brown: Documentaries including "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," in which he captured some of the world's oldest known painted images.

Werner Herzog: I absorb the world and somehow return it, but modified, changed. It was always in me this kind of quest, this kind of curiosity.

Jeffrey Brown: Now 81, Herzog tells of his lifelong pursuit in creation of images in a new memoir, "Every Man for Himself and God Against All," his childhood in poverty in a remote Bavarian village in the ruins of post-World War II Germany, his travels, often by foot, far and wide,his own visions that would often end up in his films, like, at age 17, on the island of Crete.

Werner Herzog: I stumbled all of a sudden across a field of 10,000 windmills below me. There were literally 10,000 windmills. And I sat down, because I knew I was insane. This cannot be. It's unthinkable. It's impossible.

Jeffrey Brown: But the vast field of windmills was real. And years later, it would become the central image of his first film, "Signs of Life."

This is a portrait of an artist who didn't see a film before age 11, and writes of his beginnings as a filmmaker -- quote -- "It was clear to me that, in almost complete ignorance of the cinema of others, I would have to come up with a cinema of my own.

Werner Herzog: The cinema that had an urgency inside of me, visions. I always followed a vision, and I had a very, very clear aim and vision.

And that made it possible, and I never, never deviated, departed from it. And I noticed that, looking at what others were doing, my films were in a way different.

Jeffrey Brown: One thing he is known for, stories of people, fictional and real, with impossible dreams, often in extreme circumstances, as in one of his best-known documentaries, "Grizzly Man," the story of the life and death of a man who lived among grizzlies in Alaska. And Herzog's taken on plenty of risks himself to tell those stories.

Werner Herzog: If you have an unknown alloy of metal in front of you, as a scientist, you would put it under extreme pressure, under extreme radiation, under extreme heat and then you would learn the inner nature of your metal in front of you.

And maybe it's a little bit like that in my films and also in my writing. And I have had a hard, very difficult and very risky life. I have risked a lot, more than a filmmaker normally would risk.

Jeffrey Brown: You mean physically, financially, all...

Werner Herzog: Physically, always, always, everything. You just name it.

And when we are gone, what will happen thousands of years from now in the future? Will there be alien archaeologists from another planet trying to find out what we were doing at the South Pole?

Jeffrey Brown: He's also known for what can only be called being Werner Herzog, a voice. He narrates his documentaries, giving them even more of a dramatic and personal feel, and a personality he's cultivated and others have responded to.

Taking a turn as an actor, he played quite a villain in the 2012 thriller "Jack Reacher."

Werner Herzog: I spent my first winter wearing a dead man's coat, a hole in one pocket. I chewed these fingers off before the frostbite could turn to gangrene.

I am a good-natured kind of person, but I -- on camera, on a screen, I can be very frightening.

Excuse me, my name is Walter Hotenhoffer, I'm in the pharmaceutical business.

Jeffrey Brown: And "The Simpsons" had their own fun with him, and he with them.

Werner Herzog: I'm crazy enough to be good in "The Simpsons."

(Laughter)

Jeffrey Brown: Crazy enough?

Werner Herzog: Well, I act crazy enough. Otherwise, you see, people think I'm crazy. No one -- everyone around me in Hollywood is totally crazy. I am the only clinically sane in this entire environment.

Jeffrey Brown: Maybe so, but when the editors of a recent book of poetry generated by artificial intelligence needed a human voice, it was no surprise they turned to Herzog's haunting tones.

Werner Herzog: I can remember the moment I was born. I shot out of my mother like a jack-in-the-box.

Jeffrey Brown: He's continued to turn out films, including the 2019 drama set in Japan "Family Romance, LLC."

Werner Herzog: There is something so awe-inspiring in it, so, never seen before, that attracted me as a filmmaker.

Jeffrey Brown: And the 2022 documentaries "The Fire Within" about volcano explorers.

Werner Herzog: For many years, I was fascinated by the mysteries of our brain.

Jeffrey Brown: And "Theatre of Thought," exploring a very different landscape, the human brain.

You have managed to stay on your own path, independent, away from a lot of what's happened in the industry.

Werner Herzog: Ah, yes.

Jeffrey Brown: Why has that been so important to you?

Werner Herzog: I simply do not fit very well into the film industry. I do not fit, let's say, in the world of action movies, where the explosions and car crashes are the center of things.

I just don't fit in there. My visions are differently -- are different. I have a sense of duty.

Jeffrey Brown: How do you define that duty?

Werner Herzog: Almost like a soldier. I want to be the good soldier of cinema, meaning a sense of duty, courage, responsibility.

Jeffrey Brown: Are you surprised today, all these years later, to be doing -- still doing what you are doing?

Werner Herzog: No, it has been clear to me early this is my destiny. I have no alternatives, no choices. I have never learned a profession.

(Laughter)

Werner Herzog: So...

Jeffrey Brown: So, you might as well keep doing what you're doing.

Werner Herzog: Well, you will have to carry me out from a set one day feet first. That would be the best.

Jeffrey Brown: Every man for himself and God against all, Werner Herzog's take on film and life.

For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Jeffrey Brown in Los Angeles.