Werner Herzog on Death, Los Angeles and Avoiding Introspection

The "My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done" director on his late friend Bruno S., his Toronto-bound 3D cave painting film and film critics.

Between this film, which feels like a noir, and other recent works like “Bad Lieutenant” and “Rescue Dawn,” it seems as if you’re embracing genre more, and playing with it. Is this just a side effect of your working in the American film industry now?

I would be careful, because for example, “Nosferatu” is a vampire film, and “Fitzcarraldo” you could call an adventure film. But I think your observation is right, in the sense that I’m embracing new things. I’ve always moved on, and I’ve always been out for new horizons. And I’ve always enjoyed working here in the United States. I live here now and I got married here. It’s been a wonderful time for me, of new alliances, new subjects, new distribution forms. And I’ve been working with wonderful actors. I’ve been privileged to work with people like Michael Shannon, Willem Dafoe, Christian Bale, Nicolas Cage.

There seems to have been a real resurgence of interest in your work recently. Not just in your new films or your iconic films from the ’70s, but in some of the lesser-known films you’ve made. To what do you attribute that?

Yes, very, very young people are seeing them. Today, it’s the 15-year-olds who write to me. That’s amazing, and I like to see that. Because I think the films — and I have to say this with the necessary caution — they are timeless. If you look at “Aguirre,” it looks like it could have been made today. They are films that do not age. If you look at John Huston’s “Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” it is a film that doesn’t age.

You once said of F.W. Murnau’s work that he saw the catastrophes that would befall the world, ten years ahead of time. I wonder if maybe that’s why there’s interest in your films again, because you, like Murnau, seem interested in this thin line between civilization and the chaos that threatens it, both from within and without. And that seems to be something on people’s minds in general nowadays.

I’m trying to avoid introspection into myself. I don’t want to look at my own navel. But I think you’re on target when you speak of Murnau’s work. There was a kind of premonition in much of what he did. He was some sort of a visionary. I like these types of people in the cinema, and in the arts in general.

How is your relationship with critics nowadays?

I think I’m kind of relaxed about it. I’m glad they still exist and that not everything is shifting over into celebrity news. That’s a huge trend at the moment, and I’m glad that they are still around. Criticism has never made me nervous, because I was always sure of what I was doing. If I had a bad review, it didn’t affect me. And it didn’t affect me if I had a good review, either. I said to myself, the film will not become better because it got rave reviews, and the film won’t get worse because it got bad reviews. “Aguirre” got a lot of bad reviews initially. But I thought the film would outlive them.

You were a great fan and friend of the German film critic Lotte Eisner.

Yes, and now I have a similar relationship with Roger Ebert. The film I made in Antarctica is dedicated to him. I think we have to admire Roger for being such a good soldier of cinema. He’s wounded, but he still holds out on his outpost — just totally admirable. He has been Roger Ebert all his life, but now he has become monumental.

You have a book from the making of “Fitzcarraldo, Conquest of the Useless,” based on your diaries from that period. Was it hard going back to it?

Well, I couldn’t do it for over a quarter of a century, until my wife pushed me into it. But it’s not so much a book on the making of the film. It’s clear poetry, fever dreams in the jungle. The making of the film doesn’t factor much in this book. There’s real prose, real poetry in it. And that’s what I like about it. I wrote it in this microscopic handwriting, and I wrote in it daily and in between shots and in between going from one riverbank to the other. Of course, afterwards, I cut it down. It was all in all a thousand pages or so. And I like the English translation of it, by the way — it was very carefully done.

Do you still keep such diaries?

Only under special circumstances. In a way, of course, my life has always been a special circumstance. But I must say, I have not written much recently in that sort of thing. Instead, I’ve written a screenplay for a feature film. I’m working too much at the moment.

“My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done” will be available on DVD and Blu-ray on September 14th. “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival next week.

[Additional photos: "Happy People: A Year in the Taiga," Studio Babelsberg, 2010; "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, 2010; "Portrait Werner Herzog, Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, 1986]

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