Asked if he'd turned his cellphone off, writer-director Werner Herzog said, "I do not have a cellphone.I don't have to turn off anything.
I just want to live and have a real conversation with a real person."Herzog got his wish: An authentic conversation not long ago at his home in the Hollywood Hills.He is a legitimate filmmaking visionary, in Hollywood and around the world, having directed more than 20 feature films and better than 30 documentaries – from a journey to the heart of darkness in the Amazon, to a life among grizzlies in the Arctic. He's put it all into a memoir with a title that's vintage Werner: "Every Man for Himself and God Against All" (Penguin Press)."A title has to somehow jump at you," Herzog said."When you walk by some books and you see this, you stop: 'Man, what is this?'" What it is, is the story of a filmmaker unlike any other.
"Yes, I have experienced a lot, as if I had lived ten times over already," he said."And that's the beauty of the memoir, is that it's so condensed.
When you read it, you will not be bored."Born in Munich, Germany during World War II, Herzog started making films as a teen.He was drawn to characters with impossible dreams: you see it in his 1982 film "Fitzcarraldo," with a longtime collaborator, Klaus Kinski.
The character of Fitzcarraldo wants to build an opera house in the middle of the Amazon rainforest.To do it, he needs to haul a steamship up, then down, a mountain.Herzog said, "20th Century Fox was interested to finance and produce a film.
But they wanted to produce it with a small, plastic replica of a ship in a jungle, a 'good' jungle.And they thought, 'We should do it in the botanic garden in San Diego.' And I said, 'No, it has to be really shot in a big jungle, and big rivers, and everything.'"Without the benefit of CGI, Herzog found his big jungle, his big river.
He made the astonishing decision to pull a real 320-ton riverboat over a real mountain to the Amazon River on the other side.I...