Werner Herzog Defends His “Ecstatic” Approach to the Truth
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Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

When the film director, Werner Herzog, was just 11 years old, this was in the mid-50s, a man with a mobile movie projector came to his one-room school in Bavaria and showed a film, the first film that young Werner had ever seen. He was not terribly impressed. But film became his calling. And now at 81, he's made more than 70 features and documentaries, including early epics like Fitzcarraldo and documentaries like Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Grizzly Man.

which never quite leaves my mind. Perfection belonged to the bears. But once in a while Treadwell came face to face with the harsh reality of wild nature. This did not fit into his sentimentalized view that everything out there was good and the universe in balance and in harmony.

And although acting was never his focus, Werner Herzog has become an in-demand character actor in Hollywood, largely because of that unmistakable and menacing voice. He's popped up as a villain in blockbusters like Jack Reacher and the Star Wars TV series The Mandalorian.

A few weeks ago in The New Yorker, we published an excerpt from Werner Herzog's new memoir, which is called, and it's a great title, Every Man for Himself and God Against All. It's a title from one of his early films. And we sat down to talk about that book and his unconventional approach to truth-telling. Let's go back to your beginnings, and let's go back to when you were 11 and saw your first film. You grew up quite poor and said that you didn't know about the existence of film before the age of 11, which is quite extraordinary.

And you also described that first film, which was about Eskimos building an igloo, as extremely boring, I think is the phrase you used in the book. Tell me about that experience. You began by seeing documentaries, I believe.

Yeah, but it didn't really fascinate me. I immediately could tell as an 11-year-old kid the first time ever knowing that there was such a thing like cinema. And it looked lousy. These people who built an igloo didn't know how to deal with ice and snow. But I had because I grew up in the mountains and I grew up on skis.

And I wanted to fly on skis. So my dream was to fly and all this looked kind of ridiculous to me and didn't impress me. What did impress you about films and when did you start to get – conceive the idea that maybe I want to do this?

It was a bad film, one of the endless series of Dr. Fu Manchu films, one of the sequels. And the stuntman is shot down from a rock and somersaults down into the abyss.

Twenty minutes later, I see the same shot recycled. And I told my friends, didn't you notice it was the same guy somersaulting and doing this little kick in midair? And they said, no, we didn't, number one. They didn't see it. And number two, it's impossible because that guy that you saw was dead already. We assumed who was shot down from a rock was actually really dead.

So I started to see cinema in a different way. How did they do it? What is the composite? How do they narrate a film? How is that one scene or one shot added to the next and makes a story? So from a real bad film, I started to figure out cinema myself.

But at the same time, at the same time, I knew I was a poet and I started writing. I wrote poetry and I have always been a writer as well. So it puzzles, it puzzles people. And you are speaking only of my films. My films are a distraction right now. How do you mean?

Because I'm out here, I published, I wrote three books in the last two years. And I have proclaimed and postulated for more than four decades, watch out, you have to see something else in me as well. I'm a writer. And my writing will probably outlive my films.

You write, to this day, I couldn't tell you what color my eyes are. Introspection, navel gazing is not my thing. Is that really true? You don't know color of your eyes? It is true. I look at my face when I shave so that I won't cut myself. But I do not want to look into my eyes and study myself and reflect myself. Sometimes animals, when you have a cat, we have a cat.

And when you put a mirror in front of the cat, the cat looks shy and turns away and doesn't want to face itself. So animals sometimes do that. Because of a sense of horror or disinterest? No, no, neither, neither. I do not know. I think it's only...

in a way unhealthy to look too much at your own persona and your own navel and your own well-being and your own role in society, all this I keep away from me. And I keep saying it's not healthy to illuminate every single dark corner in our soul. Leave it dark.

To remember everything and keep it alive and deal with it later in life and work away your traumas. Have you ever been in psychotherapy? No, I'd rather be dead. The same way like you see my head is baldening and I give this as an advice to men now.

rather be dead than ever were to pay. So...

Please explain. No, I don't need to explain any further. Men will understand me and women will understand it even better. I think so. But psychoanalysis would kill you because it's deadening. No, it would not kill me. But I'd rather be dead than volunteering to go to an analyst. I better work it out.

out with talking to a very dear friend who has had a similar experience. Talk to them. Not talk to a professional. Talk to your wife. Talk to somebody who is close to you. Or don't talk at all. And deal with it. Deal with it. Deal with your own soul and get over with it.

It's always struck me, since I was quite young and watching your films and then reading you, that your voice, your style, whether you're speaking to me now or whether I'm reading you or whether I'm watching you in a documentary film behind the camera or in front of it or in your films from long ago and even more recently feature films...

that there is a distinctiveness to it and that you are in control of it. And sometimes it's parodied.

Possibly because of your accent. And you parody it, too. Of course, yes. You know how to play with it. Self-irony does me good. For example, I mentioned to you before we sat down, I re-watched this Jack Reacher film with Tom Cruise, and you're playing a horrifying criminal named Zyek Chiloviek, which means in Russian, prisoner person, which is a great joke. I was in prison in Siberia.

I spent my first winter wearing a dead man's coat. A hole in one pocket. I'd shoot these fingers off before the frostbite could turn to gangrene. That is how I survived when so many others did not. A man this rare can always be of use. So show me. Show me you are rare. Show me you'll do anything to survive.

And you're playing with your own voice. Tell me what you're doing. What's your level of self-awareness and then how are you manipulating it? It's not just the voice. It's the content also. And there are other bad guys, but they have assault rifles and they open fire and they start fistfights and they yell and curse.

I have only a quiet voice and one eye is blind and pretty much all my fingers are gone from frostbite. So that's all I have, my voice, and calm, quiet. And I was cast for this. I didn't compete for it. I was cast for the part because I had to spread terror. I mean, I have to be frightening. And I knew I would be good at it.

And I am. I was paid handsomely and I did a good job. It's a ridiculous movie, but you are extremely memorable in it. Yes, I am and I'm proud of it. And it's not completely ridiculous. It's better. The story is better than most of the action movies that you see. And it's interestingly cast Tom Cruise and some other very interesting actors in it. And...

Tom Cruise, of course, as a protagonist, needs a strong antagonist. Otherwise, he cannot really show his qualities. The character, it's a samurai movie. It's a loner who comes to town and sets things right. Yes, yes. Or a western. And I'm good at these things. Or, for example, in Simpsons. Excuse me.

My name is Walter Hottenhofer, and I'm in the pharmaceutical business. I was wondering when that guy was going to state his name and occupation. Quiet! Tell me your experience of The Simpsons. I did not even know that they were speaking and moving, and I doubted what do they speak, and one of the creators...

of the Simpsons, they speak since 23 years. In which world do you live? I thought there were strips, these comic strips in newspapers. And I asked him, please, can you send me a few samples on DVD? They couldn't believe it. They thought I was pulling their legs. But indeed, I did not know about it and I didn't know about Star Wars films. Of course, I know about the Star Wars films themselves.

But until today, I haven't seen any. And I played a part, so I had to be briefed. Who are the good guys? What is this tribe out in the universe? Who is who? What is going on in previous sequels? So I had to learn about it. And enough for me to understand my part in it. I had to be a character very, very untrustworthy.

Really, you don't want to do business with that one. You mentioned you've never seen a Star Wars film? No, not until today. Why? I don't know. I'm somebody who reads movies.

You see, I read. There's not a day where I do not read. In other words, cinema, in a sense, is not a special interest of yours. It is. Somebody like Scorsese sees everything and he has a film encyclopedia in his head, not you. No, I'm not an encyclopedist. I see fairly few films per year. Not many. Film director and author Werner Herzog will continue in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around.

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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I'm talking today with Werner Herzog, the director, occasional actor, and the author of a new memoir. Herzog grew up in post-war Germany, part of the new wave of German filmmakers in the 60s and 70s. Their films grappled in very different ways with the aftermath of the war, Nazism, and the Holocaust.

Herzog's films were often propelled by extreme characters in extreme conditions, some of them driven to madness, and that became a central theme for him. Werner Herzog and I spoke recently about his new memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, and about his unconventional approach to the truth.

I know well from watching your films, your documentaries, reading you over the years, that you have an, let's just say, an interesting approach to the truth. You have something called, a belief in something called ecstatic truth. What is that? It's very complicated, but ecstatic truth, I coined this term, I think I coined it, has to do with a different approach to truth. Number one, nobody knows what truth exactly is.

Neither the philosophers are in consensus, nor is the Pope in Rome, nor mathematicians or whoever. So we have to be very cautious. Touch that term only with a pair of pliers, please. And...

There's a school in filmmaking, the so-called cinema verite. It claims truth in its very essence, but it's fact-based. It's fact, fact, fact. And I keep saying facts do not illuminate us. The Manhattan phone directory, four million correct entries do not illuminate us.

We do not know why is James Miller, and there are probably 200 different James Millers with correct address, and so why is he crying in his pillow every night? We do not know that. And that's my approach that is beyond or outside of facts.

And it requires stylizations. It requires somehow shaping, creating, creating something like poetry, a sense of poetry that gives us an approach into truth. Truth, I understand, is something vaguely somewhere at the horizon. It's out there. I am fairly sure. And

the intense quest for it and search for it, the approach to it is worthwhile. And that's what I'm doing in films and in literature and in everything I do. Is there a difference between what we call feature films, quote-unquote fictional films, and documentary films, other than the fact that one uses hired actors more?

and the other doesn't in your approach to fact and truth? Well, my approach has always been I do not make such a distinction between feature films and documentaries. I don't like the categories. For me, it's all movies anyway. Mm-hmm.

But in documentaries, I do casting. I do rehearsing. I do repeat certain scenes or statements. A key statement in a documentary, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, the key of the film, and the person who went through an ordeal is the only POW, American POW, who escaped Vietnamese in Patet Lao captivity.

He told me the key story 42 minutes nonstop. And I said, well, we need it much more abbreviated. And then he forgot this or that detail. And I did it five times until we had a very intense and very beautiful rendering of the central story. And I do that. And you normally do that only in feature films. I interfere, I shape, and I shift with facts constantly.

André Gide, the French writer, said, I modify facts to such a degree that they resemble truth more than reality. And it's a very beautiful way to understand it. I guess I'm trained differently than you are. And I would – and I publish a magazine, The New Yorker.

And if I found that an author had your approach to truth, I wouldn't reject it. I'd be pleased to publish it, but I might put it under the rubric of fiction rather than say in our terms reporter at large. Would you have objection to that? Absolutely not. Yeah. Filmmaker at large or writer at large. And you see when I publish my memoirs, I say it only in quotes. It's furious storytelling, right?

And it's furious style. You see, that's – don't look for event, event, event like in the biography. Or fact, fact, fact. Fact, fact, fact. You will be disappointed. It reminded me – and I say this without judgment, just as a matter – it reminded me of one of my favorite music memoirs is Bob Dylan's Chronicles, Volume 1, which I took to be –

used fact. Yeah. But I also know him from long experience to be someone who's not averse to fabricating or weaving or elaborating the imaginative and the fictive into the telling of his life story.

Is that fair? That makes him a great poet, period. Blessed be his heart. Indeed. Now, this morning, there was a review published in the New York Times, which I'm guessing you've glanced at. It's by Dwight Garner.

It begins this way. I don't believe a word of the filmmaker Werner Herzog's new memoir, which bears the self-deprecating title, Every Man for Himself and God Against All. What is this, a Metallica album? But then I'm not sure we're supposed to take much of it at face value. Like Jim Smiley and Mark Twain's The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Bob Dylan and Tom Waits, who

Herzog is an old-school, concierge-level bluffer and ham. He won't tell you the truth, not quite, unless it falls out of his pocket accidentally, as if it were a cigarette lighter. Okay, the writer is utterly wrong.

Let's face it, and that happens. He's confused, dazed and confused. Can't figure out. That's Led Zeppelin, not Metallica. Right. And the beauty of it is that factually, and it has been fact-checked from every single site, there's not one single stone unturned in these memoirs. When it comes to factual things, they're all correct.

And sometimes I give a caveat

For example, I'm confronting a family that is hostile against me and they have sworn, they have vowed to kill me if I appeared in their home. And I say my girlfriend had – whose family I went – has four brothers, all huge, strong guys, all Bavarian, ice hockey players, muscular guys. And immediately I add –

My memory may deceive me. It may have been only three brothers and not four. Maybe my memory enlarged the danger. So I give hints. I immediately doubt my own memory because memory is never completely correct.

But whatever you read in my memoirs goes back to diaries, goes back to things that were witnessed by dozens of people. I did move a ship over a mountain, period. If you doubt it, it's your problem. For the film Fitzcarraldo. For the film Fitzcarraldo. I did certain things. I was...

on the island of Crete and stumbled into a valley where there were 10,000 windmills. Yes, they existed, and yes, they are documented in my first long feature film. You see them. I'd like you to read something from the book. I had picked out a passage. It's about the original ending of A Gear Wrath of God. All right.

about the possibilities that I had in life, the alternatives, and how many possibilities were there out for me. It's a very, very strange thing. The original ending of my film, "Akere: The Wrath of God," went like this.

The raft with the conquistadors has nothing but corpses on board, and when it reaches the mouth of the Amazon, the only living creature on it is a speaking parrot. As the Atlantic tide pushes back against the mighty river, the parrot is incessantly screeching two words: "El Dorado, El Dorado." Then, while filming, I found a much better solution.

The raft is overrun by hundreds of little monkeys, and Aguirre raves to them about his new empire. Quite recently, I came upon another unverified account, unverified, I said, of the historical Aguirre. Abandoned by all and having murdered his own daughter so that she isn't witness to his disgrace, he orders his last follower to shoot him.

The man sets his musket against Aguirre's body and shoots him in the middle of the chest. That was nothing, says Aguirre, and he tells the man to load again. This time the man shoots him through the heart. That should do, says Aguirre, and he falls down dead.

I'm sure the version of the monkeys is the perfect ending for the film, but I wonder how many other possibilities, how many roads not taken there were for me, not only in film plots and stories, but in my life, roads I never took or only took years later.

Is there a sense of regret in that? No, no, absolutely not. No, that's my life. Whatever you throw at me, I will deal with it. And it comes with vehemence and the vehemence of things that came at me ended up in movies or in writings and now in my memoirs. Wiener Herzog, thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me. It's a joy.

Werner Herzog, the director, actor, and writer. You can find an excerpt from his new memoir at newyorker.com. It's about the time he spent as a young man living in Pittsburgh in the attic bedroom of a very eccentric family.

I'm David Remnick, and before we go, I want to take a moment to say goodbye to two of our colleagues on the show, Ngo Phan and Puto Bwele and Britta Green, who both contributed so much creativity and intelligence to the program during their time here. They brought so many terrific segments to the air, and we'll miss you both. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for this week. Thanks for listening. I hope you'll join us next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbess of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, and Louis Mitchell, with guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandra Decat.

And a special thanks this week to Alana Casanova-Burges. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherena Endowment Fund.

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