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Compared to Werner Herzog, most Hollywood directors look like overpaid couch potatoes. During a career of 50-plus films — including art-house favorites like 1972's Aguirre, the Wrath of God, 1982's Fitzcarraldo, and the 2005 documentary Grizzly Man — the German director has ventured to some of the most remote corners of the Earth, facing down perils that would bring most productions to a screeching halt, and turning that struggle into a mesmerizing, hallucinatory kind of poetry onscreen. Despite his polite, almost tranquil manner in person, the Herzog of legend is an outsized, indomitably obsessive figure constantly diving into one fray or another; even a 2006 BBC interview took a Herzogian turn when the 64-year-old was hit by a stray bullet in his abdomen.
Now, with his latest film, the riveting Vietnam POW drama Rescue Dawn, starring Christian Bale, Herzog is hacking his way through yet another jungle, delving deeper than he has before into the heart of darkness that is Hollywood summer-blockbuster season. The film tells the harrowing true story of U.S. Navy pilot Dieter Dengler (already the subject of Herzog's 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly), who was shot down in the early days of the Vietnam War and managed a daring escape from a Laotian prison camp. With Rescue Dawn now playing in New York and L.A. and expanding soon across the country, Herzog shares his own harrowing tales from the front lines — and lets loose a few brow-furrowing philosophies.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How did you originally come across the story of Dieter Dengler?
WERNER HERZOG: In the late '60s, the biggest German magazine ran a series of five or six consecutive articles on his story. It was quite well known at the time. But over time it had been somehow buried and almost forgotten. And, of course, it's a fantastic movie story. Dieter has every quality I like about Americans. It was very sane how he absorbed his ordeal and how he lived after it. He found a very healthy way to cope. He was not one of those nervous wrecks with post...what do we call it?
Post-traumatic stress disorder.
Yes, there was nothing like that in him, probably because his childhood was very tough. That was our immediate connection. We had had very similar upbringings: He grew up in a very remote place in the Black Forest and I grew up in a very remote place in Bavaria, deep in the mountains. And, of course, with the hardships after the war, both of us were very hungry. His mother would take the kids out and rip the wallpaper from the walls of bombed-out houses and cook it because there were nutrients in the glue. I never ate that, but I remember that we were very, very hungry for at least two years or so.
Even when you were making the documentary about him, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, did you always plan to make a feature film version of the story?
Yes, it was always evident I would do that. What complicated things was that Dieter died [in 2001, of Lou Gehrig's disease], and dealing with the rights situation became more complicated. It took a while to sort it out. At one point, before he died, Francis Ford Coppola's company Zoetrope tried to acquire the rights and I said to Dieter, ''Are you crazy? I'm the one who is going to do it.'' And he laughed and said, ''Yeah, okay.'' It was not so easy to get financing but once Christian Bale was chosen to be Batman, all of the sudden it became somewhat easier.
Once you started shooting, though, my sense is that it was incredibly arduous and you struggled not only with physical conditions in the jungle but also with the financiers and even with your own crew.
It was a complicated production, I think it's known. But there was nothing very special about that. It happens to all films. The really important thing is that, despite everything, I brought the film in exactly the way I wanted to have it.
You don't want to talk about all the difficulty that went into the production?
No, what's wrong with that? Why should we talk about it? I don't like these making-of things. I can only say it was fairly easy to make the film. Nothing special.
You must have a different definition of what is easy than other directors. A few of your productions, like Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, have been famous for their epic difficulties.
I have been very lucky. Quite often I have attracted disasters, one after the other, without exposing myself to the disaster. Sometimes it comes onto you like biblical plagues. On [1971's] Fata Morgana, I got very ill with a blood parasite, bilharzia, got arrested and put in jail in Africa — all sorts of really tough things. These are situations that are beyond your grasp. Quite often I have met disaster and you have to complete a film despite everything. I've never left a film unfinished and I've never been over budget.
Because of these kinds of stories, there's a perception out there that you actively seek out danger for the sake of your movies.
Not at all. Number one, I hate adventure and adventurism. It's over. Adventure doesn't exist anymore. It died away at the time when damsels would faint on couches and men would meet in pistol duels at dawn. It belongs to different centuries. Now it has degenerated into the most absurd quests to make it into the Guinness Book of World Records. It's just a shame and embarrassment. I'm not into adventure. I'm not into seeking problems. As a professional, I always minimize problems as much as I can. I've never taken someone blindly into a problematic shoot. In 55 films, I've never had an actor hurt. Crew members, in a few cases. Myself, sometimes, yes — but so what?
NEXT PAGE: Herzog on WrestleMania, Photoshop, his old friend ''the pestilence,'' and getting shot
