Werner Herzog Has Never Liked Introspection

A conversation with the filmmaker about the place of literature, the toll of war, and the conviction that his writing will outlast his movies.
A photograph of Werner Herzog in Union Square Manhattan.
Photographs by Adam Pape for The New Yorker

When I first corresponded with the filmmaker Werner Herzog, in January, 2021, he told me that lockdown reminded him of Boccaccio’s Decameron. As he put it: “Go into isolation in the countryside and let the storytelling begin.” During quarantine, he finished two films: a documentary called “The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft,” about a pair of French volcanologists; and another, “Theater of Thought,” about neurotechnology and artificial intelligence. Both are forthcoming.

He also wrote two books. The first of these, “The Twilight World,” will be published in English in June, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann. Part adventure narrative, part memoir, and part unclassifiable lyric, “The Twilight World” tells the story of Hiroo Onoda, an actual Japanese soldier who manned his post on the island of Lubang, in the Philippines, for three decades after the Second World War had ended, having convinced himself that it had not. During his thirty-year war—which Onoda described in a memoir of his own, “No Surrender”—he survived more than a hundred ambushes, all while protecting himself against the degradations of the jungle. (As Daniel Zalewski wrote in a Profile of Herzog, from 2006, the “canonical Herzogian tale . . . portrays a man immersed in a situation of almost surreal extremity.”) Onoda was also bombarded with an onslaught of well-meaning attempts to coax him from his post. Yet his delusion persisted. In “The Twilight World,” Herzog writes, “Onoda’s war is formed from the union of an imaginary nothing and a dream.”

I met Herzog in person, in April, at an apartment he maintains in Manhattan. He and his wife, the photographer Lena Herzog, were soon headed to Venice, where she would be showing “Last Whispers,” an immersive exhibit about the vanishing of languages. Her husband and I sat on opposite sides of a glass-topped coffee table that bore books about Bruegel and Goya. For four hours, we discussed Onoda’s dream, Herzog’s literary bugbears, and the genius of Buster Keaton. Up against a nearby wall were heavy-duty cases of virtual-reality equipment. When the interview was over, Lena allowed me to be the guinea pig for the V.R. version of her exhibit. Sitting in the living room, I travelled to outer space and through sinister forests. When I returned to the reality of the apartment, Herzog was seated on the couch beside me, quietly working on a piece of writing.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What was your experience of lockdown?

There were a few months when I hardly ever left my house in Los Angeles. I couldn’t venture out with a crew and actors and make films, and so that’s when I wrote “The Twilight World.” I had the story in me for twenty years. Sometimes you have something that is completely ready: you don’t have to think, you don’t have to lay out a plot—it is instantly there.

Once that book was finished, I immediately wrote the next book, which is three times the length. It will be published in German in a few months and then translated by Michael Hofmann into English. It’s some sort of memoir, but not in terms of an autobiography. Only part of it is about my life. It’s really about the origins of ideas. At age seventeen, for example, I stumbled across a valley filled with ten thousand windmills on the island of Crete. I had hired a donkey and was travelling in the mountains of the interior. When I saw this valley of windmills, I thought, This cannot be—I’m either fooled by an illusion or I’m stark mad. I knew my grandfather when he was stark mad, but he was an older man, and, I thought, It’s too early. It shouldn’t happen now.

I put myself together and walked down into the valley and there were indeed windmills. They were there to pump water for the irrigation of this entire valley. There was not a single building, just ten thousand windmills—it was completely insane. The book is about how an image like that lingers, and then, all of a sudden, connects with a story, and holds an entire feature film together—in this case, “Signs of Life.”

You met Hiroo Onoda, the main character of “The Twilight World,” in the late nineties.

I was in Japan to stage the opera “Chushingura,” composed by Shigeaki Saegusa, which is based on the famous story of forty-seven loyal ronin whose lord is wronged and has to commit seppuku, ritual suicide. The ronin avenge him, knowing that, for their deed, they will have to kill themselves in ritual suicide, as well. It’s the most Japanese of Japanese stories—every schoolchild knows about it. While in Japan, I received word that the office of the Emperor had stretched out feelers to see whether I would like to meet the Emperor in a private audience, but I had the feeling that I could speak only in formulas and polite, prefabricated dialogue, so I refused. To this day, I wish the ground had opened into a chasm and swallowed me up. There are benign silences, but there are also shocked silences and hostile silences, and there was a long silence among those with whom I had worked. Somebody then asked whom else I would like to meet in Japan, and, completely out of the blue, I said, “Onoda.”

For many years, he had declined to participate in a film about his life. But, he said, “If there’s anyone who should do it, it should be you, Herzog-san.” I was very moved by that, and, for a while, I thought his story could be a film. But something stopped me from doing it. I knew the story had to do with elements that are outside of movies—such as how a belief system originates from the observation of the tiniest details, which, all together, form a coherent world view with an almost religious intensity. For example, leaflets were thrown from small planes, trying to inform Onoda that the war was over and he ought to surrender. He would study these leaflets like papyrus fragments of the Bible, and find they contained a small error in one of the Japanese characters, or that they called his battalion by its former name, when shortly before the end of the war his battalion was renamed. For him, this was proof that the leaflets were the work of the enemy.

But I had the feeling that the tragedy of settling into a fictitious life may not have been such a tragedy after all. I have the suspicion that he lived a fulfilled life. And, of course, what fascinates me is not only how Onoda settles into a fictitious life but how basically all of us do, within our cultural norms. In his story, the deeper structure of what makes a human being becomes more visible.

Did Onoda prefer not to know the war was over?

I think he was reluctant, after thirty years of waging a solitary war, to acknowledge that there was no war. This is why he insisted that the young man who found him, in 1974, should return to Japan and mobilize a former major of his unit, who would then come back to the island and issue competent military orders for him to desist hostile activities. The end needed to be formalized and ritualized—only then would the war be over. But the astonishing thing is that he still hoped that the major would tell him, “This was all made up, we just wanted to test your perseverance.” He hoped that the end was an illusion.

The main characters of your films seem to be externalizations of forces within you. What in Onoda were you trying to explore about yourself?

It’s not easy to make any comments, because I don’t like, and I’ve never liked, introspection. But it may have to do with certain things that I’ve striven for: responsibility, a sense of duty, courage, many things that make a good soldier. Sometimes I’ve said I’d like to be a good soldier of cinema—which may be misleading, because people immediately think in military terms, when I’m not thinking in military terms.

What came to mind recently is that, when I look at my films and I look at my writing, I have the feeling that my films are like my voyage out in the world, and my writing is home. That’s where I’m home. I do believe my writing will have a longer life than my films, though I may be wrong. I have misjudged quite often.

Do you consider this your first novel?

It doesn’t have a real category. It probably comes closest to a novel. It’s something that borders poetry, or pure fantasies and pure language—language for itself.

It bears some traces of the screenplay form. It’s very efficient; when it’s nighttime, you just say, “Night.”

Strangely, my first screenplays were prose. I had no idea what a screenplay looked like, but I would write down something that you, as a reader or an actor or a financier, could immediately imagine as a movie on the screen. I would have trouble with actors who would say, “Where is the dialogue? What do I have to learn? What do I have to rehearse?” And I would keep saying, “Don’t rehearse.”

You’ve always had a fascination with people who stand outside of what the majority of us see as history. I think of someone like Fini Straubinger, who is blind and deaf and has no knowledge of the destruction of the Second World War. Or Kaspar Hauser, who spends his early years locked in a cellar with no knowledge of humanity. History as we conceive of it has missed them somehow. Do you see this as a precious quality?

There is something quite important in what you’re asking, and I can make only a very tiny step toward an answer. In my case, I have tried to live outside of the fashionable trends. This has got me into trouble all the time. I make my own observations, and, like Onoda, I create my own world view out of the knowledge that I derive from the world itself. When you travel on foot, for example—and I don’t mean backpacking or hiking, I mean, for example, travelling on foot from Munich to Paris—you are given a world view, an insight that is different or outside of the average knowledge. I have a dictum: “The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.” I do not want to explain it any further.

Your work is distinctly unromantic in its view of the natural world. Do you perceive a new romanticism emerging in reaction to ecological collapse?

The vanishing of nature is also romanticized: the lonely polar bear on an ice shelf. Romanticism has trickled down through Walt Disney, and now we have the Disneyfication of landscapes, of human existence, of storytelling, of our relationship with wild nature. The bears are cuddly and you have to hug them and you have to sing to them. That’s the tragedy of Timothy Treadwell, in “Grizzly Man,” a tragedy of misguided philosophy. When somebody espouses New Age ideas, I always lower my head and charge.

In your films, you seldom have closeups of characters. You prefer to situate them in the landscape. And it seems as though, in the book, you are going for the same effect. The jungle is always pressing in on the men.

I think you’re right.

But the jungle is resistant to a vista—you can’t really create a vista in the jungle unless you’re above the canopy.

You don’t even see the sky most of the time.

Is that what you mean by “the twilight world”?

Yes, but it’s also metaphorical. In German, the title is “Dammerung,” which means “twilight” but also “dawn,” like Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung.” What is it in English, “The Twilight of the Gods”? We decided we should translate it like Richard Wagner would translate it.

It seems to me that one of the challenges of this story would be narrating the passage of time. The story ranges over decades, and there aren’t many events in a conventional sense. “The jungle does not recognize time,” you write.

The passage of time is one of the reasons why the story became a book and not a film. I spoke about time at great length with Onoda. He was fascinated by the notion that present time cannot exist. You take a million steps in the jungle. Lifting the foot out of the mud is already past, and setting it down in front of you is the future. There is no present time. We live in a convention, in a fiction of present time, but only by dint of declaration. Technically, it does not exist. We walk on crutches when it comes to time.

You have said, in the past, that, with filmmaking, you don’t care about beautiful images in themselves, only what a shot is about and how it fits into the story. Is content more important than form?

Yes, the substance. Stylizations and formalisms are not as important. If they were, then everything that is kitsch, everything that has perfect form, perfect harmony, would be the greatest of all literature and painting. But no, it is not.

Did the prolonging of the Second World War in Onoda’s mind resonate with your experience of the war’s legacy in Germany—the sense that the war continued somehow, and exceeded the boundaries of 1945?

No, I don’t think so. There was a very, very strong feeling among the German population of “This must never happen again.” Because the deepest of catastrophes was the First World War, and then only twenty years later or so you have the Second World War, and the complete destruction of Germany. Almost every single major city in Germany looked like the World Trade Center after its attack. And that sank in—and it’s in me. My first memory is of my mother ripping my brother and me out of bed in the middle of the winter night, wrapping us in blankets, and taking us up on a slope. In the distance, at the end of the valley, the entire night sky was red and orange and very slowly pulsing. She said the city of Rosenheim was burning. I was only two and a half. Normally, memories do not go back that far, but I know this was my very first memory, and it’s embedded in my soul.

Our conversation is taking place against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine.

War is always catastrophic. I made a film with Gorbachev, “Meeting Gorbachev,” and what still resonates in me are things that he kept saying about how many opportunities were missed between the West and Russia to come to “normal terms.” I have seen footage of him in Canada, where he was received like a rock star—that’s a different side of what could have been possible. It pains me. I worked in Kyiv many years ago, as an actor, and I worked in Russia, making films. That’s how I sense the depth of the catastrophe.

You said once that you felt as though we were entering an era of isolation. I couldn’t help but think of you when the pandemic was unfolding, and whether or not you felt as though things were getting worse in that regard.

I would like to see it from its quasi-opposite side: the enormous spread of social media. You can reach out to Nigeria and to New Zealand and to Uruguay with a single tweet, and it may be read by millions. So we are not isolated. You break through isolation. However, at the same time, I do believe that, on a deeper, existential level, our solitudes are increasing, in reverse magnitude.

You never use social media, I assume.

No, I don’t. You may find me, but they are complete forgeries. On the Internet, you find people giving advice for the burning questions of your life with my imitated voice.

How do you feel about all these tech billionaires going to space?

It’s a testosterone-laden competition. One person who sticks out is Elon Musk, because he builds reusable rockets, which I find a very fine and noble thing to do. But, at the same time, his idea to colonize Mars with a million people is an obscenity. We should look after the well-being of our planet, rather than make an inhospitable place livable. You don’t have to be a scientist to know a colony on Mars is not going to happen. As for this race with Bezos and the other billionaires, I think it’s a marketing design. It gives him the label of being—and I say it in quotes, several times quotes around it—a “visionary,” meaning that if you want to buy an electric car, don’t buy it from the Germans, don’t buy it from the Chinese, buy it from the “visionary.”

Do you remember the first time you came to New York?

Yes, I came to New York on a boat, on the Bremen, the same ship that brought Siegfried and Roy the year before. But they stayed and became magicians and moved to Las Vegas. I moved to Pittsburgh and had a scholarship there, which was not very well thought through. I had a vague notion that I would like to go not to one of the Ivy League universities but to a city where there were still steelworkers. I had worked the night shift in a steel factory, and I felt that was the place where I should go. But it was already the beginning of the Rust Belt. I left the scholarship very quickly and was basically homeless, and was picked up by a wonderful family who incorporated me within minutes into their family. I have seen the very best of America, so I’m very fond of my first experience here. Of course, there are certain things for which I have ambivalent feelings, but that’s O.K. My ambivalence toward Germany is even deeper, and you probably have a certain ambivalence toward your own country, Canada. Everyone has it, in a way. But I had such a crazy, wonderful, deep, and priceless time in America, with Americans.

You’ve said that film allows us to delve into the least understood truths of man, our dreams and nightmares. If that’s the level on which film operates, on what level does literature operate?

It somehow touches on a deep level that lives in all of us, in most cases, hidden away—a sense of poetry. People who do not read at all, and do not read poetry or never have had contact with books, still have that inside of them. I’m totally convinced. There’s something embedded in language that we can touch, that we can make vibrate, with literature, with poetry.

I still believe that literature is of very deep importance not only for our singular existence but for our collective experience. In the nineteen-seventies, while making a toast, I quoted a few sentences of Turgenev, and my host toasted back by continuing the Turgenev story for the next five pages by heart. Through language, you establish a togetherness of souls. I miss that. However, not long ago, I was in front of a room of thirty or forty people, and quoted a verse of Hölderlin. Suddenly, somebody was illuminated, and that person came forward, very close to me, and started speaking with me as if nobody else were in the room. So perhaps you still do have that, in a way.

What is the place of literature now, in your view?

Certain things we have to accept. Fifty years ago, prime-time American television showed Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer debating, almost coming to blows. That’s gone, and we have to acknowledge it. We can also observe something much more widespread: people read less. You even see it in academia. Students in the humanities, and not just freshmen, do not read, or do not read enough. They have barely any knowledge of literature and deeper reading. That’s more alarming. Things have shifted very much into forms like tweets or Facebook entries or short messages.

Does it bother you that people are now watching movies on tiny devices and laptop screens?

There is something big coming at us. Just as the movies shifted from silent movies to talkies, so the location of having a collective experience in the movie theatre is dwindling away in favor of streaming platforms. I’m not insisting on movie theatres—although, for me, a movie theatre is still the mother of all battles. But there are things I have to come to terms with. Very young people not only watch a movie on their cellular phone, they also speed it up to twice the speed if it’s too slow for them.

Charlie Chaplin always looks like he’s moving at twice the speed of a normal person.

Eighteen frames per second. But, of course, there was a certain beauty. My favorite character in movies has been and still is Buster Keaton.

There’s no illusion there—he’s really doing it.

Exactly. And it looks highly stylized, but it is not.

The moment when he’s standing there and the frame of the house collapses on him, and he goes perfectly through the window.

I rejoice for having seen that. It’s one of the all-time best moments in a movie ever.

Do contemporary novels interest you?

I read everything. I just read an autobiography, “Forget Me Not,” by a woman who lives in Montana and was married to one of the great mountain climbers of his time. He perished in an avalanche, some thirty years ago, and the best friend of this mountain climber survived, and, returning home, he immediately took care of the three boys of his best friend and took responsibility, and he ended up falling head over heels in love with his friend’s wife and marrying her. It’s not that it’s great literature, but I read it with fascination. Next thing, I reach for Hölderlin. And next I reach for Diodorus Siculus, an ancient Greek historian who is not very intelligent—he’s a dumb encyclopedist. But he becomes completely exuberant, and a phenomenal writer, when it comes to the father of Alexander the Great, Philip II of Macedon, and it’s like the most intense soap opera you’ve ever witnessed in your life, outdoing all the Brazilian soap operas. So I’m very fond of Diodorus Siculus for that.

Probably my favorite novelist is Thomas Bernhard. I know you’re a fan as well. Do you have any favorite books of his?

Almost everything that he has written. I never connected so deeply to his stage plays, but I was at the world première of “Heldenplatz,” named after the square where Hitler first arrived in Austria, after the Anschluss. The right wing threatened to invade the première of this play and incite fights in the theatre, so I got myself a mouth guard and went. At the end, they brought Bernhard out on stage. The actors took a bow, and then they walked backward and came forward again and bowed again, collectively. But Bernhard turned his back to the audience and walked with his face to the depths of the stage, and then turned around and came toward the audience again, in the opposite pattern of the actors.

He didn’t often go to the theatre himself. He spent much of his time in his big farmhouse going in circles on his bicycle. Peter Handke told me about him. That’s how I got into him—Handke gave me “Das Kalkwerk” and he said, “Read this, read this. We have a great, great writer emerging.”

His project has resonance with your projects sometimes. His characters are always toiling on these great works that will never get finished—

Or they end up in vicious circles, circles that could go on into infinity, inescapable circles.

I remember reading about your father, and that he was always working on a futile book that never got written. He seemed a very Bernhardian character in a way.

I never made that connection, but you are right. On a superficial level, the book was his pretext for not working and earning money; the woman had to raise the children and earn the money. But I’m absolutely convinced that he talked himself so deep into it that he believed in the existence of this fictitious great study—I think he really believed he was writing an important book, and he never wrote a line. He actually lived his fiction, and in a way you could see him in a context with Onoda.

You once said that you believe that English literature was brought to a sort of dead end by “Finnegans Wake.”

Yes, but I would say literature per se. I perceive a hard core of what constitutes storytelling, and I have the feeling that sometimes literature has gone into a cul-de-sac. “Finnegans Wake” was clearly a cul-de-sac. Joyce worked toward it, convinced that he would explore new terrain for literature, but I do not think he discovered it—because nobody followed up, number one, and it is in disregard of what I see as the central quality of storytelling, which you find in Joseph Conrad, Hölderlin, Virgil’s Georgics, or even the Warren Commission’s report on the Kennedy assassination.

Are you a fan of Joyce’s other works?

No, I’ve never been a fan. I see the poet at work when it comes to “Ulysses,” the different forms of speech, of language. The tools of the craft are being exposed, and he is trying to show you how new his form of writing is. I have the same problem with actors. I do not like actors—and some of them are considered great actors—when I can see how they are acting. Bruno S. is the quintessential opposite of this. I’ve never seen an actor of his depth. There is something in him that deeply resonates with us, something completely untechnical, unstylized, and unformalized.

How did your great collaborator Klaus Kinski feel about your thinking that Bruno S. was the greatest actor you’d ever worked with?

I think he understood it. Kinski himself was furious when somebody would call him an actor, because in a way much of what he does is stark-naked him—with a layer of training on top of it.

Does art need to be more direct?

I don’t know exactly—it’s so primitive to label it like that, but you immediately can tell when you read, for example, Emily Dickinson. You know it instantly: yes, there’s a great poet.

Your notion of “ecstatic truth” seems to have foreshadowed many trends of the twenty-first century: fake news, virtual reality. In a way, your theory has been vindicated by people’s attraction to these forms.

Yes, but I’m speaking of truth, not news. I’m speaking about something that you cannot easily grasp. None of us knows what truth is, so I touch it only with a pair of pliers when I use this word. But, of course, it has been caught up in many of the trends of today, fake news and virtual realities. For example, I read that Bruce Willis, who retired from acting, has sold the rights to his virtual persona for a commercial, which re-creates his facial expressions and his voice. That’s something new and fascinating and stunning.

It’s easy to see as well how ecstatic truth can be misinterpreted and run rampant.

Sure. And when I start to invent certain things—like quoting Blaise Pascal at the beginning of “Lessons of Darkness”—I declare myself. In interviews, I have said this Pascal aphorism was invented by me to give a cosmic feeling, the sense of a cosmic event taking place.

Or the mountain range surrounded by mist that is, in fact, a tire track.

A few inches tall. I do not conceal that I am inventing—but sometimes it’s good that you do not need to know that I’m inventive here or inventive there.

But let me say one thing about ecstatic truth. The simplest way to explain it is by looking at Michelangelo’s Pietà, the statue. Jesus in the arms of Mary is a thirty-three-year-old man, tormented on a cross and taken down, but his mother is only seventeen. It’s one of the most beautiful sculptures that was ever created. And my question now is did Michelangelo try to cheat us, did he try to give us fake news, defraud us, lie to us? The answer, of course, is no. He shows us a deeper truth of both figures.

Inevitably, you’re going to have a biographer.

I hope it’s not going to happen. One of the reasons I’ve written my quote-unquote memoirs is to prevent that. There shouldn’t be a biography—there should be somebody pointing out this film and that film, and how these films somehow make a person behind it visible. You don’t need to describe the person.

I always had the feeling that it would be so wonderful to be anonymous. You can do it in literature, like Ferrante, and it is possible in painting, like with Banksy. But I think both have been identified by now. Some miserable human critter published their real identities. Shame on them.

Are there moments in your films that you would take back?

There are, but I cannot. I threw away all my outtakes because a carpenter doesn’t sit on his shavings. But I’ve learned to live with all the mistakes. Every one of my films has certain mistakes, and basically I’m cringing at the première. Sitting and seeing the film with an audience, I wish I was not alive anymore. But within a week I come to terms with it. Yes, it was me, and nobody saw the mistakes anyway, or hardly anyone. I don’t want to go back and reëdit my films or do some reshooting. You can pay me as much money as you want—I won’t do it.

On the last page of Onoda’s memoir, he’s travelling away from the island by helicopter, and he looks down on his battlefield and asks himself a series of questions: “Why had I fought here for thirty years? Who had I been fighting for? What was the cause?” Do you have any answers for him?

No. No. But it’s beautiful that his book ends like that.

My new book, after this one, ends in the middle of a sentence. I thought of Onoda, who told me he could see a bullet coming at him from a distance, in a strange glow, and he would turn his body away, and it wouldn’t hit the solar plexus for which it was aimed. It would whirr by. And I looked up, because outside of the window I saw something shooting at me, shining in orange and green, and it was a hummingbird. Sometimes they shoot very straight. The moment where I was, in the middle of writing, I looked up and that’s it. The book ends all of a sudden, literally in the middle of a sentence.

So maybe you appreciate “Finnegans Wake” after all?

No, because in my book the moment is derived from solid narrative. It’s embedded in storytelling.

Do you find that the images exist in your mind already and you’re searching for the words to communicate them, or do the images emerge in the act of writing itself?

Quite often, I stumble onto images, like the ten thousand windmills, but very often also the image starts to glow in the distance. I see this, and I turn myself toward it. Where does this light come from? Where is this glimmer? Where does this glow emerge? I never have a plan. I never have any sort of board with yellow Post-its and the line of the story, neither in writing nor in films. The story somehow has evolved in me, or suddenly comes at me, and I can write very fast. When I don’t know how to continue writing, I just continue anyway. I walk once around the house for thirty seconds, and then I continue writing, and something emerges that was completely unknown thirty seconds before. It’s always worked.

Do you listen to music while you write?

Yes, most of the time. I blare it, mostly Beethoven piano concertos. Somehow it has a certain level of excitement and dynamic and push. But sometimes I would listen to choral music from the Republic of Georgia.

Do you prefer a room with a view, or without?

Mostly without. I see something outside the window, like the hummingbird, but it’s very narrow. When I wrote “Fitzcarraldo,” I was in San Francisco, and Francis Ford Coppola offered me the use of his mansion on Broadway. There was a little turret with almost three-hundred-and-sixty-degree windows, and I immediately decided to sit there and write. I gave myself ten days to compose the whole screenplay. From Coppola’s turret, I could see the entire bay and the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz Island. I was completely mesmerized by what I saw out there, and, after two hours, I noticed I had only half a page. So I turned my chair around. There was one segment with no window, and with a ruler and a very sharp pencil, I made a cross on this segment, like the crosshairs in your binoculars. When I looked up from writing, I would stare into the crosshairs and then continue.