The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘I was simply always hungry’
From starving child to cinematic titan, Werner Herzog’s life story reads like a Hollywood film – so why isn’t he putting it on screen?
LIVES LESS ORDINARY: Herzog’s heroes
Werner Herzog does not want to compare himself to Ernest Hemingway or Joseph Conrad – the “immortals”, as he calls them – but he is in no doubt about the literary merit of his new memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All. “There’s prose of an intensity that you do not see anywhere in literature nowadays,” he tells me in the solemn, aphoristic tones familiar from the voice-overs of his many documentaries. “No one writes prose like me.”
The great German film director, whose masterpieces range across half a century of cinema – among them, the 1972 drama Aguirre, the Wrath of God and the 2005 documentary Grizzly Man – has chosen to tell his own story on the page. The result (translated into English by Michael Hofmann) is an evocative, shocking encounter with a man who has experienced life at its most extreme. It takes us from the childhood trauma of carrying a friend with horrific head injuries towards safety – “The sound of the collision still shakes me even now” – to smuggling guns across the US border into Mexico. Yet, he insists his choice of medium is no departure: “Forty years ago, I said that my writing, my prose and my poetry, will probably live longer than my films. I’ve kept saying that, to deaf ears.”
Herzog is in Austria, in a darkened room (we’re talking over Zoom), and it feels as if he is admonishing me personally for this collective failure to take heed. I’ve interviewed him before in person, and it is a singular experience; there is nowhere to hide.
Last time, I confessed that I did not know Moses was a murderer. “It’s in the Bible, stupid,” he said, with undisguised scorn. “I really don’t care,” he says this time, when I ask the question he put to the last Communist leader of the USSR in Meeting Gorbachev (2018): What should be on your gravestone? “Hopefully, there will be no gravestone ever for me. Posterity is going to do its thing, anyway. I will not be around.”
Now 81, Herzog appears undiminished by age, as prolific as he has ever been. His most recent drama, the thought-provoking Family Romance, LLC (2019), which he shot in Tokyo without film permits, was, he says, “financed and produced out of my own pocket”. Likewise, for his 2022 documentary Theatre of Thought, “I just rolled up my sleeves, earned money and financed it. I’ve never complained about it.”
In Every Man for Himself and God Against All, he recounts how he and his elder brother Tilbert grew up in extreme poverty in the Alpine village of Sachrang, “surely the remotest place in all of Bavaria”, after his mother, Liesel, fled Munich in the wake of an Allied bombing raid in 1942. He describes her anger and despair as her sons hung around her skirts, whimpering with hunger. “At that moment, we learnt not to wail,” he writes. “The culture of complaint disgusts me.”
So when he hears “very, very successful Hollywood directors complaining all the time that the film industry does not recognise their genius and is not producing their next project, I keep saying, ‘Roll up your sleeves and do it anyway.’”
His father, Dietrich, a German soldier in France during the Second World War, was an enthusiastic National Socialist in the early years of the Nazi movement. His mother, he says, “became disenchanted fairly early on”; knowledge of the Holocaust “was very bitter for [her]; I don’t describe it in the book. That is something which belongs to me and her alone.”
Yet, for years after the war, his father “was still bitter that Germany had been defeated”. When Dietrich chose not to return to his young family, Werner was glad. “I was certainly delighted that we didn’t have a drill-sergeant type in the house, telling us what to do.” This comes as no surprise: as a boy, Herzog was fearless, with little sense of limits. “In general, I was a danger to those around me,” he writes.
He describes a fight with his brother, after which “the room was awash with blood”. Where did his violent temper go? “I made it disappear,” he says. “You have to. I don’t want to look deep into me, but it’s simply a question of discipline.”
I ask him if the book deviates from the concept of “ecstatic truth” that he employs in his films, in which “facts” become modifiable in search of deeper truths. In his memoir, he says, “All essentials are fact-checked and verified with my siblings.” (As well as Tilbert, he has a half-sister and brothers, from his parents’ subsequent relationships.) Sometimes, though, his memory, “like with everyone else’s memories, is shaping the past slightly”.
Besides, he adds, of the stories told in the book, “quite a few things were always in public”. He picks out the 2006 BBC TV interview during which he was shot in the stomach with an air rifle, and dismissed the
wound as “not significant” on camera. “No one would believe it, but it is on tape. Whether you doubt it or not, I don’t care.”
When Werner was 13, Liesel and her children moved back to an apartment block in Munich, where “the madman Klaus Kinski” was a neighbour. The actor, who died in 1991, is an incandescent presence in the memoir, as he is in Herzog films such as Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) and Fitzcarraldo (1982). We read of him attacking a critic with a hail of potatoes, smashing his bathroom in a rage. Did Herzog find an outlet for his own violence through Kinski’s?
“Kinski wasn’t violent,” he retorts, before admitting there may have been some “performative violence” and, on reflection, genuine violence, too, “only apparently with women, including his daughter. That’s a very, very dark side I learnt about recently.” I mention a report of Kinski being diagnosed as a psychopath by a clinic in northern Germany in 1950. Does Herzog believe it? “I don’t care what he was. I only care what he was on screen. There’s no one who had his presence. And no one who had his intensity, with a very few exceptions, like, for example, the young Marlon Brando.”
Their turbulent relationship was the subject of Herzog’s 1999 film My Best Fiend, in which he described the terrifying battle of wills that began when Kinski played the maniacally driven 16th-century conquistador Lope de Aguirre, in 1972. Herzog revisits the filming of Aguirre in Peru in his memoir. I ask about the infamous incident in which he threatened to kill Kinski and then turn the gun on himself if the actor walked out on the film; had Kinski quit, would he have followed through with it? “Kinski understood that I was not joking,” he says. “It was very quiet – I mean, in a very low voice; he was screaming like a madman.”
Although there are multiple brushes with death in the memoir – in the rodeo ring, for example, or on a frozen mountaintop – “I’m not embracing danger,” Herzog insists. “I’m very prudent. If prudence has a name, it’s mine.” Yet rewatch Aguirre’s staggering opening sequence – in which a group of conquistadors descend a high Andean pass, then navigate the rapids of a vast Amazon tributary on lashedtogether wooden rafts – and it’s impossible to imagine Hollywood reproducing such a genuine sense of threat to life today, whatever daredevilry Tom Cruise may pull off in the Mission: Impossible films. “Well, there’s something deeply authentic about it,” Herzog says. “And I would like to remind you that I tested the dangers myself. I clomb this almost vertical cliff, where the whole army comes down in a zigzag.” (He says he uses the word “clomb” for its poetry, as Wordsworth did.) “And I tested the rapids alone, with two experienced oarsmen, and I knew it could be done with cameras and actors.”
Herzog worked with Cruise himself on Jack Reacher, in 2012, in which he played the coldly grim antagonist: “I delivered,” he says. In fact, the memoir’s sole trip into cliché may be when Herzog writes that he was impressed by the actor’s “absolute professionalism” – which is pretty much the only thing anyone ever says about Cruise. What of
his Scientology? Does Herzog see what he calls “the distant echo of divinity or transcendence… evident in many of my films” in Cruise’s chosen religion? “Don’t ask me that,” he says. “Like freedom of speech, there’s such a thing as freedom of choice of religion… So don’t harp on about Tom Cruise being in Scientology.”
I ask instead how he deals with the vanity of actors. “I struggle with it, but I keep silent,” he tells me. “The only thing that counts is how do I make them their best on screen.” This, judging by Christian Bale’s reported response to shooting
Herzog’s 2006 war film, Rescue Dawn, in the Thai jungle – “I’m not going to f---ing die for you, Werner” – can involve pushing them hard. He and Bale keep in touch, loosely, he says. “We have very deep respect, and Christian would very badly want me to do another film with him. So would Nicolas Cage, he would die to do another film with me. He says by far the best ever, ever he acted was Bad Lieutenant,” says Herzog, referring to his 2009 film in which Cage starred. “I make them their very best. All of them.”
Herzog himself turns up in Disney’s The Mandalorian, as the sinister figure The Client, proof, perhaps, of his enduring cult appeal. There are endless parodies of his voice online; Alexander Skarsgård played a version of him in the starry American spoof series Documentary Now! “Well, let’s face it, when you listen to my accent, it’s justified that I’m inviting parody,” he says. “I’ve easily learnt to live with at least 30 doppelgängers and voice imitators, who even give life advice to the perplexed, so I consider them as my unpaid stooges. Let them do battle out there. I know who I am.”
He laughs. It’s easy to forget that dark humour runs throughout Herzog’s films, from the cop radioing in to say that he “can’t stop the dancing chicken” at the end of Stroszek (1977) to his own much-imitated “But why?” speech as a penguin heads off by itself towards the mountains of Antarctica in Encounters at the End of the World (2007).
That film earned Herzog an Academy Award nomination in 2009, the only one so far in a career of more than 70 films. It startles him when he looks at them all listed in the appendix of his book, he says. “I ask myself, was this really me? Or did I fantasise it? Was it my brother who did it, secretly, and I talked myself into having done that?” His failure to win Oscars doesn’t bother him in the least. “I think you are putting too much weight on the importance of them,” he says. “It doesn’t have much for me.”
He did, however, chair the jury at the 2010 Berlin Film Festival, which controversially awarded the Silver Bear, for The Ghost Writer, to Roman Polanski, still a hugely contentious figure in America, where he is wanted for the statutory rape of teenager Samantha Geimer in the 1970s. “The award did not go to Polanski because he was under house arrest in Switzerland at that time,” Herzog says. “It went to him because the jury, including me, were totally convinced it’s an extraordinary achievement of directing.” He has no truck with cancel culture. It is, he says, “one of the stupidities of our time. We will look back in amazement 50 years from now.”
If we get that far. “I’m more and more convinced that because of our biological fragility and collective behaviour, we may die out fairly soon,” Herzog says. “But Nature doesn’t care about that.” There’s a beauty to the way Herzog writes about the natural world, though he reminds me he has an open invitation to escape to Mars, from Elon Musk, to whom he spoke for his 2016 tech documentary Lo and Behold. He’s suspicious of Musk’s
‘Cancel culture is one of the stupidities of our time. We’ll look back in amazement’
motives. “You should not think about populating Mars with a million human beings. It’s not doable,” Herzog says. “But it’s a marketing trick. And whoever has brains more than a primate would see it instantly.”
Still, Herzog would like to take up his place on any flight to the red planet. He had wanted to be one of the eight civilians on the SpaceX trip around the moon paid for by the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa. “I applied, seriously against the opinion of my wife,” he says. “But I was not accepted.”
For now, he lives on Earth – well, in Los Angeles – with his third wife, the Russian photographer Lena Pisetski, whom he married in 1999. Of the US, he says, “I would not live in a country that I didn’t really deeply like, in its essence,” and admits to a particular fondness for the American heartland, “which has been neglected, disenfranchised, undereducated, underrepresented in the media”.
He likes to watch trash American TV because “television gives a good bandwidth of what engages the mind of the audience… It is vulgar, but it exists, so better to take a good look of what is around you.”
He also watches a lot of football. Has he caught a whiff of Messi mania in the US? “Forget about the mania,” he says, “he is a truly great player.” And what of Harry Kane, the new star back home at Bayern Munich? “I love players – and Harry Kane belongs to them – who can read a game, who can read where to be for scoring.”
Herzog still doesn’t own a mobile phone. It’s not a generational thing, he insists. “Even if I were 18, today, or 17, I probably wouldn’t have a cell phone. Because I think on my own, and I act on my own.” He does, of course, use the internet. Lo and Behold presented a frightening portrait of how tech is changing humanity. What has happened since then that has most unsettled him?
“Well, it has intensified, and we have artificial intelligence now. And we have to deal with it.” He talks of the phenomenal achievements of AI already in biochemistry, “but at the same time, we have to be aware that warfare will change and many other things that are not very pleasant, so we have to be really vigilant”. Does he think it will change filmmaking? “Not mine. And when you look at me straight in the eye, it will never make a film as good as mine. And it will never write a book as I write.” Nor, perhaps, will anyone else.
Some time ago, in some papers, I came upon a postcard from my mother dated September 6, 1942, and written in pencil. The stamp with Adolf Hitler’s likeness was preprinted on it. The postmark is clearly readable: Munich, centre of the movement. The postcard is addressed to Herr Professor Dr. R. Herzog and Family, Grosshesselohe nr. Munich. To my grandfather then, Rudolf Herzog, the patriarch of the family.
“Dear Father,” she writes. “I want to tell you that I gave birth last night to a baby boy. He is to be named Werner. Best wishes, Liesel.” My given name, Werner, was an act of insubordination against my father, who wanted me to be called Eberhard. At the time of my birth, my father was a soldier in France, not at any front but, because he knew how to make himself scarce, behind the lines, where supplies were distributed, specifically food rations. He had sired me in the course of his most recent, no doubt hard-earned furlough shortly after the new year. My mother later discovered that he had spent the first part of his ten days’ leave with some other woman and presented himself afterward.
Barely two weeks after my birth, Munich was subjected to one of the early Allied bombing raids. My mother found me in my cradle covered in a thick layer of broken glass, bricks, and rubble. I was unhurt, but my mother in her panic snatched up my older brother, Tilbert, and me and left the city and fled up into the mountains to Sachrang, surely the remotest place in all Bavaria, in a narrow valley up against the Austrian border. That was where I grew up.
In Sachrang, our lives were spent largely outdoors; our mother wouldn’t think twice about putting us out for four hours at a stretch even in the depth of winter. As darkness fell, we would be standing gibbering at the door, all our clothes caked with snow. At precisely five o’clock, the door would be thrown open, and our mother would briskly sweep the snow off us with a twig broom before we were allowed inside.
It was only in stag mating season that we really had to be careful. A bicyclist was set upon by a furious stag and fled under a narrow bridge, pursued by the crazed animal. It took the clashing of some empty tin cans to drive him off. There were some eerie encounters. Once, in broad daylight – my brother is my witness – the whole slope behind the house was suddenly alive with weasels, all pouring downhill in the direction of the stream. I don’t think it was a dream, although it’s always a possibility.
Our childhood was archaic. We had no running water; we had to fetch it with a bucket from the pump, and in winter, it was often frozen. There was an outhouse with a privy, a piece of board with a hole in it. Because the outhouse, built up against the main house, wasn’t insulated or even sealed, there were often snowdrifts in the toilet, so our mother put a bucket in the corridor. We used the bucket for a toilet, but when it got properly cold, all its contents froze to one solid clump. It was only in the kitchen that we could keep warm, where there was a wood-fired hearth.
The tiny six-by-six room off the kitchen where my brother and I slept in bunk beds was unheated. We didn’t have proper mattresses either – my mother couldn’t afford them – so she filled rough burlap sacks with dried ferns; but the ferns, cut with a scythe, had points as hard as sharpened pencils, and when we stirred in sleep, we kept waking up. Dried ferns also have a way of compacting into hard lumps; these humps ensured that in all my childhood I never once slept on a flat surface.
Above the top bunk, right under the ceiling, was a board on which apples were kept. The room always smelled of those apples. They shriveled up in winter and froze as well, but once thawed out, they were still edible.
My brother Till and I grew up in extreme poverty, but we never even knew we were poor except perhaps in the first two or three years after the end of the war. We were simply always hungry, and my mother was unable to produce enough food for us. We ate salad from dandelion leaves; my mother made syrups from ribwort and fresh pine shoots; the former was more a house remedy for coughs and colds, and the latter stood in for sugar. Once a week, there was a longish loaf of bread from the village baker purchased with our ration coupons. With the point of a knife, our mother scratched a mark in it for each day, Monday to Sunday, allowing about a slice of bread for each of us. When hunger got to be very bad, we were each given a piece from the next day’s ration because my mother hoped something might turn up in the meantime, but generally the bread was finished by Friday, and Saturdays and Sundays were particularly bad.
My deepest memory of my mother, burned into my brain, is a moment when my brother and I were clutching at her skirts, whimpering with hunger. With a sudden jolt, she freed herself, spun round, and she had a face full of an anger and despair that I have never seen before or since. She said, perfectly calmly: “Listen, boys, if I could cut it out of my ribs, I would cut it out of my ribs, but I can’t. All right?” At that moment, we learned not to wail. The so-called culture of complaint disgusts me.
As a child, there was something grim in me. I don’t remember it, but I’m told I hit people with a stone in my hand more than once; my mother was worried about me. I was quiet and introverted, but there was something boiling inside me that might worry an adult.
It took a family disaster for me to get my violent temper under control. I was probably thirteen or fourteen at the time and we were living in Munich when I got in a quarrel with Till. We were as close as siblings can be and still are, but there were also terrible fights between us, furious punch-ups. This was thought to be natural and acceptable. But in one violent quarrel – the subject, as I recall, was the care of our pet hamster – I was so beside myself with fury, I laid into my brother with a knife. I struck him once in the wrist as he tried to fend me off and once in the upper thigh. In no time, the room was awash with blood.
I was deeply shaken at my own behaviour. Instantly, I understood that I would have to change my ways immediately and profoundly, and that this required a rigorous self-discipline. What had happened was simply too awful. I had caused the deepest possible rupture, which might have destroyed us as a family. In a brief family meeting, we decided, since the wounds were not on closer inspection grave, not to deliver my brother to the hospital to get him looked at, which would certainly have led to questions from the law. We bandaged him up, wiped the blood away, and I felt wretched. I still feel that today, to the bone.
Because the wounds were never sewn up, Till’s scars are clearly visible. I got myself under control by means of absolute self-discipline. A good part of my character to this day is determined by sheer discipline. But between Till and me there still exists a rough, often jokey palling around, which sometimes makes our continued intimacy baffling to outside observers.
A few years ago, we had a family reunion on the coast of Spain, where my brother was living at the time. At his invitation and expense, we had a wonderful evening at a fish restaurant. My brother, sitting beside me, put his arm around me as I studied the menu. Something began to smoke; I felt a light prick at my back, and suddenly I realized that with his cigarette lighter he had set my shirt on fire. I tore it off, and everyone was aghast, but the pair of us laughed loudly at the joke that didn’t seem funny to anyone else. Someone lent me a T-shirt for the rest of the evening, and the little sore patch of skin on my back was cooled with a splash of prosecco.
We used a bucket for a toilet. When it got cold, its contents froze to one solid clump