 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){kind=link}
The director on his childhood fight for survival, Elon Musk’s invitation to Mars, and why Nicolas Cage ‘would die’ to work with him again
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.”