Werner Herzog: 'Fear? It's not in my dictionary'

Werner Herzog's latest film was shot in typically wild terrain, but he's no adventurer, the director tells James Mottram

As Werner Herzog enters the room for our interview on a chilly November day, I ask, "Is it warm enough in here?" Herzog may be 65, but for one who recently returned from Antarctica (for the forthcoming documentary Encounters at the End of the World), it seems a superfluous question. Ever since he set foot in the Amazon for his 1972 conquistador tale Aguirre: Wrath of God, the German director has been drawn to inhospitable environments, albeit in the name of storytelling. "I'm not an adventurer," he argues. "Adventure is over. Now you can book an adventure trip to New Guinea to see the headhunters. It has degenerated that far. Adventure belongs to a century when men would face each other in a pistol duel at dawn."

In an age of satellites, where every inch of the world has been mapped out, it's easy to see what Herzog means. Yet, fictional or otherwise, characters that face extreme elements continue to fascinate him. Think of Grizzly Man, for example, his 2005 study of the activist Timothy Treadwell, which retraced the steps of a man who lived with bears in the wilds of Alaska – until one mauled him to death. Five years earlier, he made Wings of Hope, in which he returned to the jungles of Peru with Juliane Koepcke, the sole survivor of a plane crash there in 1972 that saw 96 others perish. "She was really clever and knew how to be in the jungle," Herzog says. "The story fascinated me because I was booked on the same plane."

It's this matter-of-fact manner – mixed with an air of nonchalance – that makes Herzog such a fascinating figure. Operating entirely without fear – "it's not in my dictionary," he says – if he's not an adventurer, then he's certainly a survivor. Born in Munich, the son of two biologists, at the height of the Allied bombing, he was in his cot when a skylight shattered above him, the glass falling around him but leaving him untouched. He cites a more recent example, when he was being interviewed by the BBC near his home in Los Angeles and was inexplicably shot by someone firing an air rifle from their balcony. He lifts up his shirt to reveal a wound on his abdominal area. "It still hurts when I laugh hard," he grins, "so don't make me laugh."

Survival is the essence of his latest film, Rescue Dawn, the thrilling true story of the German-American pilot Dieter Dengler, who was shot down over Laos in the early days of the Vietnam War. Having already told the story in his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Herzog concentrates here on the harrowing six-month stint that Dengler (played by Christian Bale) faced as a PoW before he made a daring bid to escape through an unforgiving landscape. Shot in Thailand, once again the jungle is a key character for Herzog, though he sees it differently from his previous forays into such terrain. "It's more impenetrable than ever before," he says, "more physical than in any of my other films."

But it is not, lest we forget, an adventure. "It's a test and trial of men," says Herzog. "An adventure is something you are always seeking. Dengler did not seek to be put in medieval foot-blocks and cross handcuffed with other men." Yet there can be no doubt, making a film with Herzog falls into this category. If he's capable of inspiring the sort of commitment from his cast that caused both Bale and co-star Jeremy Davies to become emaciated for their roles, he's also able to attract difficulties, as if the shoot itself must in some way mirror the character's journey. "Of course there are frictions, there always are," he remarks. In this case, it all stemmed from Herzog working on what must be regarded as the closest he has come to making a Hollywood film in his 45-year career.

Ultimately picked up for distribution by MGM, the film didn't start out as a major studio production. It was funded to the tune of $10m by Gibraltar, a fledgling production company run by men who made their fortunes in basketball, trucking or nightclubs – but definitely not film. From not paying the Thai crew on time (or at all), to firing two of Herzog's longtime key collaborators, the production manager Walter Saxer and set designer Ulrich Bergfelder, the producers clashed with the director on everything. "They had very little idea about film-making, which was a big problem, their inexperience," he says. "But that's OK. There is no film that doesn't have any problems. It's in the nature of film-making."

Admittedly, by comparison with his 1982 film Fitzcarraldo, the making of Rescue Dawn sounds a breeze. Two plane crashes, the illness of the lead Klaus Kinski, and the burning down of the production's camp during a border war between Peru and Ecuador were just some of the trials that befell the former. "There was not one day without a catastrophe," Herzog smiles. But it was a self-inflicted moment of madness that almost crippled the film. With its story of an eccentric opera-loving rubber harvester, the jaw-dropping centrepiece comes as he decides to "save time" and push his steamboat and its cargo over a mountain to join an adjacent Amazon- river system. Refusing to conjure up such a scene with special effects, Herzog insisted on shooting it for real (see Story of the Scene, above right).

"There was not enough money to solve things with cash," he explains. "No amount of cash will move a ship over a mountain. What I keep saying is that only faith moves mountains." There is a certain sense of bravura in Herzog when I suggest that the film must have rivalled another legendarily difficult shoot with his good friend Francis Ford Coppola. "Apocalypse Now was kindergarten in comparison with what had to be done in Fitzcarraldo," he says. Indeed, Herzog – who famously threatened his volatile leading man Kinski with a bullet in the brain back on Aguirre – certainly outstrips Coppola when it comes to being regarded as a megalomaniac. "Let it come as wild as it gets!" he retorts. "I don't care! You see, you can't stop it anyway."

That said, Herzog – who points out that he has abandoned plans in the past to film in dangerous places, such as the K2 mountain and Sudan – seems keen to set the record straight when it comes to the making of Rescue Dawn. "I never left any doubt that this was going to be very physical and very demanding," he says. "But at the same time, I'm not seeking these things. All the actors know that I never went over schedule. Rescue Dawn was brought in two days under schedule. I do not go over budget. Sometimes, I go under budget. And, contrary to my reputation, in more than 50 films, not one actor ever got hurt – which should make you think that you're dealing here with a man who's a professional and not a megalomaniac or a crazed adventurer."

Herzog admits that he loves being involved in everything to do with film – including acting. Next March, he can be glimpsed as a zealous priest in Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely. Having already played a father in Korine's Julien Donkey-Boy, Herzog has been something of a mentor to the young director, in part because Korine reminds him of himself when he was first making movies. "There's something similar about how we both entered the arena. Both of us were very young when we started – he was a teenager, and my first film was when I was 19. And no film school, somehow in defiance of the rules!" Like Korine, Herzog is entirely sure of his talents – in particular compared with Hollywood fare. "I think my own stories are better," he says, smiling.

Not just because he resides in LA's Laurel Canyon with Lena, his photographer wife of seven years, you might say Herzog is on Hollywood's periphery. He certainly feels he operates in a similar sphere. "I always knew that Rescue Dawn, like almost all my other films so far, was a mainstream movie, but mainstream in the best sense of the word." While he's presumably not including his 1970 breakthrough film, Even Dwarfs Started Small, with its cast of shrill-voiced little people, he has a point. "My stories are never deeply complicated and intellectual. They're always great stories that children would understand, people in other continents would understand, and penitentiary prisoners would understand."

Herzog still keeps a production office back in Munich, run by his younger brother Lucki (he also has two other siblings, a financier and an acting coach). Yet it seems strange that a man such as Herzog should choose to live in a place as reputedly superficial as LA. "It's not that I'm close to the film industry," he says. "I never go to parties or red-carpet events. I like it because it is the city with the most substance in the United States. If you only look at the glitz of Hollywood, with the stretch limos and all the crazed celebrities, then you won't find it. But look behind it – and the good thing is, hardly anybody believes it or knows about it."

Or you might say that it's just another of life's dense jungles for Werner Herzog to explore.

'Rescue Dawn' opens today