Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog appears as a filmmaker the narrator first regarded as an almost superhuman model of artistic will, and later encountered as the source of a humiliating personal rebuff. The contrast gives Herzog a double significance: his commitment to making films under extreme conditions commands admiration, while his treatment of an inexperienced admirer becomes a test case for the contempt that can accompany an ideal of strength. The book neither cancels its admiration nor lets it protect Herzog from scrutiny.

Artistic Ideal and Working Method

After returning from Indonesia, the narrator found work as a film critic and was invited by a publisher to contribute to a series of books on contemporary filmmakers. He chose Herzog, whose films were then at the height of their popularity. His interest went beyond the work: he admired the filmmaker as a man who seemed to act without waiting for anyone to certify his talent.

The examples that shaped this image are acts of physical and artistic extremity. Herzog had taken a factory job to finance documentaries about survivors of catastrophe, people on the margins, and people driven by delusions. In Aguirre, the Wrath of God, he had confronted the Amazonian jungle and the madness of his leading actor, Klaus Kinski. He had also crossed Europe on foot in winter, convinced that the journey could prevent the death of Lotte Eisner, a film historian associated with Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau and described as the living memory of German cinema.

To the narrator, Herzog’s strength, intensity, and aversion to frivolity set him against the ironic humor fashionable among Parisians in the early eighties. He sought out punishing conditions, could mistreat local people, and refused to let the caution or scruples of those following him slow him down. His cinema seemed radically opposed to the café conversations filmed by young French directors. That opposition made his work an artistic ideal, but it also sharpened the narrator’s sense of personal inadequacy: Herzog’s example made him feel still more keenly that he was not a superman.

The Cannes Encounter

The narrator’s book about Herzog brought him to the Cannes Film Festival, where Télérama sent him to interview the director as he presented Fitzcarraldo in competition. The narrator later returned to Cannes in more established roles—as a screenwriter with a film in the official competition, a director, and a jury member—but at this point he was a novice freelancer without contacts. His badge gave him access only to inconveniently timed screenings, placing him near the bottom of a festival hierarchy that stretched from celebrated stars to people pressed behind barriers hoping for a glimpse of them.

After the screening, the publisher arranged a signing at the Palais des Festivals. The narrator sat behind a small table stacked with his books. Festivalgoers, already burdened with press kits, photo books, résumés, and brochures, mostly ignored him. Some took a copy mechanically, as if it were a free glass of champagne, and walked away while looking for a garbage can. He had to catch up with them and explain, apologetically, that the book was for sale. The signing made the narrator’s low status visible in a particularly exposed way: he was not simply unknown but positioned among the people the festival’s machinery passed over.

The interview the next day, at the Carlton Hotel, proved more painful. Herzog opened the door wearing a loose T-shirt, work pants, and heavy walking shoes; to the narrator he looked as though he had just left a tent at Everest base camp in bad weather. The narrator had arranged for the book to be delivered by Herzog’s press secretary. Seeing it on the coffee table, he began awkwardly to acknowledge that Herzog could not read French. Herzog listened in silence, then said, “I’d rather we not talk about that. I know it’s bullshit. Let’s work.”

The Rebuke and Its Aftermath

Herzog’s instruction was clear: the meeting was for the interview, a professional obligation to be got through, not a conversation about the book or its author. The narrator was too timid and taken aback to object or leave. He turned on his tape recorder and asked the first prepared question. Herzog answered it and the questions that followed professionally. The interview therefore continued, but its efficient completion did not undo the injury of the opening exchange.

The narrator asks what pleasure Herzog could have taken in calmly offending a young admirer. Herzog had not read the book; even if it was bad, the narrator argues, that would not explain the gratuitousness of the response. He remains sorry to recount an anecdote so damaging to a man he still admires. He also notes that Herzog’s more recent work makes him think the director would no longer speak that way, and might be surprised to have the incident recalled. Yet the remark continues to matter to both subject and narrator: admiration cannot make the encounter insignificant, and later change cannot erase what it disclosed at the time.

Strength, Hierarchy, and Fascism

A friend’s response—“That’ll teach you to admire fascists.”—gives the incident its most compressed interpretation. The narrator does not equate Herzog with a political movement or attribute to him the explicit doctrines of racial extermination. Instead, Herzog’s ability to feel intense sympathy for deaf and mute Indigenous people or schizophrenic vagabonds stands beside his treatment of a young film enthusiast with glasses, whom the narrator describes as a bug to be morally crushed. The contrast is the point: compassion for people perceived as extreme or marginal can coexist with disdain for someone who appears weak, ordinary, or unworthy of attention.

The narrator uses the encounter to approach what he calls the roots of fascism, distinguishing that everyday disposition from neo-Nazism, extermination, or Herzog’s frank disdain considered by itself. The issue is how people respond to the evident inequalities of life: differences in beauty, talent, and preparedness for struggle. Nietzsche, Eduard Limonov, and the extreme moral stance the narrator calls fascist all answer by accepting inequality as reality. Against that acceptance, the narrator identifies pious lies, leftist otherworldliness, and political correctness as the replies the fascist dismisses. Herzog’s rebuke thus becomes more than an unpleasant interview anecdote: it puts the narrator’s admiration for force under pressure, showing how an ethic of uncompromising strength can turn a person’s vulnerability into permission to humiliate him.