He has made feverish films about crazed obsessives – but one idea was too excessive. The great director explains why Mexico, featuring acting frogs and fleets of ships on fire, is finding an audience at last
Werner Herzog has two faces, both wearing the same expression of grave forbearance. To some, he is the formidable adventurer-auteur whose cinematic odysseys, such as Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, the Wrath of God, doubled as life-imperilling expeditions for cast and crew. Millions of others know him only from his work in front of the camera, as a villain in Jack Reacher or as the mysterious Client in the Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian.
Herzog turns 82 tomorrow, but ask him how he feels about a career spanning more than six decades and he will protest. “I had no career,” he says, squinting into his webcam from a book-lined office in his Los Angeles home. “I had a wild slalom at way too high a speed and temperature, with rocks and trees that I didn’t collide with – and I didn’t perish.”
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