My film with Werner Herzog: “He’s a very nice guy who’s interested in soccer and barbecue”

There are moments in Thomas von Steinaecker’s documentary Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer that will surprise even the longtime Herzog devotee. Charting Herzog’s path from child of poverty in Second World War Germany to dark lord of the European arthouse to highly-memed pop culture figure, Radical Dreamer covers the always entertaining tales of eccentricity – Herzog tangling with combustible leading man Klaus Kinski through five films, or travelling on foot from Munich to Paris to see an ailing friend – while also uncovering something of the man beneath.

Radical Dreamer features new conversations with Herzog in his LA home, at locations from his early films and in the Bavarian village of his childhood, where Steinaecker captures displays of unexpected vulnerability: “A lot of things were planned, but you can’t plan emotions.”

Christian Bale, Nicole Kidman and Robert Pattinson are among the star Herzog collaborators interviewed in Radical Dreamer, but Herzog himself is the film’s most captivating screen presence. Steinaecker describes Herzog’s often inscrutable face as “like another screen on the screen, where you start projecting your thoughts and emotions”. Steinaecker first tried to make a film that might penetrate this enigma 10 years ago, around the time of Herzog’s 70th birthday; as Herzog approached another milestone, his 80th, Steinaecker finally got the New German Cinema icon to talk.

Why do you think Werner was willing to open up now, and for this film in particular?

I think there are two main reasons. The first is that the 80th birthday is different from the 70th birthday; you know that probably the 90th birthday will be not as pleasant as the 80th birthday… And of course you start to – as I experienced with Werner – care about your legacy, and what will happen after your death. I think these are thoughts that occupied him during the past few years, and my project just fit into that.

You see real vulnerability from him in the film. For example, he seems genuinely moved revisiting the Lanzarote location from Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) more than 50 years later. I was wondering if you could talk about the decision to interview Werner in places from his past, and whether you expected him to become as emotional as he did?

The greatest goal was to get something beyond just an interview and the statements you might expect from [Herzog]. A statement like, “It’s an injustice that we don’t have wings” – that’s a great statement, but that’s within what you might expect from him. But I don’t think you would expect him getting so moved and touched.

It was a very carefully planned decision to go with him to the village where he grew up, because I knew that it meant a lot to him and that he goes there regularly, and he always talks about his childhood and the landscape there, and the mountains. So I knew that this might trigger something in him, something emotional.

In the moment you refer to, where Werner visits his childhood home and can’t bring himself to go inside, he begins to cry but claims, “These are not tears of emotion.” It’s almost like he can’t admit that somebody has successfully pierced the cold, uncompromising reputation that’s built up around him.

He says in the beginning of the film he’s a “Good soldier of cinema” – yeah OK, we all know this, and it’s amusing and that’s what you expect. But when I met him before the production started, I met a very tender person with a very vulnerable side, and that’s what I wanted to show.

In a way, he’s a very average guy… He’s not like Kinski, as some people expect – he’s not this choleric type with this glow in his eyes and speaking at the top of his voice or anything like that. Maybe he was that when he was younger – he might have been different back then. Wim Wenders [Herzog’s fellow New German Cinema filmmaker, who also speaks in the documentary] said that you couldn’t laugh together with Werner in the 70s, and now you can laugh together with him. In the end, I met a very nice, also sometimes sweet, but very average guy who’s interested in soccer and barbecue.

There’s some never-before-seen footage in the documentary of Jason Robards and Mick Jagger in the ‘first version’ of Fitzcarraldo (1982). What was it like coming across scenes from an alternative version of maybe Herzog’s masterpiece?

Rumour had it that there was more footage of the first version than what we could see in My Best Fiend [Herzog’s 1999 documentary on his tortured relationship with Klaus Kinski, who ultimately starred in Fitzcarraldo after Robards and Jagger left the production]… And then on the last day of our shooting in Lanzarote, we had a very nice evening with a great dinner and a lot of red wine, with Werner and Lucki [Stipetić, Herzog’s half-brother and regular producer]. At the end of the dinner, [Lucki] said “OK you can have the footage.” That was a great moment, because I knew that that was like a holy grail of never-seen-before footage of one of Werner’s films, maybe even of film history. Some of the shots are really beautiful. Mick Jagger on the ship with the rainbow, that’s a great shot.

In another interview you spoke of how Werner, after seeing a rough cut of Radical Dreamer, watched through it with you again making suggestions for changes. What was it like having Werner not just as a subject but as someone who gave notes on your film?

For me, personally, that was the highlight of the whole production, because it was like having a masterclass. I arrived at this hut in the woods – kind of scary, because it was clear I couldn’t flee in case [Herzog] wasn’t happy with the rough cut. We ate something, and then I showed him the film and he said, “It’s a good film, now let’s watch it together again.”

And then he was really the soldier of cinema. We sat together in front of the computer and then went through the whole film really shot by shot… The changes he suggested were like “Take out two seconds here” and “Add two seconds there.” He took me and my work very seriously, and I think the highest praise was, during the scene where [Herzog] walks to Paris and you see him walking from archival footage and also walking in new footage, so the different times and ages are combined… at that point he said “That’s not just a film, that’s cinema.” That was the highest praise I could imagine.

Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer is in cinemas on 19 January and on BFI Player and BFI Blu-ray on 19 February. BFI Southbank’s retrospective season, Journey into the Unknown: The Films of Werner Herzog, runs throughout January, including the 50th anniversary re-release of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) in selected cinemas from 19 January.