How Werner Herzog has managed to surprise and wrong-foot audiences over his 60-year filmmaking career

There is a famous image of the great Russian director Sergei Eisenstein shaking hands with Mickey Mouse when he visited the Walt Disney studios in 1930. They make an incongruous pair, the Soviet filmmaker best known for Battleship Potemkin (1925) next to the symbol of the Disney empire. You don’t expect to see them together.

Some will experience a similar surprise when they watch the new Lucasfilm Star Wars series spin-off The Mandalorian, created by Jon Favreau and which premieres on streaming platform Disney+ in mid-November. Spotted on the trailer for the series, alongside the gun-toting droids and stormtroopers, is none other than the visionary German director Werner Herzog in best galactic leather. “Bounty-hunting in a complicated profession,” he intones in that familiar portentous voice which we are more used to hearing in his documentaries including Grizzly Man (2005), which chronicled the life and death of grizzly bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell, and Encounters at the End of the World (2007), a study of people, penguins, and places in Antarctica.

We are well accustomed to Herzog going to the ends of the earth but this is the first time we’ve seen him in outer space. When he talked about The Mandalorian in Cannes last May, where he had two new films screening in the festival, some journalists who didn’t yet know what the film was about assumed he must have been involved in a project about the American inventor and businessman John DeLorean. They didn’t expect him to be consorting with Luke Skywalker and his heirs.

Then again, throughout his near-60-year filmmaking career Herzog has always managed to surprise and wrong-foot audiences. He continually takes on new faces. One moment, he is the German Romantic striving after what he famously calls “ecstatic truth’” in his features and documentaries. The next, he might be directing Nic Cage as a sleazy cop in a thriller like Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009).

Set Herzog to work on a sports documentary about a famous Swiss ski jumper and he’ll come up with the mystical and mysterious The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1974), in which his slow-motion footage of Walter Steiner’s ski jumps is as eerie as anything found in a German expressionist horror film. He desperately wanted to be a ski jumper himself, and still expresses his envy that Steiner had the career he wanted for himself and fed all his yearning into the film.

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At times, it can seem as if Herzog is playing a gigantic cosmic joke on cinemagoers who take him too seriously. In the documentary Encounters at the End of the World, we hear him musing in very earnest fashion on the weighty question as to whether or not insanity exists among penguins. His dramatic features often have a shaggy-dog-story feel. They are about crazed inventors or explorers and conquistadors (several of them played by the gimlet-eyed Klaus Kinski) venturing downriver in search of lost cities of gold.

There may be something quixotic and Monty Python-like about some of the director’s more outlandish ventures but the continuing fascination of these films lies in the sure knowledge that Herzog is behaving with the same driven and demented energy behind the scenes as his fictional characters are on screen. George Sluizer, the director of The Vanishing (1988), worked as a production manager in the jungles of Peru on Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982). During shooting, as was shown in the making-of documentary Burden of Dreams (1982) by Les Blank, the filmmakers really did drag a steamship over a mountain. “There was no question of asking myself if the boat should go up the mountain. That was a given fact. It was only how the bloody hell we got the bloody thing up there,” Sluizer said when he remembered the experience years later, describing it as “the toughest film in film history”.

“There was madness, arrogance and danger. Werner goes to the absolute limit,” Sluizer stated.

For all the madness, hubris and solipsism of characters in his dramatic features – like Aguirre, the 16th-century explorer desperate to find El Dorado in Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972) or the South American rubber magnate in Fitzcarraldo, going to absurd lengths to try to build an opera house in the jungle – Herzog’s films, especially his documentaries, touch on political themes. His Death Row documentary Into the Abyss (2011) may not have been intended as a polemic against capital punishment but that is how it played. His 2016 thriller Salt and Fire drew attention to an environmental disaster in Bolivia. His Gulf War documentary Lessons of Darkness (1992), which showed Kuwait’s oil fields on fire, was terrifying in its abstract beauty.

The closer Herzog moves to the mainstream, the less intriguing his filmmaking becomes. His 2015 costume drama Queen of the Desert, starring Nicole Kidman as writer and archaeologist Gertrude Bell, was disappointing precisely because you felt somebody else could have made it. His 3D documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011), about cave paintings more than 30,000 years old, was awe-inspiring and technically adventurous but also slightly strait-laced: it didn’t have that deranged perversity found in his Kinski collaborations.

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The director never takes short cuts. There is a very revealing moment in his early memoir Of Walking in Ice (1978). The book is based on the diaries he kept during his three-week journey by foot from Munich to Paris in the dead of winter to visit the revered German film critic Lotte Eisner, whom he fears is close to death. He believes that, somehow, if he walks to Paris, she will stay alive. During the long and blister-filled journey, he looks up and sees a plane that could have got him to Eisner in less than a morning. “The region I’m traversing is infested with rabies. If I were sitting in the soundless plane right above me, I would have been in Paris in one and a half hours,” he writes. That, though, would have destroyed the entire purpose of the exercise. It was a matter of honour to take the long way round – and he wouldn’t have had anything to write about anyway if he had gone the direct route.

Herzog seems to fit into the age-old mould of the tyrannical, self-obsessed artist and yet, when you interview him, he is surprisingly personable and down to earth. He doesn’t have Kinski-like tantrums. He can be solicitous about those older and frailer than he is. In his new documentary, Meeting Gorbachev (2019), which he co-directed with Andre Singer, he fusses around former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev with the care and respect you might expect a dutiful nephew to show to a distinguished elderly relative. Gorbachev is now in his late eighties and in poor health. His interviews with Herzog are likely to be among the last he gives. Herzog has talked of the “instant rapport” he struck with the former Russian leader. He brings Gorbachev chocolate (sugar-free because of Gorbachev’s diabetes) and becomes just a little sentimental in his treatment in the film of Gorbachev’s all-consuming love for his wife, Raisa, whose untimely death in 1999 left the leader bereft. His own reverence for Gorbachev is self-evident. He adores him and can’t hide his gratitude about Gorbachev’s part in German reunification or his attempts to end the nuclear arms race. Herzog sees him as a noble and tragic figure, defeated by his own decency.

The director’s new dramatic feature Family Romance, LLC (2019), which he shot in Japan, is likewise a long way removed from his jungle tales or accounts of human behaviour at its most extreme. It’s about a man hired to impersonate the missing father of a 12-year-old girl. Herzog portrays a world in which all human relationships – even the most intimate family ones – can be maintained on a for-hire basis. “In a way, it points to something in society we feel and know is coming to us with all the existential solitude,” he says of the film, which he shot in Japanese, a language he doesn’t speak, using interpreters.

Herzog films come in waves. Alongside Meeting Gorbachev and Family Romance, LLC, he has a third new feature, Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin, screening in the UK this autumn. This is his tribute to his friend, the legendary British travel writer Chatwin. Herzog (whose feature film Cobra Verde was based on Chatwin’s novel The Viceroy of Ouidah) borrows Chatwin’s heavy old rucksack and recreates his trips to Australia, Patagonia and Wales.

In the last year alone, the 77-year-old German director has completed three entirely different feature-length films in different parts of a world – while also co-starring in a Star Wars spin-off. It’s a relentless schedule but nothing out of the normal for a filmmaker who, since starting his filmmaking career in the late 1950s, has rarely come up for air. He has also directed opera and theatre and still teaches at his “Rogue” film school. (Last year, he held a workshop in the Peruvian jungle with 48 young filmmakers from 28 countries.) His filmography spans everything from Georg Buchner adaptations (1979’s Woyzeck) and Jack Reacher films to documentaries set in the Antarctic. He has worked with both maverick independent directors like Harmony Korine and with stars like Tom Cruise. He is one of the few figures who straddles the worlds of European art house cinema and mainstream Hollywood, and who is as at home making documentary as fiction. Unlike Eistenstein, he may not have met Mickey Mouse, but he has featured in episodes of The Simpsons.

“I am still a man of cinema,” he pronounced recently, as if that was a point of sacred principle in a new Amazon and Netflix era. However, once he is seen in the new Star Wars-streamed Disney series, he is likely to accrue a whole new generation of disciples.

Herzog’s ‘Meeting Gorbachev’ is released in the UK on 8 November; ‘In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin’ airs on BBC2 on 21 September; Herzog’s ‘Family Romance, LLC’ screens at the LFF on 8 and 9 October and is released in the UK next year. ‘The Mandalorian’ is due to air on Disney+ on 12 November