He’s risked his life to make films, been shot at, and his latest film investigates a
triple homicide. So is Werner Herzog fascinated by death? No, he tells Steve Rose,
he’s just not afraid of it.

Werner Herzog: ‘If we perish I want to see what’s coming at me, and if we survive, I
want to see it as well.’

Some years ago, Werner Herzog was on an internal flight somewhere in Colorado
and the plane’s landing gear wouldn’t come down. They would have to make an
emergency landing. The runway was covered in foam and flanked by scores of fire
engines. “We were ordered to crouch down with our faces on our knees and hold our
legs,” says Herzog, “and I refused to do it.” The stewardess was very upset, the co-
pilot came out from the cabin and ordered him to do as he was told. “I said, ‘If we
perish I want to see what’s coming at me, and if we survive, I want to see it as well.
I’m not posing a danger to anyone by not being in this shitty, undignified position.'”
In the end, the plane landed normally. Herzog was banned from the airline for life
but, he laughs, it went bust two years later anyway.Herzog tells this story to illustrate
how he’ll face anything that’s thrown at him, as if that was ever in any doubt.

Now approaching his 70th birthday, the German film-maker has assumed legendary
status for facing things others wouldn’t. He’s lived a life packed with intrepid movie
shoots, far-flung locations and general high-stakes film-making. He has a biography
too dense to summarise. But his tale also confirms the suspicion that he’s helplessly
drawn to danger and death. Or vice versa.

Continue reading Werner Herzog on death, danger and the end of the world →