So first of all, I just want to say it's really a pleasure to meet you. I've consumed a fair

amount of your work, much less than some, more than others. And you strike me as maybe either

the sanest crazy person on the planet or the craziest sane person.

No, I'm only sane.

I just want to hear you describe how you see the world and I'll give you some leading questions and I want to talk about your books, especially your recent book, about truth.

But I don't know, do you feel like an unusual being?

No. I'm as average as it can get.

That is Werner Herzog, the German-born filmmaker and writer and actor and a sort of citizen soldier.

He is not average.

Hurtag has made more than 70 films. All of them are spirited. Some are absurdist or

pretentious. None of them are dull. There is Family Romance LLC about a Japanese entrepreneur

who leases out humans to other humans who for some, may need a stand-in family member or friend.

There's Grizzly Man, a remarkable documentary about a man who loved bears a little too much.

And there are the five films that Herzog made with the actor Klaus Kinski.

The Kinski-Herzeg relationship was volatile and sometimes violent.

Their two best-known collaborations are Fitzcaroldo and Aguirre, the Rath of God.

Both films are about an obsession that tips into madness.

In Fitzgeraldo, the Kinski character needs to haul a massive steamship over a steep hill in the Amazon in order to fund a new opera house.

Herzog says that 20th Century Fox wanted him to shoot the film in botanical gardens in San Diego and for the ship to use a plastic model.

But Herzog got his way. He shot in the Peruvian

jungle with a real 320-ton steamship and a real hill. It was a mad adventure and all the madness

of making the film is captured in the film. Today, you could use AI to generate a decent facsimile of something like that for a tiny fraction of the cost.

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