An invaluable set of career-length interviews with the German genius hailed by François Truffaut as "the most important film director alive"
Most of what we've heard about Werner Herzog is untrue. The sheer number of false rumors and downright lies disseminated about the man and his films is truly astonishing. Yet Herzog's body of work is one of the most important in postwar European cinema. His international breakthrough came in 1973 with Aguirre, The Wrath of God, in which Klaus Kinski played a crazed Conquistador. For The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Herzog cast in the lead a man who had spent most of his life institutionalized, and two years later he hypnotized his entire cast to make Heart of Glass. He rushed to an explosive volcanic Caribbean island to film La Soufrière, paid homage to F. W. Murnau in a terrifying remake of Nosferatu, and in 1982 dragged a boat over a mountain in the Amazon jungle for Fitzcarraldo. More recently, Herzog has made extraordinary "documentary" films such as Little Dieter Needs to Fly. His place in cinema history is assured, and Paul Cronin's volume of dialogues provides a forum for Herzog's fascinating views on the things, ideas, and people that have preoccupied him for so many years.

Herzog on Herzog: Conversations with Paul Cronin

Humor & Entertainment

Paul Cronin

Werner Herzog

Movies

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Of Walking on Ice

Biographies & Memoirs

Tanam Press

Screenplays

The Twilight World: Discover the first novel from the iconic filmmaker Werner Herzog

Vintage

Every Man for Himself and God against All: A Memoir

Bodley Head

Mexico: The Aztec Account of the Conquest [SCREENPLAY]

Sticking Place Books

Written more than thirty years ago, Werner Herzog's Mexico screenplay - an epic, stylized dramatisation of the conquest of the Aztec empire by Hernán Cortes and his army in 1521 - is destined to remain unfilmed. But now it can be read. An essential companion piece to the filmmaker's earlier, celebrated South American adventures, Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982), Mexico pits Cortes, "a genius of deception and intrigue," against the emperor Motecuhzoma, "reserved, laconic, wavering between exaltation and despair." It takes readers from sandy shorelines to snow-capped mountains and the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, a "mighty metropolis" of canals, gardens and temples. Tense encounters between the Aztecs and the Spaniards build to a battle sequence of dazzlingly sustained intensity and invention. As Herzog acknowledges, when he wrote Mexico in the early 1990s, its production costs "would have been prohibitively high. Today, even though many of the locations and battle scenes could be done digitally, it would still require the budget of a huge Hollywood movie. This kind of budget I could raise only if my last film grossed a few hundred million dollars at the US box office. Such is the Iron Law of the industry. But none of my films has grossed that much, and I felt that this screenplay has literary merit in its own right. I always wanted to develop screenplays as an independent form of literature. One normally would not publish a document like this before it is made into a film, but in this case the Iron Law still stands in my way."

Literature & Fiction

Die Zukunft der Wahrheit

Carl Hanser Verlag

CREPUSCOLO DEL MONDO

Feltrinelli

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Books by Werner Herzog