Werner Herzog's fearless odysseys into the abyss

"Do not go too far," says Werner Herzog on the phone when I ask for directions to his house in Los Angeles. "If you end up in Coldwater Canyon you will have gone too far."

I tell him I have a GPS. "The GPS will not help you," he says.

Trust Werner Herzog to make a visit to his home sound as fraught with peril as a Werner Herzog film. Asked to nominate a point on the map most likely to contain the itinerant German director, those familiar with his films might hazard something like "halfway up the Amazon, dodging spears". Or "in an Igloo". In fact, his house is located on a steep, winding road off Laurel Canyon, in the most jungle-like part of the Hollywood Hills, home only to the more reclusive species of rock-star and raccoon. "I am always somewhere else," he says. "I live on the sets of my films."

His living room is filled with artefacts and archeological curios from his shoots. Propped against the mantelpiece is a set of spears from the Amondauas tribe of Brazil, documented in his short film, Ten Thousand Years Older. On the coffee table rests a book about ancient Greek hieroglyphs. Curled up in front of the bookshelves is a contented-looking black-and-white cat. "I never really planned to have a cat but my wife rescued that one from a coyote," says Herzog distractedly, while making coffee in his kitchen. "The coyote almost ate him."

It is traditional among Herzog's interviewers to note the disparity between the man and the film-making legend - you come expecting cinema's answer to the wild man of Borneo, the on-set despot who threatened to have actor Klaus Kinski
killed and who once hypnotised his entire cast - and instead you get a tall, gentle figure, now 69, with soft, pillowy bags beneath eyes which retain a kindly sparkle. After the French premiere of Harmony Korine's 1999 film Julien Donkey-Boy, in which Herzog played an abusive father, his third wife Lena got a frantic call from a Parisian friend, asking "Is this man really your husband? We can give you shelter." Herzog, chortles at the memory. "That means I was convincing. My wife firmly believes that I am a fluffy husband."

"Fluffy" might be pushing it. Beneath Herzog's avuncular manner lurks an unusual bluntness, which he used to great effect while interviewing prisoners on death row in Texas and Florida for Into the Abyss: a Tale of Death, a Tale of Life, the new documentary he calls "the most intense of all my films so far". In addition to the feature film he has also created a three-part television spin-off, Death Row, that begins on Channel 4 next week.

When interviewing one prisoner, a bucktoothed 29 year-old called Michael Kelly, eight days before he was due to be executed for a triple homicide, Herzog wore a suit "out of respect" but told the convict, "it does not necessarily mean that I have to like you". For a few seconds, Kelly was too stunned to respond. "You have to take that kind of risk," says Herzog now. "But it turned him towards me because he saw I was a straight shooter. Everyone is phoney on death row - the attorneys, the family, they are always phoney - and the prisoners see from miles away if someone is talking straight to them."

More than just an indictment of capital punishment, Into the Abyss is warmed by small, unexpected inlets of sympathy from Herzog, and buoyed by his gift for oddball questions. Few other interviewers would think to interrupt a Disneyesque tribute to God's Creation from a prison chaplain, as Herzog does, with the question, "Tell me about an encounter with a squirrel." Still less, move the man to tears.

"I knew I had to break him open," says Herzog. "And I did. You have to know the heart of men. More than anything, I'm trying to look very deep into our human condition, into the deep recesses of our soul. I'm curious about us, about myself." As the old Nietzschean maxim has it: stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back into you.

Into the Abyss could be the title for almost any of Herzog's films, with their penchant for probing inaccessible landscapes and equally inaccessible souls. Herzog himself is largely free from the urge to examine the pathologies that tug him halfway across the globe. "I don't really question myself about how or when or why," he says of the motivation behind his films. "I don't want to look at myself with too much intensity." The ideas for his films just come at him, he says, like "uninvited guests - and they come at me swinging".

It is tempting to trace Herzog's fascination with danger back to his experience growing up amid the rubble of post-war Germany. The day after he was born in Munich in 1942, a bomb destroyed the house next door and his family fled to the Bavarian mountains where the young Herzog never saw any films, television, or telephones; to this day, he refuses to carry a mobile phone. "We were forced to invent our own toys and our own games," he says. "And of course I was not completely settled in this village in the mountains because my family - my mother and my brother - were refugees. We were outsiders."

His earliest memory is, he says, of his mother waking him in the night and carrying him and his older brother up the slope behind the house. The city of Rosenheim, 35km away, was ablaze. "The entire horizon out there was yellow and orange and pulsing, and we knew the cities were burning," he recalls. "The biggest of all questions which is still haunting me is this: how is it possible that such a civilised nation as Germany with such great poetry and composers and philosophers and writers and painters, within a very few years turns into sheer barbarism. How is it possible? I still do not have a real answer. I only know the alarm signs out there. It can happen easily and it may happen to others, maybe not as radically as it happened to Germany, but my sensory organs are very, very alert."



Certainly that flight - from ruined city to arboreal idyll - prefigures the journey of many of Herzog's films, all of them fraught with the suspicion that civilisation is a thin mask, easily cracked to reveal the snarl of savagery beneath. They also harbour an unfakeable horse-whisperer sympathy for the marginalised, dispossessed and spiritually orphaned, from young Kaspar Hauser, released into the community after the forced isolation of his childhood in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, to Timothy Treadwell the crackpot environmentalist seeking communion with bears in Grizzly Man, to Dieter Dengler, the German pilot whose remarkable survival story in Laos Herzog traces back to his experience growing up as a child in bombed-out Berlin first in Little Dieter Needs to Fly and then again in Rescue Dawn. Clearly the story means something to him: to what extent were his films of Dengler's story an attempt to grapple with his own autobiography?

"Only partially," he answers. "We were both very hungry as children and we both grew up fatherless. In his case, his father perished in Stalingrad. My father simply left." Herzog's abandonment by his father, who divorced his mother when he was still a boy, is by far the most striking trauma of his childhood, although he doesn't see it that way. "It was anarchy in the best sense of the word," he has said. "There were no ruling fathers around and no rules to follow. We had to invent everything from scratch."

Herzog's Oedipal wound matched Germany's own. To watch the five films Herzog made with Kinski - Aguirre the Wrath of God (1972), Woyzeck (1978), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1982) and Cobra Verde (1987) - is to be driven to the inescapable conclusion, reached by so many Germans of that generation, that the man in charge is out to lunch. His films occupy a fatherless universe of fervid spoliation and energetic chaos, populated by petty tyrants and false prophets, and plagued by the lingering suspicion that not only have the lunatics taken over the asylum, but also that we might all be better off that way.

"I qualify as a survivor," says Herzog of his collaboration with Kinski, caught in all his full-throttle dementia in the documentary, My Best Fiend, released in 1999, eight years after his death. "Neither was he mad nor am I mad. I am clinically sane, although sometimes people who were with us believed that I was the dangerous one and he was just the barking dog. Because I was so quiet. That happened on Fitzcarraldo: when Kinski would throw his tantrums, all the native Indians, the warrior hunters, proposed to kill him - and I mean seriously. It isn't a joke. In their culture everything is softly spoken, never a loud word. They would only whisper, they would huddle and whisper and then fall silent. One of the chiefs said to me, 'They are not frightened of the madman who was yelling.' They were frightened of me because I was so silent."

Herzog's post-Kinski films give the impression of an imagination in recovery, getting its puff back. He didn't direct a feature film for a decade, and while he has since returned to the fray - most recently with a feverish take on Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant starring Nicolas Cage - it is with his documentaries, most notably 2005's Grizzly Man, that he has scored his greatest successes. Herzog's reputation as the patron saint of the dispossessed has, meanwhile, made him a hero to a younger generation of film-makers, who sign up for tuition at his Rogue Film School in Los Angeles, which shuns the impartation of technical prowess for epiphanic truths ("Follow your vision. Form secretive Rogue Cells everywhere. At the same time, be not afraid of solitude"). Occasionally, he even gets a call from Hollywood.

"I don't participate in red carpet events, parties and such, but I somehow have a very pleasant relationship with the industry," he says. "They do not need me and I do not need them either." Herzog is dressed in a fleece, emblazoned with the title of a forthcoming thriller One Shot in which he takes a supporting role. Someone despicable? "Of course. That's what I'm good at. Apparently the production company, and the director Chris McQuarrie and the actor… what's his name… the leading man who did Mission Impossible… Tom Cruise! Yes, Tom Cruise believes I am a very dangerous man.

"I read it all the time - that I am some sort of maverick film-maker. No. I am not a maverick. All the rest of Hollywood or the film industry worldwide - these are the mavericks. I am dead centre. Everyone else is eccentric. I occupy the centre, the centre of our time, the centre of our cultural climate, the centre of vision, the centre of storytelling in every single aspect. I know I am dead centre. When you look at the Academy Awards, you know that this is a rather eccentric [industry]. And then you look at me."

"You may have a point," I say, not sure whether the gleam of megalomania in what Herzog has just said is exaggerated for camp effect, or simply the honest truth as he sees it.

"Not 'may', 'do'," he insists. "In capital letters. I DO have a point."

Into the Abyss: a Tale of Death, a Tale of Life is out on March 30

Death Row begins on Thursday at 10pm on Channel 4