EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF AND GOD AGAINST ALL

Herzog in all his extravagant, perspicacious glory.

Now 80, the acclaimed director, documentarian, and author, a “product of my mistakes and misjudgments,” recalls his “archaic,” poverty-stricken early years in the Bavarian Alps on the edge of a war before digressing into the making of The Wild Blue Yonder, “a completely fantastical science fiction film.” Throughout, Herzog is witty and captivating as he recollects all kinds of odd, curious, and outlandish events, people, and injuries—maybe, he speculates, some memories aren’t real. Discussing ski jumping as a boy, he shifts to a film he made about it. When the family moved to Munich, the author met the maniacal Klaus Kinski, who would appear in his films. “I knew what I was letting myself in for,” he writes. Herzog’s brief time at university was a “sham”; he was already making films. “Even physically, I was hardly ever there; there were entire semesters when I showed up once, maybe twice,” he writes. The author became a Catholic as a teenager, and while he later left the faith, he admits to a “distant echo of divinity” in some films. “There are various recurring tropes in my films,” he notes, “that are almost always derived from personal experience.” Past and present mix as Herzog rambles widely from job to job, country to country, memory to memory. He chronicles how he learned from others’ bad films, scrambled to raise money for projects, and acted in other people’s films, and he touches on the genesis of his own. The atmosphere in Aguirre, the Wrath of God was “dire,” and Herzog swapped his “good shoes for a bathtub full of fish” to feed his starving crew. During the filming of Fitzcarraldo, almost everything went wrong. “I don’t see the things that fascinate me as esoteric,” he writes near the conclusion of the book, which ends midsentence.

Fans and neophytes alike will relish the opportunity to delve deeply into Herzog’s fascinating mind.