Being Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog does not choose which films to make - they choose him. "They come after me and I have no other choice but to do them," says the famed German director. The proof is in his impressive filmography, which spans over 40 years, and includes recent works such as The Wild Blue Yonder, Grizzly Man and The White Diamond. If fact, Herzog has made four feature-length films in the last 14 months. "Once I finish a film, all of a sudden there are five more lined up. It's like if you invite two guests for dinner and 50 crowd in - how do you get them out? I keep on pushing my films out the window and the door and through the basement entrance."

But don't make the mistake of calling works like Grizzly Man or The White Diamond - Herzog's most recent non-fictions works - documentaries. He eschews such genre definitions, simply stating, "I make movies and I try my best. I think audiences don't care about categories - they just want to see a good movie."

That being said, Herzog isn't embarrassed to admit the premise of a movie he watched last year: it was about college kids in Cancun on spring break. "The only point of the film was who was going to get laid first. And I kind of liked it," he says with a laugh. "It had such an easy approach to its subjects. I hate pretentious films. But that film was so straightforward. There are certain forms of films out that normally aren't pretentious: Kung Fu films, Fred Astaire films, porno - there's no pretension in them."

There's certainly a lack of pretentiousness in Herzog's portrayal of the human condition. "With [Grizzly Man's protagonist Timothy] Treadwell, or Aguirre, The Wrath of God or The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, we are somehow exploring our innermost human conditions through them," he says. After all, Grizzly Man is a film about human nature, not wildlife, and Herzog makes you cringe as he brings his character's demons to the surface.

One thing Herzog struggles for is what he calls 'absolute truth.' "What I feel quite often is that there is an absence of searching for some deeper stratum of truth. When you look at the so-called cinema verité, it is ultimately the answer of the '60s regarding our realities. But things have become dramatically different within the last 15 or 20 years - we have gotten an enormous explosion of instruments that somehow challenge reality." He rhymes off a list of such tools: the Internet, reality TV, Photoshop, digital effects. "It's probably not so important what constitutes facts and what constitutes reality. What is much more important is 'Where is the truth in all of this?'"

How to convey that truth - and a message - has recently changed in at least part of the film industry. "You can see with the kinds of stories that were at this year's Oscars, like Brokeback Mountain, like Capote, that real storytelling all of a sudden counts more than just pure special effects."