Illuminating the dark side of human nature

HOLLYWOOD — In the living room of his cozy home in the hills above Los Angeles, Werner Herzog has a quiver of brightly colored arrows from a tribe of Amazon Indians he met while making one of his many documentaries.

As I went to touch the point of one arrow, he cautioned, "They're still quite poisonous. The brown stuff on the inside is anticoagulant. If you get hit with one, you won't stop bleeding easily."

When Werner Herzog issues a warning, it's prudent to obey. At 64, he is our filmmaking god of dark adventure, a willful but adventuresome artist whose characters — both in his features and documentaries — test the boundaries of human madness and quixotic folly.

Herzog is best known for German classics such as 1982's "Fitzcarraldo," the story of a man who attempts to build an opera house in the middle of the Peruvian jungle. In recent years, he has devoted himself to documentaries about equally obsessive characters, notably "Grizzly Man," the 2005 film about Timothy Treadwell, the ill-fated adventurer whose affinity for bears led him to a grisly end in the wilds of Alaska.

Herzog's new film is his first widely distributed feature since the early 1980s. "Rescue Dawn," set to open in Seattle this month, is another story about the dark recesses of human nature. Set during the Vietnam War, the real-life story stars Christian Bale as Dieter Dengler, a German-born U.S. fighter pilot who escapes from a POW camp after being tortured by the Pathet Lao deep in the Laotian jungle. Audacious and ingenious, Dengler is the most accessible hero Herzog has ever put on screen, brimming with take-charge swagger even as his fellow captives teeter on the brink of despair.

In anyone else's hands, the story might have drifted into triumph-of-the-human-spirit territory. But Herzog knew Dengler personally: He did a documentary about the same events in 1997 called "Little Dieter Needs to Fly." Well-acquainted with the horrors of war, having grown up starving and fatherless in postwar Germany, Herzog refuses to shy away from the brutality that Dengler (who died in 2001) and his fellow prisoners suffered at the hands of their guards.

Reputation for rigor

As with many of his films, Herzog shot much of the picture documentary-style, filming for weeks in the jungles of Thailand. He instructed his actors to lose weight — Bale lost 55 pounds to give himself an appropriately skeletal look — and dropped nearly 30 pounds himself as a form of "solidarity."

Even if the filmmaker's reputation for rigor hadn't preceded him, the actors knew they wouldn't be coddled. "My first question to Christian was, 'Would you be prepared to bite a snake in two?' " Herzog recalls. "He immediately said, 'Yes.' As it happens, he did catch a snake that tried to bite him. But it wasn't poisonous." The filmmaker sighs, as if brooding about a deadly snake was hardly worth the bother.

For Herzog, the borderline between fiction and reality is hazy at best. Facts, he says, are for accountants. He often tells stories that seem as hyperbolic as anything in his movies, beginning with the tale that his childhood was spent in a Bavarian village so remote that he didn't see a banana until he was 12.

Who would believe, for instance, that when Joaquin Phoenix flipped his car driving down a back road in Laurel Canyon it would be the eccentric filmmaker knocking on his car window. As Phoenix later recalled: "There was this German voice saying, 'Just relax.' ... And suddenly I said to myself, 'That's Werner Herzog!' "

When I asked about the incident, Herzog offered the sort of droll detail you'd expect from a master storyteller. "The danger wasn't the accident, per se," he says. "It was the gasoline dripping from the car and the fact that Joaquin, then upside down, was nervously fumbling for a cigarette, an act I had to talk him out of. Once I saw the gasoline, I thought the idea of him smoking would be a very bad idea."

For Herzog, in true art, the story is always changing. When filming "Rescue Dawn," it drove his crew crazy that he couldn't remember anything about the script, even though he'd written it himself. "I never read a screenplay once I've finished it — it stifles life on the set," he says. "It's unhealthy to be too absorbed in your own text. When I'm shooting, I want to discover the story all over again."

Thwarted for years from doing a major feature, Herzog wasn't all that choosy about who financed "Rescue Dawn." His backers included L.A. nightclub operator Steve Marlton and Los Angeles Clippers star Elton Brand. According to a New Yorker magazine piece, key members of the crew quit in disgust or were fired during production when paychecks didn't materialize. The crew also was frustrated by Herzog's unorthodox shooting style, which included an insistence on using himself as a stand-in for Bale and other actors.

A method to his madness

Herzog insists there was a method to his madness. "By being the last person out between the actors and the technical apparatus, I could tell when the actors were sometimes not ready for a scene. So I would stall, without the crew knowing, by pretending to change a camera filter. But I only could sense a problem because I was right there, next to the actors."

The movie's finances were so shaky during filming that Herzog never saw dailies. "No one had paid the lab, so they wouldn't release our footage," he says. But he insists the problems were from ignorance, not malevolence. "The producers' inexperience was a nightmare, but it was a blessing, too, because by them not knowing what was going on, I was allowed to do exactly the movie I wanted to do."

For all his roguish tales, Herzog is someone who believes that what counts is real experience, not theory or fantasy. He sees tourism as a sin, traveling on foot as a virtue. He would boot everyone out of film school until they'd done something real, like been a warden in a lunatic asylum or worked as a bouncer in a sex club.

"When someone comes to me who's earned a living as a boxer or been in jail in Africa, they would be a lot more qualified to be my assistant than someone who came from Harvard film school," he says. "What counts is the raw life."