-Our next guest is an Academy Award-nominated director
of more than 70 feature and documentary films.
His novel "The Twilight World"
was published earlier this month and is on sale now.
Please welcome to the show Werner Herzog, everybody!
♪♪ [ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪
I'm absolutely delighted to have you here, Werner.
-Thank you. Thank you for having me.
-So, this is a novel based on a true story about
a Japanese soldier who was stationed in the Philippines
and stayed for 30 years after the war ended
because he believed that that was his duty.
-Not only his duty, he had proof
or he concocted partially proof that the war was still on.
He firmly believed in it.
And he derived it from, for example, leaflets were
thrown down and there were some characters were misspelled.
So he believed it must have been the enemy, the CIA,
who couldn't properly write Japanese characters.
Then he saw massive amounts of
aircraft flying overhead to the west.
But that was already the Korean War.
So the war hadn't ended.
And he actually was shot at.
He survived 111 ambushes and skirmishes,
while his last two comrades were shot dead.
So there was proof enough for him the war is still on.
-Now, explain how you first met --
I want to get the pronunciation right.
Hiroo? How do you say the soldier's name?
-Hiroo Onoda. -Hiroo Onoda.
So, you actually met him in 1997?
-Yes. -How did this meeting come about?
-It's an embarrassment, but I'll confess.
[ Laughter ]
What happened is I staged an opera.
Sometimes I do odd jobs, like acting or I do operas.
[ Laughter ] So, the composer --
It was a world premiere of a modern composition.
The composer, very famous in Japan, he had his own TV show.
He came and people knew what we were doing.
He comes one night, completely excited at a table where
we all had dinner, and he said, "Herzog-san, you know what?
The office of the emperor stretched out feelers,"
when I was ready to meet the emperor in a private audience.
And I immediately said, "Oh, my God,
it will be only formalities and pleasantries.
That's not my kind of thing."
And this was a faux pas so bad.
I mean, in Japan, it's so unbelievably bad.
Until today, I wish the floor would open
right here and swallow me up. [ Laughter ]
It's such an embarrassment.
And there was silence. Silent, silent silence.
Nobody made eye contact with me anymore, it was so bad.
And somebody asked, "Whom else, if not the emperor,
would you like to meet?"
And I said, "Onoda."
And they said, "Onoda, Onoda?"
"Yes, Hiroo Onoda."
And very few days later, I met him, and I met him a few times.
We had very, very deep conversations
because he lived in the jungle.
I have worked in the jungle, in a different one, in Amazonia.
-Yes. -So we had very, very deep and instant rapport.
-I find you to be both very honest and yet also cryptic.
Is that fair?
And you, the opening -- there was sort of in
the opening page, this I found to be very Herzogian.
You wrote in the beginning,
"Most details are factually correct, some are not.
What was important to the author
was something other than accuracy,
some essence he thought he glimpsed when he encountered
the protagonist of this story."
-Sure, I have to make a statement because I was not
there when he was in the jungle.
And for example, I am quoting dialogues
he had with his few comrades.
He had three, and one deserted very soon.
Two left, and they were shot dead.
So I'm describing dialogues, but I haven't been there.
I only know the gist of it.
And I had to invent to a certain degree.
So, of course, I have not been an eyewitness.
Otherwise, I wouldn't do a caveat like that.
But today, you see, we have too many fake news,
and you have to tell what is happening
and what is my own invention.
And sometimes I would invent a few things in order
to make some essence of the man visible.
His dignity, his stoicism,
his perseverance,
his dreams, his nightmares.
So all this has to be sometimes invented.
-You have another book coming out very soon.
You have two more films coming out.
You've always been very prolific.
Are you someone, while you're working, that you feel the work
propels you to your next project?
-It's hard to describe.
Sometimes I -- Or most of the time,
they come with great vehemence at me.
And so I have to man up, and I say,
"Yes, I'm going to face this now."
But what happened is, four things came at once.
So two books, two films.
And all of this will be released
within the next six, eight weeks.
A new film in the United Kingdom
in four days from now or five days from now.
I can't even be there at the world premiere.
I just flew in from Europe, so I'm not going to crisscross,
so I miss my own world premiere.
-Do you get nervous about when a new movie of yours comes out?
-No, no, no, I have -- [ Laughter ]
-You don't strike me as someone who often gets nervous.
-No, I've seen it all, and I've done wild stuff,
so you can't -- you can't knock me out of my shoes.
[ Laughter ] -I want to ask a question.
My mother is a French teacher. I know you're multilingual.
I once heard you say that you speak French.
You don't like speaking French.
You only spoke it once.
-Yes. [ Laughter ]
No, actually twice.
Once on a volcano that was about to explode in the Caribbean.
And I filmed with the last man who actually lived on the slope
of the volcano, a poor farmer in Guadeloupe,
and it's French-speaking.
They speak Creole French.
I even had to wake him up on camera,
and the mountain right on top of us was --
gave signals it was going to explode.
So I had to speak French.
-So basically only because a volcano was erupting?
[ Laughter ]
-No, because he was the only man who didn't want to be evacuated,
so I had to speak French.
The other time, in the Central African Republic,
I was passing through, arrested a couple of times
by drunk soldiers in the middle of the night.
And one gun here, one gun at my heart, one gun somewhere there.
-Yeah. [ Laughter ]
-And I tried to explain that we were not soldiers,
we were not mercenaries.
We were doing a film. And they said to me --
And I tried French and German and Spanish and whatever.
And they said... [ Speaking French ]
"We speak French here."
So I had to do some French. [ Laughter ]
-Yeah. And do you regret it a little bit, even though --
-No, no, no, it's okay now. [ Laughter ]
I have no problem with the French and French language.
It's wonderful. But when you talk with French people,
they love to go into irony, into the mood of irony.
And I have a speech defect.
I have a communication defect.
I do not understand irony. [ Laughter ]
You can do the wildest stuff with me.
I always understand it verbatim.
Humor, yes. Humor, I completely understand.
There's a lot of humor in all of my films,
even when I'm playing a villain,
a real badass bad guy, like in "Jack Reacher."
It has a sort of humor in it.
-It's wonderful when we see you playing those roles
that are so unexpected, like "Jack Reacher."
It must be fun to do. -Yes.
I was really invited with great enthusiasm
by Christopher McQuarrie, the director, and Tom Cruise.
They really wanted to have me there because they've seen me
in other films by Harmony Korine,
where I play a dysfunctional father who is completely hostile
with his children and terrorizes the family.
They had seen that, and they knew I probably would
be good to scare the audience.
[ Laughter ]
And now it sounds funny.
Yes, I was scary. I was really scary.
But it's a performance.
As a private person, I'm kind of friendly.
My wife will testify that I'm sweet and fluffy.
[ Laughter ]
-We might have to check with her.
-I'm a fluffy husband.
[ Laughter ]
-I have one last question, because you're multilingual.
I've had some people -- some German viewers of the show
take issue with the fact -- I think it's very American
that you assume the English expression is the only one.
So, here, we say roosters say "cock-a-doodle-doo."
-Yeah. -Germany, what would they say?
-Kikeriki.
-Which do you think is closer?
-Well, the English is far remote because they had the Brexit.
-Yeah. -So the British rooster is
somewhere out in the Atlantic. [ Laughter ]
-Yeah, that's a good way of looking at it.
Let them have "cock-a-doodle-doo."
Thank you so much for being here.
It's a wonderful book. -Thank you.
-Congratulations on everything.
Werner Herzog, everybody!
"The Twilight World" is available wherever
you buy books, so please support
local and independent bookstores.