67 Minutes With... Werner Herzog

The filmmaker famous for bending the truth tries his hand at memoir.

- By Zak Cheney-Rice

"WE FIND EACH other in the middle of nowhere, a very, very dubious location that stretches for a kilometer," Werner Herzog tells me shortly after we meet near a parking lot on an overcast morning in Altadena, California. The filmmaker is a droll and enigmatic conversationalist, so when he says we're like "explorers of the 19th century," it's not totally clear he's joking. We are, in fact, far removed from the era of Arctic expeditions-outside the fence that borders NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which controls America's planetary rovers and space probes.

Early in his forthcoming memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, Herzog describes breaking into this facility to get footage for a nascent film project. I thought we could discuss his gonzo mission near the perimeter he once scaled, but he has other ideas. "There's an area at the top of the hill with picnic benches," he suggests. Once we're settled, he tells me, "I clomb the fence," explaining that he prefers old terms like clomb (instead of climbed) from "the time of Wordsworth and Coleridge." This is the only point in our interview when he musters more than a chuckle.

Twenty years ago, scientists were crashing the Galileo probe into Jupiter because it was out of fuel, and Herzog wanted to film them celebrating and mourning the 14-year mission. "Normally, I don't get caught," he says. "I bamboozle them out of their wits." Herzog's exploits usually end with either good footage or a good story; this one had both. "Let that madman in with his camera," he recalls officials in Washington saying.