Raup, Jordan. "Gael García Bernal Join Werner Herzog's 'Salt and Fire' ". The Film Stage . Retrieved 13 August 2013. E mentre l'imperatore giapponese fece sapere a Herzog che sarebbe stato ben lieto di incontrarlo, lui, con un ardire sorprendente, dichiarò di non voler incontrare l'imperatore. A nulla valse la stretta della moglie per tappargli la bocca. Ormai la gaffe era fatta: “Poi, da quel silenzio, si alzò una voce e chiese chi, se non l’imperatore, avrei desiderato incontrare in Giappone. Senza riflettere, risposi: Onoda. Leopold, Todd (16 August 2013). "Film legend Herzog takes on texting and driving". CNN . Retrieved 13 August 2015. Hiroo Onoda leaving the jungle in 1974, when he was finally persuaded that peace had broken out. Photograph: Jiji Press/AFP/Getty Images If by setting one's heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way. His whole life will be without blame, and he will succeed in his calling."

Fascinating book about the real-life Niro Onoda, the last Japanese soldier to surrender in the Philippines a full 29 years after the end of World War II ended.* Werner Herzog: "You can learn the essentials of filmmaking in two weeks" ". Film Industry Network. 30 May 2016. In 1997, Werner Herzog was in Tokyo to direct an opera. His hosts asked him, Whom would you like to meet? He replied instantly: Hiroo Onoda. Onoda was a former solider famous for having quixotically defended an island in the Philippines for decades after World War II, unaware the fighting was over. Herzog and Onoda developed an instant rapport and would meet many times, talking for hours and together unraveling the story of Onoda's long war. In its brevity, The Twilight World is sometimes as superficial as a Wikipedia entry – whole decades are skimmed over in a line or two – and at times frustratingly withholding. Herzog informs us that “the matter of those he had killed among the population never quite went away”, but no deeper investigation or reimagining follows. A bit of Googling reveals that Onoda and his comrades may have murdered as many as 30 people during his three decades as a rogue commando – which would make him one of the 20th century’s weirdest serial killers. The Twilight World provokes – and thwarts – an appetite to know more. Nearing his 80th birthday, Herzog gives off the megalomaniacal vibe of one who won’t let old age slow him down, perhaps won’t even notice that it’s happening. I hope he follows up this book with a probing, feverish and apocalyptic documentary: Hiroo Onoda – Human War.

The result is an easy to read and short novel that fits Onoda's strange and twisting odyssey perfectly, the language effortlessly switching between the narrative in the jungle to a more abstract appreciation of a fascinating life. Werner Herzog. A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin. London: Faber & Faber, 2014. ISBN 978-0-571-25977-9. The great filmmaker Werner Herzog, in his first novel, tells the incredible story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who defended a small island in the Philippines for twenty-nine years after the end of World War II. German filmmaker Werner Herzog's earliest memory is of war. He was 2 and a half in April 1945, and his mother woke him up in the middle of the night, wrapped him in blankets and rushed outside to watch the Allied airstrikes against the German city of Rosenheim, which was 40 miles away. Das Buch beginnt mit einem kleinen Vorspiel, das den Weg für alles Folgende bereitet. Es erzählt die Geschichte von Chushingura, Herzog nach “die japanischte aller japanischen Geschichten,” in denen 47 Krieger ihren beleidigten Herr rächen, obwohl sie wissen, dass Scheitern Tod bedeuten würde, und Erfolg dasselbe. Die Geschichte evoziert das japanische Motiv der totalen Hingabe an eine Lebensweise, das durch Selbstverleugnung veranschaulicht wird. Man kann z.B. dieses Motiv in der Zen-Maxime spüren, dass man so meditieren soll, wie um den Kopf vor Feuer zu retten. In Hagakure, Yamamoto Tsunetomes klassischen Samurai-Handbuch, liest man:

I really enjoyed Herzog's interviews inside and about jungles because the idea of jungles being lawless, horrifying Molochs of debauchery and murder is wild. To me at least. Not because jungles aren't about animals breeding and eating each other but more because I feel that the breeding and murder in the jungle has a sort of natural harmony to it, while we "civilized" people have brought breeding and murder (for food) to a whole new perverted level. Compared to big animal farms, I really don't see the jungle as a place of horror at all.# I read this side by side with Elie Wiesel's memoir of the holocaust, Night, which again highlights what is necessary in a text for it to really connect author and reader. Or content and reader, rather.Werner Herzog moved to Los Angeles with his wife in the late nineties. "Wherever you look is an immense depth, a tumult that resonates with me. New York is more concerned with finance than anything else. It doesn't create culture, only consumes it; most of what you find in New York comes from elsewhere. Things actually get done in Los Angeles. Look beyond the glitz and glamour of Hollywood and a wild excitement of intense dreams opens up; it has more horizons than any other place. There is a great deal of industry in the city and a real working class; I also appreciate the vibrant presence of the Mexicans." [24] Later career: 2006 onwards [ edit ] This book is a poem, an opera without music, a film without images. It presents a true fact of the human heart and invites us to consider it without commentary or judgment. Just to see it as it is. It's inexplicable in all the ways that people are inexplicable. The long-awaited memoir by the legendary filmmaker and celebrated author. Told in Werner Herzog's inimitable voice, this is the story of his epic artistic career, as inventive and daring as anything he has done before. A] potent, vaporous fever dream; a meditation on truth, lie, illusion and time that floats like an aromatic haze through Herzog’s vivid reconstruction of Onoda’s war . . . Hofmann’s resonant translation conveys the portentous shimmer of Herzog’s voice.”— New York Times Book Review Herzog, Werner; Cronin, Paul (2002). Herzog on Herzog. New York: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-20708-4.

Werner Herzog praises new 'Star Wars' series 'Mandalorian' – YouTube". www.youtube.com. Archived from the original on 11 December 2021 . Retrieved 17 July 2020. Every Man for Himself and God Against All is a literary event unto itself, and the fact that it mirrors Werner Herzog’s life through his own eyes makes it all the more powerful. In particular the end of the book, which is a true a sensation. . .a must-read!”— Freunde der Künste Wer jeden Morgen und jeden Abend sein Herz prüft und dadurch fähig wird, so zu Leben, als wäre sein Körper schon tot, den macht dieser Weg frei. Er wird sich nie etwas zuschulden kommen lassen und wird auch in seinem Gewerbe erfolgreich sein." (Übersetzung hier.)

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Herzog’s book covers the expected elements: accounts of the making of his films; descriptions of his relationships with actors such as Klaus Kinski and friendships with luminaries such as Bruce Chatwin and the mountaineer Reinhold Messner; glimpses into his personal life, including an exploration of his parents’ Nazi ties and his relationships with his several wives. Fans of his work (and perhaps fans of his persona) will find much to love here, all of it jumbled up into a kind of memoir-diary-polemic hybrid. At times so jumbled I found myself wondering: is this actually a book? But that hardly seems to matter, given the power and specificity of Herzog’s writing. In fact, what we have here is something weirder and truer than a mere autobiography. The subject of every memoir is “how I got this way” – and in the case of Werner Herzog, it’s a very specific way indeed. An important artist like Herzog doesn’t necessarily need to do the memoirist’s work of answering that question. It’s enough to get the dates down and the anecdotes told; we’re already interested. But his book does do the serious labour of letting us into his deepest compulsions and yearnings. He is able to pull the reader up short; to demand that we wonder at the tangible world, in all its mystery Werner Herzog Tells a Book Club Why The Peregrine Is One of His Favorite Books, a 20th-Century Masterpiece

Ebert, Roger (30 April 1999). "Herzog's Minnesota declaration: defining 'ecstatic truth' ". RogerEbert.com . Retrieved 8 August 2017.

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Werner Herzog Reads His Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema". Walker Art Center. 30 April 1999 . Retrieved 8 August 2017. A love-hate relationship: Herzog and Klaus Kinski during the filming of Cobra Verde in one of many memorable moments captured in a 2001 Storyville documentary Cronin, Paul (5 August 2014). Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin. Faber & Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-25978-6 . Retrieved 30 November 2020. Whether you're creating films or books or operas, you so often zero in on characters like Onoda, who are kind of single-minded in their pursuit of a belief. They are quixotic. They're in extreme situations. And so when you said, I want to meet Onoda, did any part of your brain think, because he is a Herzogian (ph) character; he's the kind of person who I've spent my life thinking and writing and creating about? Nem tudom, Herzogot mi ragadta meg Hiroo Onoda történetében. De azt pontosan tudom, engem mi. Az, hogy az ember nemes tulajdonságai - a hűség, a kitartás, a szakértelem - milyen könnyen fordulnak visszájukra, ha a hülyeség szolgálatába állítják őket. Itt van ez a szerencsétlen japán katona, akit felettesei azzal hagynak ott Lubang szigetén, hogy rejtőzzön el, zaklassa az amerikaiakat, amíg a per pillanat rendezetten visszavonuló, de amúgy dicsőséges és győzhetetlen japán haderő vissza nem tér. Csak ugye a dicsőséges és győzhetetlen japán hadseregről kiderült, hogy a "győzhetetlen" jelző nem egészen pontosan írja körül őket, így hát Onoda ott ragad a dzsungelben röpke harminc évre.