Werner Herzog explores the Antarctic

WERNER HERZOG says he should have known better. In 46 years of visionary filmmaking often devoted to life in extremis, the prolific director has never been one to toe the line. But on his latest work, the nonfiction feature "Encounters at the End of the World," he had a brief lapse: Against his better instincts, he followed instructions -- and found himself on the losing end of a tussle with an 800-pound snowmobile.

"Encounters," filmed over seven weeks in Antarctica, abounds with exhilarating and strange beauty, unforgettable characters both human and otherwise, and is often mordantly funny. Having now made features on all seven continents, Herzog discovered a landscape unlike anything he had previously explored. "The only thing that comes close would be the Sahara Desert, in just the expanse of it and the amount of solitude," he said recently.

Arriving at the Studio City offices of the film's production company, Creative Differences, Herzog was all warm hellos and high energy and dispensed not a syllable of unnecessary preliminaries. That focus and efficiency are hardly surprising; this is a man who has released six films in the last five years, one of which, the acclaimed documentary "Grizzly Man," he shot, edited and delivered in 29 days.

In the lead-up to this Friday's Los Angeles bow of "Encounters" for a weeklong run at the Nuart, Herzog was juggling preproduction logistics for his next project, the Nicolas Cage-starring remake of "Bad Lieutenant." That film, which has more than 45 speaking roles, is at the far end of the spectrum from Herzog's two-man-crew adventures in the vast emptiness of Antarctica.

But he's famous for moving between fiction and nonfiction -- sometimes within the same film -- and for dismissing the distinction between the two as arbitrary. Central to his 2005 sci-fi narrative "The Wild Blue Yonder" was documentary footage of Antarctic dives. That underwater imagery, by diver Henry Kaiser, led Herzog to the South Pole to make "Encounters."

"There is something almost sacred about being there," he said, "something that does not belong to our planet anymore. As if it were science fiction, as if we were confronted with the essence of creation."

But before Herzog, who handled the film's production sound, and his longtime cinematographer, Peter Zeitlinger, could venture into the frozen wilderness and out to the field camps where glaciologists, biologists, physicists and volcanologists pursue their singular passions, they had to endure a week of "briefings and bureaucracy and snowmobile training," not to mention the mandatory exercises of the Happy Camper survival school.