Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog admits he has never had any grand plan for choosing his projects. "The films always stumble into me," says the German-born, L.A.-based filmmaker. "I have never planned a career like other filmmakers would do. It's always been like a home invasion -- how do you get the burglars out of your homes in the middle of the night?" Case in point: His stumbling into "Grizzly Man," his 2005 award-winning documentary that explored the life and death of Timothy Treadwell, who studied grizzly bears before he and his girlfriend were killed by a bear in 2003.

Unlike many a modern filmmaker, compelled to excavate the intimate and even mundane for life's meaning, German director Werner Herzog believes in extremes. During his impressively prolific career, he has consistently sought out the outcasts and the heroes, the misfits and prophets, the dreamers of fevered and spectacular dreams. The subjects of his 25 feature-length documentaries include a deaf and blind woman, a freestyle mountain climber, the lone survivor of an airplane crash and a man who lived with grizzlies.

Unlike many a modern filmmaker, compelled to excavate the intimate and even mundane for life's meaning, German director Werner Herzog believes in extremes. During his impressively prolific career, he has consistently sought out the outcasts and the heroes, the misfits and prophets, the dreamers of fevered and spectacular dreams. The subjects of his 25 feature-length documentaries include a deaf and blind woman, a freestyle mountain climber, the lone survivor of an airplane crash and a man who lived with grizzlies.

Werner Herzog's understated new documentary, "Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life," is at its core the filmmaker's personal argument against capital punishment. The director, who came of age in post-World War II Germany with its concentration camp legacy, makes it clear where he stands on the issue — the taking of another life, whether legally sanctioned or not, is wrong. Though that is the starting point, Herzog is neither an apologist for the criminal's deeds nor strident in his debate.

Werner Herzog and David Lynch make quite a pair. Herzog, the German-born director of such films as "Fitzcarraldo," "Grizzly Man" and "Rescue Dawn," is a relentless adventurer and the master of external conflict, of man's desire to fling himself recklessly toward the void. Lynch, maker of "Eraserhead," "Blue Velvet" and "Mulholland Dr.," explores an inner domain, a dreamscape where nightmare and reality intersect. So it is somewhat unlikely that Lynch would serve as executive producer on Herzog's latest film, "My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done," which opens Friday in Los Angeles at the Downtown Independent theater.

"Lessons of Darkness," a documentary by Werner Herzog about the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War in Kuwait, will be shown on cable TV's Discovery Channel at 10 tonight. The film focuses on efforts to extinguish the fires set in Kuwait's oil fields by Iraqi troops, leading to a deeper exploration by the filmmaker of the nature of evil.

GERMAN director Werner Herzog will be on hand for a four-day American Cinematheque retrospective of his films this weekend at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica. The showcase starts tonight with Herzog's visually arresting "Nosferatu: The Vampyre," his 1978 take on the F.W. Murnau vampire classic. It stars frequent Herzog collaborator and bete noire Klaus Kinski as the sensual bloodsucker.

"Invincible" is a great title for a Werner Herzog movie. Throughout his four-decade career, the New German Cinema pioneer has determinedly portrayed the outer limits of human experience. In his documentaries and fictional films, men and occasionally women are driven to pursue the most formidable goals and to try to overcome the most daunting challenges, whether deep in a jungle or deep in their own crazed minds--or both.

Turnarounds are a funny thing. German filmmaker Werner Herzog has seen his critical reputation totally resuscitated over the last few years, as he has gone from semi-forgotten sleeping lion to revered giant, looming tall. His recent films, including "Grizzly Man" and "Rescue Dawn," have certainly seemed more engaged, but he has also reemerged as a personality, with a wizened, wry persona. His latest film, the documentary "Encounters at the End of the World," finds Herzog trekking to Antarctica.

WERNER HERZOG has been here before, and not just because he first visited this story in his 1997 documentary "Little Dieter Needs to Fly." His first Hollywood feature, "Rescue Dawn" is a dramatic interpretation of the true-life ordeal of U.S. Navy pilot Dieter Dengler, who escaped from a Laotian prisoner-of-war camp and survived weeks in the jungle just before the start of the Vietnam War.

Imagine an enormous cave in the Ardeche region of southern France hermetically sealed for tens of thousands of years. Stumbled upon in "one of the greatest discoveries in human cultural history," it turned out to contain things so hypnotically, startlingly beautiful they make your head spin, things so unimaginably ancient and fragile that human entry is close to forbidden. Now, for the first time, we can see inside and luxuriate in the wonders of the "Cave of Forgotten Dreams. " Evocatively titled by writer-director and narrator Werner Herzog, a filmmaker who seems almost born for this project, "Cave" not only takes us inside the Chauvet cave, home to hundreds of wall paintings and named after the man who led the discovery team on Dec. 18, 1994, it takes us there in 3-D. As Herzog determined once he entered the cave for the first time, this film's gratifying use of the third dimension is no gimmicky ploy to hype the box office.

During two brief periods a year, a few select paleontologists, geologists and other specialists receive special permission from the French government to pass through a vault-like door on a cliff above the Ardeche River in southwestern France. Once inside the Chauvet cave, they become members of an exclusive group — those who have witnessed, in three dimensions, the oldest known art in the world. Discovered in 1994, the 32,000-year-old cave paintings show bears, bison, tigers and horses ranging with life-like movement over wavy limestone walls.

"Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" is not a remake of, or a sequel to, "Bad Lieutenant," as the people involved with both movies have taken pains to point out. When Abel Ferrara, who directed the first "Bad Lieutenant," heard that the iconic title of his 1992 film was being repurposed for a 2009 project directed by Werner Herzog, starring Nicolas Cage and produced by Ed Pressman (one of the producers of the first movie), the Bronx-born auteur did not mince words: "I hope they're all in the same streetcar and it blows up," he said.

With filmmaker Werner Herzog ("Fitzcarraldo," "Grizzly Man," "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans") at the helm and David Lynch as an executive producer, it's no surprise that "My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done" is such an eccentric, often dreamlike concoction. What is unexpected, however, is that the film manages to be flat and uninteresting, despite the juicy (or, at the very least, lurid) true story from 1979 that serves as this curio's inspiration. Michael Shannon, whose tedious performance here is a far cry from his Oscar-nominated turn in last year's " Revolutionary Road," stars as Brad, a disturbed, would-be actor who goes full-on batty after rehearsing the lead in a stage production of the Greek tragedy "Orestes," in which the title character kills his mother with a sword.

Werner Herzog and David Lynch make quite a pair. Herzog, the German-born director of such films as "Fitzcarraldo," "Grizzly Man" and "Rescue Dawn," is a relentless adventurer and the master of external conflict, of man's desire to fling himself recklessly toward the void. Lynch, maker of "Eraserhead," "Blue Velvet" and "Mulholland Dr.," explores an inner domain, a dreamscape where nightmare and reality intersect. So it is somewhat unlikely that Lynch would serve as executive producer on Herzog's latest film, "My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done," which opens Friday in Los Angeles at the Downtown Independent theater.

In "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans," Nicolas Cage portrays a cop of unwavering commitment: He never lets his duty to protect and serve stand in the way of a hard-core drug binge. As a homicide detective policing the Big Easy's toughest precincts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he snorts cocaine at crime scenes, blows marijuana smoke in the face of a suspected perp and whips out his "lucky crack pipe" to the amazement of a local drug kingpin. Amped up, antic and crackling with chemical intensity, the performance moved movie critic Roger Ebert to observe: "Cage is as good as anyone since Klaus Kinski at portraying a man whose head is exploding."

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. Tribe members were the last people in the Amazon to be, as the filmmaker puts it, "contacted" by white people. 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.

New movies from Werner Herzog, Claude Chabrol and Ken Loach will be screened at AFI Fest 2009, organizers said Wednesday. The film festival will run from Oct. 30 to Nov. 7 in Hollywood and Santa Monica. Among the first dozen films unveiled were Herzog's "The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans," with Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes and Val Kilmer; Chabrol's "Bellamy," a mystery with Gerard Depardieu; and Loach's "Looking for Eric," about a soccer fanatic. Also being shown are Lee Daniels' "Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire," starring newcomer Gabourey Sidibe as a pregnant teenager in 1980s Harlem, and Bong Joon-ho's "Mother," a thriller from South Korea.