‘Werner Herzog lives every day like he wants his life to be an adventure’

“That sounds like it probably is true,” Robert Pattinson says a little way into Radical Dreamer, a new documentary about Werner Herzog. “Is it true?”

Pattinson is one of a line-up of stars – alongside Nicole Kidman, Christian Bale, Henry Rollins and Patti Smith – who assemble for Radical Dreamer, Thomas von Steinaecker’s smart portrait of the German actor, director and mythmaker. They have much to ponder. Did the legendary film-maker eat his shoe as part of a bet? Can he hypnotise chickens and actors? (Kidman says yes.)

Von Steinaecker notes that Herzog is capable of embellishment: a story about a snake attack in the jungle can, upon investigation, turn out to be a story about a vicious rat. But the strangest thing about the tales attached to the German film-maker – threatening to kill the actor Klaus Kinski only to be thwarted by a dog; arranging for a 340-tonne streamship to be transported over a mountain – is that so many turn out to be true.

Echoing the impossible (and occasionally deranged) dreamers of his films Fitzcarraldo and Cobra Verde, Herzog once walked from Munich to Paris to see the curator and critic Lotte Eisner on her deathbed; she lived for eight more years.

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“It sounds like a fairy tale,” says von Steinaecker, who grew up near Sachrang, the Bavarian village where Herzog spent his childhood. “But it’s also very moving. I think he is always in search of not father figures but mother figures. He has all these strong women, including his own mother, in his life. Lotte Eisner played a very prominent role in his life, and he didn’t want her to die. There was nothing pretentious about it. He really believed that he could save her life by walking from Munich to Paris.”

Von Steinaecker was 12 when he stumbled across Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Werzog’s epic and suitably deranged tale of 16th-century conquistadors searching for El Dorado. “I was shocked,” he says. “I didn’t know what to do with the film and with Klaus Kinski’s performance. Even the way it was shot. I thought something between ‘This can’t be serious’ and ‘This is brilliant. I want to know the story behind it.’ And since then I’ve been hooked by Werner’s work.”

Herzog was born Werner Stipetic in Munich in 1942. He was two weeks old when his mother and brothers relocated to Sachrang, in the Chiemgau Alps, after their home was destroyed by an Allied bombing raid. He grew up without running water in a remote village where the mostly fatherless children embraced a sense of anarchy. Radical Dreamer follows Herzog as he returns to the mountains of his childhood. “That’s me,” he says, smiling, as he gestures towards a waterfall. “That’s my landscape.”

Unlike his fellow directors in new German cinema, von Steinaecker says, Herzog has a deep understanding of nature. “He lived a basic life, without luxury or even education. He was living in the mountains with nothing but his mother figure and his brothers. That was something that touched me when we talked to the brothers for the film. You could sense in the interviews that they appreciate each other although they are totally different from each other. I think when you grow up like that, with nothing, you start to see things without a filter.”

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Legend (and history) has it that Herzog stole a camera when he was 19; at 26 he made the first of some 20 features and 34 documentaries, spanning all seven continents, and supplemented by dozens of operas, short films and TV series and by a second prolific career as an actor.

“It was a mission impossible in a way,” von Steinaecker says of his unwieldy subject. “I did a lot of documentaries on musicians, which is easy. But with film-makers I think the trick is trying not to be bigger than the films. It’s an exercise in being humble. I just want to tell his story. That was what counted.”

Herzog has previously been profiled in Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, and his documentary My Best Fiend gave his own account of his combustible relationship with Kinski. Von Steinaecker structures his wider-ranging film around remarkable, previously unseen footage from Bavaria, from Lanzarote, where the 81-year-old presides over a film-making workshop, and from Los Angeles, where he lives – and where he has found a most unusual haunt.

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“Christian Bale said something very revealing about Werner,” von Steinaecker says. “When you lead an adventurous life, adventurous things happen to you. Werner lives every day like he wants his life to be an adventure. The one place he picked in Los Angeles, this great city, to take us is the obscure Museum of Jurassic Technology. Nobody would ever pick that as his favourite place in Los Angeles. If you just accidentally walked into that museum you would wonder, What is this place? But Werner sees it as like the greatest masterpiece of Michelangelo. His enthusiasm for life can turn coal into a diamond.”

Of all Herzog’s improbable adventures, his recent elevation to American pop-cultural icon may be the strangest development yet. Following appearances in The Simpsons, Parks and Recreation, and Rick and Morty, he has become globally recognisable as a droll, self-deprecating nihilist prankster.

“As Wim Wenders says in the film, Werner is a prototypical German,” von Steinaecker says. “In that way he’s like Arnold Schwarzenegger: Herzog fulfils a kind of cliche for the Americans, with his heavy Bavarian accent. He’s a very philosophical person, and you always assume that what he says is something deep. I think that’s where the Americans get him wrong. They don’t always get his humour. They think he’s a very nihilistic person. At some point he was the right person at the right place at the right time. His film Grizzly Man was appreciated by the Americans but not in Germany. Werner has this American aspect within him. He’s a cowboy coming down from the mountains and always ready for the next frontier.”

Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer opens in cinemas on Friday, January 19th; the IFI and Light House Cinema, in Dublin; Triskel, in Cork; Queen’s Film Theatre, in Belfast; and Pálás, in Galway, will also be screening Herzog’s film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser as part of a retrospective