Werner Herzog hastily cordoned off a swath of jungle with wooden sticks and yellow tape, like a cop marking a crime scene. “Nobody will cross this line!” he announced. It was late August, and the German director had travelled to northwest Thailand, a few miles from the border of Burma, to shoot “Rescue Dawn” amid virgin rain forest. It was his first Hollywood-funded feature, and he was determined to stop what he called “the Apparatus”—a squadron of makeup artists, special-effects engineers, and walkie-talkie-carrying professionals who had been deployed to work with him—from trampling on yet another pristine thicket. Herzog, who typically works with a small crew and a minuscule budget, was pleased to have millions of dollars at his disposal, but he was not so pleased to have been saddled with more than a hundred collaborators. “I do not need all these assistants,” he complained. “I have to work around them.” The enclave he had sequestered was filled with overgrown vines and rotting, semi-collapsed palm trees, and was partially hidden by a moss-slicked boulder. Herzog, having spent his childhood clambering across the Alpine slopes of southern Bavaria, says that he has an uncanny talent for “reading a landscape,” and he could immediately spot the danger: his primeval nook was an ideal place for a bathroom break.

A dozen Thai crew members began setting up equipment at the base of a sharply sloped mountain that appeared much taller than it was, owing to the ancient, absurdly distended trees that covered it. The mountain was garlanded with picturesque wisps of mist, but Herzog, who has filmed three documentaries and three features in deep jungle, did not want the terrain in his film to have the groomed, glistening-dewdrop look of so many movies set in frond-filled places. “The moment anything on this film becomes purely aesthetic, I will stop it,” he had promised.

Herzog, now sixty-three, no longer has the virile brown mustache of his youth, but his face has compensated by acquiring a patina of menace. Gravity has given his mouth a permanent frown. His blue eyes are partially obscured by thick, drooping brows, and they are perpetually rheumy, as if he were harboring a deadly tropical disease. “I am always being stopped at airports by drug-interdiction officials,” he said, with satisfaction. “There is something about my face that is sinister.” The aura is heightened by his sonorous voice, which, in his heavily accented English, suggests a Teutonic Vincent Price. Herzog likes to say that he is “clinically sane and completely professional,” but he is keenly aware that his reputation is otherwise—“One of the most persistent rumors plaguing me is that I’m a crazy director doing crazy things”—and he is fascinated by the myriad ways that people form this impression.

Herzog has spent his career rushing headlong into new projects—in 2005, he released three documentaries, including the heralded “Grizzly Man,” and each was filmed on a different continent—but in “Rescue Dawn” he is revisiting familiar ground. The movie, his fifty-second, will be his first twice-told tale: a feature-film version of “Little Dieter Needs to Fly,” his 1997 documentary about Dieter Dengler, a German-American pilot who was shot down during a bombing mission over Laos, in the early days of the Vietnam War. After being tortured for six months in a Pathet Lao prison camp—his head was repeatedly covered with an ants’ nest during interrogations—Dengler escaped, taking with him another P.O.W., Duane Martin. Dengler helped Martin, who was sick with dysentery, trek across the monsoon-swamped jungle. He built a makeshift raft for Martin, camouflaged him with branches, and guided him westward along muddy tributaries, toward the Mekong River. One afternoon, they encountered some Lao villagers and were attacked. Martin was beheaded. Dengler evaded capture and survived for weeks in the forest, on a diet of beetles and snakes, before being rescued by a U.S. Army helicopter. Herzog became close friends with Dengler, who died in 2001. He said of him, “All that I like about America was somehow embodied in Dieter: self-reliance and courage and loyalty and optimism, a strange kind of directness and joy in life.”

In the documentary, Dengler recounts his escape in a transfixing monologue, vividly conjuring the horror of being lost in the jungle: sudden mud slides sent him and Martin careering down jagged mountains, and he woke up each morning covered with leeches. For him, wild Nature was even more brutal and confining than the Pathet Lao prison. “Rescue Dawn” aimed to convert Dengler’s monologue into visceral cinema.

To convey the feeling that Dengler’s liberation from prison was no liberation at all, Herzog wanted the new film’s star, Christian Bale, to spend time forcing his way through forest so tangled that it appeared “almost unmanageable for human beings.” The camera, Herzog explained, would trail Bale closely, heightening the oppressive mood. “We are really with him the whole time, trapped in this forest prison,” he said. “There is no width of perspective.”

A fast-moving cloud unleashed a short burst of rain, and Thai production assistants collected beneath the gnarled boughs of an old pomelo tree. Herzog, who was still drying off from an earlier rain, allowed his T-shirt and khakis to be resoaked as he set up that afternoon’s scene, which depicted the frenzied moment of Martin’s decapitation. Speaking in German, the director discussed how to choreograph the sequence with his longtime cinematographer, Peter Zeitlinger, a burly Czech who appeared on location each day wearing a flowing white linen ensemble. As they talked, Herzog stood in front of Zeitlinger’s camera and mimed a series of rapid actions: kneeling, twisting around, raising an imaginary blade, then running to the area hidden by the boulder.

“Don’t you want a stand-in?” Julian White, the chief lighting designer, asked. Like most of the crew, White, a commonsensical Englishman, had not worked with the director before.

“No, no, no,” Herzog said. “I’m always the best stand-in.”

These days, film directors typically cocoon themselves, setting up shots by watching a monitor that displays a live feed from the cinematographer’s lens; this tells them exactly how a scene will appear onscreen. But Herzog refuses to separate himself from the action: he wants to feel what he’s filming. His participatory method struck many crew members as bizarre. “How can you see the way a shot looks if you’re the stand-in?” White later muttered to himself. “You can’t see yourself.”

Herzog was being barraged by such complaints. At every turn, crew members let him know that they considered his directing habits strange, impulsive, even amateurish. They couldn’t comprehend why Herzog insisted on grabbing the machete himself when the sound crew wanted to capture the sound of slashed reeds. They were baffled by his ignorance of his own screenplay; Herzog told me that he hadn’t reread it once since writing it, three years earlier, because he wanted to “respond to the situation in the jungle” and “keep things completely fresh.” They were annoyed by continuity errors that Herzog considered “of no great consequence.” (“Werner, isn’t Christian supposed to have a rucksack in this scene?”) They were irritated when Herzog declared that someone’s unfinished makeup looked “good enough,” and that he couldn’t wait for it to be perfect, because he liked the way the tropical light was filtering through the treetops. They objected to his reliance on hastily improvised handheld shots. (“How about using a dolly just this once?”) And they questioned his reluctance to film scenes with more than one camera. (“The audience will never see Christian’s reaction unless you add a closeup.”) Herzog’s stated belief that his approach would create “an event-based dynamic, a feeling of being an observer dragged into the scene,” struck many of his colleagues as a cover for a lack of technique. As they saw it, Herzog was ruining a potentially lush adventure movie by shooting it like a quickie documentary.

The fact that Herzog has been making films for more than forty years, many of them acclaimed as works of unnerving originality, didn’t shake the collective judgment that he was doing it all wrong. The mood on the set was toxic. Josef Lieck, the first assistant director, who has worked with Wim Wenders, said, “For a man of his age, it’s a very . . . raw talent. It’s more like an eighteen-year-old running into the forest.” A costume designer complained, “He doesn’t know basic things about filmmaking, things that simply make it easier to tell a story. He thinks that these things will undermine his vision, but they won’t.” Harry Knapp, an assistant director, said, “There is a silent war on the set. We’re all in a state of shock.” Herzog, for his part, politely ignored the crew’s complaints. Zeitlinger explained, “When making a film, Werner tries to pretend as if nobody is around but him and the actors.”

Bale and Steve Zahn, who plays Martin, arrived at the mountainside—doing so required crossing a rushing river on a bridge consisting of a few wobbly bamboo poles—along with several actors from the local hill tribes. Herzog gave them succinct instructions; whenever he speaks, his hands make fluid, precise gestures, like those of a maestro. First, he said, Zahn’s leg would be slashed by a Lao assailant. The beheading would occur offscreen. “I do not want to show any gory detail,” Herzog said. Zahn would then be replaced by a headless dummy, which would collapse at Bale’s feet.

Herzog had exercised a similar kind of restraint in “Grizzly Man,” which tells of an environmental activist, Timothy Treadwell, who became so enchanted by Alaskan bears that he attempted a trans-species version of going native—living in the animals’ habitat for months, and getting close to them, often with a video camera in hand. The sweetly deluded Treadwell could not see the dark truth of Nature, Herzog explains in a typically doomy voice-over (“I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony but hostility, chaos, and murder”), and Treadwell’s experiment ended in dismemberment. The killing was caught on tape—Treadwell’s lens cap was on, so the recording is audio only. Any other director would have shared at least a snippet. But in “Grizzly Man” the viewer sees only the back of Herzog’s head as he listens through headphones; facing Herzog, and the camera, is Treadwell’s former girlfriend, Jewel Palovak. As she silently gauges his horrified response, her face becomes a cracked mirror of the director’s, telling viewers all that they need to know.

Zeitlinger suggested a way to combine the dummy’s fall with an image of Bale rising up in the background, in order to give the scene a more “balletic” feel.

No, Herzog said. “If it’s too perfect, then I’ll hate it,” he explained. The sequence had to be blunt and brutal.

He turned to Bale, and said, “First you’re kneeling, then scream, then look behind you, see the Lao guys, and scream—this way, then this way. An intimidating scream, Christian.” Bale asked various questions as Herzog showed him how to position his body, but he was deferential. The actor, who had just starred in the summer blockbuster “Batman Begins,” had long wanted to work with Herzog, and he was willing to submit to onerous demands; in about four months, he had lost fifty-five pounds for the role, becoming cadaverous.