For what it's worth, I don't think there's even a chance that Herzog faked Treadwell's home movies (the contents of Treadwell's footage were well-known before Herzog's documentary), let alone set up his own Hollywood Hills shooting, even if he's somewhat attracted by the absurdity of people believing he might have. (The indoor space he has chosen for our meeting, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, is a kind of grand, wonderful art project masquerading as a conventional museum and thrives on a similar spirit; he calls it "my favorite place in America.") But these days, he also finds himself surrounded by other kinds of fictions. "I find it interesting that there are impostors out on the Internet," he says, "pretending to be Werner Herzog."

He partly means the kind of mundane wannabes who set up competing Werner Herzog Facebook pages, but more interesting are those impersonators exploiting a public fascination with Herzog's way of speaking English, in a Bavarian accent with its own very distinctive, mannered enunciation that has become familiar from his documentaries. "My voice," he notes, "has become kind of notorious." This recent epidemic of faux-Herzog narration appears to have begun with YouTube videos in which imitators read aloud children's books such as Curious George, Where's Waldo?, and Winnie the Pooh, wherein his clipped Teutonic tone—methodical, world-weary, and as stoic as he can manage to be in the face of mankind's annoying idiocy, but still somehow also grouchily acceptant that there may yet be wonder in the universe—seems both hilarious and poignant.

"It's mushrooming," he says of all this imitation. "What it's about I don't know, but I welcome it, because I see them as some kind of protectors around me. As though they were bodyguards."

Like Saddam Hussein's?

He nods. "The doppelgängers. The paid stooges, shielding me."

As for that one insignificant Hollywood- hillside projectile that nonetheless got through, Herzog concedes that he does still have a slight scar.

"It still hurts," he says, "when I laugh very hard. Slightly. I feel the spot here. Don't make me laugh too hard."

One's first instinct is that this probably won't be the greatest challenge to be faced when interviewing Werner Herzog.

Herzog's original renown came from the innovative, unconventional, and often mysterious feature films he released in the '70s and early '80s—movies like Aguirre, Wrath of God; Stroszek; Even Dwarfs Started Small; and, most famously, Fitzcarraldo. It's hard to remember now that there was a time, not just before Netflix but before VHS home video, when most movies were secrets. Movies with special images and weird dissonant ways of looking at the world could usually be seen only with great effort, typically when they came to the one cinema in town that catered to the arty college crowd; even the keenest movie fan might have to wait many years to see every film by a favorite director. Herzog's were the kind of films that thrived in such a world. They may at times have been narratively oblique and frustrating, but they would contain moments—sometimes of great beauty and vision, and sometimes of surreal jarring oddness—that many who saw them would hold within and cherish for years.

The myth of his movies was compounded by the myth of Herzog himself; over time he became almost as famous for the stories of what happened during the making of his movies as for the movies themselves, particularly the two he made in the Peruvian Amazon, Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo. Fitzcarraldo took several years to complete and was beset by obstacles, and its on-screen story—the tale of an ambitious delusional man with a crazy dream to carry a ship from one river to another over a jungle-covered mountain—seemed to also become the story of its making. (Characteristically, Herzog decided that the best way to film a ship being moved over a mountain deep in the rain forest was to actually move a ship over a mountain deep in the rain forest, and film it.) From such stories, and from the intense and obsessive man Herzog seemed to be in the interviews he would give back then, the perception grew that he might genuinely be crazy.