Attempts on his life, a shoe-eating episode, border war and now a 3D documentary about cave paintings. Weirdness just seems to dance around Werner Herzog, as TARA BRADYdiscovers when she interviews him across the road from a dead body

WE CAN still see the body. For some hours the unfortunate victim of a traffic accident has remained under a blue tarpaulin across from Brixton’s Ritzy cinema, the venue for tonight’s premiere of Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

A crowd lingers over the way. Downstairs a team of publicists and boffins prepare for a live post-screening broadcast to various venues around the UK and Ireland. Cave, the “first 3D arthouse film”, is not just a movie; it’s an event. Regardless of the fatality across the street, there are many cables to be plugged in.

Werner Herzog stands on his tippy-toes and gazes across the street. Cinema’s most enduring enfant terrible will be 69 this year, but the sudden rising movement is that of a mischievous eight-year-old. He calmly surveys the chaos. He might be directing it for all we know.

“No, no, no,” he tells me later. “I control nothing. I own nothing. I’m just a man from the mountains. Everything else they say about me I dismiss.” They say plenty. Herzog the man is almost as famous as Herzog the director. His colourful career is the stuff of folk songs and movie legends. Yes, he did cook and eat his shoe to fulfil a wager with the documentarian Errol Morris. Yes, his early collaborator and leading man Klaus Kinski did try to kill him. Yes he did walk from Berlin to Paris to see film critic and archivist Lotte Eisner on her deathbed.

“I went for Lotte,” he recalls. “I felt passionate about Lotte Eisner, who was dying.” He has, nonetheless, suffered for his art. His productions frequently mirror the impossible follies he likes to depict. More than one player has reportedly “gone native” on a Herzog shoot.

“During the making of a film everything can collapse,” he shrugs. “All of a sudden an actress doesn’t show up because she’s ill. All of a sudden an actor throws a tantrum every 20 minutes because they are Klaus Kinski. You run into a civil war or a border war. My camp was attacked and burned down on the border between Ecuador and Peru. Film- making is vulnerable from all sides. You do the best shot of your film and the lab process it with the wrong chemicals and it’s gone. You get the light right and the battery runs out. And on and on.”

Strange things happen around encounters with Werner Herzog. In 2006, during an interview with the BBC’s Mark Kermode, an unknown assailant with an air rifle took a shot at him. Herzog looked down at the wound, noted that “it not a significant bullet” and carried on giving answers.

Back at the Ritzy we can still see the body.

I’ve already overheard his producer describe the situation as a very Herzogian one. But when I mention as much to the director he isn’t having any of it.

“No, no, no,” he says. “I am not simply about death. There is a lot of humour in my films, including this one. It goes completely wild into a science-fiction fantasy with albino crocodiles and mutants.”

Like his back catalogue, the man François Truffaut once described as “the most important film director alive” is drily contrarian. Even when he’s agreeing with you he’s inclined to preface his responses with “no” or a small shake of the head.

“I love cinema but I do not watch cinema,” he says. “I make cinema. That’s okay. What’s wrong about that? I have staged operas, but I never go to them either. I listen to the CDs and work on the productions, but I never, ever go to the opera house as a spectator. I went a few times long ago and found it very disappointing. I do not need to see other operas staged in order to stage my own. There are some film-makers who see two or three films a day. Quentin Tarantino grew up in a vidéothèque watching two or three trash movies a day and he loved it. I’m different. It’s fine what he’s doing. He proves cinema is very much alive with great vigour. But I am different.”

He is similarly dialectic on the question of 3D: “I saw one or two 3D films in the ’50s. In a way I’m a sceptic about 3D for a variety of reasons. Let’s not get in to them. It is too involving. But I was adamant that 3D was necessary for Cave of Forgotten Dreamsfor the drama and the space.”

An increasingly prolific talent, Herzog’s late career has regained the flair of his early 1970s triumphs, when he fashioned such modern classics as Aguirre, Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldoand The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. In 2009, he became the first director to have two films screened at the Venice Film Festival when My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?and Bad Lieutenantplayed as part of that year’s programme. His capacity for producing thrilling, idiosyncratic features is matched by his remarkable output as a documentary film-maker. Last year , Encounters at the End of the World, his ninth theatrical non-fiction film, was nominated for an Academy Award.

Like that film, Cave of Forgotten Dreamsis a sensation. With Herzog acting as gallery guide, we’re taken around the prehistoric paintings of France’s Chauvet cave. The remarkable and largely toxic site has never been open to the public.

“Audiences who have seen the film never talk about the movie,” smiles Herzog. “They talk about the experience of being in the cave. I think that’s a wonderful observation. This is a place where we have no clear concept of time. It’s unfathomable. Almost all the animals depicted in the pictures on the walls – woolly mammoth, woolly rhino, cave lion – are extinct now. The stalactites and stalagmites you see were formed after Cro-Magnon man, who made the paintings, had left. We know for example some paintings were started by one person and continued 5,000 years later by another person.”

A trippy picture rooted in peer-reviewed science, Cave refuses to give up its own mysteries. “We have no idea what the perception was of these painters, what their rituals were, what their thinking was. We simply do not know. You have to accept it from the first moment that it is a mystery. We can guess at things by looking at societies like the Aboriginals in Australia, who maintained a Stone Age way of life until relatively recently. But even that is only a vague form of speculation. I find it very interesting that there is a new school of archaeologists who are very focused on what they can determine for certain. They know that a torch was swiped against the wall in a certain spot 40,000 years ago. They do not claim to know that it was part of a shamanistic ritual. It’s a very healthy attitude.”

Herzog has proved remarkably fond of dark caves. His films are invariably defined by obsessional behaviours and crazed protagonists, each determined to stencil order on a random, chaotic universe. Their ambitions rarely end well.

“My films have been about the same things, the same chaos, for 40 years. They are looking into the abyss of time. Or any abyss. Whatever way you look there is always an abyss. The cave is an abyss. My next film is on death row. That will also be an abyss picture.”

The song remains the same, yet there is increasing evidence that Herzog is finally mellowing. His most recent feature films are in English and in multiplexes. Bad Lieutenant, starring Nicolas Cage, reached mainstream audiences. But has Muhammad moved or is it the mountain?

“I am still a Bavarian director making Bavarian films – but in English. I work with these actors because they want to work with me. I think Nicolas Cage has never been better before or after the film he made with me. He is even better than in the film than he was in Leaving Las Vegas,the film he won the Oscar for. I make the best out of actors. Kinski made 210 films. Who knows the 205 films he made without me?”

Herzog says he never felt like he belonged to the New German Cinema that spawned him and Kinski, that his emergence alongside such film-makers as Wim Wenders and Rainer Fassbender is entirely coincidental.

“I belonged to it in that I was part of the first generation that grew up in Germany after war and started to articulate itself. I was not part of it. I have always been alone. Had I made films in the 1920s I would probably have been alone.

“When we worked in New Orleans, Nicolas Cage had a magnificent house there and asked me if I’d like to stay. I declined. It is not good that we meet each other, smelly from the short night, or that we eat fried eggs together. I want to keep a certain distance.”

To make any art or just cinema? “No, I am not an artist. I make films. And for that you need to know the heart of men. And that comes from travelling on foot or having been in jail or finding yourself thirsty in the Sahara or knowing what it means to be shot dead. There are certain fundamental experiences, certain dangers that allow you to know the heart of men. I do not want to be an artist.”

He smiles wryly. “I want to be an athlete.”