Director-documentarian-deity Werner Herzog has stared death in the face, blazed a path through madness, and charted the outermost limits of human experience. For a man of such stature, sitting down with one of the most significant public figures of the twentieth century was no biggie.

“We had an instant rapport,” Herzog says of his recent rendezvous with Mikhail Gorbachev, in an interview with the Guardian during the Tribeca film festival. His new non-fiction feature Meeting Gorbachev chronicles three tête-à-têtes across the span of six months between the film-maker and the final general secretary of the Communist party of the Soviet Union, in which two personalities known for exuding an intense presence immediately took a shine to one another.

“We have similar backgrounds,” Herzog explains, “growing up after the war and knowing what it means to be hungry, having traveled very extensively, living in a very remote area without even running water, a devastated landscape. We knew of one another. Apparently, Gorbachev had seen some of my films and done a lot of homework on me. He had a huge stack of remarks about my work … We brought him chocolates without sugar from a London chocolatier.”

During the most prolific period of a long, varied, full career – he currently has three new features playing festivals all over the globe, and what he calls an “avalanche” of obligations to go with them – Herzog got the chance to realize a dream. Quixotic types undertaking herculean efforts have long captivated the director, from the arduous ship transport of Fitzcarraldo to the defiance of nature’s law in Grizzly Man. He’d always respected Mikhail Gorbachev from afar, and when the chance for a private meeting presented itself, he couldn’t resist the opportunity to get to know a key player of modernity a little better. Far from the glowering Russky of 80s pop culture in the west, Gorbachev struck his guests as “a charming, disarming presence,” according to André Singer, Herzog’s longtime collaborator and co-director on this project.

Biographical documentaries, especially those with a focus on magnets for political controversy, tend to keep their subject at an arm’s length in the interest of maintaining some clinical detachment. Not an issue for Herzog, who blows right past the pretense of nonpartisanship into an intimate hagiography. He and the Russian reformer openly regard one another with warmth and admiration; the true topic of the film isn’t Gorbachev in some vacuum of posterity, but Herzog’s individual understanding of him. Journalistic ethics don’t apply when you’re pursuing ecstatic truth, and by the director’s own declaration, he’s in a class by himself.

“I have never interviewed anyone,” he says. “I have had conversations, but an interview would mean a journalistic attitude with a catalogue of questions. That’s the first thing I told [Gorbachev]: ‘I’m not a journalist, I have no paper in my hands. You’re talking to a poet.’”

He’s playing at a game of his own creation, in which he can exempt himself from the requirements placed on career reporters while doing the things reporters do, namely the organizing of real-life fact into a cogent narrative. Through voice-over narration, he directly portrays the purger of Stalinism as a hero still under fire in his own country for his progressivist leanings. Herzog inverts the revolutionary’s maxim that “the personal is political”, contending that the political can be made personal just as easily.

“The film shows a historical context,” Herzog concedes, “but it also shows the soul of a man, and for a fleeting moment, it seems you look into the soul of his country itself – the soul of Russia.”

While Herzog’s on-camera chats may have been cordial, he’s a much more slippery fish when he’s not the one asking the questions. Inquire about the resonance that this film may have in an America seized with paranoia in an easterly direction, and he bristles that he’s “not a pundit. Don’t push me into that corner.” Same response when grilled on his opinion of Edward Snowden and other hot-button specifics. He prefers to traffic in lofty philosophical ideas, not nitty-gritty policy stances. By casting Gorbachev as an embattled personification of hope and change, he hopes to mold the west’s perception of Russia as the big bad bugaboo into something a bit more sober-minded.

“That’s part of what the film achieves,” Herzog says, “that the demonization of Russia in the west has been a very big mistake. The tone has been set by the media, their mongering. I wish for this to be a little step towards seeing Russia and Russian politics in a big way.”

Andre Singer, Werner Herzog and Mikhail Gorbachev in Meeting Gorbachev. Photograph: The Orchard

For an American writer constantly inundated with headlines about techno-terrorists using lines of Cyrillic code to destabilize democracy, the objection to Herzog’s line of thinking is clear. What of the hackers, proven real beyond any figment of public imagination?

“What of China?” He shoots back. “Have you ever heard of Titan Rain, discussed in my film Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World? The biggest hack of all. China hacked into the White House, into the Pentagon, into Wall Street, into Nasa, everywhere. They’re siphoning off billions in intellectual property, and they’re doing it systematically. Have you ever heard that the United States hacked into the private phones of Angela Merkel? The Brazilian president? The French president? The Italian president?”

If it sounds like the sort of deflection referred to as whataboutism, know that these words come from someone with a sincere blanket distrust for the modern world. Herzog lives off the grid, using no cellphone and computers only when necessary. (“You cannot hack into me. When I must use email, I exercise the necessary precautions. I do not divulge my darkest secrets and criminal actions.”) If he believes that attacks on our privacy are coming from everywhere all the time, then one might see how he’d think it strange that Russia’s commanded the most attention.

Herzog’s been in and out of the country since the 70s, through perestroika and glasnost and the “catastrophe” of the Yeltsin years. He’s watched the tide slowly turn, as the once-resentful citizenry has gradually embraced Gorbachev’s progressive legacy even as they continue to live under the reactionary yoke of Vladimir Putin. With a studied knowledge of Russian history, he sees their hectic modernity through a sociologist’s eye. For example, one mention of the dashboard cameras in Russian culture and he’s off like a shot:

Werner Herzog attends the Meeting Gorbachev screening during the 2019 Tribeca film festival. Photograph: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival

“The dashboard cameras are a reflex of the Yeltsin years. Under Yeltsin, no pensions were paid, no university teachers were paid, police were underpaid, and so the country was handed over to organized crime. Let’s face it, they’re called oligarchs today, but it’s nothing more than organized crime. Russia lapsed into utter destitution and the loss of all dignity. At that time, since Russian police were barely paid at all, they’d stop you at a traffic light and tell you that you’d run a red light, and it would cost you 10 dollars, or rubles, a fee. The dashboard cameras could prove what did or did not happen. The beauty of this, for example, is that a meteor that went down near the Siberian town of Chelyabinsk was recorded by 30 or 40 cameras.”

Again, any misgivings over a surveillance state take a back seat to a fascination somewhere between the academic and artistic. When I express my own anxiety over the prospect of being constantly watched, there is a long pause until Herzog replies with utter, freezing-cold indifference, “OK. I accept that.”

Herzog lives in his own world, less in a Hollywood-solipsism way and more in an alien way. It’s not that the concerns of the common rabble don’t matter to him, it’s that the concerns of humanity don’t matter to him. In one scene, Herzog asks Gorbachev (whose health precipitously declined over the course of the film’s production, leaving him too sick to attend its well-received Russian premiere at the recent Moscow international film festival) which words he’d like to see on his gravestone. The former general secretary responds “we tried”, an answer of sage simplicity and humble compassion. I pose this same query to Herzog, and after a moment’s consideration, all he can say is, “Mine? I don’t care.”