One of the most revered filmmakers of our time, Werner Herzog wrote this diary during the making of Fitzcarraldo, the lavish 1982 film that tells the story of a would-be rubber baron who pulls a steamship over a hill in order to access a rich rubber territory. Later, Herzog spoke of his difficulties when making the film, including casting problems, reshoots, language barriers, epic clashes with the star, and the logistics of moving a 320-ton steamship over a hill without the use of special effects.
Hailed by critics around the globe, the film went on to win Herzog the 1982 Outstanding Director Prize at Cannes. Conquest of the Useless, Werner Herzog's diary on his fever dream in the Amazon jungle, is an extraordinary glimpse into the mind of a genius during the making of one of his greatest achievements.

Most of what we've heard about Werner Herzog is untrue. The sheer number of false rumours and downright lies disseminated about the man and his films is truly astonishing. Yet Herzog's body of work is one of the most important in post-war European cinema. His international breakthrough came in 1973 with Aguirre, the Wrath of God, in which Klaus Kinski played a crazed Conquistador. For "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser", Herzog cast in the lead a man who had spent most of his life institutionalised, and two years later hypnotised his entire cast to make Heart of Glass. He rushed to an explosive volcanic Caribbean island to film La Soufriere, paid homage to F. W. Murnau in a terrifying remake of Nosferatu and in 1982 dragged a boat over a mountain in the Amazon jungle for Fitzcarraldo. More recently Herzog has made extraordinary 'documentary' films such as "Little Dieter Needs to Fly". His place in cinema history is assured. Paul Cronin's volume consists of an invaluable set of career-length interviews with the German genius once hailed by Francois Truffaut as the most important film director alive. It provides a forum for Herzog's fascinating views on the things, ideas and people that have preoccupied him for so many years.

Werner Herzog's Of Walking on Ice, a fever-dream of a book, one (mule-like) man's febrile pilgrimage to save an ailing friend. Herzog was contacted and told that his mentor Lotte Eisner was dying of cancer, and he became possessed with the idea that if he walked to her in Paris from his Munich home she would live. The account is frayed and hallucinatory: Herzog walks through blizzards and rain, sleeps in barns and empty holiday homes; the landscape consumes him, space is blurred by motion, dominated by the force of exorcism and the need to arrive. This is walking as sacrament, what Chatwin called a 'poetic activity that can cure the world'. The book's power doesn't come from great writing, although it does have a certain haunting descriptive power, rather it comes from its status as an event, a document of a journey of belief. Eisner was waiting to receive Herzog on his arrival. Her recovery was complete and she went on to live 10 more healthy years.
The book isn't in print as far as I can tell (the cheapest copy on Amazon is £234!) - hence the odd picture above; but it's well worth tracking down (I know for sure the British Library have a battered copy as it is now soiled with my grubby paw prints).

When Alan Greenberg first showed up at Werner Herzog’s Munich home at age twenty-four, he was, according to the director, the first outsider to seek him and recognize his greatness. At the end of their first evening together, Herzog urged Greenberg to work with him on his film Heart of Glass—and everything thereafter. He clinched his plea by assuring the young American, “On the outside we’ll look like gangsters, but on the inside we’ll wear the gowns of priests.”
Every Night the Trees Disappear is an intimate chronicle of how this visionary filmmaker directed a masterwork. Greenberg’s observations, interwoven with Herzog’s original screenplay, elucidate just how unusual Herzog’s filmmaking methods could be. By hypnotizing his actors before shooting each scene, Herzog led his crew into a veritable cinematic netherworld, resulting in one of the most haunting movies ever made.
Rather than a conventional, journalistic account of how a director makes a movie, Every Night the Trees Disappear instead presents a unique vision with the feel of a novel—intimate, penetrating, and filled with mystery.

Legendary filmmaker and celebrated author Werner Herzog tells in his inimitable voice the story of his epic artistic career in a long-awaited memoir that is as inventive and daring as anything he has done before

Werner Herzog was born in September 1942 in Munich, Germany, at a turning point in the Second World War. Soon Germany would be defeated and a new world would have to be made out the rubble and horrors of the war. Fleeing the Allied bombing raids, Herzog’s mother took him and his older brother to a remote, rustic part of Bavaria where he would spend much of his childhood hungry, without running water, in deep poverty. It was there, as the new postwar order was emerging, that one of the most visionary filmmakers of the next seven decades was formed.  

Until age 11, Herzog did not even know of the existence of cinema. His interest in films began at age 15, but since no one was willing to finance them, he worked the night shift as a welder in a steel factory. He started to travel on foot. He made his first phone call at age 17, and his first film in 1961 at age 19. The wildly productive working life that followed—spanning the seven continents and encompassing both documentary and fiction—was an adventure as grand and otherworldly as any depicted in his many classic films .

Every Man for Himself and God Against All is at once a personal record of one of the great and self-invented lives of our time, and a singular literary masterpiece that will enthrall fans old and new alike. In a hypnotic swirl of memory, Herzog untangles and relives his most important experiences and inspirations, telling his story for the first and only time.

From legendary filmmaker and author Werner Herzog, a compact, effervescent, and deeply personal exploration of art, philosophy, and history that unravels one of our most elusive and contested questions: What is truth—and how to find it in our “post-truth” era?

For over half a century, Werner Herzog has challenged, enriched, and expanded our understanding of the truth. His films and books have mixed fiction and nonfiction, documentary and drama, reality and imagination. Invariably, Herzog goes beyond the appearance of what is true in search of a higher truth, or what he has often referred to as the “ecstatic truth.” In The Future of Truth, a great artist essays an answer to one of humanity’s deepest, most eternal questions. At a moment when deepfake AI videos are proliferating, and most people have simply thrown up their hands in despair at the ubiquity of what we now know as fake news—not to mention the constant lying and propagandizing from certain public figures—Herzog seeks a remedy. Mixing memoir, history, politics, poetry, science, and fierce opinion, he writes with dazzling originality and panache, urging readers to be unflagging and imaginative in the pursuit of truth, endless though the quest may be:

I don’t think truth is some kind of polestar in the sky that we will one day get to. It’s more like an incessant striving. A movement, an uncertain journey, a seeking full of futile endeavor. But it is this journey into the unknown, into a vast twilit forest, that gives our lives meaning and purpose; it is what distinguishes us from the beasts in the fields.

Legendary filmmaker and celebrated author Werner Herzog tells in his inimitable voice the story of his epic artistic career in a long-awaited memoir that is as inventive and daring as anything he has done before
Werner Herzog was born in September 1942 in Munich, Germany, at a turning point in the Second World War. Soon Germany would be defeated and a new world would have to be made out the rubble and horrors of the war. Fleeing the Allied bombing raids, Herzog’s mother took him and his older brother to a remote, rustic part of Bavaria where he would spend much of his childhood hungry, without running water, in deep poverty. It was there, as the new postwar order was emerging, that one of the most visionary filmmakers of the next seven decades was formed.
Until age 11, Herzog did not even know of the existence of cinema. His interest in films began at age 15, but since no one was willing to finance them, he worked the night shift as a welder in a steel factory. He started to travel on foot. He made his first phone call at age 17, and his first film in 1961 at age 19. The wildly productive working life that followed—spanning the seven continents and encompassing both documentary and fiction—was an adventure as grand and otherworldly as any depicted in his many classic films.
Every Man for Himself and God Against All is at once a personal record of one of the great and self-invented lives of our time, and a singular literary masterpiece that will enthrall fans old and new alike. In a hypnotic swirl of memory, Herzog untangles and relives his most important experiences and inspirations, telling his story for the first and only time.