On the formal methods of Werner Herzog and why his films are unlike anyone else's.

Herzog's films — both documentary and fiction — are animated by a quality of attention to the extreme that is personal to the point of being an eccentricity elevated to a worldview.

In fiction films like Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, Herzog pursues the physical reality of his subjects at a cost to the production that would not be acceptable under any normal filmmaking logic. The boat in Fitzcarraldo was hauled over an actual mountain by actual villagers because Herzog believed that the impossibility of the enterprise was the film's subject and the film could only be made if the enterprise was actually impossible.

In documentary films, Herzog is interested in a specific category of human being: the person who has moved beyond the social compact, who has staked their life on something most people would recognize as madness. Grizzly Man, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Into the Abyss — these are portraits of extremity.

Herzog has described his method as 'ecstatic truth': the idea that factual accuracy is less important than a higher emotional or psychological truth that facts alone cannot access. This is a provocation and a methodology, and it produces films that could not be made by someone who believed that the camera's job was documentation.