For the past 20 years, Herzog has lived with photographer Lena in a bungalow in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles. Other than reading books and cooking for friends, he has little hobbies and spends most of his time at work (“I’m a worker,” he said many times). ..
Herzog has published several non-fiction books, such as “Walking in the Ice” and “Conquering the Useless”, which explain the disasters that occurred in the production of “Fitzcarraldo”.
He professes to have little literary influence, but “my prose is somehow very homemade,” he said. He is a wide range of enthusiastic readers. Asked about his favorite author, he was JA Baker, Hemingway, Conrad, Virgil (“Agricultural Poetry” instead of “Aeneid”), an anonymous Nordic poetry collection, and German poet and philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin. (“He was so young and insane that he could hardly translate.”)
He started late, but fiction came naturally, Herzog said. He began working on “Twilight World” in the fall of 2020, when he couldn’t make a movie during a pandemic, and Lena suggested that he concentrate on writing. He created a story based on a conversation with Onoda, and examined Onoda’s autobiography for details.
“He lived a kind of fictional war, which was fictitious, illusion, and a feverish dream in the jungle, but he solidified the fictional war into a real war.” Herzog said. “It went beyond our logic and became something beyond logic, but for him it had logic, and it makes him tragic.”
