I meet Werner Herzog in Hollywood. What on earth is he doing here? He’s as far from the mainstream as you can get. On the other hand this is the land of dreams and dreamers – and he is nothing if not that. Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre Wrath of God, The Enigma of Caspar Hauser – these films proved an inspiration to directors as diverse as Francis Ford Coppola, David Lynch and François Truffaut, who once called Herzog “the most important director alive”. So what are you doing in Hollywood? I asked him at the first opportunity. “Not Hollywood,” he said. “Los Angeles. I’m here because of married life. But I am looking for new horizons.”

Herzog was part of an extraordinary moment in the early Seventies when German cinema suddenly came into its own. But whereas many of Herzog’s contemporaries (including Fassbinder and Wim Wenders) have since died or faded from view, he still makes film after film, and none of them pays heed to the staid conventions of film-making. Drama or documentary, fact or fiction, fantasy or reality, it’s all the same to him – storytelling is all that matters.

Now he’s working on a remake of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, this time starring Nicolas Cage So here we are, Herzog and I, in the Hollywood hills. He’s driving and I’m gently quizzing him when he makes a sudden diversion and casually remarks that we won’t be taking the high road, “because that’s where I was shot”. Yes, shot, by some lunatic with an air rifle, who had issues with film-makers. It happened, incidentally, while he was being interviewed by the BBC’s Culture Show.

He was remarkably relaxed about it. As he told me with a genial smile: “The way I make films, you shouldn’t complain. You have to anticipate everything. I’ve been ill, I’ve been arrested, I’ve been harassed and attacked, I’ve been shot at. I’ve even been caught up in a civil war which no one could have foreseen. People don’t believe this stuff. They think it’s all made up. But it isn’t.”

Times Archive 1982: A mania for carrying ships across mountains

The hero of Fitzcarraldo is, of all Werner Herzog's characters, the one most made in his creator's own image

• Aguirre, wrath of God: Werner Herzog's epic film on old Peru

What of the legion of other Herzog escapades? Did he really attempt to film that volcano in La Soufrière in the West Indies just as it was about to explode? Could he possibly have hypnotised his entire cast during the shooting of Heart of Glass? And was he mad enough – or should that be man enough? – to drag that immense boat over a mountain in the Peruvian jungle at a perilous angle of 40 degrees in Fitzcarraldo, instead of settling for a model boat in the Botanic Gardens in San Diego, as Twentieth Century Fox pleaded with him to do?

Well, yes, yes and yes, apparently. But why? I asked him. “Because,” he said, “by moving that monster of a ship over the mountain, the deed itself would reveal things that no one would ever have dreamt of, surprising things that people even in their wildest fantasies would never be able to concoct.”

Fitzcarraldo took three years to make, a story worthy of a film in itself, which indeed it became when Herzog invited the documentary film-maker Les Blank to join him with his camera in the jungle. Blank, an admirer of Herzog’s, is a man of few words, but on this occasion they were very much to the point. “ ‘I was scared shitless!’ he told me. I know, I said, and quoted to him from his diary: ‘When the boat ploughed into the rocks it made an explosive noise which reminded me of the LA earthquake’.”

But now even LA is warming to Herzog. Grizzly Man, his documentary about Timothy Treadwell, the man who loved bears – even though one ate him – defied expectations and made a big impact. Then he recruited Christian Bale for a big Hollywood feature, Rescue Dawn. They fell out only when Bale didn’t understand that Herzog expected him to eat only a couple of mouthfuls of live maggots and then stop. “He waits and waits for me to say ‘Cut!’ ” Let’s hope that Cage understands the risks.

Finally, Herzog gave me a quick run-down of his tips on how to be a successful film-maker: “Work as a bouncer in a sex club, work as a taxi driver, work as a butcher – earn the money and make your own film. Today, with these little digital cameras, there is no excuse any more.” Herzog stole his first camera and ended up using it to make 11 films. “It fulfilled its real destiny,” he says.

Imagine: Werner Herzog – Beyond Reason, Tuesday, BBC One, 10.35pm

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