Four Werner Herzog moments: 1 The opening sequence of his 1972 film Aguirre, Wrath of God, so astonishingly other for a teenager in the acrid darkness of a 1970s London cinema. I remember the porcelain face of the Madonna in her glass box, then the camera reverse-zooming, so that we see the conquistadors strung out along the jungle path. Back and back the camera pulls, revealing more and more immensities of mountain. It’s a perfect image: the European invaders, with their religious baggage, reduced to the status of ants crawling up a log.

2 An interview with one of Herzog’s earlier wives in a documentary about the film-maker. She stands on some godforsaken Baltic coast, with the wind whipping her hair about her face; she is beautiful and mournful, and speaks of how they were married: “Then Werner left immediately to film in the Arctic for a year. He returned for a few weeks and then departed once more to film in central Africa. Then he came back to me, but he was editing mostly, then he left again . . .”

3 Klaus Kinski interviewed on the set of Fitzcarraldo, Herzog’s 1982 film about a man trying to build an opera house in the Amazon jungle, for the documentary about the making of the film (Burden of Dreams). The skull-faced actor appears haunted as he recounts how he threatened to walk off the set, but Herzog said to him: “ ‘This is a Mauser rifle with a 10-shot magazine — before you reach that first bend in the river over there, nine of these bullets will be in your head!’ And you know what, I completely believed him!”

4 The flat bled of Kuwait after the first Gulf war, the camera circling over the smoke-belching, flame-vomiting oil wells set on fire by the retreating Iraqi army. It’s a scene of unearthly horror and beauty, heightened unbearably by the haunting majesty of the andante from Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony that plays on the soundtrack — an indissoluble marriage of image and sound.

These are a selection of my own Herzog moments, but I could have set down a score more. Of course, they may not be altogether accurately recalled, but I think the director will forgive me. When I taxed him with his public image as a tyrannical presence on the set, he bristled: “In that film (Burden of Dreams) there is no testimony, there is no witness who has ever seen me direct who has ever used the word ‘tyrannical’. It’s not unfair, it’s outright wrong. I work like a surgeon doing open-heart surgery. I am very quiet, very focused. That’s it. You only hear the whispers on my set.”

Possibly I should have said “fanatical”, and although no doubt Herzog would have rebutted the charge — born, I concede, of an overidentification between him and his protagonists — he would probably not have minded. “That’s okay,” he told me, “that there are those doppelgängers out there — other Herzogs. They’re like guards who are protecting me.”

And Herzog must need protecting. His restless energy (he is the only director to have shot on all seven continents) and the sheer grit required to get his films made would seem profoundly alienating — and not only to wives. For film fans of my generation, Herzog, now 66, remains the most persistently maverick of the directors loosely grouped under the heading of the German new wave. Of course, what mostly tied Wim Wenders, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Herzog and Jean-Marie Straub together was an accident of birth.

“It’s commonly noted that we were a ‘new wave’,” Herzog said. “But I think only that we were the first generation of film-makers not involved in the Nazi time. That’s the only denominator; otherwise I never belonged to my peers.”

Never belonged to his peers, and perhaps never belonged to any commonplace understanding of cinema. For a decade or so, from Aguirre (1972) to Where the Green Ants Dream (1984), Herzog’s films were mandatory viewing, but since then any kind of box-office success for his features has eluded him (not that I imagine he cares a jot). The surprising thing is that while such conventional fare has been returned to the creative kitchens uneaten, the director has made a feast of side dishes. Herzog has always made documentaries, to me he was forthright. “What’s wrong with a novelist writing theatre plays, or poetry? In literature it’s understood that people work in different genres.” Of course, I conceded, this is understood in film as well; it’s just that the allure of big features, and the associated studio system, seems to suck directors in like a digitally imaged black hole sucking in digitally imaged spacecraft. Herzog shrugged: “It’s not the rule — and I suppose I am pretty much the exception.”

But Herzog’s sensibility — the quest, as he describes it, “for the ecstatic truth” — has always led him to point his camera at the natural world, and in particular to try to divine the changes that humankind has wrought upon it. Not that his films are straightforward eco-parables; rather, Herzog’s ecstatic truth seems to be the highly charged reciprocal relationship between man and nature — a classic case of German dialectics, although he refuses any easy synthesis. The film that includes the shots of burning oil wells, Lessons of Darkness (1992), had a forerunner in Fata Morgana (1971), which was shot in the Sahara, but neither are bare accounts. “Lessons pretends to be a sci-fi film, but of course it’s not,” he says. “I prefaced the commentary with a quote from Pascal that I made up myself. We can talk for 48 hours about some great quest for inherent truth through sound and images, but I believe this is intrinsic to all films.”

Herzog has a reputation as forbidding and steely. While being interviewed by Mark Kermode for the BBC in 2006, the director was shot with an air gun by some La-La land freak — and barely flinched, although he was wounded — but I found him eminently approachable. When I asked him whether it had made any difference to his work that he was now living in LA, he replied warmly: “No, it hasn’t!” Then made an abrupt volte-face: “Yes, it has! I’m happily married here — that’s the reason why I’m here.”

He conceded, “Whether I live in Los Angeles is pretty much unknown to people”, but continued: “Hollywood is looking at my work.” The reason is that “over the past two decades, the studios may have developed great digital effects, they may have giant stars, but there is a deficit, I think, of storytelling, and because of that shortcoming, they are looking at my films”.

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