Do you consider yourself prolific? Driven? You're nothing, I hate to say, compared to Werner Herzog.
The master filmmaker, whose work has for decades been part of the film canon, remains as prolific as ever. If anything, his output is growing with ever increasing speed. He's at TIFF this week getting his miraculous 3D film Cave of Forgotten Dreams into the public light. Yet he's also got so many other projects on the go, one could apply the term manic to Herzog's output, if it wasn't for the director's cool demenour.
He has just started filming another movie. He also just completed a screenplay for another film and plans to write another script next week. "And in three weeks, I'll write another screenplay. I have five or six feature film stories that I'd like make fairly soon," he adds.
He's smiling, but he's also (as you start to learn if you meet Herzog in person) deadly serious. "It's not that I'm compulsive or so. I'm totally relaxed. And you see, for example, my shooting days are very pleasant," he says. "Never one single hour of overtime -- because I know what I want to shoot. I have a clear vision. I'm not shooting all sorts of coverage and angles [i.e. reshooting scenes from different positions, just in case]. It wastes my time. I shoot what I need for the scene."
That's his trick: "There's always an urgency. You leave anything that's unnecessary. You leave it behind you," he said. "But you see I can work faster nowadays. Since I'm editing digitally, I can edit almost as fast as I think. I do not create 22 parallel versions and then can't decide. I just go once through it, and that's that."