Compared to Werner Herzog, most Hollywood directors look like overpaid couch potatoes. During a career of 50-plus films — including art-house favorites like 1972's Aguirre, the Wrath of God, 1982's Fitzcarraldo, and the 2005 documentary Grizzly Man — the German director has ventured to some of the most remote corners of the Earth, facing down perils that would bring most productions to a screeching halt, and turning that struggle into a mesmerizing, hallucinatory kind of poetry onscreen. Despite his polite, almost tranquil manner in person, the Herzog of legend is an outsized, indomitably obsessive figure constantly diving into one fray or another; even a 2006 BBC interview took a Herzogian turn when the 64-year-old was hit by a stray bullet in his abdomen.

Now, with his latest film, the riveting Vietnam POW drama Rescue Dawn, starring Christian Bale, Herzog is hacking his way through yet another jungle, delving deeper than he has before into the heart of darkness that is Hollywood summer-blockbuster season. The film tells the harrowing true story of U.S. Navy pilot Dieter Dengler (already the subject of Herzog's 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly), who was shot down in the early days of the Vietnam War and managed a daring escape from a Laotian prison camp. With Rescue Dawn now playing in New York and L.A. and expanding soon across the country, Herzog shares his own harrowing tales from the front lines — and lets loose a few brow-furrowing philosophies.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How did you originally come across the story of Dieter Dengler?
WERNER HERZOG: In the late '60s, the biggest German magazine ran a series of five or six consecutive articles on his story. It was quite well known at the time. But over time it had been somehow buried and almost forgotten. And, of course, it's a fantastic movie story. Dieter has every quality I like about Americans. It was very sane how he absorbed his ordeal and how he lived after it. He found a very healthy way to cope. He was not one of those nervous wrecks with post...what do we call it?

Post-traumatic stress disorder.
Yes, there was nothing like that in him, probably because his childhood was very tough. That was our immediate connection. We had had very similar upbringings: He grew up in a very remote place in the Black Forest and I grew up in a very remote place in Bavaria, deep in the mountains. And, of course, with the hardships after the war, both of us were very hungry. His mother would take the kids out and rip the wallpaper from the walls of bombed-out houses and cook it because there were nutrients in the glue. I never ate that, but I remember that we were very, very hungry for at least two years or so.

Even when you were making the documentary about him, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, did you always plan to make a feature film version of the story?
Yes, it was always evident I would do that. What complicated things was that Dieter died [in 2001, of Lou Gehrig's disease], and dealing with the rights situation became more complicated. It took a while to sort it out. At one point, before he died, Francis Ford Coppola's company Zoetrope tried to acquire the rights and I said to Dieter, ''Are you crazy? I'm the one who is going to do it.'' And he laughed and said, ''Yeah, okay.'' It was not so easy to get financing but once Christian Bale was chosen to be Batman, all of the sudden it became somewhat easier.

Once you started shooting, though, my sense is that it was incredibly arduous and you struggled not only with physical conditions in the jungle but also with the financiers and even with your own crew.
It was a complicated production, I think it's known. But there was nothing very special about that. It happens to all films. The really important thing is that, despite everything, I brought the film in exactly the way I wanted to have it.

You don't want to talk about all the difficulty that went into the production?
No, what's wrong with that? Why should we talk about it? I don't like these making-of things. I can only say it was fairly easy to make the film. Nothing special.

You must have a different definition of what is easy than other directors. A few of your productions, like Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, have been famous for their epic difficulties.
I have been very lucky. Quite often I have attracted disasters, one after the other, without exposing myself to the disaster. Sometimes it comes onto you like biblical plagues. On [1971's] Fata Morgana, I got very ill with a blood parasite, bilharzia, got arrested and put in jail in Africa — all sorts of really tough things. These are situations that are beyond your grasp. Quite often I have met disaster and you have to complete a film despite everything. I've never left a film unfinished and I've never been over budget.

Because of these kinds of stories, there's a perception out there that you actively seek out danger for the sake of your movies.
Not at all. Number one, I hate adventure and adventurism. It's over. Adventure doesn't exist anymore. It died away at the time when damsels would faint on couches and men would meet in pistol duels at dawn. It belongs to different centuries. Now it has degenerated into the most absurd quests to make it into the Guinness Book of World Records. It's just a shame and embarrassment. I'm not into adventure. I'm not into seeking problems. As a professional, I always minimize problems as much as I can. I've never taken someone blindly into a problematic shoot. In 55 films, I've never had an actor hurt. Crew members, in a few cases. Myself, sometimes, yes — but so what?

NEXT PAGE: Herzog on WrestleMania, Photoshop, his old friend ''the pestilence,'' and getting shot

One of the most legendary difficulties on your films was puling a riverboat over a mountain in Fitzcarraldo. Some people look at that and think, With all the movie magic at a director's disposal, wasn't there an easier way?
At the time, 20th Century Fox was interested in the production and proposed to pull a small plastic ship over a studio hill or at the botanic garden in San Diego. It was clear to me there was no plastic solution. The audience needs to be able to trust their eyes.

So do you look at Hollywood's increasing reliance on computer-generated spectacle and despair?
Yes and no. Sure, today you have an overabundance of digitally created tricks. But part of Hollywood is starting to move in my direction, because there has been a vacuum of storytelling. A good part of Hollywood understands that we have to look into real acting, real depth, some sort of illumination. Actors feel it, audiences feel it, agents feel it, production companies feel it, studios feel it — everyone feels it. So movies like Capote and Brokeback Mountain were seen with better focus than they would have been 10 years ago. That's why some of the industry is looking at me. Real storytelling will always prevail. It has prevailed for tens of thousands of years. It's so much a part of our collective existence, or collective dreams and nightmares, you can't brush it aside.

You sound more optimistic about Hollywood than I expected you would be.
I've never been in the culture of complaint. You look around here and even very accomplished filmmakers who earn a lot of money are constantly complaining. Just roll up your sleeves. You are Hollywood. Do it better. Many of them have so much money they could make 10 feature films for the cost of Aguirre from their own pocket money. Aguirre cost a grand total of $360,000.

Much of which must have gone to your notoriously combative star, Klaus Kinski.
Yes, the pestilence took quite a huge chunk of it. He was phenomenally good, though. Let's not complain about Kinski either. He had a presence and intensity you do not see very often in film history. I bow my head in reverence to him.

Your on-set battles with Kinski and your struggles to control his raging moods are the stuff of legend, like the time during the making of Aguirre that you threatened to shoot him if he left the film. Did the dysfunction between you two help the films in a way or hurt them?
Whatever strife, conflict, murder plots there was, I always managed to make it productive to the screen. He would have a tendency to walk off the set and disappear for good. That's what I would not allow. I always made it productive. And not just Kinski. Everything on Rescue Dawn as well — whatever came along, I used it.

Rescue Dawn seems, on the surface at least, to be your most commercial film: a war movie with mainstream stars released by a Hollywood studio during the summer. Do you see it that way?
Not really. All of my films are commercial in a way. They're very strong stories, very easy for audiences. They just haven't reached the mainstream. I've worked within the niche of foreign films and hardly anyone here watches foreign films. It's a market that is so small, it's not more than there is black under my fingernails. That, of course, has kept me outside in a way. But in the long run, over 25 years or so, some of my films have really made good money. Normally. the mainstream films disappear after two weeks. Mine do not disappear after two decades.

You did have some commercial success recently with the documentary Grizzly Man. But you were snubbed for an Oscar nomination for the movie, perhaps because you've alienated yourself from a lot of people in the documentary community for the liberties you take in your nonfiction films, like scripting lines for your subjects.
That's okay. We need a new approach to reality. Cinéma vérité is basically the answer of the '60s and, in my opinion, just the accountant's truth. We are in a situation now where there is a huge onslaught on our notion of reality, from reality TV, virtual reality, the Internet, digital effects, Photoshop, WrestleMania — all these things pretending to be reality. Since the early '70s, I've been working towards a new form of dealing with reality, going for something that illuminates us, something that is like an ecstatic truth. Whatever departs from facts is wonderful. I'm not so much into facts.

Some of the facts of your own life seem almost too strange to be true — like the time last year when you were hit by a bullet during an interview.
Well, being shot during an interview — I consider that part of the folklore of Los Angeles. We shouldn't even talk about it because it was so insignificant.

But it's stories like that that contribute to this mythic Werner Herzog that stands alongside the real Werner Herzog.
It's not just one. There are at least five or six. They're like paid stooges. But you can't prevent it. I would prefer to make films anonymously, like the medieval painters, because then we are looking at the painting and not at the life of the painter. But that's not possible, so I can live with it. In the end what remains is the film on the screen and that's it.