Werner Herzog's Guide for the Perplexed: Timeless Lessons on Making Things

More than a decade after its publication, Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed — Conversations with Paul Cronin has quietly become one of those books that gets passed from one restless creative person to the next, dog-eared and underlined. At nearly six hundred pages, it is less a film manual than a working philosophy stitched together from Cronin's patient, decade-spanning interrogation of the Bavarian director. Reviewers at the time called it a kind of secular bible for anyone who makes anything — and that reputation has only thickened with age.

For an Australian audience scrolling through ten masterclasses a week on YouTube, the book offers something stranger and more durable: a sustained argument that art is not a career path but a way of standing in the world. Here is why it has lasted, and what it still has to say in 2024.

A book Herzog didn't want, then rewrote

The story behind A Guide for the Perplexed is itself instructive. As the Independent's review notes, the volume began life in 2002 as a slimmer book called Herzog on Herzog, also assembled by Paul Cronin. Herzog — not a man given to nostalgia about his own back catalogue — agreed to expand and update it only when Cronin proposed something more comprehensive: a working handbook for would-be filmmakers, structured around his films but reaching far beyond them.

The result is a book in which Herzog talks not just about Aguirre, the Wrath of God or Fitzcarraldo but about how to forge a shooting permit, how to live cheaply, how to read your way out of mediocrity, and why he believes the documentary establishment has lost its nerve. The Los Angeles Review of Books, in its conversation with Herzog timed to the book's release, framed it as a guide to “the outer fringes of our language” — a phrase that captures Herzog's lifelong suspicion that conventional speech, and conventional cinema, can only get us so far.

Read, walk, work: the three commandments

If the book has a refrain, it is this: read. Herzog has repeated it for decades, and Cronin gives him room to expand on it. The world, in Herzog's telling, is full of aspiring filmmakers who have seen everything and read nothing, and it shows in their work. He recommends the Warren Commission Report, Hemingway's short stories, Virgil, the Poetic Edda — an idiosyncratic syllabus designed to drag the imagination away from the algorithmic centre of contemporary culture.

The second commandment is to walk. Herzog famously walked from Munich to Paris in winter 1974 to visit the dying film critic Lotte Eisner, and the experience hardened into doctrine: the world, he insists, reveals itself to those who travel on foot. In The New Yorker's playful piece on making New Year's resolutions with Herzog, the director is taken at his word — his admonitions to walk, to take handwritten notes, to defy comfort, are presented as a kind of annual reset for the soul. It is, the piece suggests, hard to read Herzog without feeling slightly accused of softness.

The third is to work, regardless of permission. Herzog's most quoted line — that if you need a camera, steal one — is not really an endorsement of theft but of agency. The film schools, the funding bodies, the festival gatekeepers: none of them, he insists, will give you a career. You make the thing, then you make the next thing.

Ecstatic truth versus the accountant's truth

The intellectual centrepiece of Herzog's worldview, and the one most useful to anyone making documentaries or non-fiction, is his distinction between factual truth and what he calls ecstatic truth. The book excerpt published by RogerEbert.com lays this out at length. For Herzog, the journalistic ideal of pure factuality is what he derisively calls the “accountant's truth” — technically correct, spiritually inert. The truth worth chasing is the one that arrives in a flash of recognition, often through invention: a staged scene, a fabricated monologue, a deliberately impossible image.

This is heresy in some documentary circles, and Herzog knows it. He has long disliked cinéma vérité, which he accuses of mistaking surface accuracy for insight. His own documentaries — Lessons of Darkness, Grizzly Man, Cave of Forgotten Dreams — routinely stylise, stage and editorialise. For Australian filmmakers raised on the strong observational tradition of the ABC and SBS, Herzog's position is provocative but useful: it forces a question about what, exactly, a documentary is for.

The Rogue Film School and the ethics of self-reliance

Running through Cronin's interviews is the shadow of the Rogue Film School, the informal weekend seminar Herzog has periodically run for filmmakers prepared to fund their own travel and tolerate his eccentricities. The curriculum, as outlined in the conversations, includes lock-picking, forging shooting permits, the carrying of bolt-cutters, and the ability to survive in hostile terrain. It sounds like a joke until you realise it isn't, quite.

What Herzog is teaching, in the end, is self-reliance dressed up as banditry. The Rogue Film School manifesto, referenced throughout the book, is uninterested in equipment fetishism or industry contacts. It assumes that the obstacles to making a film are mostly internal — cowardice, laziness, a sense of entitlement to other people's money — and that the external ones can usually be walked around. The Los Angeles Review of Books interview returns to this point: Herzog's optimism, such as it is, is grounded in a belief that the determined individual is more powerful than the systems arrayed against them.

Why the book still matters in 2024

It would be easy to file Herzog as a relic — a 1970s European auteur whose advice about stealing cameras feels quaint in an era of iPhone cinema and AI-generated b-roll. But the conversations with Cronin keep finding new readers precisely because the technology has caught up with Herzog's argument. When anyone with a phone can shoot in 4K, the question of what to point it at — and why — becomes more urgent, not less.

The Independent's reviewer noted that the book reads, at its best, as a sustained meditation on how to lead an examined working life. That is more or less what it has become for the generation of makers who have discovered it since. The specific filmmaking advice is useful. The deeper argument — that you owe your audience images they have not seen before, in a language slightly stranger than the one they expect — is what gives the book its half-life.

A reading list, not a recipe

Herzog has always resisted the idea that he is offering a method. There is no Herzog technique to be applied, no five-step structure, no template. What Cronin has assembled instead is closer to a reading list: the films to seek out, the books to read, the walks to take, the habits to break.

For Australian readers in particular — working at the edge of the world, often on small budgets, in a film culture that oscillates between cringe and bravado — there is a quiet permission embedded in the book. You do not need to be in Los Angeles. You do not need a slate. You need, Herzog suggests, a notebook, decent boots, a library card, and the nerve to begin.

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