Once, at the height of COVID, I dropped off a book at the home of Werner Herzog. I was an editor at the time and was trying to assign him a review, so I drove up to his gate in Laurel Canyon, and we had the briefest of masked conversations. Within 30 seconds, it turned strange. 'Do you have a dog' A little dog'' he asked me, staring out at the hills of Los Angeles, apropos of nothing. He didn't wait for an answer. 'Then be careful of the coyotes,' Herzog said. 'The coyotes will come and eat it. That's what they do. They hunt for little dogs.' I felt for a second as if I had entered a Herzog documentary, because this is what he does: allows himself to articulate the inner ping-pong. Many people might stand in the middle of a jungle thicket and have this kind of deep thought (as Herzog once did on camera): 'We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order.' But they would most likely keep it...
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