For the past two decades, Herzog has lived in Los Angeles, in a bungalow in Laurel Canyon, with Lena, a photographer. Other than reading and cooking for friends, he has few hobbies, and most of his time is consumed by his work (“I’m a working man,” he said more than once).
Herzog has published a handful of nonfiction books, including “Of Walking in Ice” and “Conquest of the Useless,” an account of the calamities that befell the production of “Fitzcarraldo.”
Although he professes to have few literary influences — “My prose is somehow very much homegrown,” he said — he is a wide-ranging and passionate reader. Asked about his favorite authors, he rattled off a list that included J.A. Baker, Hemingway, Conrad, Virgil (“‘Georgics,’ not the ‘Aeneid’”), an anonymous Norse poetry collection and Friedrich Hölderlin, a German poet and philosopher (“Almost untranslatable, because he became insane fairly young”).
Though he started late, fiction came naturally, Herzog said. He began working on “The Twilight World” in the fall of 2020, when he was unable to make movies during the pandemic, and Lena suggested that he occupy himself with writing. He based the story on conversations he had with Onoda, and consulted Onoda’s autobiography to verify details.
“He lived some sort of a fictitious war, it was a figment, a fantasy, it was fever dreams in the jungle, but he solidified the fiction into a real war,” Herzog said. “It became something beyond logic, beyond our logic, but for him it had logic, and that makes him tragic.”
