Extreme close-up

Iconoclastic director Werner Herzog talks about the lengths he goes to making movies, filming in Antarctica - and how he's really a sweet guy

In Herzog's "Encounters at the End of the World," a diver is filmed under the Antarctic ice. (Henry kaiser)

NEW YORK - There are two known Werner Herzogs: the ferocious creature of movie lore and the sensitive talker seated across the table from me.

That second Herzog was born almost 66 years ago and raised in the Bavarian Alps, and now calls Los Angeles home. The first Herzog makes that LA news unthinkable. The man who hypnotized his entire cast for "Heart of Glass" (1976); hired the mentally unstable street performer Bruno S. to star in "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser" (1974); hauled a steamboat over a mountain in the Peruvian jungle for "Fitzcarraldo" (1982); and, because he lost a dare with Errol Morris in the early 1980s, ate some of his boot in public? That guy lives in LaLa Land?

This story is mostly about the second Herzog, the one who says he's quite enjoyed his eight years in LA, the man who told me recently that, while German, he has his problems with Germany - culturally speaking.

"I'm too much Bavarian," he said in the lobby of a Manhattan hotel. "I have to explain to Americans. It's like telling a Scotsman: 'Are you British?' 'No, I'm Scottish!' He would immediately insist on his dialect. It's a little bit like that with Bavarians." As for Los Angeles, he said he tries to remain a low-key resident: "Most people don't know I live there."

The place might be good for his personal disposition, but it's had no appreciably deadening effect on his filmmaking. One of the world's greatest directors is still a great iconoclast. To one degree or another, his thematic specialty has been man against nature - man's own nature and the elements. The conditions tend to be extreme. For "Encounters at the End of the World," Herzog's new movie, which opens here Friday, the extreme is geographical. He and his director of photography, Peter Zeitlinger, trekked to Antarctica and McMurdo Station, the American research facility, to experience a region of the planet before it undergoes further ecological changes.

The Discovery Channel's movie wing financed the film, but it's not a nature special. According to Herzog, it's "pure science-fiction." It's also a lament, with Herzog himself at its center - a bemused interloper trying to make sense of the men and women living and working in the Antarctic. He plays the uneasy essayist, narrating the film in his inimitable conflation of casual harshness and gentle warmth. It's an effect that cuts through pretense and artifice.

It's much of the reason that 2006's "Grizzly Man," the most popular film of Herzog's career, struck a nerve. The director was challenging his subject, the doomed environmentalist Timothy Treadwell, not in an act of disrespect but as a matter of personal honesty. He found Treadwell foolish and sentimental, and, in the film, he said so. In "Encounters," he complains about the ATMs and yoga classes at McMurdo. ("I will end my life never going into a fitness studio," he promises me.)

That forthrightness connects to a real gift for self-expression. This is true of most directors, but Herzog happens to be entertainingly articulate. During our conversation, he exhausted a range of topics (jetlag, Antarctic solitude, the expansion of his creative horizons, the ephemeral nature of the new German film wave of the 1970s), taking every question seriously. You might already know that Herzog has an exuberant side, if you've seen him acting in, say, Harmony Korine's "Mister Lonely" or Zak Penn's "The Grand." Given both movies' box-office haul, it stands to reason you probably don't.

Herzog arrived in New York a wanted man. It had been announced recently that he was set to direct Nicolas Cage in a remake of the great dystopic 1992 Harvey Keitel cop thriller, "Bad Lieutenant," and the movie's original writer and director, Abel Ferrara, threw a hissy fit. Last month, he told reporters in France what he thinks of Herzog's production: "I wish these people die in Hell. I hope they're all in the same streetcar, and it blows up."

Where Ferrara is furious, the rest of the world is confused. Why that movie? Herzog said the story compelled him, correcting the notion that his film would be a remake of Ferrara's. For one thing, he's shooting in New Orleans (the original was set in New York). For another, "it's a completely different movie, a film noir." Herzog wanted to explore the post-Katrina setting. So the swirl of man and nature continues.

He'd never been to New Orleans before the film came up and was struck by the city and the disquieting picture emerging from it. "After such a disastrous event as the hurricane, New Orleans was kind of left alone," Herzog said. "And politics did not so much care for it. To see something evil emerging out of it, the swamp from which the mosquitoes emerge and start to sting: In a way, that's related to the subject of the film. It will be a very dark movie."

As for his unwell-wisher, Herzog finds his outrage "beautiful" and said he hasn't ever seen Ferrara's film. "I don't even know who he is. But I'm told he's got a very gruff face. Maybe I should ask him to play a gangster in the movie."

Herzog was giving a teasing, playful flash of his more diabolical self. But what about the myth of the other Herzog, the dark overlord and the tyrannical commandant? It seems, in part, precisely that: mythical. It's true that he could be difficult. But time has contributed to the legend and, perhaps, mellowed the man. He and Klaus Kinski, with whom Herzog made five films, including "Aguirre," had their battles. Herzog could be dangerous, too; this is a man, after all, who dragged a film crew up an active Guadeloupe volcano (the 1977 short "La Soufrière").

But there was a method to his madness, in the truest sense of the phrase, a rationality that makes sense. At least it does when Herzog explains it, since he does so with such frankness and clarity. Take the situation with "Heart of Glass." Herzog has admitted that hypnotizing the whole cast was a terrible idea. But as he told Paul Cronin in the series of interviews compiled for the book "Herzog on Herzog," it seemed like a good idea at the time.

The lean visionary whom Les Blank and Maureen Gosling captured roving the Peruvian jungle in "The Burden of Dreams," their fascinating 1982 documentary of the making of "Fitzcarraldo," is pretty much the ruminative man seated before me today. He's a lot grayer and not as spry, and that dashing moustache is gone. But they're the same. "When you see a crazed conquistador like Aguirre, sometimes people think the filmmaker must be mad himself," he said. "I maintain that I'm the only clinically sane man out there."

Today he calls the other Herzog his "doppelganger," and characteristically, Herzog can use it to his advantage. "In the media there's also the invented Herzogs out there. But it's OK. Let them be out there. They are the ones who do the battles, the virtual battles. I feel as if they are paid stooges - stooges I don't have to pay for! If there is an obsessive wild-eyed Herzog out there, let him take the brunt."

Behind those various "others," Herzog is free to be the gentle soul he said he truly is.

"You've got to ask my wife," he said about his reputed dark side. "She will maintain steadfastly that I am a fluffy husband." For almost a decade, Herzog has been married to Lena Pisetski, an American photographer who has taken Herzog's surname. At some point he excuses himself from the table to say goodbye before she heads back to Los Angeles. At the risk of rudeness, I watched him with her only because I couldn't have imagined it - well, I didn't want only to imagine it.

He approached her and gently touched her arms. They exchanged a few words, and Mrs. Herzog, an attractive blonde with an alluring glow, said something that seemed to light him up. He kissed her lips and briefly watched her head across the lobby toward the elevators. His lingering over her reminded me of certain moments in "Encounters" where Herzog lets a scene hang on many seconds after the official conversation between him and the subject has ended. He does something similar for that ex-girlfriend of Treadwell's in "Grizzly Man." The lingering with him is a form of affection.

Herzog might be at the peak of his public displays of affection. "Encounters at the End of the World" is dedicated to the film critic Roger Ebert, who has been battling cancer. Despite his poor health, Ebert remains a "good soldier of cinema," Herzog said, which he himself strives to be.

The night before, Herzog sat down with the filmmaker Jonathan Demme at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, where Demme read aloud the reply letter in praise of Herzog that Ebert published on his website. During our conversation the following day, Herzog's eyes began to well at the memory, suddenly obviating his suggestion that I ask the missus for a sensitivity report. The conquistador is, indeed, made of fluff.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/movienation.