In the mid-1990s, Lena Herzog was a student in California, studying philosophy at Mills College and taking classes at Berkeley.
When she first met Werner Herzog, a renowned filmmaker by then, she didn’t know who he was and hadn’t seen any of his films.
Rather than out himself as a famous movie director, Werner Herzog made up a backstory.
“He told me he was a stuntman,” Lena told Anderson Cooper.
He kept up the ruse for months. The couple even moved in together before Werner revealed who he really was.
“And I thought, ‘My God, I’m falling in love… It’s too bad he’s a stunt man. What am I gonna say to my mother?'” Lena told Cooper.
Today, the couple lives in California, a paradoxical stomping ground for an eccentric auteur who has defied Hollywood conventions throughout his career.
“I live in Los Angeles because I fell in love,” Werner Herzog explained to Cooper.
Lena Herzog is a visual artist and photographer working across multiple mediums.
She’s taken photographs on the set of her husband’s films, snapping documentary-style shots that feature actors, including Nicolas Cage, Chrisitian Bale, Chloë Sevigny, and Michael Shannon.
She told Cooper that traveling with Werner for his film shoots is something that works for her career as an artist as well.
“Wherever he goes, I find a subject,” she told Cooper.
“And some of what I shoot is documentary photography because that was my original medium… I do stills for his films.”
Cooper wanted to know what Lena thought of her husband’s career as an actor, playing villains in the “Star Wars” series “The Mandalorian” and “Jack Reacher.”
“He’s very proud of it. He brags about it,” she said.
In “Jack Reacher,” Werner plays the role of Zek Chelovek, a menacing, cold-hearted leader of a Russian gang who lost his mind after spending decades in Soviet gulags.
“I had friends in Paris who, in a panic, called me and said… you’re married to that man. Remember we’re only one flight away,” Lena told Cooper.
“I think he’s absolutely unafraid to make fun of himself and to allow other directors to cast him in a way that almost is a caricature of him.”
Lena Herzog thinks her husband’s public perception as an obsessive filmmaker who will do anything for his art has set him up for these roles.
“Werner sort of plays into this perception of him… that he’s this kind of wild man and capable of anything.”
But those perceptions are misleading, Lena argued.
“He’s the sweetest man… He’s a really, really sweet, good man.”
The video above was produced and edited by Will Croxton.
