How Werner Herzog has managed to surprise and wrong-foot audiences over his 60-year filmmaking career

The 77-year-old has made three entirely different feature-length films this year, including ‘Meeting Gorbachev’, while also co-starring in a Star Wars spin-off ‘The Mandalorian’, but this relentless schedule is nothing out of the normal for the filmmaker who continually takes on new faces, says Geoffrey Macnab

Herzog interviews the former Soviet leader in his documentary ‘Meeting Gorbachev’ (Altitude Film Distribution)

There is a famous image of the great Russian director Sergei Eisenstein shaking hands with Mickey Mouse when he visited the Walt Disney studios in 1930. They make an incongruous pair, the Soviet filmmaker best known for Battleship Potemkin (1925) next to the symbol of the Disney empire. You don’t expect to see them together.

Some will experience a similar surprise when they watch the new Lucasfilm Star Wars series spin-off The Mandalorian, created by Jon Favreau and which premieres on streaming platform Disney+ in mid-November. Spotted on the trailer for the series, alongside the gun-toting droids and stormtroopers, is none other than the visionary German director Werner Herzog in best galactic leather. “Bounty-hunting in a complicated profession,” he intones in that familiar portentous voice which we are more used to hearing in his documentaries including Grizzly Man (2005), which chronicled the life and death of grizzly bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell, and Encounters at the End of the World (2007), a study of people, penguins, and places in Antarctica.

We are well accustomed to Herzog going to the ends of the earth but this is the first time we’ve seen him in outer space. When he talked about The Mandalorian in Cannes last May, where he had two new films screening in the festival, some journalists who didn’t yet know what the film was about assumed he must have been involved in a project about the American inventor and businessman John DeLorean. They didn’t expect him to be consorting with Luke Skywalker and his heirs.