A short chat - and a long journey - with Werner Herzog

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He's a self-taught artist with zero tolerance for artistic pretension. He's a born communicator with a deep distrust of communication's evolving instruments. He's a man as obsessed as the tragically obsessive protagonists his films love to dramatize. He's a European who surfed the German New Wave all the way to Los Angeles, where he continues to work and thrive. He's a legendary eccentric disguised in an accountant's grey slacks, navy jacket and white shirt. Ever the walking contradiction, Werner Herzog is all that and more; but today, having flown into Toronto after stops in Munich, Venice and an "unelectrified village in rural India," he's mainly just … tired.

Tired but, even at 67, answering the call to promotional duty on behalf of his latest feature, Bad Lieutenant:Port of Call New Orleans . Yes, that title is quite the awkward mouthful and, with typical frankness, he'll tell you why in a moment. For now, though, let's focus on his voice, which is as distinctive and hard to define as its owner. His English is softly accented, quietly measured and impeccably grammatical down to the last "whom." Yet, never straying from those quiet cadences, that same voice can somehow soar without rising, suddenly taking wing with bursts of candour and passion. If Herzog weren't a director, he'd make a hell of an actor.

Now back to that lumpy title. Despite its first two words and lots of Internet buzz, this is not a remake of Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant , a famously brutal and bleak tale about a drug-addled New York cop. The movie here is a never brutal and surprisingly funny tale about a drug-addled New Orleans cop. Not only are the setting and tone different, but so are the plots. Why, then, sow the seeds of comparison? Cue the candour.

"One of the producers, Ed Pressman, bought the rights to the title and, and at the beginning there was speculation about starting a franchise. Nothing wrong with that. But in this case, with this script, it didn't fit. I knew I would be inviting comparison to a film I've never seen. So I battled with the producers from day one against that title, but didn't fully prevail. It's probably a mistake, but so be it. I can live with it because I love the film as it is. Nobody touched it - it's a director's cut."

Note the progression, there, from candour to passion. Even a short chat with Herzog is filled with such little journeys. He takes it again when discussing the film's setting: "New Orleans was unknown terrain for me. I had never been there before. In the screenplay, the city is supposed to be Detroit, but the producers advised me to change because of tax incentives. It was as banal as that. In the end, though, it all fell into place. I mean [and here's when the voice softly soars] Nicolas Cage and New Orleans, it doesn't get any better than that."

Actually, it doesn't get any worse than that, but that's precisely why Herzog is excited. His star's drugged-out cop and the city's post-Katrina woes are a match made in cinematic heaven - both are suffering in the aftermath of a trauma, and struggling to get by.

But the sly director, taking full advantage of his gifted if erratic actor, has chosen to play that struggle for black, often hallucinatory humour - little of which could be found in the original script. "Not much of the comedy was in the screenplay, but I sensed there was something darkly hilarious there. I've always been labelled this obsessive, Teutonic director, but wrong - I've always been hilarious. So we extemporized, but within the strictures of a pre-existing sequence. Within those boundaries, Nicolas went completely wild with dialogue - just turn the pig loose."

He laughs hugely here, perhaps remembering that other gifted if erratic actor, Klaus Kinski, who dominated much of Herzog's early canon - Nosferatu , Woyzeck , Fitzcarraldo . Their on-set battles, caught so memorably in Les Blank's Burden of Dreams , once prompted Herzog to inveigh: "Every grey hair on my head I call Kinski. I had to domesticate the wild beast." But you just know that's a part of the job he relishes - turning the pig loose, reining the pig in, playing his players every bit as much as they play their characters.

And making them better in the process. On screen almost continually, Cage is superb in this picture, yet his most memorable moments (staring blankly at an iguana only he can see) and his most delicious lines ("Shoot him again - his soul is still dancing") are pure Herzog. "I have to cast animals," he says, "They weren't in the script, but I insisted on my three minutes of iguana time. And, like the iguana, the 'dancing soul' line wasn't there either, but I knew I needed it. How these things come to me, I don't know, but it's my profession. For scenes like that, for moments like that, I love my profession."

That love has redoubled since his move to Los Angeles in the nineties: "I'm not treading in the same spot all my life. I love to live in the United States, although sometimes I have an ambivalent feeling about America. But it has given me a lot, and many of my films wouldn't exist if I hadn't been there, like GrizzlyMan , The Wild Blue Yonder , Encounters at the End of the World , Rescue Dawn . It has become lively. I'm out for new horizons, new production alliances, new forms of distribution, new actors."

But not new technology, at least not all of it: "I see a rigorous correlation between the explosion of instruments of communication, cellphones, the Internet, virtual reality, and the amount of human solitude, existential solitude. I can't fully explain it, I can only observe it. More people are withdrawn, and they are incapable of real dialogue. The 21st-century will be the century of solitude."

Exploring new horizons,

but within a broadening cave of solitude. A gloomy prophecy, but from a hilarious prophet. Our appointment is over and, smoothing out his accountant's garb, the artist moves on, leaving others to wonder at his wrinkled contradictions.