'Soon you'll hit gold!': the day I took lessons with Herzog, Atwood, Lynch and more

‘I lived in a hammock in the jungle for one-and-a-half years,” says Werner Herzog. “And it was fine. I ate snakes, alligators and giant crawling maggots.” In that calm, steely voice familiar to anyone who has seen his documentaries, the German director is talking about his commitment to film-making, casually mentioning the time he threatened to murder Klaus Kinski and how, in turn, the actor planned to murder him. He also talks about being shot, forging the president of Peru’s signature on film permits, on-set plane crashes and refusing to stay at Nicolas Cage’s home because he couldn’t face watching egg dribble down his lead actor’s chin at breakfast time.

I’ve spent six hours in the company of Herzog, sitting rapt as he talked me through the insights he has picked up in the course of a wild career, in