"Los Angeles is raw, uncouth, and bizarre, but it's a place of substance"

The Los Angeles Times interviewed director Werner Herzog this weekend about his upcoming film, Rescue Dawn, and asked the German-born iconoclast why he has chosen to make Los Angeles his home:

"We lived for a while in San Francisco, but it was too chic and leisurely," Herzog explains. "New York is only a place to go if you're into finances. But we wanted a place of cultural substance. And if you look behind the stereotype of glitz and glamour, that is Los Angeles."

Herzog likes Los Angeles because, in his eyes, it is so un-chic, its treasures so unappreciated. "If you go to Florence, it has all surface beauty, but like Venice, it's simply a museum of Renaissance times. Los Angeles is raw, uncouth and bizarre, but it's a place of substance. It has more new horizons than any other place."

Below the jump, Herzog speaks with Henry Rollins about his unusual filmmaking philosophies, and explains further his fascination with the City of Angels. We defy you not to start waxing poetic about the "ecstatic truth" in a German accent for the rest of the day.