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"In the \u201970s&amp;nbsp;and early-\u201980s, Werner Herzog was the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema, the visionary auteur-explorer who made \u201CAguirre, Wrath of God,\u201D \u201CStroszek,\u201D \u201CNosferatu the Vampyre,\u201D and \u201CFitzcarraldo.\u201D He approached his work as if he were a cross between a Wagnerian romantic and a modern conquistador. Beside such tortured genius, his great contemporaries Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders seemed merely diligent.Who would have predicted that, by the 2010s, Herzog, now 69, could justifiably claim to be the busiest man in show business? Last year saw the release of two penetrating Herzog documentaries, \u201CThe Cave of Forgotten Dreams,\u201D his 3D investigation of the oldest known art in the Chauvet caves in Southern France, and \u201CInto the Abyss,\u201D a study of a Death Row inmate (who was subsequently executed) that argued against capital punishment.Since then the sometime actor Herzog has completed his role as a homicidal maniac, known as \u201CThe Zec,\u201D opposite Tom Cruise\u2019s Jack Reacher in the Paramount thriller \u201COne Shot.\u201DYesterday came the news, via comments given to the British trade Screen International by Herzog and his producer partner Andre Singer, that the indefatigable filmmaker is lining up three films that will all have a \u201Cmust-see\u201D vibe about them.The first he hopes to put before the cameras is a \u201Cstylized documentary\u201D about volcanoes. \u201CI have become friends with a great volcanologist from Cambridge University called Clive Oppenheimer,\u201D Herzog told Screen. \u201CHe wrote a wonderful book called \u2018Eruptions That Shook the World\u2019 about cataclysmic events of the past, some that almost wiped out the human race.\u201DAlso in conversation with Screen, Singer noted that the film could echo his and Herzog\u2019s first collaboration, \u201CLessons of Darkness\u201D (1992), which documented the 1991 Kuwaiti oil fires. \u201CThe Herzogian hell-on-earth images in that film could be similar to those Werner strives for in the volcano documentary,\u201D Singer said. \u201CBut it is obviously dangerous to predict what it will look like as Werner could take it in any direction.\u201DHerzog has also been asked by June Browne Newton, the widow of Helmut Newton, to direct a documentary about the celebrated German-Australian fashion photographer, who died in 2004. (Newton famously shot Nastassja Kinski, the daughter of Herzog\u2019s iconic star Klaus Kinski, for Playboy.)He is also developing a fictional film about Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), the British explorer, Arabist, archaeologist, diplomat, administrator, and spy who with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following World War I helped lay the foundations for modern Iraq. Naomi Watts will play the extraordinary woman, sometimes known as \u201CGertrude of Arabia,\u201D who, for all her pioneering, was an ardent leader of the Anti-Suffragette movement. There has been a talk of a rival Ridley Scott film about Bell to star Angelina Jolie, but the Herzog-Watts version is potentially the more subversive one.With all this frantic activity, the danger is that Herzog won\u2019t have time to guest on \u201CThe Simpsons\u201D again.[content:advertisement-center]&amp;nbsp;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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