Herzog journeys south ... way south

PROFILE. When Werner Herzog stood at the South Pole, he had the odd sensation of knowing every direction was north. Whichever way he stepped was a different time zone: 2 p.m. to the left, 3 a.m. to the right.

Likewise, Herzog has for decades been dipping into different times and different worlds. But the 65-year-old filmmaker doesn’t merely tiptoe across borders, he leads film productions where they wouldn’t normally go: the Peruvian rain forest, the Alaskan plains, the Laos jungle.

Herzog’s latest expedition is to Antarctica for the new documentary “Encounters at the End of the World,” for which he went seeking something besides, as he narrates, “fluffy penguins.”

As ever, Herzog is interested in the meeting of man and nature. The German-born filmmaker documents the “ugly mining town” of McMurdo Station and the odd dreamers who have ended up at the bottom of the world.

He was first drawn to the project after being captivated by underwater footage - which he used in his 2005 “The Wild Blue Yonder” — of a diver beneath the Antarctic ice: a science-fiction-like landscape he compares to “a fever dream of an alien.”

One of the men in “Encounters” describes humans as a witness for the universe, which experiences its glory through our eyes and ears. Herzog says although the man is a tractor driver, he studied philosophy and comparative literature.

“This man, in a way, sets the tone for the film. He says, ‘I fell in love with the world.’ And all of a sudden, it struck me: Yes, that’s all that has carried me through all of my films. All of sudden, it’s more clear than in any of my movies — this kind of falling in love with the world.”