Herzog’s advice to students at his Rogue Film School—where he teaches how to pick locks and forge shooting permits—is “read, read, read, read, read, read, read—if you do not read, you’ll never be a filmmaker,” but he isn’t interested in talking about books: “I don’t want to rattle down 500 titles to you.” The only texts he mentions are those included on the Rogue Film School’s mandatory reading list, among them The Warren Commission Report, the near-1,000-page document that concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. The report has often been questioned—Woody Allen said he was going to give up comedy to write “a nonfiction version"—but Herzog says this is "stupid baloney”; other doubters, such as Oliver Stone (whose film JFK proposes a rival narrative), simply haven’t read it. Herzog has and calls it “incredibly conclusive” but also “a great crime story.” In his own nonfiction films, Herzog wants to tell stories and he doesn’t feel beholden to fact. His approach to documentary is an alternative to cinema vérité, the observational aesthetic that proceeds “as if presenting facts was everything.” Just because something is factually true, he argues, “it does not constitute truth per se.” Herzog likes to respond to and collaborate with his subjects; if he bends fact—by inventing dialogue, for instance—it is to the ends of “truth.” The Manhattan phone directory provides millions of correct entries, he says, “but it doesn’t inspire you”; in the film, he says it doesn’t tell you what Manhattanites dream. Instead of fact, which is the “accountant’s truth,” he is after the kind of “ecstatic truth” available to poetry: “These moments are rare but I’m trying to find them, which is why I have had different goals from some of my colleagues.”