“I saw a man with a huge big dog, [and] we knew somebody called Wee Tam, in Edinburgh. It seemed like it was a good idea in terms of one person looking up at the stars - Wee Tam and the Big Huge, just like the vastness of the universe.”

Both Werner Herzog and Florian Fricke have a vision that is almost religious in its intensity but lately a divergence has appeared in their ways of seeing.

Florian has no time for blissed-out hippy-trippy muzak and feels that it’s not enough to show a phoney happiness all the time, and yet despite the awesome powers at play in the light and shade of Popol Vuh he does not see himself as being at one with his friend.

Herzog revels in conflict: When he was refused permision to unleash thousands of rats on the town of Delft for a scene in ‘Nosferatu’, he met the truck bringing the rats back with a tractor on which he perched himself, forcing the truck to go in the opposite direction.

“Too much the darkness”, says Florian.