"Incident at Loch Ness" itself may be less interesting than the total multimedia hoax project -- there are Web sites soberly claiming that Penn had a whale airlifted into the lake to play the role of the monster, or that he hushed up the deaths of two crew members. Herzog, however, is highly enjoyable, "playing" himself not as a hothead artist but as a rational man trying to complete a job while surrounded by hopeless idiots.

Penn is, if anything, even funnier; his portrayal of himself as a self-involved dunderhead Machiavelli who's trying to scam a great director reportedly enraged preview audiences. "People get that there's a hoax going on here," says Penn, in a later phone call from his production office. "But they don't necessarily get what it is. They don't seem to ask themselves, 'Why would Zak Penn make a movie that makes himself look like a total asshole?'" (Penn also promises that the forthcoming DVD version will make the precise dimensions of the hoax clear.)

"I get e-mails from people wanting to defend me from this bastard producer, Zak Penn, who is abusing me," Herzog says drily. Still, he is anxious to reiterate that he isn't the director of "Incident at Loch Ness" and this isn't really another of the meta-movies about his troubled career, in the vein of Les Blank's "Burden of Dreams" (about the making of "Fitzcarraldo") or his own "My Best Fiend" (about Herzog's tortured relationship with actor Klaus Kinski).

Herzog admits he has wound up on the other side of the camera too many times. "It's not really healthy" for a director, he says. "But in this case I was an actor, and that's something different. It's not about me -- that was just a pretext."

Penn's idea to use Loch Ness as the focal point for an elaborate spoof project was "immediately intriguing," Herzog says. "Loch Ness is such a wonderful candidate for exploring the strange borderline between truth and fiction. If Nessie is a figment of our collective fantasy, maybe our collective paranoia, it's a wonderful toy -- a way to play intelligently with the notion of what constitutes fact and what constitutes pure invention, as well as maybe semi-invention."

Even if Herzog is acting in "Incident at Loch Ness," most of his dialogue is unscripted and most of the ideas he expresses about the monster hunt are his own. "Zak organized the film about real characters," he says. "What I say in the film about the need for monsters in our type of civilization, that's what I really think. There should be no doubt to anyone that we were not really searching for the physical monster, but for something else: What sort of collective mind-set makes us believe in the monster? Why do we need the monster? It has to do with being a highly advanced, technical civilization that has a deep longing to go back into the dark, where monsters lurk that are basically prehistoric. They seem to be more necessary than ever."

As Penn puts it, "Werner Herzog lends this film an off-the-charts credibility." There isn't much similarity between "Incident at Loch Ness" and Herzog's own quasi-documentaries like "La Soufrière" or "Wodaabe: Herdsmen of the Sun" (or "Lessons of Darkness," his extraordinary, little-seen study of the Kuwait oil fires after the 1991 Gulf War). But his reputation as a filmmaker who sees the categories of fiction and reality as artificial was crucial to establishing the "Loch Ness" hoax in the first place.

"For me, never anything is ambiguous," Herzog insists (his English is fluent but still inflected by German syntax). "My films are very straightforward and easy to understand. Documentary filmmaking as we see it on TV is very boring. I call it the 'accountant's truth.' It only shows you the surface of what is supposed to be true. I am always trying to dig much deeper, illuminate things and illuminate an audience, instead of boring an audience. I've always been after the ecstasy of truth."

After 42 years as a director and almost 50 films (he's only 62, but started young), Herzog now finds himself an international legend who is forced to make movies on the cheap. His last few pictures, like the 2001 feature "Invincible" or the documentaries "Wheel of Time" and "Little Dieter Needs to Fly," have been basically unseen in North America. He has difficulty raising money and can no longer reliably reach the worldwide art-house audience he once did (let alone a mass audience). Acting in other people's films is, among other things, a chance to make some money and stay on the radar screen.

He has absolutely no regrets, and he says he'll keep making personal, unpredictable films until he's dead: "Movements trickle away, fade away. There are always a couple of figures just sticking around and struggling on, and I'm one of those. The films that I'm making today have the same spirit of -- I wouldn't say adventure -- something daring about them. Maybe it's the courage to articulate your dreams."

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