Trying to pin down Werner Herzog's career is an impossible task. Since his turbulent early years making the likes of Fitzcarraldo (1982) – shot in the Peruvian jungle with muse Klaus Kinski – he's mastered myriad cinematic forms, from a documentary in the Antarctic (Encounters at the Edge of the World, 2007) to thriller Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, in which Nicolas Cage starred as a maniacal, crack-smoking cop. Today most people know the 70-year-old, Munich-born auteur as the critically acclaimed documentary maker of films like Grizzly Man (2005), Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) and Into the Abyss (2011).

Fewer know him for his acting, but since 1998 he's been popping up in the unlikeliest English-language movies, from 2008 poker mockumentary The Grand to a short film the following years as the voice of a plastic bag. But it's his role as The Zec, the unflappable criminal overlord up against Tom Cruise in mystery thriller Jack Reacher that's going to have you squirming in your seat. Herzog used his deadpan turn of phrase to tell us why he's so good at being bad.

You're very scary as Russian capo The Zec.

That was the point. The only point.

Did you have any inspiration for the character?

No, it's all standardisations of course. Russians are very sweet people, very deep, very different than you would imagine. I know what I'm talking about because I’m married to a Russian woman from Siberia.

Tell us about The Zec's signature scene – he tells an underling to chew off his own fingers...

That scene was longer. I was very quiet and just kept encouraging (the victim) and the studio got scared. They wanted PG-13, which means no sex, no physical violence, no swearing, no blasphemy. And I'm very quietly inviting him to eat his fingers off – it was so scary the studio wanted to cut it down. (Writer/director) Chris McQuarrie cut it down and still the studio was scared about it. So we used a third, even more cut-down version and they're still scared.

If you find it scary then everything is good.

How did you get into the character of The Zec?

I could literally step from this table and if there were a camera and actors ready, I would step into it and I would be scary.

As such an esteemed filmmaker yourself, is it tempting to tell everybody what to do?

No, I wouldn't interfere at all. Absolutely not. And I have no problems following direction. There was one tiny, tiny moment where I made a remark that was picked up, but I shouldn't even have said it.

Did Tom Cruise apologise for pointing a gun in your face?

No, that was part of the deal. We are in movies.

Did you know he's a big fan of yours?

I didn't know that. He's very respectful and apparently has seen some of my films. But he's seen some acting of mine and he apparently wanted to have me as a real badass, a really bad and dangerous character. They have much larger parts for bad guys but they have weapons, and they needed somebody who looked dangerous before he even spoke.

What's changed in the business, for better or worse?

Changes are coming. I see it and I don't want to grow old about certain things. Two nights ago I did live streaming of a rock concert (by The Killers) over the internet. Eighteen cameras, no post-production. So I set the visual styling, and we had internet connectivity so the audience could participate and send in photos, which was part of the show. I'm always curious about what's coming at me. Of course there have been huge changes in the last 45–50 years of cinema: great innovations like digital effects, although I do not use them. There's phenomenal possibility out there. Audiences have changed, drastically.

But a good story is still a good story.

Of course, and that's going to outlive anything. Whatever is coming at us in forms of digital effects and franchised moviemaking, the long-range survival is great storytelling. That's what's good about Jack Reacher.

Is acting just for fun or does it give you a different perspective on directing?

The answer is very simple: I love everything that has to do with cinema. I like writing a screenplay, directing, editing and producing, I just love it all. I do what comes at me swinging most wildly and then I deal with it. I've never had a career because I've never planned step one, step two. It's all come at me like burglars in the night. And you're there in your kitchen and you hear the noise and if one of them comes at you swinging more wildly you have to deal with that one first.

Is that how you've come across most of your projects?

Take Grizzly Man. I swear to God I was not looking for a film. I'd been in the office of a producer who had been very friendly to me and I paid him a courtesy visit and after ten minutes I got up to leave and reached in my pocket, and there were lots of papers and half-eaten lunch salad and I realised my car keys were not in my pocket, they were somewhere on the desk. We were looking for my car keys and he spots something and pushes it to me and says, 'Read this, we're planning a very interesting film.' So I read it and ten minutes later I went straight back and asked about the status of the film, who was directing it. The producer, who is also a director, said, 'I'm kind of directing it,' and I knew then and there he wasn't completely sure. So I stretched my hand to him and said, 'I will direct it,' and I was in business. I was not looking for a film – I was looking for my car keys.

Are you a journalist at heart?

No, I am a poet. If you look at Into the Abyss, I wanted to interview a man on death row, and the authorities had no objection because I came without a catalogue of questions. I wanted a discourse with this person who was going to be executed eight days later and had no idea what I was going to say to him.

Were there any similarities between working with Klaus Kinski and Tom Cruise?

Kinski was an extraordinary professional and so is Tom Cruise. Of course there was some other problems with Kinski but bottom-line, he was a phenomenal professional, and it's always very easy to work with great professionals. Tom Cruise has an enormous intensity.

Would you like to direct a film with Tom Cruise?

I would need a real good story, one that would fit. I wouldn't randomly have him in a film where he wouldn't be the right one.

Your work has primarily been in documentaries lately. Do you have a passion for telling the truth?

No, it's just that in the last ten years I've made more documentaries. I've also made five feature films in the last ten years and that's easily overlooked because some of my recent documentaries were very successful, and all of a sudden people think you make documentaries. I just make movies.

You're working almost constantly. Are you a workaholic?

That word couldn't be more wrong, because I work very calmly and quietly. For example, on Bad Lieutenant my days of shooting were normally over by 2pm or 3pm, not a single hour over time. I brought the film in two days under schedule and $2.6 million under budget, which is unheard of in Hollywood. Now the producer wants to marry me.

My team got nervous, asking, 'What about the coverage?' I had to ask my assistant what the term meant. Is it something to do with insurance? No, no, no, they said, shoot from this angle here and that angle there. I said no, I've shot everything I need for the screen. At one point Nicholas Cage said, 'Silence everyone for a moment.' Everybody falls silent and he says, 'Finally, somebody who knows what he’s doing.’

So what do you think of someone like David Fincher who does 60, 70 takes?

Who is this?

Zodiac, Fight Club, Se7en, The Social Network…

I haven't seen any of his films. I do not know who he is. But let him do it if the result is good.

Cindy Gallop wants you to have good sex, for real. In 2009 the New York City-based advertising executive gave a four-minute talk at a TED conference that became one of the event’s most talked about presentations. “I date younger men, predominantly men in their 20s,” was her opening line, and she went on to discuss the obvious influence of hardcore porn on the sex techniques of her young lovers. According to Gallop, internet porn has created a generation of young people who think that “what you see in hardcore pornography is the way that you have sex.” Basically, in the absence of proper sex-ed, porn has become the default sex-educator.

Gallop used her TED talk to unveil makelovenotporn.com, a witty, non-judgmental website that compares sex in the “porn world” to that in the “real world”. For example: “Porn World: Women come all the time in positions where nothing is going anywhere near the clit. Real World: There has to be some sort of rhythmic pressure on the clit in just the right way to make a woman come. Can be public bone, tongue, fingers, something else entirely. But it has to be there.” Oh, how true.

The site became a worldwide phenomenon, leading Gallop to publish the book Make Love Not Porn: Technology's Hardcore Impact on Human Behavior. Four years later, she’s now preparing to launch makelovenotporn.tv, a video-based social-media site that aims to revolutionise sexual entertainment by offering videos of real people having real sex. Say goodbye to smoke and mirrors and anal bleaching –this is the real deal!

The best thing about makelovenotporn.com is that it’s funny. It’s so much less awkward to talk about sex when there’s humour involved.
Exactly. I wrote all the copy myself, and I deliberately made it lighthearted to defuse the embarrassment that exists around talking about sex. Also, when I was creating the site I said to my designer, ‘I don't want the slightest whiff of education or public service about it,’ because that’s the kiss of death where kids are concerned. I said, ‘I want you to take your design cues from the world of hardcore porn.’

And were you surprised by the response?
The response has been so extraordinary. I’ve been receiving emails about the site literally every day for the past four years. They tend to go something like this: ‘I came across your TED talk, I went to your website, I shared them both with my girlfriend/boyfriend/lover, and off the back of that we had a great conversation, and now our sex life is so much better.’ Essentially, the site is working as an objective, outside platform that helps people have the conversations they need to have.

You’re like the Santa Claus of good sex! So can you explain your new venture, makelovenotporn.tv?
Well, the sheer amount of emails I received made me feel that I had a personal responsibility to take Make Love Not Porn forward, in a way that would make it more far-reaching and effective. One of my philosophies – born of my advertising background – is ‘communication through demonstration’. So I decided to take every dynamic that currently exists in social media, and apply them to the one area no other social platform has gone or will ever dare to go: sex. I want to socialise sex, and to make real-world sex socially acceptable, and therefore just as socially shareable as anything else we share on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. So makelovenotporn.tv is a user-generated, crowdsourced platform on which anybody from anywhere in the world can submit videos of themselves having real-world sex.

And how do you define real-world sex?
Real-world sex is not performing for the camera; it's funny, messy, human, and ridiculous. It's the shit that really happens. For example, the total nightmare of putting the condom on. Guys are supposed to be able to do this like magic, but as we all know it often doesn't happen like that, and sometimes things go soft, juices go dry and libidos get derailed. Or fanny farts – everyone does it, nothing to be ashamed of. Also, I find it so amusing when people talk about porn being “dirty”, because porn actually sanitises sex. In porn nobody has hair, you never actually see anybody using lube, or having sex on their period, when actually that’s when girls are the horniest! So we want categories like ‘period sex’ – bring it on, blood everywhere – no big deal, take the tampon out with your teeth.

So your site will show actual orgasms, not the fake, overdramatic screamed orgasms common in mainstream porn?
Totally. For example, our very first submission was from a young straight couple, and as I was watching it, no matter how hot what they were doing to each other was, I just could not stop looking at the girl’s face. And the reason was because she was loving it. She was so aroused that it became adorable. You never see faces like that in porn.

Will there be a fee for users?
We charge $5 per video for a three-week streaming rental. We also charge $5 to submit a video to the site, which is a curation fee, as my team and I will review all submissions. But then we revenue share – we give you, the contributor, 50% of the revenue that your makelovenotporn.TV video generates.

Whoa, so one can potentially make a lot of money.
Absolutely! In theory, your video could hit the YouTube holy grail of a million rentals, and at $5 a rental, the revenue is a nice amount of cash. That’s why we like to call ourselves ‘the Etsy of Sexy’.

Does makelovenotporn.tv have a primary ambition?
The message is pure and simple: talk about it. The issue I'm tackling is not porn, I'm tackling our society’s lack of an open, healthy dialogue around sex and porn. Because people find it bizarrely difficult to talk about sex with the people they're actually having it with, because they’re terrified of hurting the other person’s feelings, or putting them off, or derailing the entire relationship. But at the same time, people really want to please their partners and make them happy, so they take cues on how to please from anywhere they can, and if the only cues people have are from porn, then those are the ones they take, to not very good effect.

And is it only men who are being misled by this sex-ed-through-porn trend?
Not at all. I talk to young men who say, ‘My girlfriend is putting on a performance in bed and it’s getting in the way of a real connection.’ One guy said, ‘I've been getting a lot of pornified blowjobs lately. I don't know whether she's really into me or if it’s what she thinks she should be doing.' So it cuts both ways.

That makes sense.
And porn does a massive disservice for men, because it makes them think that sex is entirely dick-centric – it’s all about how big it is and how hard it is. For example, the other night I was with a 25-year-old, and for whatever reason he was having some trouble getting it up. I didn’t mind, but obviously he cared massively, and so as unfortunately often happens in these situations, the entire session became about his need to get it up and cum. And I was thinking, well, there’s actually a whole different way to approach us being in bed together, and it doesn't have to be all about addressing your penis. Great sex is about the whole body. I deliberately spend time telling the men I sleep with how beautiful they are, and praising various parts of their bodies that aren't their dick, and they're stunned when I do this, because that’s not something they've even conceptualised. So for a lot of men, porn is causing unnecessary neuroses and insecurity.

Do you think people truly have difficulty understanding that porn is not an accurate representation of real sex? That it’s sensationalised for entertainment, just like regular films?
I had this conversation with some students in Oxford recently, because they were saying, ‘Come on, how could anybody think that porn is real? It's like disaster movies or police chases.’ But here's the difference: you can watch The Fast and the Furious, but everybody knows and talks about how to drive in real life. But with sex there’s no counterpoint, because we don't talk about how sex operates in the real world. That’s why our tagline is 'Pro-Sex, Pro-Porn, and Pro-Knowing-the-Difference'.

You have said you think makelovenotporn.tv could actually benefit the mainstream porn industry. How so?
Porn is a male-dominated industry. Now, the best of all possible worlds, in every sector, is one that is designed by men and women equally. I explain to guys that us girls like porn too – who doesn’t like to watch other people fucking?! – but often we have to watch porn that’s made for men. So I'm watching porn and trying to get off, but I can't avoid processing it through the lens of female experience. I can’t help but think, ‘I know that hurts – if she keeps her leg up one more moment she's going to get a cramp, I know she's not actually coming,’ etc. But I want to see real-life sex, because I’m much more in tune emotionally with something I can relate to. The world of porn hasn't even begun to experience what women can bring to the table. Make Love Not Porn is a venture founded by a woman, conceived by a woman, and built by a tech team that is more female than male. So that's part of how we want to help the porn industry – by demonstrating that it’s possible to create a disruptive, innovative new business model, and to leverage human sexuality entertainment in a whole different way.