Twelve years before airship engineer Graham Dorrington went to the jungle with Werner Herzog, a similar expedition with his friend, renowned nature filmmaker Dieter Plage ended in disaster. He spoke to us about working with Herzog and what he hopes The White Diamond will achieve.

BBC Four: How did you get involved with Werner Herzog?
Graham Dorrington: I had been trying to get an airship project going for 10 years. I flew an airship in Borneo in 1996 and tried and failed to get someone interested in filming that. I did more than 30 flights over Borneo but then gave up. A German production company suggested making a film but I was lukewarm about their treatment. When Herzog's son, Rudolf, started working at the company I initially didn't realise who he was, but one day we were talking about films and I said that I loved Herzog's Fitzcarraldo. Then the penny dropped. The company suggested that Rudolf give my story to Werner and it all ran from there.

BBC Four: What did you want to get out of the film and what did he want?
Graham Dorrington: I didn't want to make a standard documentary. As I said, I love Fitzcarraldo and I wanted that different sort of flavour, which was probably a big mistake. Liking Werner's films isn't necessarily a good reason to be in one of them. Let's be frank, in his documentaries, he basically portrays his chief protagonists as slightly mad. Although, when you've got a director like Werner Herzog you're not going to turn that down. But my motivation wasn't to appease my needs. I wanted to make a tribute to Dieter Plage.

BBC Four: Has the film turned out as you'd hoped?
Graham Dorrington: I think Werner is quite happy with it. I've had two privileges now: working with Werner and working with Dieter Plage. Dieter was a great man. Not only a fantastic cinematographer but he really did start the nature film genre with his Survival films of the 1970s. I thought The White Diamond would be more like Herzog's film Lessons of Darkness: more laconic, with more flying scenes over the forest, which is incredibly beautiful. I developed the airships but it was Dieter Plage's vision to fly over forests and use them for rainforest conservation. You could use infra-red cameras and observe population levels of animals like orang-utans, but more than that, the biodiversity in the canopy. We've sent probes to Mars with enormous expense but the life-science opportunities for an airship, at a fraction of what was spent on Beagle 2, are massive. The canopy is a prodigiously bio-diverse region that needs to be explored. I'm just hoping that this film will act as a springboard to encourage someone to fund that.

BBC Four: Did you prepare much with Herzog?
Graham Dorrington: There was no preparation at all. He films in a very utilitarian way. He's a craftsman; he just comes in and does his job. But he did allow me considerable latitude to suggest what I wanted. I watched all of Werner's films before we started and The White Diamond does reference his past work in many ways. I developed this theme of gravity and levity. Herzog liked that because it ties in to one of his ideas. If you look at Heart of Glass there's this incredible scene of mists and that theme of lightness. But lots of things I suggested he rejected. It was great though, because he did listen: he took what he liked and rejected what he didn't, but it did mean that I could steer things slightly.

BBC Four: What do you think the main themes were for Herzog?
Graham Dorrington: Many of his films are about a battle over nature - he calls nature "continuous murder", which is a different perspective from what you see in most wildlife films. Most wildlife films are about lovely animals like meerkats or exploring a wonderful ecosystem. That sort of approach is so dominant that Herzog pulls back from that. I tried to get in a scene about saving the rainforest and he rejected that immediately. His idea that nature is a brutal place full of murder and cruel indifference is probably closer to what most biologists think. You see the Nosferatu elements there. I think death is always in Werner Herzog's mind.

BBC Four: Knowing a bit about Herzog's working practices, were you at all wary of him?
Graham Dorrington: Absolutely. At one point in the film Mark Anthony, the other character, refers to Werner as "thunder" and that really summed up how we felt. He is a very austere man, with sharp blue eyes and you do wonder what he's thinking all the time. He has a tattoo of Death on his arm and you do think that each encounter could go anywhere.

BBC Four: Herzog is famous for fabricating certain elements in his documentaries. Did you experience any of that?
Graham Dorrington: As the film went on I did repeat phrases that Werner used. I balked at one point when he wanted me to talk about curses, but he would often insist on a particular wording. For instance, the scene with the champagne bottle at the falls was all his language although the idea was mine. Also, some things were acted. The argument with Herzog in the film is completely fake - pure acting. Why did I do it? Because I said to Werner that if I was going to do the film then we'd have to do it 100% his way; it would be no good for him to tell me how to design an airship and I couldn't tell him how to direct a film. So the argument was set up, but it did underline the feelings of a lot of people about who was really in control. On the other hand, there is a scene at the end where I had to think very intensely about Dieter Plage which brought back a lot of sadness and was very genuine.

BBC Four: Was there much antagonism making the film?
Graham Dorrington: Not with Werner. He was always a gentleman, but there was with others in the production team. Werner brought along Walter Saxer, who was the production manager on Fitzcarraldo and many of his films. Saxer was absolutely derogatory about Herzog all the time. Why would Herzog use someone who hates him? Saxer says he made Fitzcarraldo - him and Klaus Kinski. This Kinski-Herzog argument is clearer to me now. From all the portrayals of Werner you'd expect him to be a very dictatorial person with a very clear idea of what he wanted. But in fact he is a very inclusive director. He looks for ideas and then goes with what he wants. That's why I think this debate about Herzog and Kinski has gone on for so many years, as I suspect they were both egging each other on.

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