According to Werner Herzog, "Invention, imagination, and fabrication can fathom deeper truths than cinéma vérité can." Though a relatively straightforward documentary by Herzog standards, the 1998 film Little Dieter Needs To Fly still veers well away from vérité territory, beginning with an opening scene in which Herzog and his subject meet in a tattoo parlor to compare their visions of Death. The Dieter of the title is Dieter Dengler, whose real life seems dramatic enough to have been a Herzog invention. Raised in impoverished post-war Germany, Dengler, who died in 2001, was driven by a fascination with planes triggered by the childhood bombing of his village. Immigrating to America at 18, he joined the Air Force, taking the first step on a twisting journey that eventually led to his imprisonment in Laos during the Vietnam War. These events, and Dengler's matter-of-fact descriptions of the horrific indignities suffered at the hands of his captors, make up the film's bulk. In Laos, Herzog and his crew help him revisit his ordeal, even going so far as to film locals who bind him and march him through the jungle as the Viet Cong did. The choice may seem questionable, but Dengler hardly minds, and the strange re-creation only enhances the almost dreamlike structure of the film, which brings in everything from Army training footage to Dvorak to elucidate its subject's journey. Dengler's unwavering voice dominates Little Dieter, and around it Herzog constructs a mysterious film about the strange forms human compulsions can take, the paths they open, and the fates they forge. Vérité it's not. But when, after telling a chilling tale involving a stolen wedding ring and an amputated finger, Dengler puts his arm around the shaken Laotian man beside him and assures him it's just a story retold for a movie, and his own finger will not be cut off, Herzog's methods of fathoming deeper truths feel remarkably right.