Calling to talk about his new movie, "The Bad Lieutenant 2: Port of Call New Orleans," which opens next Wednesday, and is improbably good.

I say improbably because it's a remake of the Abel Ferrara/Harvey Keitel cult B classic - and doing a remake seems like that last thing that might interest Herzog, one of the most original moviemakers in history (though he also did a bang-up remake of "Nosferatu").

So what is the great German filmmaker (who now lives in L.A.) doing in somebody else's playpen?

He wanted, he said, to create "a new form of film noir."

This was two years ago, when Herzog said he sensed the country was on the verge of some kind of great misfortune, and needed a new kind of noir.

"You see, the Great Depression created a certain kind of literature. It was fertile ground for Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler and the movies that followed. I sensed something like the financial collapse was coming before we started filming, and had this pervasive feeling that this is the right time for film noir.

"Now, we're not going to imitate Humphrey Bogart in the forties; this has to be a step ahead, a new form of noir," said Herzog, who believes other filmmakers and artists are on the same, new-noir wavelength.

"It will take a variety of shapes. I was amazed by how wonderfully, abysmally dark that last 'Batman' was. Almost a premonition of something coming at us," said Herzog, who had watched "the Dark Knight" to see collaborator Christian Bale ("Rescue Dawn").

In BL2, Herzog's neo-Bogart is none other than Nicolas Cage. Herzog rouses him from a mid-career snooze to inspire one of his most animated performances in years.

Herzog said the slumping Cage wasn't forced on him - in fact, he was attracted to BL2 because Cage was on board.

"Nicolas is touched by the grace of God," said Herzog, explaining, I guess, why Cage won't be disappointed if he doesn't win an Oscar.

But the real star may be New Orleans, which turned out to be the ideal site for his neo-noir, in part because it already wore the scars of the kind of disaster that Herzog felt in the air.

"The city is totally unique. When you see it on the screen, it is almost like a second character," he said. "There's a [psychological] climate that's suggested by the city."

And by what has happened to it. Cage plays a detective whose descent from hero to corrupt officer, indifferent to the city's most vulnerable victims, reflects the city's unfortunate recent history.

"Of course, what happened was a natural disaster, and a failure of engineering - the levees broke. But the real horror was the collapse of civility and the neglect of the government," Herzog said.

Cage's character, he said, is a creature born of that horror, a man who goes over to a dark side that would make Darth Vader look like Snow White.

"There is a joy of doing things wildly out of the rules, to be violent, debased. The bliss of evil," said Herzog, who credits Cage for capturing that bliss.

"He's absolutely formidable, and his performance is something you don't expect."

Yep. Especially if you saw him in "Knowing."