Best Known As: German filmmaker who made Aguirre: The Wrath of God
Name at birth: Werner Stipetic
Film critics can't seem to decide whether Werner Herzog is a genius or charlatan, but his position as one of the most well-known German "new wave" filmmakers of the late 20th century is assured. Known for making allegorical films in exotic locations, Werner Herzog worked briefly in American television before making documentaries and short subjects. He has a reputation for an intense -- some would say obsessive -- vision and commitment, but naysayers harp on his storytelling deficiencies. The movies that made his career starred Klaus Kinski and include Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1973), Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1978) and Fitzcarraldo (1982). In recent years he has had more commercial success and found a broader audiences with the films Grizzly Man (2005, about Timothy Treadwell) and Rescue Dawn (2006, starring Christian Bale) as Herzog's friend Dieter Dengler).
Herzog made a documentary about Kinski called My Best Fiend (1999, original title Mein liebster Feind)... The 1982 documentary Burden of Dreams was a behind-the-scenes look at the filming of Fitzcarraldo.
(b. Sept. 5, 1942, Munich, Ger.) German filmmaker. He won two awards for his first feature film, Signs of Life (1967), which introduced the theme of a descent into madness that was to reappear in his later films, most powerfully in Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Nosferatu (1979), and Fitzcarraldo (1982). He documented his tumultuous friendship with actor Klaus Kinski in the film My Best Fiend (1999). His surreal and exotic films were among the best of the highly praised postwar West German cinema.
In the motion picture world, West German filmmaker Werner Herzog (born 1942) is a clear anomaly. At the age of 19, and with no formal training, Herzog made his first film, which he financed through nightshift work as a welder. Over the next 40 - something years, Herzog produced nearly 50films and was still going strong in his 60s. Most of Herzog's films feature society's castoffs - dwarfs and aborigines, the deaf, blind, and mentally impaired, the lonely and desperate. He loves to document the lives of ordinary people who possess extraordinary madness in pursuit of their dreams. Raw and intimate, Herzog's films are intended to awaken viewers' perceptions to new possibilities.
Besides filming extraordinary people, Herzog films in extraordinary places. He avoids filming in studios because he believes it interferes with spontaneity. Instead, Herzog takes his viewers, literally, to the far corners of the earth. He has shot films in the South American jungle, the Alaskan forests, and the African deserts. He once journeyed to the evacuated island of Guadeloupe to film a volcano, though it did not erupt as planned. "He's a guy who not only eschews the norms of the industry but will go make a movie with no crew and no set and no director's chair and no trailers and no anything," screenwriter Zak Penn told the San Francisco Chronicle. "I think that that adventurous spirit appeals to people."
Grew up in Bomb - Raided Germany
Herzog was born September 5, 1942, in Munich, Germany. Shortly after his birth, his parents separated. Growing up, Herzog was known as Werner Stipetić which was his mother, Elizabeth's, maiden name. He later adopted the last name Herzog, which means "duke" in German, because he felt it had dramatic flair. When Herzog was born, World War II was in full force. Within days of his birth, a bomb destroyed the neighbor's house. Elizabeth Stipetić figured her children would be safer out of the city, so she took Herzog and his older brother, Tilbert, to Sachrang, a remote mountain village on the German - Austrian border. Sachrang proved to be a safe haven from the war zone, but the isolation meant Werner grew up in a place very different from his peers. "My childhood was totally separate from the outside world," Herzog told Paul Cronin, editor of Herzog on Herzog. "As a child I knew nothing of cinema, and even telephones did not exist for me. A car was an absolute sensation . . . I did not know what a banana was until I was twelve and I did not make my first telephone call until I was seventeen." The house had no running water. In lieu of a mattress, his mother stuffed dried ferns into a linen bag for a makeshift bed.
Herzog later said that growing up in a world without conveniences bolstered his imagination and ingenuity. He noted to Cronin that while growing up in the ruins of a city was hard on adults, it was satisfying for a child. "Kids in the cities took over whole bombed - out blocks and would declare the remnants of buildings their own to play in where great adventures were acted out. . . . Everyone I know who spent their early childhood in the ruins of post - war Germany raves about that time. It was anarchy in the best sense of the word. There were no ruling fathers around and no rules to follow. We had to invent everything from scratch." By 1954, the family was back in Munich and living together in a boarding - house room. Herzog's family now numbered four - his half - brother, Lucki, had been born. A self - described loner, Herzog spent much of his childhood reading.
Early on, Elizabeth Stipetić realized her son experienced the world differently than others. Speaking to Cronin, she expressed her thoughts this way: "When he was in school, Werner never learned anything. He never read the books he was supposed to read, he never studied, he never knew what he was supposed to know, it seemed. But in reality, Werner always knew everything. His senses were remarkable. If he heard the slightest sound, ten years later he would remember it precisely . . . and maybe use it some way. But he is absolutely unable to explain anything. He knows, he sees, he understands, but he cannot explain. That is not his nature. Everything goes into him. If it comes out, it comes out transformed."
Discovered the Silver Screen
Herzog was 11 when he saw his first films at school. These films featured Eskimos and pygmies and Herzog was unimpressed. He also saw other B - grade American films, like Tarzan, but remained indifferent to the medium. Then one day, while watching a Fu Manchu movie, Herzog had a revelation. The film contained a scene where a stuntman fell 60 feet, doing a somersault and peculiar kick on his way down. The sequence, recognizable by the funny kick, appeared in the film a second time. At first, Herzog did not understand how that was possible. "Before this moment I thought it was some kind of reality I had been watching on screen, that the film was something like a documentary," Herzog explained in the book Herzog on Herzog. "All of a sudden I could see how the film was being narrated and edited, how tension and suspense were created, and from that day on cinema was something different for me."
During his teens, Herzog disappeared from home periodically. He liked to walk and hitchhike around Germany. At 16, he ran away to the English port city of Manchester to work on the docks. By 17, he was raising money to make films, attending school during the day and working at a steel mill at night. Previously, he had had a script accepted by a producer who canceled the project when he found out Herzog was just a teen. After that, Herzog knew he would have to finance his films himself. At 19, and with no training, Herzog produced his first film, Herakles, (Hercules) released in 1962. The short film mostly involved editing. Herzog took images of a tragic Le Mans raceway accident and commingled it with footage of body builders. Later in life, he called the film stupid, but nonetheless, said it provided a good apprenticeship for him.
Traveled to United States and Mexico
At 22, Herzog accepted a Fulbright scholarship to study in the United States. He chose a school in Pittsburgh. The city appealed to him because of its working - class people. He did not like it, however, and left after three days. He did not have enough money to return home. In time, Herzog landed a job making films for NASA. Just as he was starting, however, a security check revealed Herzog had violated his student visa by dropping out of school. Realizing he was about to be shipped out of the country, Herzog took his rusty Volkswagen to New York City and lived in it over the course of a brutal winter, hanging out with the homeless. Next, Herzog traveled to Mexico and earned a living smuggling items across the border, mostly delivering televisions to the Mexican natives.
Herzog contends that his wanderings were time well spent and helped formulate a base of human experience from which to draw on in his moviemaking. In Herzog on Herzog, he gave this advice to aspiring filmmakers: "Go out to where the real world is, go work as a bouncer in a sex - club, a warden in a lunatic asylum or in a slaughterhouse. Walk on foot, learn languages, learn a craft or trade that has nothing to do with cinema. Filmmaking must have experience of life at its foundation. I know that so much of what is in my films is not just invention, it is very much life itself, my own life. You can tell when you read [Joseph] Conrad or [Ernest] Hemingway how much real life is in those books." Herzog thinks of filmmaking the same way.
Churned out Films
In 1966, Herzog established Werner Herzog Filmproduktion and began filming again. His 1967 short film, Letzte Worte (Last Words), won the major prize at Germany's Oberhausen Film Festival. In 1968, he produced his first feature - length film, Lebenszeichen (Signs of Life), a treatise on self - expression. Signs of Life told the story of a German soldier sent to an isolated Mediterranean island to wait out the end of the war. The man ends up going insane. The film won the 1968 Bundesfilmpreis (German National Film Award) for best feature.
Herzog's second feature film, 1970's Auch Zwerge Haben Klein Angefangen (Even Dwarfs Started Small), was banned in Germany because critics said it promoted fascism, a system of government characterized by a central, one - party dictatorship. Though perhaps symbolic of world politics, the film itself was about dwarfs who inhabited an asylum and the rebellion and mayhem that ensued.
Herzog's first international breakthrough came in 1972 with Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, the Wrath of God). The movie marked his first collaboration with German actor Klaus Kinski. The two had met years before in Munich when they lived in the same boardinghouse, though Herzog was just a child. Filmed on location in the Peruvian jungle, Aguirre explores the human penchant for power and madness as it follows the story of Spanish conquistadors searching for El Dorado, the legendary Incan city of gold. The film also touches on the themes of disease and brutality.
Scored at Cannes
Herzog won further acclaim with his film Jeder für Sich und Gott Gegen Alle (Every Man for Himself and God Against All/The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser). Though the film is not a documentary, it aims to tell the true story of Kaspar Hauser, a boy found standing in the town square at Nuremberg, Germany, in 1828. The boy could not walk or even talk because he had been left alone in a dark cellar since birth. Herzog took a chance and cast a former mental patient known as Bruno S. in the title role. The results were amazing. The film won the Special Jury Prize at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival. Herzog scored again at Cannes in 1982 with Fitzcarraldo, which won the award for best director. The film chronicled the journey of a real - life Irish expatriate, who toiled to bring opera to the depths of the jungle in the 1890s. In the end, the man is defeated by nature. In re - creating the tale, Herzog's crew had to drag a 320 - ton steamboat over a mountain in the Amazon jungle.
Herzog has also received awards for his documentaries. In 1998, he won the International Documentary Association Award for Distinguished Documentary Achievement for Little Dieter Needs to Fly. The film told the story of Vietnam Prisoner of War survivor Dieter Dengler. Herzog explored other aspects of war in Lekionen in Finsternis (Lessons of Darkness), released in 1992. The documentary, which aired on the Discovery Channel, discussed the environmental impact of the 1991 gulf war in Kuwait.
Many of Herzog's films never made any money, but when they did, he took the money and invested it into another film. Many times, Herzog knew he did not have money for a film, but he started shooting anyway, sleeping in his car when he could not afford a hotel. "Financing of films only comes when the fire ignites other fires," he said in Herzog on Herzog. Early on, while watching other aspiring filmmakers fail, he realized that it was not money, but organization and commitment, that finished films.
Continued Filmmaking into His 60s
In 2004, Herzog was still going strong and released The White Diamond, a film that followed Graham Dorrington through the Guyana rainforest canopy in a zeppelin - type aircraft he had invented to reach the remote areas. A previous craft had crashed, killing a friend. In the spring of 2005, Herzog had another film set for release. Titled Wake for Galileo, the movie features scientists and their creations intermingled with footage from space taken during the launch of the Galileo probe.
Along the way, Herzog also found time for love, marrying actress Martje Grohmann. He also has a son, Rudolph Amos Ahmed Herzog. Despite his prolific oeuvre and awards, Herzog has continued to be a marginal character in the history of filmmaking. He was never appreciated in his own country and was somewhat ignored in others. Writing in Film Comment, Michael Atkinson said Herzog deserves another look because "few filmmakers have such a powerful and clearly impassioned point of view, spilling off every frame and possessed of every found location, natural wonder, accident and butterfly. . . . The crucial idea about Herzog's films is that they shouldn't be defined as narratives but as manifestations of his gaze, his zealous imperative to see and experience, which has a quality and weight unique in movies. It's not style; it's essence."
Books
The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, edited by Timothy Corrigan, Methuen Inc., 1986.
Herzog on Herzog, edited by Paul Cronin, Faber and Faber Ltd., 2002.
Herzog, Werner, 1942-, German director, screenwriter, and producer; originally named Werner Stipetic. One of the leading filmmakers in contemporary German cinema, the prolific Herzog is known for his vivid and poetic films. He made short films during the 1960s, made his first feature, Signs of Life, in 1968, and came to wide public attention with Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), a spectacular portrayal of the tropical rain forest and the character of a mad conquistador. Breathtaking landscape, acutely observed detail, mysterious heroes, and tales of danger and escape fill his work, which enthusiasts have called visionary and some critics have branded self-indulgent. His other feature films include The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), Heart of Glass (1976), Stroszek (1977), Nosferatu (1978), Woyzeck (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1982; the subject of Les Blank's revealing 1982 documentary Burden of Dreams), Hard to Be a God (1989), and the Hollywood-made Invincible (2002).
Herzog has also made a group of varied and original documentaries. They include Lessons of Darkness (1992), which pictures a devastated Kuwait in the wake of the Persian Gulf War; My Best Fiend: Klaus Kinski (1999), a portrait of the brilliant and wildly unpredictable actor who starred in five of his films; Wheel of Time (2003), exploring Tibetan Buddhism; and Grizzly Man (2005), the story of a man devoted to wild Alaskan bears who was ultimately killed by one. The plot of his documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997)-a Vietnam War pilot is shot down, imprisoned, and escapes-was recounted in his Hollywood feature Rescue Dawn (2007). Herzog has also directed several television features and operas.
Bibliography
See his Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of "Fitzcarraldo" (2004, tr. 2009); Herzog on Herzog (2002), ed. by P. Cronin; study by T. Corrigan, ed. (1986); B. Presser, ed., Werner Herzog (2003).
Career Highlights: Burden of Dreams, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Aguirre, the Wrath of God
First Major Screen Credit: Herakles (1962)
Biography
One of the most influential filmmakers in New German Cinema and one of the most extreme personalities in film per se, larger-than-life Werner Herzog quickly gained recognition not only for creating some of the most fantastic narratives in the history of the medium, but for pushing himself and his crew to absurd and unprecedented lengths, again and again, in order to achieve the effects he demanded.
Born Werner Stipetic in Munich on September 5, 1942, Herzog came of age in Sachrang, Bavaria, amid extreme poverty and destitution, because his father (with whom he nonetheless had a superb relationship) could never hold down a job for any decent length of time. When their parents divorced, eleven-year-old Werner and his two brothers moved with their Yugoslavian mother to Munich. Though something of an underachiever in elementary and middle school, Herzog nevertheless demonstrated frightening intelligence from an early age, and recognized his future vocation in his early teens, when he began ferociously authoring one script after another and submitting the scenarios to German film producers. He also cultivated a strong affinity for (and aptitude with) poetry, gleaning a number of literary awards as a young man.
After Herzog turned seventeen, a German film producer optioned one of his screenplays, then promptly destroyed the contract when he discovered the author's age. The young maverick concluded from this experience that it would become necessary, in the future, to produce his own work, so he accepted a position as an assembly line welder in the Munich area to raise funding, laboring all night from 8pm to 6am and dozing off during the school day. Circa 1962, 20-year-old Herzog enrolled in the University of Munich as a history and literature student, and produced his first motion picture, the twelve minute Herakles, his second, the 1964 short Spiel im Sand (Game in the Sand), and his third, the 1966 pacifist tract Die Beispiellose Verteidigung der Festung Deutschkreutz (The Unprecedented Defense of Fortress Deutschkreuz. Throughout this period and thereafter, he scoffed at the idea of attending a film school, convinced that one cannot learn filmmaking in a classroom, but only via hands-on experience. In 1963, he established his own production banner, Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, designed to give him complete autonomy over all of his projects.
Meanwhile, Herzog acquired an insatiable degree of wanderlust that never left him. He won a scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh in 1965 or '66, and immigrated to the States, where he held down a job at a television station, purportedly shot films for NASA, and sustained himself for a time by smuggling television sets over the Mexican border. He returned to Deutschland in 1967, where he won the top prize at the Oberhausen Film Festival for his short Letzte Worte (Last Words), then migrated to the Greek islands to shoot his premier feature, Lebenszeichen (Signs of Life, 1968), a story about a stricken German infantryman (Peter Brogle) who lapses into unbridled insanity. Herzog began production only a couple of weeks after the infamous Greek military junta of '67, and thus battled untold numbers of on-set obstacles and extermal interferences. The film nevertheless drew well-rounded critical praise, won the German National Film award for a debut feature (with its stipend of 350,000 Deutsch Marks) and ran at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center.
Never one to slow down, the director followed Lebenszeichen with two shorts in 1969, Massnahmen gegen Fanatiker (Precautions Against Fanatics) and Die Fliegenden Arzte von Ostafrika (The Flying Doctors of East Africa), and a 1970 documentary about the disabled, Behinderte Zukunft (Handicapped Future). His second feature film, the 1970 Even Dwarfs Started Small, depicts the daily activities of a bunch of dwarfs and midgets in a German penal community, who descend into an anarchic state. Horrified, the German authorities banned it, but critics everywhere raved over its disturbing allegorical portrait of life, particularly Richard Roud.
Herzog issued his third feature, the critical darling and arthouse mainstay Fata Morgana, in 1971; it juxtaposes, in non-narrative form, a series of fantastic and mesmeric images of footage that Herzog edits into an a rhythmic structure. After completing the documentary Land des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit (Land of Silence and Darkness) that same year, Herzog embarked on the first of a series of fruitful collaborations with the maniacally intense German actor Klaus Kinski, Aguirre the Wrath of God (1972). This story of insane Spanish conquistador Don Lope de Aguirre, (Kinski) and his ill-fated quest to locate El Dorado, the Incan city of gold, forced Herzog, Kinski and the crew to venture deep into the heart of the Peruvian jungles, where they battled now-legendary conditions to obtain the images. Critics and the public instantly heralded the film as a masterwork.
Herzog temporarily withdrew from filmmaking for a period of time, then emerged with The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser (1975) - the Wild Child-like true story of a strange, sixteen-year-old boy who turns up in Bavaria circa 1828, sans the ability to read, write, talk or walk -- and the uber-cerebral drama Heart of Glass, about the death of a manufacturer in a nineteenth century German town dominated almost exclusively by a glass factory, and that event's horrid repercussions on the surrounding community. Though Heart's beautiful, haunting images stunned everyone, it became more notorious for Herzog's on-set antics: he mass-hypnotized his entire crew on a daily basis to drive them into a state of hysteria as the cameras rolled. Critics disagreed on the meaning of this enigmatic film; some read it as an allegorical parable about the inevitable collapse of contemporary society, others read it literally, about the death of a community. All marveled at the almost otherworldly craftsmanship of Herzog and his cinematographer, Jorg Schmidt-Reitwein.
After a 1975 documentary, the 47-minute Die grosse Ekstase des Bildschnitzers Steiner (The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner), Herzog produced his 1977 Stroszek, a tale of three German social outcasts who immigrate to Wisconsin, plunging themselves into the "American Dream," only to encounter misery, destitution, and death. In the late seventies, Herzog masterfully re-filmed F.W. Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu (1978) with Klaus Kinski as his vampiric lead; he followed it up with yet another Kinski collaboration, a big screen adaptation of Georg Buchner's stage work Woyzeck. This tale - about a soldier exploited by a local doctor and driven to madness by his wife's infidelity - returned Herzog to familiar thematic territory and drew additional critical praise. He followed it up with another small work -- God's Angry Man (1980), a scathing 44-minute examination of money-hungry American televangelist Dr. Gene Scott, produced for German television.
Between 1980 and 1982 (coincidentally, just after Francis Coppola wrapped Apocalypse Now (1979)), Herzog managed to top the insanity of that film shoot with the most difficult production in movie history. With Fitzcarraldo, he sought to tell the story of Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, a nineteenth century eccentric and opera lover, determined to bring the music of Enrico Caruso to the Peruvian indians by actually pulling a steamship over the top of a mountain that divides two rivers Only one catch: the real Fitzgerald never completed his task, whereas Herzog insisted on devising a system to follow through with it. During the production, a plane crashed and killed several locals, lead Jason Robards acquired amoebic dysentery and had to be replaced with Kinski, second-billed Mick Jagger abandoned the shoot to tour with the Rolling Stones (forcing Herzog to re-write the script) the central steamers became mired in the mud and could not be moved until rainy season, a tribal war nearly erupted, and the steamer that the film crew attempted to drag over the top of the mountain became stuck midway. Famed documentarists Maureen Gosling and Les Blank foresaw the calamities prior to the shoot, and filmed the ordeal in their haunting documentary Burden of Dreams (1982), a work that was itself lauded as a masterpiece. The picture apparently ends with Herzog - who had started to crack by the end of the production - revealing his own insanity by damning all of mankind and referring himself to a mental institution.
In 1984, Herzog filmed two acclaimed shorts: The Green Glow of the Mountains - a document of a mountain climbing exhibition in Pakhistan -- and The Ballad of the Little Soldier, a film of a journey to the land of the Miskito Indians during a Sandinistan war. Herzog shot his feature Where the Green Ants Dream (1985) in Australia; it concerns a mining corporation's ill-advised attempts to extract much-needed materials from sacred Aboriginal ground, and earned mediocre reactions from critics.
After another lapse of several years from filmmaking, Herzog embarked on his final collaboration with Kinski, the adventure drama Cobra Verde. It stars Kinski as a Brazilian plantation owner who voyages to West Africa to recruit slaves, but instead participates in overthrowing the local monarch, and sets himself up as emperor.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Herzog largely drifted away from feature filmmaking and into hardcore documentary work, with an endless series of small, acclaimed nonfiction films. In fact, he leaned so heavily on documenting actual events that Herzog features became an increasingly rare occurrence, and a noteworthy, even seminal event. His documentaries from this period include: Lessons of Darkness (1992), Bells from the Deep: Faith and Superstition in Russia (1993), The Transformation of the World into Music (1994), Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997), Wings of Hope (2000), Wheel of Time (2003) and Incident at Loch Ness (2004). The White Diamond (2004) - an account of Dr. Graham Dorrington's unique, man-powered airship, designed to explore the jungles of Guyana - and Grizzly Man (2005) - comprised of footage shot by ill-fated "Grizzly Bear expert" Timothy Treadwell just before his death in a bear attack - elicited particularly strong acclaim.
Herzog's abandonment of features came to a temporary end twice during the early 2000s. 2001's Invincible dramatizes the story of a Jewish man who rose to power with the Nazis, only to renounce his party affiliations and swear allegiance to his people as Hitler crested the height of fame and authority. The director's 2006 Rescue Dawn culled inspiration from his 1997 Dieter Needs to Fly, with a fictional recreation of the true events captured in that documentary. Christian Bale stars as Dieter Dengler, a U.S. fighter pilot shot down over Vietnam, and held in a Vietnamese prison camp, who leads a successful escape with his inmates.
In addition to his directing and screenwriting work, Herzog has acted in a number of films, perhaps most memorably in Les Blank's 1980 documentary Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. The film was the result of a bet Herzog once had with an American film student: Herzog told the student -- who was always talking about making a film but never actually doing it -- that if he actually completed the film, Herzog would eat his own shoe. The student was Errol Morris, who later became known for his documentaries Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line, and Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, and he did indeed make his film. Having lost the bet, Herzog made good on his promise, and the result was one of the stranger moments in documentary history. In Paul Cox's 1983 picture Man of Flowers, Herzog plays the central character's stern, disciplinarian father during a wordless flashback. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide
Herzog was born Werner Herzog Stipetić (German pronunciation: [ʃtɪpɛtɪtʃ]) to Dietrich Herzog and Elizabeth Stipetic in Munich. His family moved to the remote Bavarian village of Sachrang (nestled in the Chiemgau Alps), after the house next to theirs was destroyed during the bombing at the close of World War II.[2] When he was 12, he and his family moved back to Munich.
The same year, Herzog was told to sing in front of his class at school and he adamantly refused. He was almost expelled for this and until the age of 18 listened to no music, sang no songs and studied no instruments. He later said that he would easily give 10 years from his life to be able to play an instrument. At 14, he was inspired by an encyclopedia entry about film-making which he says provided him with "everything I needed to get myself started" as a film-maker—that, and the 35 mm camera that the young Herzog stole from the Munich Film School.[3] In the commentary for Aguirre, the Wrath of God, he states, "I don't consider it theft—it was just a necessity—I had some sort of natural right for a camera, a tool to work with." He studied at the University of Munich despite earning a scholarship to Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
In the early 1960s, Herzog worked nightshifts as a welder in a steel factory to help fund his first films.
Herzog has been married three times and has three children. In 1967, he married Martje Grohmann,[4] with whom he had a son in 1973, Rudolph Amos Achmed,[5] who is a film producer and director as well as the author of several non-fiction books. In 1980, his daughter, Hanna Mattes (now a photographer and an artist), was born to Eva Mattes. In 1987, Herzog was divorced from Grohmann; later the same year he married Christine Maria Ebenberger. Their son, Simon Herzog, who attends Columbia University, was born in 1989. Herzog and Ebenberger divorced in 1994. In 1995 Herzog moved to the United States and in 1999 married photographer Lena Pisetski, now Lena Herzog. They live in Los Angeles.
In January 2006 actor Joaquin Phoenix overturned his car on a road above Sunset Boulevard. Herzog, who lived nearby, helped him get out of it.[6] A few days later, while giving an interview to Mark Kermode for the BBC, Herzog was shot on film with an air rifle by an unknown individual. Herzog continued the interview and showed his wound on camera but acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, remarking "It is not a significant bullet."[7]
Herzog is also a Jury Member for the digital studio Filmaka, a platform for undiscovered filmmakers to show their work to industry professionals.[8]
Herzog once promised to eat his shoe if Errol Morris completed the movie project on pet cemeteries that he had been working on, in order to challenge and motivate Morris, whom Herzog perceived as incapable of following up on the projects he conceived. In 1978 when the film Gates of Heaven premiered, Werner Herzog cooked and publicly ate his shoe, an event later incorporated into a short documentary Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe by Les Blank. At the event, Herzog suggested that he hoped the act would serve to encourage anyone having difficulty bringing a project to fruition.
Herzog's films have received considerable critical acclaim and achieved popularity on the art house circuit. They have also been the subject of controversy in regard to their themes and messages, especially the circumstances surrounding their creation. A notable example is Fitzcarraldo, in which the obsessiveness of the central character was mirrored by the director during the making of the film, as shown in Burden of Dreams, a documentary filmed during the making of Fitzcarraldo. His treatment of subjects has been characterized as Wagnerian in its scope, as Fitzcarraldo and his later film Invincible (2001) are directly inspired by opera, or operatic themes. He is proud of never using storyboards and often improvising large parts of the script, as he explains on the commentary track to Aguirre, The Wrath of God.
Mauch worked with Herzog on ten films: starting with Signs of Life and Last Words and ending with Fitzcarraldo. He helped to create hallucinogenic atmosphere in Aguirre and realistic style of Stroszek. Mauch won Film Award in Gold and National Society of Film Critics Awards for Aguirre. He was Herzog's first choise to be cinematographer during Cobra Verde, but after a perpetual torrent of verbal abuse from Kinski, Mauch walked out on the project. That was Mauch and Herzog's final collaboration.
Reitwein worked with Herzog on seventeen films. Reitwein was Thomas Mauch's assistant camera during Even Dwarfs Started Small. His first independent work for Herzog was Precautions Against Fanatics in 1969. He helped to create poetical atmosphere of Fata Morgana, Heart of Glass, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Nosferatu. He won Film Award in Gold for Heart of Glass and Where the green ants dream during German Film Awards. He last collaborated with Herzog during Pilgrimage in 2001.
Zeitlinger collaborated with Herzog on eleven films, from Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices (1995) to My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (2010), including Rescue Dawn, Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World.
Producers
Walter Saxer
Saxer produced sixteen of Herzog's films, including Nosferatu and The White Diamond. He worked as Sound Department during seven of Herzog's films, including The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner and Echoes from a Somber Empire. He co-wrote Scream of Stone which Herzog directed. Saxer appeard as himself in Herzog's My Best Feind and in Les Blank's Burden of Dreams, in which he was perpetual torrented of verbal abuse from Kinski.
Lucki is Herzog's half-brother. He also produced several Herzog films, including Aguirre and Invincible. Stipetic is a head of Werner Herzog Productions. He won Bavarian Film Award in 1988 for Cobra Verde and International Documentary Association Award for Little Dieter Needs to Fly in 1998. He was also nominated for an Emmy Award in 1998.
Beate Mainka is a film editor. She worked with Herzog on twenty films, from Signs of Life and Last Words (both from 1968) to Where the Green Ants Dream (1984).
Bini is a film editor. He collaborated with Herzog on eleven films, from Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) to Bad Lieutenant (2009).
Costumes designers
Ann Poppel
Poppel is a costume designer. She collaborated with Herzog on four films, including Nosferatu the Vampyre and Scream of Stone.
Gisela Storch
Storch is a costume designer. She with Herzog on six films: The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Heart of Glass, Nosferatu the Vampyre, Woyzeck, Fitzcarraldo and Cobra Verde. She was nominated for a Saturn Award for Nosferatu the Vampire in 1979.
Gierke collaborated with Herzog on seven films and several operas. He was Production Designer during The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Nosferatu the Vampyre and Fitzcarraldo. As a Set Decorator he worked on Heart of Glass and Woyzeck, as Stage Designer on operas: Lohengrin and Giovanna d'Arco and as Costume Designer on film The Transformation of the World Into Music. Gierke shot additional still photographs on Stroszek 's set. He appeared twice in Herzog's film The Transformation of the World Into Music as himself and in Herzog's TV realisation of opera Giovanna d'Arco. Von Gierke won Film Award in Gold for The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser during German Film Awards and Silver Berlin Bear for Nosferatu, during Berlin International Film Festival.
Popol Vuh was a German Krautrock band founded by pianist and keyboardist Florian Fricke. The band took its name from the Popol Vuh, a manuscript of Quiché Maya kingdom, after watching Herzog's Fata Morgana (in which Lotte Eisner read Popol Vuh's parts). The band composed music for eight Herzog's films: Aguirre, the Wrath of God, The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, Heart of Glass, Nosferatu, The Dark Glow of the Mountains, Fitzcarraldo, Cobra Verde and My Best Fiend. Their compositions were also used by Herzog in Rescue Dawn. Florian Fricke made a cameo as a pianist in Signs of Life and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.
Filmography
All films were directed and written (or co-written) by Werner Herzog:
Wo Die Grünen Ameisen Träumen (Hanser 1984, ISBN 3446141065)
Nosferatu (Ulbulibri, 1984)
Fitzcarraldo, Nosferatu, Stroszek (Mazarine 1982)
Screenplays: Aguirre, The Wrath of God, Every Man For Himself and God Against All & Land of Silence and Darkness (translated by Alan Greenberg & Martje Herzog; Tanam, New York, ISBN 0934378037)
Drebücher III: Stroszek, Nosferatu (Hanser 1979)
Drebücher II: Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, Jeder Fü sich Und gott Gegen Alle, Land des Schwiegens Und der Dunkelheit (Hanser 1977)
Drebücher I: Lebenszeichen, Auch Zwerge Haben Klein Angefangen, Fata Morgana (Hanser 1977)
Co-writer:
Alan Greenberg & Herbert Achternbusch. Heart of Glass 1976
