Werner Herzog: The Life Story Behind Cinema's Wildest Director

Sachrang: A Childhood Without Cinema

Werner Herzog was born on 5 September 1942 in Munich, in the middle of the Second World War, and his first years were shaped by a Germany that was being bombed, divided and rebuilt. His father was a scientist and his mother came from a family with Croatian roots; his birth name was Werner Herzog Stipetić, and he later dropped the second surname. When he was a small boy, his mother moved the family to Sachrang, a remote village in the Bavarian Alps near the Austrian border, where they lived in a farmhouse without running water or electricity in the early years. It was a childhood of mountains, snow, farm work and silence, far from the cinemas and cities where most directors grow up, and Herzog has said that he did not see a film until he was eleven years old.

Sachrang gave him an education that no film school could have provided. He learned to ski, to climb, to work with his hands, and to be alone in a landscape that did not care about him. The mountains were beautiful and indifferent, and that combination became the centre of his cinema: human beings who dream enormous dreams in places that are entirely unmoved by them. He has described the village as a place where the modern world arrived late, and where a boy could grow up believing that the world was mostly mountains, weather and work. That belief never really left him. Even his films about cities and deserts carry the feeling of a man who learned the world in a valley in Bavaria.

As a teenager he returned to Munich, where he went to school and began to read widely, teaching himself about history, literature and philosophy. He briefly studied history and German literature at the University of Munich, but he did not finish, and he never attended film school, a fact he has mentioned with pride throughout his career. Instead he learned by doing: he stole a camera, by his own account, from the Munich Film School, because he believed that making films required a camera and not a diploma, and he used it to make his first short films. The story may be partly legend, as Herzog’s stories often are, but the point of it is true to his method. He has always believed that a filmmaker should go out and film, rather than wait for permission, money or training.

The Munich of the late 1950s and early 1960s was a city full of young artists trying to rebuild German culture after the war, and Herzog found his place among them. He was not interested in the commercial cinema of the time, which he found timid and forgettable. He wanted to make films about obsession, about people who push themselves beyond reason, about landscapes that dwarf human ambition. That ambition was already visible in his first short, Herakles, made in 1962 when he was nineteen, a twelve-minute film about a bodybuilder that already showed his interest in bodies, effort and absurdity. It was a small film, but it announced a director who was not going to wait for anyone’s approval.

Herakles at Nineteen and the Refusal of Film School

Herzog made Herakles in 1962, at nineteen, and followed it with a series of short films that he financed himself, working odd jobs to pay for film stock and equipment. In 1963 he founded his own production company, Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, a decision that gave him control over his films and freed him from the need to convince a studio to fund them. He has kept that independence for his whole career, producing his own work, raising money film by film, and accepting that the price of freedom is constant financial uncertainty. It is a model that few directors can sustain for sixty years, and Herzog has sustained it by keeping his crews small, his ambitions large, and his costs as low as the subject allows.

His first feature film, Signs of Life, released in 1968, won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and announced him as a major talent of the New German Cinema, the movement that included Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders and Volker Schlöndorff. The film was set on a Greek island and told the story of a German soldier who slowly goes mad in the sun, and it already contained the elements that would define Herzog’s work: a remote landscape, a man alone with his obsession, and a camera that watches both without flinching. The award gave him credibility, but it did not give him money, and he continued to work with tiny budgets, small crews and actors who were willing to follow him into difficult places.

The films that followed in the early 1970s were stranger and more daring. Even Dwarfs Started Small, released in 1970, was shot in the Canary Islands with a cast made up entirely of little people, and it told the story of a rebellion in an institution that descends into chaos. The film was shocking to audiences of the time, and it remains controversial, but it showed Herzog’s willingness to film what other directors would not touch, and to do it without apology. He was not interested in being liked. He was interested in images that had never been seen before, and he believed that the cinema’s job was to show the audience things they had never imagined.

Through these years Herzog developed a method that he would keep for the rest of his career. He wrote his scripts quickly, often in a few days, and he treated the script as a starting point rather than a plan, allowing the landscape, the weather and the accidents of the shoot to change the film. He worked with non-actors alongside professionals, he shot in real locations rather than studios, and he accepted danger as part of the job. Other directors storyboarded every shot. Herzog went to the place, looked at it, and decided what to film. The method produced films that feel alive in a way that carefully planned films rarely do, because the audience can sense that something real is happening in front of the camera.

Aguirre and Klaus Kinski: The Volcano Years

The partnership that defined Herzog’s early career was with the actor Klaus Kinski, a man as volatile and obsessive as any character Herzog ever wrote. They made five films together, and the first of them, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, released in 1972, is one of the most celebrated films in the history of cinema. Shot in the Peruvian Amazon, it tells the story of a Spanish conquistador, Don Lope de Aguirre, who leads an expedition down the Amazon in search of El Dorado and descends into madness as the river carries his men toward death. Kinski played Aguirre with a terrifying intensity, stalking through the jungle in armour, his eyes fixed on a prize that does not exist, and Herzog filmed him against the river, the rain and the forest, until the man and the landscape seemed to be the same thing.

The shoot was as extreme as the film. The crew worked on rafts on the Amazon, in rain and heat, with little money and no safety net, and Kinski’s behaviour on set became legendary. He threatened the crew, he raged at Herzog, and at one point, according to Herzog’s later accounts, Herzog threatened Kinski with a gun to keep him from leaving the production. Whether every detail of these stories is literally true is a question Herzog himself has left open, and that is part of his method: the legend and the film feed each other. What is certain is that the film they made together is extraordinary, a portrait of madness that could not have been made in a studio, and that the tension between director and actor is visible in every frame.

They worked together again on The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser in 1974, a film based on the true story of a young man who appeared in Nuremberg in 1828 claiming to have been kept in a dark cell for his whole life. Herzog cast Bruno S., a street musician with no acting experience who had spent years in mental institutions, in the title role, and the film became a meditation on language, society and what it means to be human. It won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, and it is still considered one of Herzog’s finest films, a work of tenderness that is easy to miss if you only know him for the jungle epics.

The Kinski films continued with Woyzeck in 1979, an adaptation of Georg Büchner’s play about a soldier driven to murder, and Nosferatu the Vampyre, also in 1979, a remake of the 1922 silent classic, in which Kinski played the vampire Count Dracula opposite Isabelle Adjani. Both films were shot quickly, on small budgets, and both showed the range of the partnership: Woyzeck was intimate and claustrophobic, Nosferatu was grand and atmospheric, and Kinski was terrifying in both. By the end of the decade, Herzog and Kinski were famous as a pair, and the stories of their fights were almost as well known as the films themselves.

Kaspar Hauser, Stroszek and the Outsider Films

Between the Kinski films, Herzog made two works that show a different side of his talent, a gentleness that the jungle epics can hide. The first was The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, which treated its strange true story with a patience and a warmth that surprised critics who expected another film about madness and violence. Bruno S., the non-actor in the lead role, gave a performance of extraordinary innocence, and Herzog filmed him with a care that suggested he understood the character’s loneliness from the inside. The film asks what a society does to a person who does not understand its rules, and it asks the question without ever giving a simple answer.

The second was Stroszek, released in 1977, a film about a German street musician, played again by Bruno S., who emigrates to Wisconsin in the United States with a prostitute and an old man, hoping for a new life, and finds a different kind of loneliness instead. The film was shot in Wisconsin and in Germany, and it is one of Herzog’s funniest and saddest works, a portrait of people who dream of America and discover that America does not dream of them. The final sequence, in which a dancing chicken plays a piano in a roadside attraction while the police close in, is one of the most famous endings in cinema, and it captures Herzog’s view of the world in a single image: absurd, beautiful and indifferent.

These films matter because they show that Herzog was never only a director of extremes. He was also a director of outsiders, of people who do not fit, and he treated them with a respect that the world rarely gave them. Bruno S. was not a professional actor, and Herzog did not ask him to be one. He asked him to be himself, in front of a camera, in a story that was partly his own. That trust in non-actors is one of Herzog’s most important contributions to cinema, and it runs through his whole career, from the villagers of Aguirre to the scientists of his documentaries.

The outsider films also show Herzog’s relationship with America, a country he has always been drawn to and always kept at a distance from. Stroszek is not a film about America as a place of opportunity. It is a film about America as a place where dreams go to be tested, and where they often fail. Herzog would later move to Los Angeles, and he would make many films in America, but he never became an American director. He remained a Bavarian in California, a man who looked at the American landscape with the eyes of someone who grew up in the Alps, and who saw in it the same indifference and grandeur he had seen at home.

Fitzcarraldo: The Ship Over the Mountain

The most famous film of Herzog’s career, and the most difficult film ever made by some accounts, is Fitzcarraldo, released in 1982. It tells the story of Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, an Irishman in Peru who dreams of building an opera house in the jungle town of Iquitos, and who decides to finance it by hauling a steamship over a mountain between two rivers. Herzog did not build a model. He did not use special effects. He hauled a real steamship, weighing more than three hundred tons, over a real mountain in the Peruvian jungle, using the labour of hundreds of local people and a system of pulleys. The shoot took years, the original lead actor, Jason Robards, fell ill and was replaced by Klaus Kinski, and the production was marked by accidents, illness, conflict with local communities, and the death of crew members.

The film won Herzog the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1982, and it became a legend in its own right, the subject of books, documentaries and endless discussion about whether the effort was justified. Herzog’s own diary of the production, published as Conquest of the Useless, is a portrait of a man pushing himself and everyone around him to the edge of endurance, and it is as revealing as the film itself. The diary shows a director who believed that the film could only be true if the effort was real, that a fake ship over a fake mountain would be a lie, and that the audience would know the difference. Whether that belief is admirable or reckless is a question that has followed the film for forty years, and Herzog has never apologised for it.

Fitzcarraldo is also the film that ended the Herzog-Kinski partnership in its most dramatic form. Kinski’s behaviour on set was at its worst, the crew was exhausted, and the film was completed only because Herzog refused to stop. The documentary Burden of Dreams, filmed during the production by Les Blank, is one of the great films about filmmaking, and it shows Herzog at his most determined and his most vulnerable, a man who knows the enterprise is mad and continues anyway. The film is a monument to obsession, and it is also a warning about it, and Herzog has spent the rest of his career living with both readings.

The legacy of Fitzcarraldo is complicated. It is a great film, and it is a film that could not be made today, for reasons that have to do with safety, with respect for indigenous communities, and with the ethics of putting people at risk for art. Herzog has defended the film and the method, and he has also acknowledged the cost. The argument will continue, and it should, because the film raises questions that have no easy answers. What is certain is that no other director of his generation attempted anything on this scale, and that the attempt itself changed what people thought cinema could do.

The Documentaries: Grizzly Man and the Ends of the Earth

From the 1990s onwards, Herzog turned increasingly to documentary, and the documentaries became as famous as the features. The most widely seen of them is Grizzly Man, released in 2005, about Timothy Treadwell, an American who spent thirteen summers living among grizzly bears in Alaska and was killed by one in 2003, along with his girlfriend. Herzog used Treadwell’s own video footage, narrated it in his own unmistakable voice, and built a film about a man who believed he could live with wild animals and was wrong. The film is tender toward Treadwell and unsparing about his delusion, and it is one of the great documentaries of the century.

The voice is part of the story. Herzog narrates many of his own documentaries, and his deep, German-accented English has become one of the most recognisable voices in cinema, imitated by comedians and quoted by fans. He uses it not to explain but to reflect, to ask questions, to wonder aloud about what the images mean. The narration is philosophical rather than informational, and it gives the films a quality that no other documentarian has matched. When Herzog says that nature is violent and indifferent, the audience believes him, because the voice sounds like a man who has seen it.

Other documentaries followed the same pattern. Encounters at the End of the World, released in 2007, took him to Antarctica, where he filmed the scientists who work at McMurdo Station and the landscape that surrounds them, and it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Cave of Forgotten Dreams, released in 2010, took him into the Chauvet Cave in France, where the oldest known paintings in the world are preserved, and he filmed them in 3D, treating the cave as a cathedral. Into the Abyss, released in 2011, examined the death penalty in America through the story of two men convicted of murder in Texas. Each film is different, and each one carries the same curiosity: what do people believe, and what happens when belief meets a world that does not care?

The documentaries also show a Herzog who has mellowed without losing his edge. He is still drawn to obsession, to people who push themselves to extremes, but he films them with more patience than he did in the 1970s, and he allows them to speak for themselves. The films are less about Herzog’s will and more about the world’s strangeness, and that shift has made them accessible to audiences who never saw Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo. For many younger viewers, Herzog is first and foremost a documentarian, and the features are the surprise.

The Voice, the Walk, the Shoe: Herzog the Public Figure

Herzog has become a public figure in his own right, almost as famous as his films, and the stories about him have become part of his legend. In 1974, when the German film critic Lotte Eisner was dying in Paris, he walked from Munich to Paris, a journey of more than five hundred miles, because he believed that if he walked, she would live. He kept a diary of the walk, later published as Of Walking in Ice, and Eisner did live, for several more years. The walk was an act of faith, and it is typical of Herzog: a grand, irrational gesture, carried out with total seriousness, in the belief that the physical act matters as much as the thought behind it.

In 1980 he ate his own shoe, on camera, in the short film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, directed by Les Blank. He had bet the young filmmaker Errol Morris that if Morris ever finished his documentary Gates of Heaven, Herzog would eat his shoe, and when Morris finished it, Herzog kept his word, cooking the shoe with garlic and herbs and eating it in front of an audience at the University of California, Berkeley. The film is funny and strange, and it is also a statement about keeping promises, about the value of a bet, and about the seriousness with which Herzog treats the act of making a film.

In 2006, during an interview with the BBC in Los Angeles, he was shot by a pellet from an air rifle, and he continued the interview, bleeding slightly, refusing to make a fuss. The moment was captured on camera and became famous, and Herzog’s reaction, calm and slightly annoyed, was exactly what his admirers expected. He has also taught a film school of his own, the Rogue Film School, in which he tells young filmmakers to learn lock-picking, to read, to walk, and to make films without waiting for permission. The advice is eccentric, and it is also practical, and it sums up his philosophy: a filmmaker needs a camera, a place, and the will to go there.

The voice, the walk and the shoe have made Herzog a figure of popular culture, imitated on television, quoted on the internet, and recognised by people who have never seen his films. He has embraced that fame without letting it change his work, appearing in commercials, lending his voice to cartoons, and playing himself in films and television. The public Herzog is a character, and he knows it, but the character is built on the real man, and the real man is the one who walked to Paris and ate his shoe.

The Mandalorian, Opera and the Late Career

In the later part of his career, Herzog has moved between documentary, fiction, opera and acting, with a freedom that few directors of his age enjoy. He has directed operas, including productions in Bayreuth and elsewhere, bringing his sense of landscape and obsession to the stage. He has acted, most famously as the Client in the first season of the television series The Mandalorian in 2019, a role that introduced him to a vast new audience of Star Wars fans who had never heard of Aguirre. He played the part with a quiet menace, in his own voice, and he became a favourite of the show’s audience, a Bavarian villain in a galaxy far away.

He has also continued to make documentaries at a remarkable rate, including films about volcanoes, about the internet, about the painter and filmmaker, and about the world of science. His documentary about volcanoes, Into the Inferno, released in 2016, took him to active volcanoes around the world, and it returned to the theme that has run through his whole career: the earth is alive, it is dangerous, and human beings are small beside it. He has also written books, including novels and memoirs, and he has continued to teach, to lecture, and to encourage young filmmakers to go out and make films.

Herzog now lives in Los Angeles, where he has lived for many years, but he remains a German director in his outlook, his language and his themes. He has made films on every continent, in many languages, and he has never lost the Bavarian boy’s sense that the world is large, strange and worth looking at closely. His career has lasted more than sixty years, from Herakles in 1962 to the present, and it shows no sign of ending. He is still filming, still writing, still walking, and still insisting that the cinema’s job is to show us things we have never seen.

The late career is also a reminder that Herzog’s reputation has only grown with time. The films that were once considered too strange, too difficult or too dangerous are now taught in film schools, screened in retrospectives, and cited by directors around the world as influences. The young man who stole a camera and refused film school has become one of the most respected filmmakers alive, and the respect has not made him cautious. He is still the director who would haul a ship over a mountain, still the man who would walk to Paris, and still the voice that tells us, in that unmistakable accent, that the world is more strange than we think.

My Take:

What I admire most about Werner Herzog is that he never asked for permission, and I mean that literally. He stole a camera, he founded his own company at twenty-one, he went to the Amazon with almost no money, and he made the films he wanted to make. Most directors spend their careers waiting for someone to say yes. Herzog spent his career finding a way to do it without the yes. I think that is the most useful lesson in his whole story, because it applies to anyone who wants to make something: the permission you are waiting for is not coming, and the work will not wait for it. Go and make it, with what you have, where you are.

I also think his childhood in Sachrang matters more than the biographies usually allow. A boy who grows up in a farmhouse without electricity, in a village in the Alps, learns something about the world that a boy who grows up in a city never learns. He learns that the world is large, that it is indifferent, and that it is beautiful anyway. That is the whole of Herzog’s cinema, in a single sentence. The jungle does not care about Aguirre. The mountain does not care about Fitzcarraldo. The bears do not care about Timothy Treadwell. And yet the films are beautiful, because the men care, and their caring is the story. I do not think you can learn that in a film school. I think you learn it by growing up in Sachrang.

The Kinski partnership is the part of the story that people argue about most, and I want to be honest about it. The films they made together are masterpieces, and the behaviour on set was, by every account, appalling. I do not think those two facts cancel each other out, and I do not think they can be separated either. The tension between Herzog and Kinski is in the films, and it is part of why the films are so powerful. But I also think we should be clear-eyed about the cost: the crew, the local people, the actors who were caught between two enormous egos. Herzog has never hidden the cost, and he has never apologised for it either, and that refusal is part of what makes him a difficult figure to admire simply. I admire the films. I am less comfortable with the method, and I think that discomfort is appropriate.

Fitzcarraldo is the film I return to most, because it is the clearest test of Herzog’s philosophy. He believed that the film could only be true if the ship really went over the mountain, and he was willing to risk lives, money and years to make it true. Was he right? I am not sure. I know the film is extraordinary, and I know that no other director would have attempted it, and I know that the attempt itself is part of why we are still talking about it forty years later. But I also know that the production hurt people, and that the hurt is part of the story too. I think the honest position is to hold both thoughts at once: the film is a masterpiece, and the making of it was reckless. Herzog himself seems to hold both thoughts, and that is why his diary of the production, Conquest of the Useless, is such a remarkable book.

The documentaries are, for me, the most surprising part of the career, because they show a Herzog who learned to listen. The young director of Aguirre imposed his will on the landscape and on his actors. The older director of Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World listens to the people he films, lets them speak, and then reflects on what they have said in that extraordinary voice. I find the later films more moving than the early ones, precisely because they are less certain. The young Herzog knew what the world meant. The older Herzog wonders what it means, and the wondering is more honest. If I were introducing someone to Herzog, I would start with Grizzly Man, not with Aguirre, because Grizzly Man shows the whole man in a single film.

The voice deserves a paragraph of its own, because it has become a cultural object. That deep, German-accented English, slow, deliberate, philosophical, is now imitated by comedians and quoted by people who have never seen a Herzog film. I think the voice works because it sounds like a man who has thought about what he is saying, and who is not in a hurry to say it. In a media world that rewards speed and certainty, Herzog speaks slowly and wonders aloud, and the slowness is a form of resistance. He is telling the audience to pay attention, to look at the image, to think about what it means, and he is doing it in a voice that cannot be mistaken for anyone else’s.

The walk to Paris is the story I tell people when I want to explain Herzog, because it contains everything. A man hears that a friend is dying, and instead of sending flowers or making a phone call, he walks five hundred miles through winter, because he believes that the act of walking will keep her alive. It is irrational, it is grand, it is completely serious, and it worked, in the sense that Lotte Eisner lived. I do not believe the walk saved her life in a medical sense, and I do not think Herzog believes that either, in the end. But I believe the walk mattered, because it was an act of love carried out with the whole body, and because it shows what Herzog believes about the world: that physical acts have meaning, that the body is part of the mind, and that doing something difficult is a way of saying something true.

The shoe is the funniest part of the legend, and I think it is also the most revealing. Herzog bet Errol Morris that if Morris finished Gates of Heaven, he would eat his shoe, and when Morris finished it, Herzog cooked the shoe and ate it in front of an audience. Most people would have laughed the bet off, or pretended it was a joke. Herzog kept his word, in public, on camera, because he believed that a promise is a promise, even a foolish one. I admire that, and I think it tells you something about his cinema too: he does what he says he will do, even when it is difficult, even when it is absurd, and the audience knows it. That is why people trust his films, even when they disagree with them.

I also think about the Rogue Film School, and about what Herzog tells young filmmakers. He tells them to learn lock-picking, to read, to walk, to make films without permission. The advice sounds like a joke, and it is partly a joke, but it is also serious: a filmmaker needs to be resourceful, to be able to get into places, to understand the world, and to keep moving. I think that advice is better than most of what film schools teach, because it is about the life of a filmmaker rather than the technique. Technique can be learned. The willingness to go out and film, without money and without permission, cannot be taught, but it can be encouraged, and Herzog encourages it.

The Mandalorian role is something I find genuinely delightful, because it introduced Herzog to an audience that would never have watched Aguirre, and it did it without asking him to change. He played the Client in his own voice, with his own stillness, and Star Wars fans loved him for it. I think that is a lesson in itself: you do not have to become someone else to reach a new audience. You have to be yourself, clearly and confidently, and the audience will come to you. Herzog has been himself for sixty years, and the audience, in the end, has come to him, from film festivals to streaming television.

What I take from the whole career, finally, is a picture of a man who looked at the world and found it strange, and who spent sixty years trying to show the rest of us the strangeness. The world is strange. The mountains are indifferent, the rivers are dangerous, the bears do not care, and human beings dream impossible dreams anyway. That is Herzog’s subject, and he has never tired of it, because it is inexhaustible. I expect him to keep filming, and I expect the films to keep surprising me, because the world keeps being strange, and Herzog keeps being the man who notices.

If I had to recommend one film, I would say Grizzly Man, because it is the most accessible and the most complete. But I would also say: watch Aguirre, and then watch Fitzcarraldo, and then read Conquest of the Useless, and you will understand why this man matters. The films are not easy, and they are not always comfortable, but they are unlike anything else in cinema, and that is the highest praise I can give a director. Werner Herzog made films that no one else could have made, and he made them his way, without permission, and the cinema is larger because of it.

I also want to mention Burden of Dreams, the documentary Les Blank made during the filming of Fitzcarraldo, because it is one of the great films about filmmaking ever made. It shows Herzog exhausted, angry, determined, and sometimes doubting himself, and it shows the jungle, the rain, the machinery and the people caught in the middle. I think it is essential viewing for anyone who wants to understand Herzog, because it shows the cost of the films, not just the glory. The director in that documentary is not a legend. He is a man who has taken on too much and refuses to stop, and the refusal is both admirable and frightening. Watch the documentary and the film together, and you will see both sides of the story.

His acting work deserves a note too, because it shows the same quality as his directing: a willingness to be strange in public. He played the villain, known as the Zec, in the Tom Cruise film Jack Reacher in 2012, a cold, quiet antagonist who barely raises his voice, and he was memorable precisely because he did not act like a Hollywood villain. He also appeared in Incident at Loch Ness in 2004, a mockumentary that played with his own legend, and he has lent his voice to cartoons and commercials, always sounding unmistakably like himself. I enjoy this side of him, because it shows that he does not take his own legend too seriously, even though he takes his work very seriously indeed.

His writing is another part of the career that I think deserves more attention. Conquest of the Useless, the diary of Fitzcarraldo, is a remarkable book, full of dreams, fears and observations about the jungle, and Of Walking in Ice, the diary of the walk to Paris, is a small masterpiece of travel writing. In 2021 he published a novel, The Twilight World, about the Japanese soldier Hiroo Onoda, who refused to believe the Second World War had ended and hid in the Philippine jungle for nearly thirty years. The subject is pure Herzog: a man, an obsession, a jungle, and a refusal to accept the world as it is. The novel shows that his imagination is not limited to film, and that the themes that drive his cinema also drive his prose.

Finally, I think about his influence, and about the young filmmakers who have learned from him. His Rogue Film School has taught students to make films without permission, to read, to walk, to learn practical skills, and to go to the places that scare them. The advice is eccentric, and it is also the most practical advice a young filmmaker can receive, because it is about the life rather than the technique. The directors who have followed him, from the documentary world to fiction, carry his example with them: the camera, the place, the will to go there. That is a legacy that will outlast any single film, and it is one that Herzog has built deliberately, by teaching as well as by making.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where did Werner Herzog grow up?

He was born in Munich on 5 September 1942, but he spent much of his childhood in Sachrang, a remote village in the Bavarian Alps, where his family lived in a farmhouse without running water or electricity in the early years. He has said he did not see a film until he was eleven.

Did Werner Herzog go to film school?

No, he never attended film school. He briefly studied history and literature at the University of Munich, then taught himself filmmaking, making his first short film Herakles in 1962 when he was nineteen and founding his own production company in 1963.

What is Werner Herzog’s most famous film?

Fitzcarraldo from 1982 is his most famous film, telling the story of a man who hauls a real steamship over a mountain in the Peruvian jungle. Herzog actually did haul the ship, and the production is one of the most legendary in cinema history. Aguirre, the Wrath of God from 1972 is his other landmark film.

What happened between Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski?

They made five films together, including Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, and their relationship was famously volatile, with shouting matches and threats on set. Herzog later made the documentary My Best Fiend in 1999 about their partnership.

Is Werner Herzog really the narrator of his documentaries?

Yes, he narrates many of his own documentaries, including Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the World and Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and his deep, German-accented voice has become one of the most recognisable in cinema.

Did Werner Herzog really eat his shoe and walk to Paris?

Yes to both, as he has described them himself. In 1974 he walked from Munich to Paris when the film critic Lotte Eisner was dying, keeping a diary later published as Of Walking in Ice. In 1980 he ate a shoe on camera after losing a bet with Errol Morris about finishing the film Gates of Heaven.