Werner Herzog Biography Quotes 8 Report mistakes

Early Life and Formation
Werner Herzog was born Werner Herzog Stipetic on September 5, 1942, in Munich, Germany, and came of age amid the devastation and scarcity that followed the Second World War. His family moved to the remote Bavarian village of Sachrang, where he grew up largely without modern conveniences. He has often noted that he did not see a film until his teenage years, a late encounter that deepened rather than diminished his devotion to cinema. In his early twenties he worked night shifts in a steel factory to fund his first productions and founded Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, with his half-brother Lucki Stipetic later becoming a crucial producing partner. Early on he was encouraged by the critic and historian Lotte Eisner, whose mentorship became so important that in 1974, when she was gravely ill in Paris, he undertook a winter pilgrimage on foot to her bedside, later chronicled in his book Of Walking in Ice.

New German Cinema and Breakthrough
Herzog emerged as a central figure of the New German Cinema alongside contemporaries such as Wim Wenders, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Volker Schlondorff. His first feature, Signs of Life (1968), shot with cinematographer Thomas Mauch, won a Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and established a distinctive voice: spare dialogue, rigorous framing, and an intense fascination with landscapes and obsession. The early 1970s brought two crucial collaborators. With the volcanic actor Klaus Kinski, Herzog forged one of cinema's most combustible partnerships; and with the experimental musician Florian Fricke and Popol Vuh, he shaped a sonic language of trance and reverie that became inseparable from his images.

Aguirre, Bruno S., and the Outsiders
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), produced with Walter Saxer and photographed by Thomas Mauch in the Peruvian rainforest, followed a mad conquistador drifting toward annihilation, with Kinski's performance giving Herzog's themes their most iconic mask. Herzog also sought nonprofessional performers whose lives resonated with his stories. He cast Bruno S., a Berlin street musician with a difficult past, as the lead in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) and later in Stroszek (1977). In both films, the fragile dignity of an outsider meets a world that will not accommodate him, a collision staged with the tenderness and severity that would become Herzog's hallmark.

Fitzcarraldo and the Edge of the Possible
Fitzcarraldo (1982) dramatized an Irish dreamer who drags a steamship over a mountain to bring opera to the Amazon. Herzog insisted on moving a real ship over a real hill, an act of audacity that mirrored the film's subject. Kinski again starred, with Claudia Cardinale as a luminous counterweight. The production's hardships and Herzog's relentless determination were immortalized by Les Blank in the documentary Burden of Dreams (1982). Fitzcarraldo earned Herzog the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival and cemented the legend of a filmmaker who would test the limits of filmmaking itself. The volatile interplay between Herzog and Kinski, both adversarial and symbiotic, was later confronted by Herzog in My Best Fiend (1999), a frank remembrance of art, mania, and enduring fascination.

Philosophy of Nonfiction and Global Journeys
Herzog's documentaries form a parallel body of work, driven by what he calls ecstatic truth, a pursuit he articulated in the Minnesota Declaration of 1999. Long before that, Land of Silence and Darkness (1971) and Fata Morgana (1971) transformed observation into metaphysical inquiry. With Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997), about the aviator Dieter Dengler, Herzog combined reenactment and testimony to explore survival and will; he later reframed the story as the feature Rescue Dawn (2006), starring Christian Bale. His collaboration with cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger, beginning in the mid-1990s, gave these journeys a fluid, searching camera across diverse terrains: the Alaskan wilds in Grizzly Man (2005), with the tragic figure of Timothy Treadwell; the Antarctic research stations in Encounters at the End of the World (2007), which brought him an Academy Award nomination; and prehistoric art in Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), an immersion in the Chauvet Cave that fused science, myth, and carefully orchestrated 3D imagery.

Fiction After the 1990s
Even as his documentaries expanded, Herzog continued to make dramas that stretched genre and tone. The Wild Blue Yonder (2005) and The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), starring Nicolas Cage, display his flair for the uncanny and the absurd nested inside crime and science fiction. Later works, including Queen of the Desert (2015) and Family Romance, LLC (2019), show a filmmaker still probing the dislocations of modern life and the strangeness that lies just beneath practical surfaces.

Allies, Adversaries, and Music
Herzog's films are a tapestry of collaborators. Producers Lucki Stipetic and Walter Saxer sustained projects through years of risk. Cinematographers Thomas Mauch and Peter Zeitlinger gave his images their hypnotic gravity. Popol Vuh's Florian Fricke provided a hallmark sound in the 1970s and 1980s; later, composers such as Ernst Reijseger worked with him on projects like Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Actors Isabelle Adjani and Bruno Ganz haunted Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979); Eva Mattes brought a fierce clarity to Woyzeck (1979); and Claudia Cardinale, Christian Bale, and Nicolas Cage, among others, extended his reach into new eras and audiences. The young Errol Morris, encouraged by Herzog, completed Gates of Heaven after Herzog promised to eat his shoe if he did; the resulting stunt, filmed by Les Blank as Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980), became a parable of creative tenacity.

Acting, Opera, and Teaching
Herzog's deadpan presence and singular voice have led to an acting career of surprising highlights, from an unnerving villain in Jack Reacher (2012) to the enigmatic Client in The Mandalorian. He has also directed opera internationally, guided by a belief that staging must reveal raw emotion and elemental conflict rather than decorative spectacle. In the late 2000s he launched the Rogue Film School, a traveling seminar that emphasizes practical resourcefulness, storytelling, and what he calls the athleticism of filmmaking.

Personal Life and Legacy
Herzog has lived and worked on several continents, settling for many years in Los Angeles while remaining deeply connected to Germany. His personal life has intersected with his art: he had a relationship with the actress Eva Mattes, with whom he has a daughter, the photographer Hanna Mattes; he later married the photographer Lena Herzog. Among his children is the filmmaker and writer Rudolf Herzog, while Lucki Stipetic remained central to his professional base. If the Kinski collaborations made him famous, the wider circle of allies, from Lotte Eisner and Les Blank to Peter Zeitlinger and Popol Vuh, sustained an ongoing experiment in cinema that crosses borders between fiction and documentary.

Herzog's body of work centers on dreamers and obsessives, the dignity of risk, and nature as both magnificent and indifferent. From Kaspar Hauser to Fitzcarraldo, from the Antarctic ice to Paleolithic caves, he returns to a belief that truth lies in the encounter between human will and overwhelming reality. With awards that include the Best Director prize at Cannes and an Academy Award nomination for documentary, he stands as one of the defining filmmakers of his generation. His ideas, like ecstatic truth, have influenced directors across the world, while his voice, literal and metaphorical, continues to guide audiences through the strange, luminous territories where his films so often dwell.

Our collection contains 8 quotes who is written by Werner, under the main topics: Truth - Movie - Technology - Stress - Confidence.

Other people realated to Werner: Roger Ebert (Critic), Eva Mendes (Actress), Richard Thompson (Musician), Robert Pattinson (Actor)