Introduction

Several of his films come in the English language. He directed 5 movie star German actor Klaus Kinski: Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Nosferatu, Woyzeck, Fitzcarraldo, and Cobra Verde. Inside 1999 he directed & narrated a documentary film My Best Fiend, a retrospective in his typically-rocky relationship using Kinski. He is noted for his filmic interest inside forearm peoples & considered one of a better post-war directors. He is typically associated by having a German New Wave movement, along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and features heroes by owning impossible dreams or even humans sustaining unique talents within obscure fields.

Early life

Herzog grew higher inside the remote village around Bavaria. At a age of long dozen his personal shared an flat using Klaus Kinski. All about this, Herzog recalled, "I knew at that moment that I would be a film director and that I would direct Kinski".

within the early sixties Herzog worked as the welder in a steelworks to help fund his 1st films.

He received his post-secondary education at two a University of Munich & Duquesne University around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Inside 1967 Herzog married Marje Grohmann. A marriage produced leash tykes. Around 1987 a few divorced. Herzog is now (2005) married to Lena Herzog.

Trivia

When walked in foot from either Munich to Paris to visit an sickly friend, critic Lotte Eisner. A own experience is recounted inside Herzog's book Of Walking inside Ice (ISBN 0934378010).

It used to be that ate his have shoe when losing the bet to fellow film producer Errol Morris. Morris was interested around making the film all about the pet graveyard (Gates of Heaven) and Werner believed Morris was non challenging plenty to produce a film. This story resulted in the film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980).

Narrowly avoided existence on the commercial airliner that crashed in the Amazonian Rainforest with only a single survivor (Juliane Koepcke) on December 24, 1971. Herzog was location reconnoitring for Aguirre, Wrath of God and had his reservation cancelled referable overbooking. This incident inspired Herzog cinematography Wings of Hope together using Koepcke.

Quotes

"If I had to climb into hell and wrestle the devil himself for one of my films, I would do it."

"I shouldn't make movies. I should go to a lunatic asylum."

"Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character. To suppress this is dangerous. It is an approach that works the other way too: sometimes the footage has amazing qualities that you did not expect."

"Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates."

"Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film."

"Coincidences always happen if you keep your mind open, while storyboards remain the instruments of cowards who do not trust in their own imagination and who are slaves of a matrix... If you get used to planning your shots based solely on aesthetics, you are never that far from kitsch."

"Stupidity is the devil. Look in the eye of a chicken and you'll know. It's the most horrifying, cannibalistic, and nightmarish creature in this world."

"I have never been one of those who cares about happiness. Happiness is a strange notion. I am just not made for it. It has never been a goal of mine; I do not think in those terms."

"I am not an artist and never have been. Rather I am like a craftsman and feel very close to the mediaeval artisans who produced their work anonymously and who, along with their apprentices, had a true feeling for the physical materials they were working with."

"You are all wrong." After faced by having a jeer & roar of a 1,500 booing patrons world health organization feared his Lessons of Darkness at the Berlin Film Festival

"Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness."

"Actually, for some time now I have given some thought to opening a film school. But if I did start one up you would only be allowed to fill out an application form after you have walked alone on foot, let's say from Madrid to Kiev, a distance of about five thousand kilometres. While walking, write. Write about your experiences and give me your notebooks. I would be able to tell who had really walked the distance and who had not. While you are walking you would learn much more about filmmaking and what it truly involves than you ever would sitting in a classroom. During your voyage you will learn more about what your future holds than in five years at film school. Your experiences would be the very opposite of academic knowledge, for academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion."

"It is my firm belief, and I say this as a dictum, that all these tools now at our disposal, these things part of of this explosive evolution of means of communication, mean we are now heading for an era of solitude. Along with this rapid growth of forms of communication at our disposal - be it fax, phone, email, internet or whatever - human solitude will increase in direct proportion."

"I have the impression that the images that surround us today are worn out, they are abused and useless and exhausted. They are limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution. When I look at the postcards in tourist shops and the images and advertisements that surround us in magazines, or I turn on the television, or if I walk into a travel agency and see those huge posters with that same tedious and rickety image of the Grand Canyon on them, I truly feel there is something dangerous emerging here. The biggest danger, in my opinion, is television because to a certain degree it ruins our vision and makes us very sad and lonesome. Our grandchildren will blame us for not having tossed hand-grenades into TV stations because of commercials. Television kills our imagination and what we end up with are worn out images because of the inability of too many people to seek out fresh ones."

"Everyone who makes films has to be an athlete to a certain degree because cinema does not come from abstract academic thinking; it comes from your knees and thighs."

"Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of mind; cinema comes from the country fair and the circus, not from art and academicism."

"It is a place where nature is unfinished yet...a place where God, if he exists, has created in anger...Even the stars up in the sky look a mess." Expressing anger at a Amazon rawithin forest for the difficulties exposed in motion-picture photography Fitzcarraldo.

Awards

Herzog & his films use at times won & been nominated for numbers of awards above a years. Virtually all notably, Herzog won a better director award for Fitzcarraldo at a 1982 Cannes film festival.

Complete Works
Film
Director
2005 - Grizzly Man 2004 - The Whiten Diamond 2003 - Wheel of Time 2002 - Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet - (Ten Thousand Years Older) 2001 - Pilgrimage 2001 - Invincible 2000 - Wings of Hope 1999 - My Right Fiend 1997 - Little Dieter Needs to Fly 1993 - Bells from a Deep 1992 - Lessons of Darkness 1991 - Scream of Stone 1990 - Echoes From the Somber Empire 1987 - Cobra Verde 1982 - Fitzcarraldo 1979 - Woyzeck 1979 - Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht 1977 - La Soufrière 1977 - Stroszek 1976 - How tremendously Wood Would the Woodchuck Chuck 1976 - No Of these May Play by using Me 1976 - Heart of Glass 1974 - The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser 1974 - The Smashing Ecstasy of Carver Steiner 1972 - Aguirre, Wrath of God 1971 - Land of Silence and Darkness 1971 - Fata Morgana (movie) 1970 - Even Dwarfs Started Small 1969 - Precautions Against Fanatics 1968 - Signs of Life 1967 - The Unprecedented Defence of the Fort Deutschkreuz 1967 - Last Words 1964 - Game in The Sand 1962 - Herakles

Writer
2004 - Incident at Loch Ness 1980 - Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe

TV
2000 - Wings of Hope 1999 - a Lord & the Laden (aka. God of the Heavy-laden) [part 9 of the series "2000 Years of Christianity"] 1995 - Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices 1994 - The Transformation of the Globe Into Music 1991 - Jag Mandir 1990 - Film Lesson One-4 1989 - Wodaabe - Herdsmen of the Sun 1988 - Les Français vus par... - (Les Gaulois) 1984 - The Dark Glow of the Mountains 1984 - Ballad of the Little Soldier 1984 - Where a Green Pismire Dream 1980 - Glaube und Währung 1980 - ''God's Angry Man 1980 - Huie's Sermon 1971 - Handicapped Future 1969 - The Flying Doctors of East Africa

Opera (director)
2000 - Tannhäuser (Wagner) 1992 - La Donna del lago 1991 - Lohengrin (opera) 1989 - Giovanna d'Arco

Actor Filmography
2004 - Incident at Loch Ness 2000 - Der Letzte Dokumentarfilm 1999 - Julien Donkey-Boy 1998 - What Dreams May Come 1995 - Burning Heart 1994 - Tales from the Opera - (Forrest Fever - Il Guarany) 1990 - Hard to Be a God 1989 - Bride of the Orient 1983 - Man of Flowers 1971 - Geschichten vom Kübelkind''