1. Werner Herzog's style involves avoiding storyboards, emphasizing improvisation, and placing his cast and crew into real situations mirroring those in the film they are working on.
55 Facts About Werner Herzog
1. 2.
In 1961, when Herzog was 19, he started work on his first film Herakles.
3.
Werner Herzog has published over 12 books of prose and directed many operas.
4.
Werner Herzog was named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time in 2009.
5.
Werner Herzog's mother was Austrian with Croatian ancestry, while his father was German.
6.
Werner Herzog recounted that his family had "no toys" and "no tools" and said that there was a sense of anarchy, as all the fathers of the village's children were absent.
7.
Werner Herzog never saw films, and did not even know cinema existed until a traveling projectionist came by the one-room schoolhouse in Sachrang.
8.
When Werner Herzog was 12, he and his family moved back to Munich.
9.
Werner Herzog's father had abandoned the family early in his youth, but he later adopted his father's surname as he thought it sounded more impressive for a filmmaker.
10.
Werner Herzog made his first phone call when he was seventeen; two years later, he started work on his first film, Herakles.
11.
For several years Werner Herzog listened to no music, sang no songs, and studied no instruments, but when he turned eighteen he immersed himself in music with particular intensity.
12.
Werner Herzog started to embark on long journeys, some on foot.
13.
Werner Herzog subsequently moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in order to study at Duquesne University.
14.
Werner Herzog developed a habit of casting professional actors alongside people from the locality in which he was shooting.
15.
In 1971, while Werner Herzog was location scouting for Aguirre, the Wrath of God in Peru, he narrowly avoided taking LANSA Flight 508.
16.
Werner Herzog's reservation was cancelled due to a last-minute change in itinerary.
17.
Werner Herzog won the Best Director award for Fitzcarraldo at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival.
18.
Werner Herzog's films have been nominated at many other festivals around the world: Cesar Awards, Emmy Awards, European Film Awards and Venice Film Festival.
19.
Werner Herzog once promised to eat his shoe if Errol Morris completed a film project on pet cemeteries that he had been working on, in order to challenge and motivate Morris as he perceived Morris to be incapable of following up on the projects he conceived.
20.
In 1978, when the film Gates of Heaven premiered, Herzog cooked and publicly ate his shoe; the event was later incorporated into a short documentary, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, by Les Blank.
21.
Werner Herzog suggested that he hoped the act would serve to encourage anyone having difficulty bringing a project to fruition.
22.
Werner Herzog moved to Los Angeles with his wife in the late 1990s.
23.
Werner Herzog was honored at the 49th San Francisco International Film Festival, receiving the 2006 Film Society Directing Award.
24.
Werner Herzog seemed to attract danger even in more suburban settings.
25.
In 2006, Werner Herzog was shot in the abdomen while on Skyline Drive in Los Angeles.
26.
Werner Herzog had been giving an interview on Grizzly Man to Mark Kermode of the BBC.
27.
Werner Herzog continued the interview without seeking medical treatment, stating "it's not significant".
28.
In 2009, Werner Herzog became the only filmmaker in recent history to enter two films in competition in the same year at the Venice Film Festival.
29.
Werner Herzog provided the narration for the short film Plastic Bag, directed by Ramin Bahrani, which was the opening night film in the Corto Cortissimo section of the festival.
30.
Werner Herzog completed a documentary called Cave of Forgotten Dreams in 2010, which shows his journey into the Chauvet Cave in France.
31.
Also in 2010, Werner Herzog co-directed with Dimitry Vasuykov Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, which portrays the life of fur trappers and their families in the Siberian part of the Taiga; it premiered at the 2010 Telluride Film Festival.
32.
In 2011, Werner Herzog competed with Ridley Scott to make a film based on the life of British explorer Gertrude Bell.
33.
In 2012, it was confirmed that Herzog would start production on his long-in-development project in March 2013 in Morocco with Naomi Watts to play Gertrude Bell along with Robert Pattinson to play T E Lawrence and Jude Law to play Henry Cadogan.
34.
In 2015, Werner Herzog shot a feature film, Salt and Fire, in Bolivia, starring Veronica Ferres, Michael Shannon and Gael Garcia Bernal.
35.
Dissatisfied with the way film schools are run, in 2009 Werner Herzog founded his own Rogue Film School.
36.
Werner Herzog was selected to be the president of the jury at the 60th Berlin International Film Festival in 2010.
37.
Werner Herzog lent his voice to a recurring character during the 4th season of the Adult Swim animated series Metalocalypse.
38.
Werner Herzog appeared in person opposite Tom Cruise as the villain Zec Chelovek in the 2012 action film Jack Reacher.
39.
In 2019, Werner Herzog joined the cast of the Disney+ live action Star Wars television series The Mandalorian, portraying "The Client", a character with nebulous connections to the Empire.
40.
Werner Herzog accepted the role after being impressed with the screenplay, although he said he had never seen any of the Star Wars films.
41.
In June 2022, Werner Herzog published his debut novel, titled The Twilight World, telling the story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who had refused to surrender for decades while hiding in the jungle of a Philippine island.
42.
Werner Herzog had met Onoda in Tokyo more than two decades before, and the two had discussed the jungle.
43.
Werner Herzog had used jungles as settings of many of his important works.
44.
Werner Herzog said his novel was a fictional account of Hiroo Onoda's ordeal of being stranded in a jungle fighting a war that had officially ended.
45.
Werner Herzog has said, "Most details are factually correct; some are not".
46.
Werner Herzog's films have received considerable critical acclaim and achieved popularity on the art house circuit.
47.
Werner Herzog explains this technique in the commentary track to Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
48.
In 1999, before a public dialogue with critic Roger Ebert at the Walker Art Center, Werner Herzog read a new manifesto, which he dubbed Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema.
49.
Werner Herzog has directed several operas, including Mozart's The Magic Flute, Beethoven's Fidelio, and Wagner's Parsifal.
50.
Critical of film schools, Werner Herzog has taught three cinema workshops.
51.
Werner Herzog was enthusiastic, and said of the resulting films that "the best 10 of them are better than the selections for best short film at the Academy Awards".
52.
Werner Herzog has been married three times and has three children.
53.
Werner Herzog moved to Los Angeles in 1996 and married Russian-American photographer Elena Pisetski in 1999.
54.
Since 1962, Werner Herzog has directed 20 fiction feature films, seven fiction short films, and 34 documentary feature films, as well as eight documentary short films and episodes of two television series.
55.
Werner Herzog has been the screenwriter or co-writer for all his films and for four others, and has appeared as an actor in 26 film or television productions.