Werner Herzog is a German film director, screenwriter, author, actor, and opera director, regarded as a pioneer of New German Cinema.
52 Facts About Werner Herzog
2.
Werner Herzog has published more than a dozen books of prose and directed many operas.
3.
Werner Herzog recounted, "we had no toys, we had no tools", and said that there was a sense of anarchy, as all the children's fathers were absent.
4.
Werner Herzog never saw films, and did not even know of the existence of cinema until a traveling projectionist came by the one-room schoolhouse in Sachrang.
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Werner Herzog's father had abandoned the family early in his youth.
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Werner Herzog made his first phone call when he was seventeen; two years later, he started work on his first film, Herakles.
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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.
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Werner Herzog started to embark on long journeys, some on foot.
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Werner Herzog subsequently moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in order to study at Duquesne University.
10.
Werner Herzog developed a habit of casting professional actors alongside people from the locality in which he was shooting.
11.
In 1971, while Werner Herzog was location scouting for Aguirre, the Wrath of God in Peru, he narrowly avoided taking LANSA Flight 508.
12.
Werner Herzog's reservation was cancelled due to a last-minute change in itinerary.
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Werner Herzog won the Best Director award for Fitzcarraldo at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival.
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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.
15.
Werner Herzog once promised to eat his shoe if Errol Morris completed the film project on pet cemeteries that he had been working on, in order to challenge and motivate Morris, whom Werner Herzog perceived as incapable of following up on the projects he conceived.
16.
In 1978, when the film Gates of Heaven premiered, Herzog cooked and publicly ate his shoe, an event later incorporated into a short documentary Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe by Les Blank.
17.
At the event, Werner Herzog suggested that he hoped the act would serve to encourage anyone having difficulty bringing a project to fruition.
18.
Werner Herzog believed this act of devotion would prolong Eisner's life.
19.
Durning these travels Werner Herzog kept a diary which would eventually be published as Of Walking in Ice.
20.
Werner Herzog moved to Los Angeles with his wife in the late nineties.
21.
Werner Herzog was honored at the 49th San Francisco International Film Festival, receiving the 2006 Film Society Directing Award.
22.
In 2006, Werner Herzog was shot in the abdomen while on Skyline Drive in Los Angeles.
23.
Werner Herzog had been giving an interview on Grizzly Man to Mark Kermode of the BBC.
24.
Werner Herzog continued the interview without seeking medical treatment, stating "it's not significant".
25.
Two days later, Werner Herzog helped actor Joaquin Phoenix exit his car after a car crash.
26.
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.
27.
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.
28.
Dissatisfied with the way film schools are run, Werner Herzog founded his own Rogue Film School in 2009.
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Werner Herzog was the president of the jury at the 60th Berlin International Film Festival in 2010.
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 from the Siberian part of the Taiga, and had its premiere at the 2010 Telluride Film Festival.
32.
Werner Herzog has narrated many of his documentary films, and he lent his voice to an animated television program for the first time in 2010, appearing in The Boondocks in its third-season premiere episode "It's a Black President, Huey Freeman".
33.
Werner Herzog appeared opposite Tom Cruise as the villain Zec Chelovek in the 2012 action film Jack Reacher.
34.
In 2011, Werner Herzog competed with Ridley Scott to make a film based around the life of explorer Gertrude Bell.
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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.
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In 2015, Werner Herzog shot a feature film, Salt and Fire, in Bolivia, starring Veronica Ferres, Michael Shannon and Gael Garcia Bernal.
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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.
38.
Werner Herzog accepted the role after being impressed with the screenplay, despite admitting that he had never seen a Star Wars film.
39.
In June 2022, Werner Herzog published his debut novel, titled The Twilight World, telling the story of Hiroo Onoda.
40.
Werner Herzog had met Onoda in Tokyo more than two decades ago, and the two had discussed the jungle, a setting that reoccurs throughout many of Werner Herzog's film works.
41.
Werner Herzog's films have received considerable critical acclaim and achieved popularity on the art house circuit.
42.
Werner Herzog explains this technique in the commentary track to Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
43.
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.
44.
Werner Herzog has directed several operas, including Mozart's The Magic Flute, Beethoven's Fidelio and Wagner's Parsifal.
45.
Critical of film schools, Werner Herzog has taught three cinema workshops.
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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".
47.
Werner Herzog has been married three times and has three children.
48.
In 1980, Werner Herzog's daughter Hanna Mattes was born to his then-companion Eva Mattes.
49.
In 1987, he married Christine Maria Ebenberger, and their son, Simon Werner Herzog, was born in 1989.
50.
Werner Herzog moved to the United States in 1996 and married photographer Lena Werner Herzog, formerly Elena Pisetski, in 1999.
51.
Between 1962 and 2019, Werner Herzog directed twenty fiction feature films, seven fiction short films and thirty-one documentary feature films, as well as eight documentary short films and episodes of two television series.
52.
Werner Herzog has been the screenwriter or co-writer for all his films and for four others, and has appeared as an actor in twenty-six film or television productions.