The influential director, who now turns 80, reveals how he developed his fascination for the edges of the world in his memoirs, titled "Every man for himself and God against all."
Influential filmmaker Werner Herzog has published his memoirs ahead of his 80th birthdayImage: dpa/picture-alliance
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One of Werner Herzog's earliest childhood memories is of Rosenheim burning. The Upper Bavarian town in southern Germany was bombed to flames by Allied forces towards the end of the World War II. Herzog vividly describes how the entire night sky was ablaze with hues of orange and yellow in his recently published memoirs (the English version of the autobiography, "Every Man for Himself and God Against All," will come out in 2023).
"I knew from that moment on, that outside, outside our world, outside our narrow valley, there was another world that was dangerous, that was haunting," writes Herzog, who turns 80 on September 5.
He concludes the tale of his childhood realization by adding: "Not that I feared this world, it made me curious." That curiosity about chaos, nature, and danger has accompanied Werner Herzog throughout his life.
A director of superlatives
French director François Truffaut once praised his colleague as the "greatest living filmmaker." Superlatives are often used to describe Herzog: No wonder, he has made over 70 films, received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and some of the most important film awards worldwide. Time Magazine listed him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2009.
In addition to his work as a filmmaker, Herzog has written books and literary translations, has directed operas, works as a dubbing artist, actor, producer and has been running his own, unconventional kind of film school with the "Rogue Film School" since 2009.
He established his worldwide fame with feature films like "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" (1972), "Woyzeck," (1979) and "Fitzcarraldo" (1982), as well as the documentary film "My Best Fiend" (1999), about his collaboration with German actor Klaus Kinski, who died in 1991. Other documentaries such as "Grizzly Man" (2005) or "Encounters at the End of the World" (2007) also caused a sensation, especially in the US.
Werner Herzog: A selection of cult films
As German filmmaker Werner Herzog is honored with the 2019 European Film Academy Lifetime Achievement Award, we revisit some of his most important films.
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European Film Award for Werner Herzog
The director is shown here receiving the German Film Award's honorary prize in 2013. On December 7 he is being honored in Berlin with the European Film Academy Lifetime Achievement Award. Having directed over 60 feature and documentary films, his oeuvre comprises a wide variety of genres — and many influential works.
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'Signs of Life' (1968)
Herzog demonstrated his impressive artistic range in his debut feature film, "Signs of Life." When it came out in 1968, the period known as New German Cinema was already thriving, and Herzog emerged as another exceptional talent in the country. The film tells the story of German soldiers going crazy during an otherwise uneventful World War II assignment on a Greek island.
Image: Imago/Prod. DB
'Even Dwarfs Started Small' (1970)
Two years later, Herzog presented an unusual work at the Cannes film festival: All actors in "Even Dwarfs Started Small" are persons of short stature. Anarchy and revolution, individualism and society were some of the themes the film explored. Herzog would regularly come back to them in later works.
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'Aguirre, the Wrath of God' (1972)
Set on the Amazon River in South America, Herzog's 1972 epic historical drama immediately became a cult film. One of the reasons behind the success of "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" was lead actor Klaus Kinski, who later collaborated with Herzog on several other films. The eccentric actor and the director became one of the most interesting duos of New German Cinema.
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'The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser' (1974)
The drama explores the historical 19th-century figure of Kaspar Hauser, who claimed to have spent his entire youth chained in a tiny cellar. The lead actor, Bruno Schleinstein (credited as Bruno S.), also had a difficult childhood and grew up in mental institutions. Herzog has often said that Bruno S. was the best actor he ever worked with, even though he didn't have any formal acting training.
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'Nosferatu the Vampyre' (1979)
Five years later, Herzog moved on from historical dramas to a classic story of literature and cinema, by revisiting F.W. Murnau's 1922 Expressionist horror film, "Nosferatu." It was the second collaboration between Herzog and actor Klaus Kinski — who was naturally given the lead role of the nobleman, Count Dracula.
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'Woyzeck' (1979)
At the end of the 1970s, Herzog released a second film on top of "Nosferatu." "Woyzeck" is an adaptation of an unfinished play by German playwright Georg Büchner. It once again starred Kinski, this time in the title role of a battered soldier.
Image: Studiocanal/Arthaus
'Fitzcarraldo' (1982)
Herzog officially reached the world's peak of cinema with "Fitzcarraldo," which earned him the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1982. Shot in Peru and Brazil, the movie infamously features an indigenous crew transporting a steamship over a mountain. Actors Klaus Kinski (center) and Claudia Cardinale (right) starred.
Image: picture alliance / United Archives/IFTN
'My Best Fiend' (1999)
A few years after the death of Kinski in 1991, Herzog revisited his tumultuous yet productive relationship with the controversial actor in the documentary "My Best Fiend." The film offers a glimpse into the creative partnership that led them to make five films together, despite various heated and even violent altercations.
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'Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans' (2009)
Herzog moved on to Hollywood, where he started working with big stars, such as Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendes in "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" from 2009 (pictured above). That film and "My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done" were both selected for the Venice Film Festival competition in 2009, making Herzog the only filmmaker to date to have entered two films simultaneously into competition.
Image: AP
'Cave of Forgotten Dreams' (2010)
Alongside his films starring Hollywood actors, Herzog keeps directing compelling documentaries. Shot in 3D, "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" shows his exploration of the Chauvet Cave in southern France, which contains the oldest human-painted images yet discovered. As always, Herzog narrates the documentary himself, with his trademark Bavarian accent.
Image: 2011 Ascot Elite Filmverleih GmbH
'Queen of the Desert' (2015)
Four years ago, the director surprised his fans again with a feature film starring Nicole Kidman. In "Queen of the Desert," she portrays real-life British historian and adventurer Gertrude Bell. The historical drama premiered at the Berlinale but received mostly negative reviews.
Image: 2015 PROKINO Filmverleih GmbH
'Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World' (2016)
The documentary that followed was positively received. In "Lo and Behold," Herzog reflects on the existential impact of the internet and artificial intelligence, interviewing experts on the opportunities and risks of new technologies.
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From the mountains to Hollywood
Over the past 20 years, Herzog has influenced countless filmmakers and has become a pop culture icon in his adopted country, the US.
He has been on every major talk show, from David Letterman to Conan O'Brien to Stephen Colbert. He has been quoted over and over again and even become an internet meme — he seems downright timelessly hip.
Nevertheless, the director does not want US citizenship, despite all the adoration he receives. He could not become a citizen of a country in which the death penalty exists, he said in a podcast with talk show host Sandra Maischberger.
The memoirs are available in German; an English-language translation will follow in 2023
While Werner Herzog's enormous influence on the film world has been described and discussed in numerous publications, he has never read any of them, and works about him have never interested him, he says in the interview volume "A Guide For The Perplexed" by E. F. Schumacher. For him, it's always about his next film.
It is all the more interesting to finally read in Herzog's own words how, as a young boy, he arrived hungry and poor at a remote mountain farm in Bavaria as a war refugee with his single mother and older brother. This is where he grew up. In his autobiography, Herzog tells the captivating story of how this young boy eventually became such a colorful character.
Portraying the fullness of life
His prose is infused with poetry and full of lyrical passages, just as his documentaries contain an enormous amount of fictional, staged material, and his feature films in turn have much in common with documentaries.
Herzog often referred to one of his greatest global successes, the feature film "Fitzcarraldo," as "my best documentary film" in interviews.
The filmmaker's images are clear and direct and radiate a simplicity, but behind them there is always meticulous preparation, a world of knowledge and detail.
Werner Herzog goes all out when it comes to his choice of cinematic weapons. He doesn't make German films either, but Bavarian ones: "more full of life than what is made in other parts of Germany," Herzog said in an interview. Herzog can draw almost endlessly from the fullness of life.
In his own life, he has worked night shifts as a welder in a metal factory, worked as a fisherman in Greece, and ridden bulls as a rodeo clown in Mexico. He has smuggled and forged documents for his films, picked locks, and repeatedly broken into homes and trespassed.
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A soldier of cinema
"Where did fate take you, me? How has it always given life new twists and turns?" asks Herzog in his memoirs. "Much, I see, is constant, though — a vision that never left me, and like a good soldier, a sense of duty, loyalty and courage. I always wanted to hold outposts that everyone else had abandoned with haste." He is drawn to the edges of the world and society. Where others no longer dare to go, Werner Herzog's path begins.
Throughout his life, Herzog has seen himself as a "soldier of cinema" who goes into battle with everything he has. He says of himself that for a film he would even descend into the depths of hell to wrest it from the devil. And you believe him, because Werner Herzog is fearless. Sniveling and whining are deeply abhorrent to him. Courage, on the other hand, attracts him, as does the beauty of the senseless.
The steamer that Fitzcarraldo pulls over the mountain in the jungle in the film of the same name is an important metaphor — he just doesn't know what for, Herzog once said.
Herzog (left) with actors Claudia Cardinale and Klaus Kinski on the set of FitzcarraldoImage: imago images
Ecstatic truth
"You don't move mountains with money, but with faith," Herzog said. For him, film was also always a redefinition of truth.
In the 1960s, it was the "cinéma vérité" style of documentary filmmaking that attempted to depict truth with the greatest possible authenticity. According to Herzog, however, facts in a film never create knowledge, only norms. For Herzog, cinéma vérité was always the "truth of accountants." His answer to this was "ecstatic truth," which he measured with staging and documentary methods. Genre restrictions did not interest him.
In his biography, Werner Herzog describes another, almost magical moment that he experienced as a young man in a fishing boat off the Greek coast: "Above me was the dome of the universe, stars as if within reach, everything rocking me gently in a cradle of infinity. And below me, brightly illuminated by the carbide lamp, was the depth of the ocean, as if the dome of the firmament sat down with it to form a sphere. Instead of stars, there were flashing silver little fishes everywhere. Embedded in a universe without equal, above, below, everywhere, in which it took the breath away from all sounds, I found myself suddenly in an incomprehensible wonder. I was sure that I knew everything here and now. My destiny was evident to me."
It is his deep admiration of nature and love of man, his unconditional humanism, that gives Werner Herzog's work its radiance and makes his films popular worldwide. He still considers picking locks and forging filming permits to be the most important things that aspiring directors should learn. The rest of the tools needed for filmmaking can be learned in two weeks, he says.
The memoirs are available in German, under the title "Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle: Erinnerungen," Hanser Verlag.
The Deutsche Kinemathek is also paying tribute to Werner Herzog in a special exhibition that runs until March 27, 2023.
This article was originally written in German.
10 Bavarian filmmakers
For many cinema enthusiasts, Munich is Germany's secret film capital — although not everyone in the country would agree. But many great directors were in fact born in Bavaria. Here's 10 great Bavarian film directors.
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Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog, born in 1942 in Munich, is currently the world's most famous Bavarian filmmaker. Ever since "My Best Fiend," his 1999 documentary about his favorite actor Klaus Kinski, Herzog has mostly directed in the US, combining fiction and documentary films, and charming the world with his unmistakable Bavarian accent. In Hollywood he has worked with stars such as Nicole Kidman.
Image: Reuters/H. Hanschke
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
With Herzog, Fassbinder was a catalyst of the New German Cinema movement that put the country back on the cinematographic map in the 1960s. Born in 1945 in the Bavarian town of Bad Wörishofen, he experimented and broke the conventions of the time like no other filmmaker in the country. Later, Fassbinder also filmed outside of Bavaria.
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Herbert Achternbusch
Herbert Achternbusch was and remains a Bavarian original. The director also often stared in his own films. In "Bierkampf" (above), which translates as "beer fight," he celebrated his love-hate relationship with his Bavarian homeland and its people. In the movie he played Herbert, who pretends to be a police officer (above right). Achternbusch is also the author of books, plays and radio dramas.
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Karl Valentin
Karl Valentin was another Bavarian original. The singer, actor and author directed numerous short films in the early ages of cinema, as well as a few longer works later on. Born in 1882 in Munich, Valentin was renowned way beyond Bavaria for his duo performances with his stage and film partner, Liesl Karlstadt. His humor influenced generations of comedians after him.
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Helmut Dietl
Traces of Karl Valentin's humor can be found in the TV shows and films directed by Helmut Dietl. Born in 1944 in the Bavarian town Bad Wiessee, Dietl's first hit TV series came with "Monaco Franze," followed by "Kir Royal." His most successful film was a 1997 comedy with a title that translates as "Rossini, or the Killer Question: Who Slept with Whom." It poked fun at Munich's vain high society.
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Dominik Graf
Born in Munich in 1952, Dominik Graf should be considered one of the greatest filmmakers of the country. However, his works weren't commercial hits, and he has mainly concentrated on directing for TV. His movies nevertheless belong to the best ever produced in this country. He also paid tribute to his home city with his film essay from the year 2000, titled "Munich — Secrets of a City."
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Michael Haneke
In Haneke's case, even though he started working for TV, he ended up as an internationally recognized filmmaker. As fans know, he's official holds Austrian nationality, but he was actually born in Munich. The glory of the award-winning director's oeuvre therefore also shines a bit on the city where he was born.
Image: Getty Images
Josef Bierbichler
Josef Bierbichler is another Bavarian film director, though he only recently stepped behind the camera. He first established himself as an actor, shown here in Ina Weisse's film "The Architect." Bierbichler, born in 1948 in Amach, had his debut in films directed by other Bavarian greats Werner Herzog and Herbert Achternbusch. He's also a successful theater actor and novelist.
Director Hans-Christian Schmid is perhaps a discrete figure in Germany's cinematographic landscape, but nevertheless currently one of the most skilled filmmakers in the country. Born in 1965, he gained renown through his 1995 comedy, "After Five in the Forest Primeval," starring Franka Potente in her film debut. His works are not all set in Bavaria, but when they are, they're powerfully strong.
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Michael 'Bully' Herbig
The youngest Bavarian filmmaker in our top 10 selection is comedian Michael "Bully" Herbig. Born in 1968 in Munich, Herbig initially became famous through his comedy skits and a TV late night sketch show, "Bullyparade." He went on directing for the big screen with parodies including "Manitou's Shoe," a smash-hit Western spoof, and "Traumschiff Surprise — Periode 1," which pokes fun at Star Trek.
