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Werner Herzog

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Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog was born Werner Stipetic on September 5, 1942 in Munich. He is a German screenwriter, film director, actor and opera director of Croat descent.

Introduction

Many of his films are in the English language. He directed five films starring German actor Klaus Kinski: Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Nosferatu, Woyzeck, Fitzcarraldo, and Cobra Verde. In 1999 he directed and narrated the documentary film My Best Fiend, a retrospective on his often-rocky relationship with Kinski. He is noted for his filmic interest in indigenous peoples and considered one of the best post-war directors. He is often associated with the German New Wave movement, along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and features heroes with impossible dreams or people with unique talents in obscure fields.

Early life

Herzog grew up in a remote village in Bavaria. At the age of thirteen his family shared an apartment with Klaus Kinski. About this, Herzog recalled, "I knew at that moment that I would be a film director and that I would direct Kinski".

When Herzog was 13 he was made to sing in front of his class at school and adamantly refused. He was almost expelled from school for the incident and until the age of 18 listened to no music, sang no songs and learned no instruments. At the age of 18 he decided to begin listening to music again.

In the early sixties Herzog worked as a welder in a steel factory to help fund his first films.

He received his post-secondary education at both the University of Munich and Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

In 1967 Herzog married Marje Grohmann. The marriage produced three children. In 1987 the couple divorced. Herzog is at present (2005) married to Lena Herzog.

Trivia

  • Once walked on foot from Munich to Paris to visit an ailing friend, critic Lotte Eisner. The experience is recounted in Herzog's book Of Walking in Ice (ISBN 0934378010).
  • Once ate his own shoe after losing a bet to fellow filmmaker Errol Morris. Morris was interested in making a film about a pet cemetery (Gates of Heaven) and Werner believed Morris was not ambitious enough to make the film. This story was the subject of a documentary by Les Blank called Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980).

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." When faced with the jeering and hollering of the 1,500 booing patrons who despised 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 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 the Amazon rainforest for the difficulties involved in filming Fitzcarraldo.

Awards

Herzog and his films have won and been nominated for many awards over the years. Most notably, Herzog won the best director award for Fitzcarraldo at the 1982 Cannes film festival.

Complete Works

Film

Director

Writer

TV

Opera (director)

Actor Filmography

External links

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