Werner Herzog: Biography

One of the most influential filmmakers in the New German Cinema movement, Werner Herzog (born Werner Stipetic) began attracting attention with his short films of the mid-'60s, and his first feature, Signs of Life, in 1968. Born in Munich on September 5, 1942, Herzog knew he wanted to be a filmmaker from an early age. And after unsuccessful attempts to persuade a production company to finance his films when he was still a teenager, he worked long hours in a steel factory to raise money for his work. His efforts paid off: After founding his own production company in 1963, his work began attracting notice.

As a writer/director, Herzog made a series of provocative, highly personal films, including Even Dwarfs Started Small (1968), the cryptic desert journey Fata Morgana, and, perhaps his finest work, the stunning Heart of Glass (1974), in which he hypnotized his actors to get properly somnambulistic performances. The director cast Bruno S., a lifelong inmate of mental institutions and prisons, to play a real-life man who was raised in a dark basement in Every Man for Himself and God Against All (aka The Mystery of Kasper Hauser [1975]) and as an uncomprehending visitor to the United States in Stroszek (1977). A long and tumultuous collaboration with the notoriously volatile actor Klaus Kinski produced Herzog's best-known films of the 1970s: his conquistador drama Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1974); his 1979 remake of F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu the Vampyre; and Woyzeck (1978), his adaptation of Georg Büchner's classic play. Notorious for dragging his cast and crew to remote and arduous locations, Herzog has made fewer feature films since the '80s; his notable works of that decade include Fitzcarraldo (1982) and Cobra Verde (1988), both with Kinski.

Herzog is also widely admired as a superb documentary filmmaker for such works as Land of Silence and Darkness (1971), about the deaf and blind. During the 1990s, in fact, much of his work has centered around documentaries, whether playing himself in Die Nacht der Regisseure/Night of the Filmmakers, a 1995 piece featuring directors such as himself, Leni Riefenstahl, and Wim Wenders discussing the state of German cinema and the New German Cinema; as the director and screenwriter of 1997's Little Dieter Needs to Fly; or as the director and partial subject of Mein Liebster Feind/My Best Fiend, his 1999 documentary about his infamous collaboration with Klaus Kinski.

In addition to his directing and screenwriting work, Herzog has acted in a number of films, perhaps most memorably in Les Blank's 1980 documentary Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. The film was the result of a bet Herzog once had with an American film student: Herzog told the student -- who was always talking about making a film but never actually doing it -- that if he actually completed the film Herzog would eat his own shoe. The student was Errol Morris, who would later become known for his documentaries Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line, and Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, and he did indeed make his film. Having lost the bet, Herzog made good on his promise, and the result was one of the stranger moments in documentary history. ~ All Movie Guide