Werner Herzog (born 1942) is the German filmmaker behind Nosferatu the Vampyre, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo and Grizzly Man.
Quick Specs
| Born | Werner Stipetić, September 5, 1942, Munich, Germany |
| Raised in | Sachrang, a village in the Chiemgau Alps; back in Munich from age 12 |
| Training | self-taught, with a camera he took from the Munich Film School |
| Feature breakthrough | Signs of Life (1968) |
| With Klaus Kinski | five films, Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), Woyzeck (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1982), Cobra Verde (1987) |
| Key documentaries | My Best Fiend (1999), Grizzly Man (2005), Encounters at the End of the World (2007) |
| Honors | Best Director at Cannes (1982) for Fitzcarraldo; Oscar nomination for Encounters at the End of the World; Venice Career Golden Lion (2025) |
| Acting | The Client in The Mandalorian (2019); Zec in Jack Reacher (2012) |
| Lives in | Los Angeles, since the late 1990s |
Who He Is
Werner Stipetić was born in Munich on September 5, 1942. His father was Dietrich Herzog; his mother, Elisabeth Stipetić, was Austrian with Croatian ancestry. When he was two weeks old, a bombing raid destroyed the house next door, and his mother fled with him to Sachrang in the Chiemgau Alps. He grew up there with no running water, no flushing toilet, no telephone and, as he tells it, no toys and no fathers around.
He didn’t know cinema existed until a traveling projectionist came to the one-room schoolhouse. The family moved back to Munich when he was 12, and he made his first phone call at 17. Around 12 or 13 he became fascinated with cave paintings, the subject he would return to decades later in Cave of Forgotten Dreams. He took his father’s surname, Herzog, which means “duke,” because it sounded more impressive for a filmmaker. His half-brother, Lucki Stipetić, kept the birth name and became his longtime producer.
He taught himself filmmaking from a few encyclopedia pages and a 35mm camera he took from the Munich Film School. “I don’t consider it theft,” he has said. “It was just a necessity. I had some sort of natural right for a camera.” He paid for his first short films by working night shifts as a welder in a steel factory, and started the first, Herakles, in 1961, at 19.
His own account of the next years reads like one of his films. He studied history and literature briefly in Munich, spent months in Manchester, and tried to reach the Congo but got sick in southern Sudan. At 20 he went to Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, then fled to Mexico over a student-visa violation, worked the charreada rodeo circuit and smuggled TVs and stereos across the border.
He also met Klaus Kinski as a teenager. Kinski, then a struggling performer, lodged in the same boarding house as Herzog’s family.
The Work, and What He Did in It
His first feature, Signs of Life (1968), won the Silver Bear Extraordinary Jury Prize at Berlin. In 1971, while scouting his next film in Peru, he was booked on LANSA Flight 508, and the booking was canceled in a last-minute change of plans. The plane broke apart after a lightning strike. The only survivor was Juliane Koepcke, and in 1998 Herzog made a documentary about her, Wings of Hope.
That next film was Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), with Kinski as the conquistador Lope de Aguirre, shot on Amazon tributaries, largely on rafts, for about $370,000, a third of which went to Kinski. Herzog’s own account of the shoot, told in his 1999 documentary My Best Fiend, is full of Kinski’s violence. Kinski hit an extra with a sword hard enough to concuss him through his helmet. One night, annoyed by extras playing cards in a nearby hut, he fired three shots through the wall and took the tip off one man’s finger. Herzog took the rifle away and says he still owns it.
The famous confrontation came near the end of the shoot, when Kinski packed to leave. Herzog says he was not armed. What he did, by his telling, was make a threat: he had a rifle, and by the time Kinski reached the next bend in the river there would be eight bullets in his head, and the ninth would be for Herzog himself. Kinski screamed for the police, then was “very docile” for the last 11 days. Asked in an interview whether he really would have shot him, Herzog said, “yes, I think so.” The popular version, in which he directed the rest of the film with a gun on Kinski, is one Herzog himself calls apocryphal. He also says a local Machiguenga chief offered to kill Kinski for him, and that he declined.
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) won the Grand Prix, the Ecumenical Prize and the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes in 1975. That winter, hearing that the critic and archivist Lotte Eisner was gravely ill in Paris, he walked there from Munich, three weeks on foot, believing she wouldn’t die if he did. She lived, and his diary of the walk became the book Of Walking in Ice.
For Heart of Glass (1976) he hypnotized his cast. Almost every actor performed under hypnosis. The exceptions were Josef Bierbichler, who played the seer Hias and had to stay clear-eyed, and the professional glassblowers, for safety. Herzog supplied most of the dialogue, which the actors memorized under hypnosis, and many gestures came out spontaneously. It is a film about a village sleepwalking toward disaster, played by people in an actual trance.
Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) is his horror film, a remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu with Kinski as Count Dracula and Bruno Ganz as Jonathan Harker. It was a co-production of Herzog Filmproduktion, Gaumont and ZDF, shot by a crew of just 16. He couldn’t film in Wismar, Murnau’s location, so Delft stood in for it, with some scenes shot in Schiedam after the Delft authorities refused to allow a rat release. Dracula’s castle was filmed in Czechoslovakia.
The rats were real: about 11,000 white lab rats bought from Hungarian laboratories and dyed grey. The production’s behavioral biologist, Maarten ’t Hart, quit over how they were treated. At 20th Century Fox’s request the film was shot in German and English versions at the same time, so the actors’ own voices could be used in both.
Fitzcarraldo (1982) is the one with the ship. Kinski plays an opera-mad rubber baron who drags a steamship over a mountain to reach untapped rubber country. The historical Fitzcarrald moved his boat in pieces. Herzog insisted on hauling the 320-ton Molly Aida intact over a steep hill at Camisea, Peru, using hundreds of Indigenous Peruvians from the Campa, Machiguenga and Aguaruna peoples. His diary dates the crossing to November 4, 1981. Jason Robards had shot about 40 percent of the film before he fell ill and left. Mick Jagger dropped out too, his footage was scrapped, and Kinski took over the lead. Les Blank filmed the whole ordeal for Burden of Dreams (1982), which Roger Ebert called “one of the most remarkable documentaries ever made about the making of a movie.” Herzog’s own diaries became Conquest of the Useless. The film won him Best Director at Cannes, and Ebert called it “imperfect, but transcendent.”
Two years earlier, Herzog had kept a promise. He had said he would eat his shoe if Errol Morris ever finished his pet-cemetery film. Gates of Heaven premiered in 1978, so Herzog cooked the shoe and ate it in public, and Les Blank filmed it as Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980). He said he hoped it would encourage anyone struggling to finish a project.
The fifth and last Kinski film was Cobra Verde (1987). In 1999 Herzog made My Best Fiend, a documentary about their partnership, and called Kinski’s autobiography “highly fictitious.”
His documentaries now reach more people than his features. Grizzly Man (2005), about Timothy Treadwell, is his most widely seen documentary in the US, and Encounters at the End of the World (2007) earned his only Oscar nomination. In 2006, while being interviewed about Grizzly Man on Skyline Drive in Los Angeles, he was hit in the abdomen by an air-rifle pellet and kept talking: “it’s not significant.” In 2009 he had two films in competition at Venice, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? In 2013 he made From One Second to the Next, a 35-minute film about texting while driving, financed by phone carriers and sent to more than 40,000 high schools.
He also has a second career as an actor. He played the villain Zec in Jack Reacher (2012) and the Client in The Mandalorian (2019), a part he took for the screenplay; he has never seen a Star Wars film. He has done voice and guest roles on The Simpsons, The Boondocks, American Dad!, Metalocalypse, Rick and Morty and Parks and Recreation, and voiced Castorp in the English dub of The Wind Rises (2013).
He ran the Rogue Film School from 2009 to 2016 and has directed more than two dozen opera productions, including Lohengrin at Bayreuth in 1987. His memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All (2022), borrows its English title from the German title of Kaspar Hauser. The same year he published a first novel, The Twilight World, about Hiroo Onoda, whom he met in Tokyo. He has been married three times, to Martje Grohmann, Christine Maria Ebenberger and Lena Pisetski, and has three children. He moved to Los Angeles in the late 1990s because, he said, “Things actually get done in Los Angeles.”
Cool Verified Facts
- Joaquin Phoenix flipped his car on a canyon road above Sunset Boulevard in 2006, and Herzog was the man who tapped on the window. Phoenix: “There was this German voice saying, ‘Just relax…’ I said to myself, ‘That’s Werner Herzog!'” Herzog says he took a cigarette lighter out of Phoenix’s hand while gasoline dripped, then drove off without waiting to be thanked.
- After the 2006 air-rifle shot, he summed up: “I seem to attract the clinically insane.”
- Francois Truffaut called him “the most important film director alive.”
- His Rogue Film School admissions policy: “I prefer people who have worked as bouncers in a sex club, or have been wardens in the lunatic asylum.”
- He speaks German, Bavarian, English, Greek, Italian and Spanish, and reads Latin and Ancient Greek.
- Time put him on its 100 list in 2009, and he was president of the Berlinale jury in 2010.
Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes
- Ecstatic truth. In his Minnesota Declaration, delivered in April 1999 at the Walker Art Center in a public dialogue with Roger Ebert, he wrote that cinema verite “reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants,” and that “poetic, ecstatic truth” can be reached “only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” He added six points in 2017. It’s also why his best stories should be read as his stories.
- New images or nothing. In 1982 he told Ebert that civilization is “starving for new images… unless we discover new images, we will die out.”
- He never storyboards, improvises large parts of his films and casts locals alongside professionals.
- He does the thing on camera. He hauls the real ship, hypnotizes the real cast and eats the real shoe, and someone is usually filming.
- Kinski runs through the middle of his career: five films with a man he met in a boarding house, and a documentary about him called My Best Fiend.
- Ebert’s verdict: he “has never created a single film that is compromised, shameful, made for pragmatic reasons, or uninteresting. Even his failures are spectacular.”
Why He Matters
Herzog is where arthouse cinema meets horror. Nosferatu the Vampyre is one of the essential vampire films. It treats Murnau’s original with reverence and plays Kinski’s Dracula as lonely, worn-out evil. Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo aren’t shelved as horror, but they’re about madness and obsession in landscapes that swallow people. He also changed what a director is expected to go through to get a film made: take the camera, hypnotize the cast, haul the ship, eat the shoe. Every extreme production since gets measured against him. Then in his seventies, without softening at all, he became a pop-culture figure, a voice in a dozen animated shows and a villain in Star Wars.