German film director Werner Herzog - biography, filmography and interesting facts

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Like any great German, Herzog (German: Werner Herzog) does not like to brag about his biography and personal achievements, because he is afraid of unnecessary associations with narcissistic Teutonic "messiahs" of past eras. His deeds and creativity speak much more eloquently. French filmmaker François Truffaut once called Herzog "the most important director of a generation". American film critic Roger Ebert once said that Herzog "never made a single film that was compromised, disgraced, made for pragmatic reasons, or uninteresting. His creative failures are as impressive as his successful films." He was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2009.

The complete filmography of Werner Herzog contains both documentaries and historical films and condo arthouse. He became famous for historical films such as "Aguirre - The Wrath of God" starring Klaus Kinski, informative documentaries like "Echoes of the Blackempire" about Jean-Bedel Bokassa, dictator and emperor of Central Africa, and absurdist art-house films like "Fitzcarraldo".

Werner Herzog: biography

The future director was born Werner Stipetich in Munich, the son of Elisabeth Stipetich, an Austrian of Croatian origin, and Dietrich Herzog, who was German. When Werner was two weeks old, his mother took refuge in the remote Bavarian village of Sachrang (in the Chiemgau Alps), after the house next to them was destroyed by bombing during World War II. In Sachrang, Herzog grew up in a shabby house that didn't even have running water. He had never seen films and was not even aware of the existence of cinema until a traveling projectionist visited his school in Sachrang. When the Duke was 12 years old, he and his family returned to Munich. His father left the family long before that. Werner later adopted his father's surname, Herzog, ("duke" in German), which he felt was better suited for a director.

Tough youth

In the same year, Herzog was asked to sing in the school choir, and he categorically refused, as a result of which he was almost expelled. Until he was eighteen years old, Herzog did not listen to music, did not sing any songs, and did not play any instruments. He later said that he would have easily given 10 years of his life to be able to play the cello.

At an early age he experienceda dramatic stage that lasted several years, under the influence of the experience, he converted to Catholicism. Herzog began to make long journeys, some on foot. Around the same time, he realized that he wanted to become a filmmaker and began to learn the basics of filmmaking from a few pages in an encyclopedia, after which he stole a 35mm camera from the Munich film school and began to create. In the commentary for Aguirre, the Wrath of God, he says: “I don't consider it theft. It was just a necessity. I had some natural right to the camera as a tool for the job.”

Years of study and torment

He received a scholarship to Dukenes University but lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. During his last years of study, no manufacturing company was willing to take on his projects, so Herzog worked night shifts as a welder in a steel mill to raise funds for his first creations. After graduating from high school, he became intrigued by the mysterious country of the newly independent Congo and decided to go there, but only reached the south of Sudan, where he became seriously ill.

Career start

Werner Herzog, together with Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlöndorff, spearheaded the new German cinema movement outside of Germany. The West German filmmaking community consisted of yesterday's documentary filmmakers who made low-budget films and were influenced by the French New Wave.

In addition to using professional actors - German, American and others - Herzog is known foruses people from the area in which he shoots.

First awards

As a result, Werner Herzog's films were nominated and received many awards. His first major award was the Silver Bear, an extraordinary jury award for Signs of Life (Nosferatu the Vampire was nominated for a Golden Bear in 1979).

In 1987, Herzog and his half-brother Lucky Stipity won the "Bavarian Film Award for Best Direction" for Cobra Verde. In 2002, he won the Honorary Dragon of Dragons Award during the Krakow Film Festival.

Conflict with Ebert

In 1999, before a public dialogue with critic Roger Ebert at the Walker Art Center, Herzog read a new manifesto he called "The Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Filmmaking." The declaration's sub title began with the preamble: "Modern cinema is devoid of faith, it achieves merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants." Ebert later wrote of this: "For the first time he fully explained his theory of 'ecstatic truth'." In 2017, Herzog wrote an addendum to the manifesto prompted by the question of "truth in an age of alternative facts."

The way forward

Werner Herzog received a standing ovation at the 49th San Francisco International Film Festival, winning the 2006 Best Director Award. Four of his films have been screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival over the years: Wudabe - Shepherds of the Sun in 1990,"Bells of the Abyss" in 1993, "Lessons in Darkness" in 1993 and "The Wild Blue Yonder" in 2006. In April 2007, Herzog appeared at the Ebertfest in Champaign, Illinois, where he received the Golden Punch Award and an engraved glockenspiel given to him by a young director inspired by his films. Later, German film director Werner Herzog won the Alfred P. Sloan Award at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.

In 2009, Herzog became the only director in recent history to enter two competitions at the same time at the prestigious Venice Film Festival in the same year.

Own film school

Dissatisfied with the way film schools work, Herzog founded his own school in 2009. Her program is a four-day workshop with Herzog that takes place annually (the last one took place in March 2016 in Munich). Courses include walking skills, the art of admiration, the skill of coping with failure, failure, the sports side of filmmaking, creating your own filming permits, neutralizing bureaucracy, guerrilla tactics, self-confidence. Speaking to students, Herzog once said: “I prefer people who worked as bouncers in a sex club, or were guards in a lunatic asylum. You must live life in its most elemental forms. Costa Ricans have a very pleasant word: pura vida. It is not just the purity of life, but the raw, unconditional quality of life. And that's what makes young people go tofilmmakers, not professors or academics.”

Activities in the 2010s

Herzog was President of the Jury Board at the 60th Berlin International Film Festival in 2010.

In the same year, he completed a documentary called "The Cave of Forgotten Dreams", which tells about his journey to the Chaouvet Cave in France. Although he was skeptical about 3-D film as a format, he presented his new film at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival in 3D. Also in 2010, Herzog, together with Dimitri Vasuykov, filmed Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, which depicts the life of hunters in the Siberian taiga.

For the first time in 2010, Werner Herzog provided the voice of an animated television program, appearing in The Boondocks, as well as in the first episode of the third season of Huey Freeman's It's the Black President. He played a fictionalized version of himself while filming a documentary about various marginals and their actions during the 2008 election when Barack Obama won.

Creative experiments

Continuing his voice work, Herzog played W alter Hotenhoffer (formerly known as August Gloop) in The Simpsons episode "A Scorpion's Tale", which aired in March 2011. The following year, he also appeared in the season eight episode "American Dad!", voicing a minor character in the Adult Swim episode Metalocalypse. In 2015, he voiced a similar character, already in the animated series "Rick and Morty", inepisode of Adult Swim.

Herzog brought attention back to his persona in 2013 when he released a 35-minute publicity documentary, starting with One Second to Next, showing the dangers of typing while driving. The film, which describes four stories where texting while driving led to tragedy or death, quickly amassed more than 1.7 million views on YouTube and was subsequently distributed to more than 40,000 high schools. In July 2013, Herzog contributed to an art installation called Hearsay of the Soul for the Whitney Biennale, which was later acquired as a permanent exhibit by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. At the end of 2013, he also participated in the English dub of the full-length anime The Wind Rises by Hayao Miyazaki.

In 2011, Herzog competed with Ridley Scott to direct a film based on the life of explorer Gertrude Bell. In 2012, it was confirmed that Herzog would begin production on his long-term project in March 2013 in Morocco. The film originally cast Naomi Watts, who was to play Gertrude Bell, Robert Pattinson, who was to play T. E. Lawrence, and Jude Law, who was cast as Henry Cadogan. The film was completed in 2014 with a slightly different cast, with Gertrude Bell played by Nicole Kidman and Cardogan by James Franco. The personal life of Werner Herzog, for all his publicity, is not widely advertised. It is known that he was married three times, he has a daughter. Currently marriedwith Lena Herzog, an American of Russian origin. She is engaged in art photography and documentary.

In 2015, Herzog filmed the feature film "S alt and Fire" in Bolivia. Starring Veronica Ferres, Michael Shannon and Gael Garcia Bernal. It is described as "an explosive drama inspired by a Tom Bissell story."

In 2016, Herzog released an online workshop called "Werner Herzog Who Teaches Film" where he talked in detail about his craft.

Director's style

Herzog's films have received significant acclaim from both critics and audiences, and many of them have become art house classics. Noteworthy is the project "Fitzcarraldo", in which the obsession and obsession of the protagonist is written off by the director from himself. The Burden of a Dream, a documentary filmed during the making of Fitzcarraldo, explored Herzog's efforts to film the film in harsh environments. Herzog's diaries at the time of the Fitzcarraldo's creation were published under the title Conquering the Useless: Reflections on the Making of the Fitzcarraldo. Mark Harris of The New York Times wrote in his review, "The film and its making is a fable of foolish obsession, an exploration of the blurred line between dream and madness." Werner Herzog's filmography is full of such semi-autobiographical pictures.

His vision of the world has been described as "Wagnerian" in scope. The plot of "Fitzcarraldo"revolves around the opera house, and Herzog's later film, Invincible (2001), touches on the personality of Siegfried. He prides himself on never using storyboards and often improvising, filming significant amounts of material spontaneously.