Werner Herzog Bio
Werner Herzog (born
Werner Herzog Stipeti?; 15 September 1942) is an Academy Award-nominated German film director, producer, screenwriter, actor, and opera director.
He is often associated with the
German New Wave movement (also called
New German Cinema), along with
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Wim Wenders and others. His films often feature heroes with impossible dreams, people with unique talents in obscure fields, or individuals who find themselves in conflict with nature.
Herzog was born
Werner Herzog Stipeti? to Dietrich Herzog and Elizabeth Stipetic in Munich. His family moved to the remote Bavarian village of Sachrang (nested in the Chiemgau Alps), after the house next to theirs was destroyed during the bombing at the close of World War II. When he was 12, he and his family moved back to Munich.
The same year, Herzog was told to sing in front of his class at school and he adamantly refused. He was almost expelled for this and until the age of 18 listened to no music, sang no songs and studied no instruments. He later said that he would easily give 10 years from his life to be able to play an instrument. At 14, he was inspired by an encyclopedia entry about film-making which he says provided him with "everything I needed to get myself started" as a film-maker — that, and the 35 mm camera that the young Herzog stole from the Munich Film School. In the commentary for
Aguirre, the Wrath of God, he states,
"I don't consider it theft — it was just a necessity — I had some sort of natural right for a camera, a tool to work with." He studied at the
University of Munich despite earning a scholarship to
Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
In the early 1960s, Herzog worked nightshifts as a welder in a steel factory to help fund his first films.
Herzog has been married three times and has three children. In 1967, he married Martje Grohmann,with whom he had a son in 1973,
Rudolph Amos Achmed, who is a film producer and director as well as the author of several non-fiction books. In 1980, his daughter,
Hanna Mattes (now a photographer and an artist), was born to
Eva Mattes. In 1987, Herzog was divorced from Grohmann; later the same year he married Christine Maria Ebenberger. Their son, Simon Herzog, who attends Columbia University, was born in 1989. Herzog and Ebenberger divorced in 1994. In 1995 Herzog moved to the United States and in 1999, the director married photographer Lena Pisetski, now Lena Herzog. They live in Los Angeles. In February 2006, during an outside BBC interview with movie journalist Mark Kermode, Herzog was shot with an air rifle by an unknown individual. Herzog continued the interview and showed his wound on camera but acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, remarking "It is not a significant bullet."
Besides using movie stars, German, American and otherwise, Herzog is known for using people from the locality in which he is shooting. Especially in his documentaries, he uses locals to benefit his, as he calls it, "ecstatic truth", using footage of them both playing parts and being themselves. Herzog and his films have won and been nominated for many awards. Herzog's first important award was
Silver Bear for his first feature film
Signs of Life (
Nosferatu the Vampyre was also nominated for Golden Bear in 1979). Most notably, Herzog won the best director award for
Fitzcarraldo at the
1982 Cannes Film Festival. On the same Festival, but a few years earlier (in 1975) his movie
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser won The Special Jury Prize (also known as the '
Silver Palm'). Other films directed by Herzog nominated for Golden Palm are:
Woyzeck and
Where the green ants dream. His films were also nominated at many other very important festivals all around the world:
César Awards (
Aguirre, The Wrath of God),
Emmy Awards (Little Dieter Needs to Fly),
European Film Awards (
My Best Fiend) and
Venice Film Festival (Scream of Stone and The Wild Blue Yonder).In 1987 he and his half-brother
Lucki Stipetic won the
Bavarian Film Awards for Best Producing, for the film
Cobra Verde. In 2002 he won the
Dragon of Dragons Honorary Award during
Kraków Film Festival in Krakow.
Herzog was honored at the 49th
San Francisco International Film Festival, receiving the 2006 Film Society Directing Award. Four of his films have been shown at the San Francisco International Film Festival:
Wodaabe - Herdsmen of the Sun in 1990,
Bells from the Deep in 1993,
Lessons of Darkness in 1993, and
The Wild Blue Yonder in 2006. Herzog's April 2007 appearance at the
Ebertfest in Champaign, IL earned him the Golden Thumb Award, and an engraved glockenspiel given to him by a young film maker inspired by his films.
Grizzly Man, directed by Herzog, won the
Alfred P. Sloan Prize at the 2005
Sundance Film Festival.
Encounters at the End of the World won the award for Best Documentary at the 2008
Edinburgh International Film Festival and was nominated for the
Academy Award for Documentary Feature, Herzog's first nomination.
Herzog once promised to eat his shoe if Errol Morris completed the movie project on pet cemeteries that he had been working on, in order to challenge and motivate Morris, whom Herzog perceived as incapable of following up on the projects he conceived. In 1978 when the film
Gates of Heaven premiered, Werner Herzog cooked and publicly ate his shoe, an event later incorporated into a short documentary
Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe by Les Blank. At the event, Herzog suggested that he hoped the act would serve to encourage anyone having difficulty bringing a project to fruition.
In 2009, Herzog became the only filmmaker in recent history to enter two films in competition in the same year at the prestigious
Venice Film Festival. Herzog's
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans was entered into the festival's official competition schedule, and his
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? entered the competition as a "surprise film".
Herzog's films have received considerable critical acclaim and achieved popularity on the art house circuit. They have also been the subject of controversy in regard to their themes and messages, especially the circumstances surrounding their creation. A notable example is
Fitzcarraldo, in which the obsessiveness of the central character was mirrored by the director during the making of the film, as shown in
Burden of Dreams, a documentary filmed during the making of Fitzcarraldo. His treatment of subjects has been characterized as
Wagnerian in its scope, as
Fitzcarraldo and his later film
Invincible (2001) are directly inspired by opera, or operatic themes. He is proud of never using storyboards and often improvising large parts of the script, as he explains on the commentary track to
Aguirre, The Wrath of God.
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