Werner Herzog was born in the Bavarian capital of Munich in 1942. Herzog's family relocated to Sachrang, a tiny village near the Austrian border, just before the end of World War II. Herzog began filmmaking in his late teens, allegedly with a camera he stole from the Munich Film School. Following the completion of many short films and his first feature film, Signs of Life (1968), his work was compared to that of directors such as Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who were of the same generation and began filmmaking at an early age. He has spoken respectfully of these other auteurs and the New German Cinema movement, highlighting his independence, his refusal to lend his name to political causes, and his identification as a Bavarian rather than a German. Herzog achieved international acclaim for Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and was awarded the Cannes Grand Jury Prize for The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (2007). (1974). He faced widespread criticism for his 1982 film Fitzcarraldo, for which he was alleged to have injured the indigenous Amazonians who worked on the production. Herzog refuted these charges, yet an air of controversy persisted. Les Blank's Burden of Dreams (1982), a documentary about the creation of Fitzcarraldo, portrayed Herzog as a dynamic performer and compelling speaker. Herzog worked less and less in Germany throughout the years, eventually relocating in California in the 1990s, first in the San Francisco Bay Area and then in Los Angeles. He continued to make documentaries and feature-length fiction films during his tenure in the United States, including Rescue Dawn (2006) and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans (2009). He garnered considerable appreciation for his documentary work, particularly for Grizzly Man (2005) and Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), the latter of which was hailed as a groundbreaking experiment in 3D filming. Herzog's documentary movie Encounters at the End of the World was nominated for an Academy Award (2007). While he is still well-known for the daring exploits of his early works, his turbulent relationship with actor Klaus Kinski, and his willingness to push cinematic boundaries, he is best known for his ability to express himself philosophically on a wide variety of subjects and for his sage Germanic voice, which he has lent to a variety of projects.
In the following excerpt Werner Herzog is interviewed by Paul Cronin about his approach to making movies.
Have you ever doubted your abilities?
Never, which is probably why I have achieved certain things. I’m aware that I possess an almost absurd self-confidence, but why should I doubt my abilities when I see all these films so clearly before my eyes? My destiny was somehow made clear to me at an early age, and I have shouldered it ever since. There was never any question as to what I should do with my life. None of this is anything to brag about. Anyone who raises children has at least as much courage as someone who follows his “destiny,” whatever that means. It’s an utterly pretentious word.
Most film-production companies have a half-life, normally not beyond six or seven years, but mine still exists fifty years after I established it. I have persevered, having learnt from the struggles and defeats and humiliations. My hunger as a child helped define me, as did seeing my mother desperate and furious while struggling to feed us. Something terrifying I will never forget is playing basketball at school one day and having a violent collision with another player. An hour later I began seeing black spots and was blind “for nearly an hour. There is nothing wrong with hardships and obstacles, but everything wrong with not trying. I think about the original trip I made down several Amazon tributaries before I filmed Aguirre, not having the faintest idea what might be around the next corner. It’s some kind of metaphor for my life, which has been lived on a tightrope, even a slalom. I couldn’t tell you what has prevented me from slamming head first into a brick wall at a hundred miles an hour. I count myself lucky to have avoided the trapdoors.
I don’t do anything on anyone else’s terms and have never felt the need to prove anything. I don’t have the kind of career where, once a project is finished, I check the New York Times bestseller list to see about buying the next big thing, or wait for my agent to send me scripts. I have never relied on anyone to find me work. The problem isn’t coming up with ideas, it is how to contain the invasion. My ideas are like uninvited guests. They don’t knock on the door; they climb in through the windows like burglars who show up in the middle of the night and make a racket in the kitchen as they raid the fridge. I don’t sit and ponder which one I should deal with first. The one to be wrestled to the floor before all others is the one coming at me with the most vehemence. I have, over the years, developed methods to deal with the invaders as quickly and efficiently as possible, though the burglars never stop coming. You invite a handful of friends for dinner, but the door bursts open and a hundred people are pushing in. You might “You might manage to get rid of them, but from around the corner another fifty appear almost immediately.
As we sit here today there are half a dozen projects lined up waiting to be ejected from my home. I would like to be able to make films as quickly as I can think of them, and if I had an unlimited amount of money could shoot five feature films every two years. I have never had much choice about what comes next; I just attend to the biggest pressure. I basically have tunnel vision, and when working on a project think of little else. It’s been like this since I was fourteen years old. Today, finishing a film is like having a great weight lifted from my shoulders. It’s relief, not necessarily happiness.
I am glad to be rid of them after making a film or writing a book. The ideas are uninvited guests, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t welcome. As a soldier who holds a position others have long since abandoned, I have always accepted the challenges and am prepared for the worst. Rest assured I will never beat a cowardly retreat. I shall continue as long as there is breath in me.
You have never started a film you didn’t finish. One also gets the feeling there are very few unproduced scripts in the drawers of your desk.
No sleep has been lost over the fact that I have written a small handful of screenplays that I haven’t yet made. There are too many new ideas to spend time with for me to feel sorry for myself. One unproduced script of mine is the story of the conquest of Mexico, from the arrival of Cortés in Veracruz to fall of the city of Tenochtitlan, seen through the eyes of the Aztecs, for whom it must have felt like aliens landing on their shores. There are only three or four narratives in the history of mankind that have the same depth, calibre, enormity and tragedy. Joan of Arc, Genghis Khan, Akhenaten and Jesus Christ are the obvious examples. When I first started work on the project, my idea was to reconstruct Tenochtitlan, which would have meant sets five times bigger than those built for Cleopatra. Even with computerised digital effects, those pyramids, palaces and twenty thousand extras would cost a fortune. The rules of the game are simple: if one of my films is a box-office hit that brings in at least $250 million, the Aztec project might conceivably be financed. While researching I studied the primary sources, including lawsuits filed against Cortés after the conquest. I wanted to make the film in Spanish and Classical Nahuatl – which I even started to learn – though at the time it was unthinkable to make a film like this in anything other than English.
– Excerpt From Werner Herzog - A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin
Paul Cronin.
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