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Werner Herzog is a German filmmaker, actor, opera director, author and documentarian. Regarded as a pioneer of New German Cinema, his films often feature ambitious protagonists with impossible dreams, people with unusual talents in obscure fields, or individuals in conflict with nature. His film-making process involves avoiding storyboards, emphasizing improvisation, and placing his cast and crew…
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entertainment · German director, producer, screenwriter (born 1942) · film director · film producer · screenwriter · film editor · film actor · author · cinematographer · voice actor · documentary filmmaker · opera director · also Werner Herzog, Werner Herzog Stipetić, Herzog
Born 5 September 1942 · Q44131
60 published statements · 0 followers
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Werner Herzog BBC Radio4 Start the Week 26 March 2012 b01dtjcj
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When you watch a tornado laying waste to a village you don
85%The GuardianSource
“for those who have a sense of poetry. For those who can tell a story to four year old children and hold their attention. For those that have a fire burning within. For those who have a dream.”
“When you watch a tornado laying waste to a village you don”
“I kept thinking about how I might produce a somnambulistic, collective trance and that is when I came up with the idea of hypnosis.”
“Only one of them seemed really to be in a trance in one of the preceding hypnosis exercises: an older man was sitting at the back of the room and fell asleep. Everybody else was waving their hands wildly, some even threatened self-mutilation. As all the actors, whether hypnotised or only pretending to be, were doing these strangely uniform movements, it did, however, give a sense of the collective insanity which had struck the villagers.”
“He smashed everything, to the point where you could sift it all through a tennis racket.”
“s ambitions only when, aged 15, Werner decided to enter a script-writing competition:”
“because there were security checks and it was found out very quickly that I was not supposed to be in the country. So, I was summoned to emigration.”
“you can only kill it by an even wilder rumour.”
“but I find it all right that many things appear in utter distortions, with which I can identify, but which do not exist independently. It”
“I just thought it would be so much better than the average dull interview location.”
“s most controversial and iconoclastic directors, he is also credited with leading a renaissance in European film. John O”
“I am saturated with life. There is still this spell upon me that I must not die—can you lift it?”
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“very first intellectual fascination independent of my family or independent of school. A fascination that I developed myself when I was 12 or 13 years, and it has never left me completely”
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Public attention spiked: 9,282 Wikipedia readers in one day, 3.5× the usual 2,644, with 0 article edits.
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The Guardian: The Future of Truth by Werner Herzog review – profound, or just a prank?
The Guardian: Ghost Elephants review – Werner Herzog embarks on a mission to track down giant jumbos
Won Golden Lion (2025).
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The Guardian: Burden of Dreams review – on-location account of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo is a gruelling delight
The Guardian: Werner Herzog tells aspiring directors to work in a ‘sex club or lunatic asylum’
The Guardian: This month’s best paperbacks: Werner Herzog, Karl Ove Knausgaard and more
fact checker rated the claim “Werner Herzog said: "Dear America: You are waking up as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches."” fake.
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Lead Stories rated the claim “Werner Herzog said America is waking up” Fake Werner.
Shown as reported and rated by a fact checker, not as an established fact.
“I seem to attract the clinically insane.”
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PolitiFact rated the claim “Werner Herzog said, "Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches."” False.
Shown as reported and rated by a fact checker, not as an established fact.
Awarded European Film Academy Lifetime Achievement Award (2019).
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Herzog joined the cast of the Disney+ live-action Star Wars television series The Mandalorian, portraying The Client, a character with nebulous connections to the Empire
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Held "Filming in Peru with Werner Herzog", a 12-day workshop in the Amazonian rainforest, close to the locations for Fitzcarraldo, for new filmmakers from around the world
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Herzog wrote a six-point addendum to the manifesto, prompted by a question about "truth in an age of alt-facts"
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“truth in an age of alt-facts”
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Voiced Old Reptile for Adult Swim's Rick and Morty
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Herzog shot a feature film, Salt and Fire, in Bolivia, starring Veronica Ferres, Michael Shannon, and Gael García Bernal
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With a different cast: Nicole Kidman as Gertrude Bell, James Franco as Henry Cadogan, Damian Lewis as Charles Doughty-Wylie, and Robert Pattinson as a 22-year-old archaeologist T
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When he released a 35-minute public service announcement-style documentary, From One Second to the Next, demonstrating the danger of texting while driving and financed by AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and T-Mobile as part of th
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Awarded Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2012).
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It was confirmed that Herzog would start production on his long-in-development project in March 2013 in Morocco with Naomi Watts to play Gertrude Bell along with Robert Pattinson to play T
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Herzog competed with Ridley Scott to make a film based on the life of British explorer Gertrude Bell
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Expanded his reach by performing a voiceover for an animated television program for the first time, appearing in The Boondocks in its third-season premiere episode "It's a Black President, Huey Freeman"
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Herzog co-directed with Dimitry Vasuykov Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, which portrays the life of fur trappers and their families in the Siberian part of the Taiga; it premiered at the 2010 Telluride Film Festival
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Which shows his journey into the Chauvet Cave in France
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Herzog founded his own Rogue Film School
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“I prefer people who have worked as bouncers in a sex club, or have been wardens in the lunatic asylum. You must live life in its very elementary forms. The Costa Ricans have a very nice word for it: pura vida. It doesn”
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Herzog became the only filmmaker in recent history to enter two films in competition in the same year at the Venice Film Festival
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Herzog was shot with an air rifle in the abdomen while on Skyline Drive in Los Angeles
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Awarded Alfred P. Sloan Prize for Grizzly Man (2005).
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Won the Dragon of Dragons Honorary Award at the Kraków Film Festival
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Awarded Bayerischer Poetentaler (2000).
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Before a public dialogue with Ebert at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Herzog read a manifesto which he dubbed "Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema"
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Released My Best Fiend, a documentary about his tumultuous professional relationship with Kinski, which was screened out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival
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And married Russian-American photographer Elena Pisetski in 1999
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Bells from the Deep in 1993, Lessons of Darkness in 1993, and The Wild Blue Yonder in 2006
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Herzog and his half-brother Lucki Stipetić won the Bavarian Film Award for Best Producing for the film Cobra Verde
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Awarded Rauriser Literaturpreis (1979).
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When the film Gates of Heaven premiered, Herzog cooked and publicly ate his shoe; the event was later incorporated into a short documentary, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980), by Les Blank
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The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury (also known as the "Silver Palm") and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at Cannes
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After hiding out on Lubang Island in the Philippines for almost 29 years
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While Herzog was location scouting for Aguirre, the Wrath of God in Peru, he narrowly avoided taking LANSA Flight 508 when his reservation was cancelled due to a last-minute change in itinerary
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“something of a religious echo in my work”
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“The military would not have been so intimidated by a very young man who looked like a high-school kid.”
When Herzog was 19, he started work on his first film, Herakles
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Born 1942-09-05.
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Only one of them seemed really to be in a trance in one of the preceding hypnosis exercises: an older man was sitting at the back of the room and fell asleep. Everybody else was waving their hands wildly, some even threatened self-mutilation. As all the actors, whether hypnotised or only pretending to be, were doing these strangely uniform movements, it did, however, give a sense of the collective insanity which had struck the villagers.
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