Werner Herzog: the filmmaker who sent cinema to places it was afraid to go

Werner Herzog

Photo: Greg2600 / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 5, 1942 Munich, Germany
Occupation	Filmmaker
Known for	Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Grizzly Man, Fitzcarraldo
Awards	Silver Bear, Berlin International Film Festival · Best Director, Cannes Film Festival · Golden Lion (lifetime achievement) · Donostia Award, San Sebastián International Film Festival

The week Werner Herzog turned 84, he was at the Venice Film Festival, competing for the Golden Lion. His new film, Bucking Fastard, was there. He had declined to take it to Cannes earlier that year, turning down the official selection because Cannes would not offer him a competition slot. This is not vanity — at least not primarily. It is a statement about what a film is for. Herzog has spent sixty years arguing, mostly through his work, that a film that does not ask to be judged on equal terms with the best of the year has already conceded something. He dedicated Bucking Fastard to David Lynch, who died earlier this year. That gesture locates him precisely: at the edge between the history he has already made and the work he insists on making now.

He was born on September 5, 1942, in Munich, with the name Werner Stipetić. His family moved to Sachrang, a village in the Bavarian Alps that had no electricity, no telephone, and no cinema. He saw his first film at eleven. He made his first short film at nineteen, financing it by working night shifts in a steel mill and using a 35mm camera he had taken without permission from the Munich Film School. This is not a colorful origin story — it is a philosophy. Herzog has always operated from the premise that cinema begins before anyone gives you the equipment.

Without formal film education, he taught himself from encyclopedias and from watching films wherever he could find them. His debut feature, Signs of Life, won the Silver Bear for Best First Work at the Berlin Film Festival in 1968. He became, alongside Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlöndorff, one of the central figures of New German Cinema — a movement that used the medium to reckon with a country still processing its twentieth century.

The collaboration that made him mythological was with actor Klaus Kinski. Across five films — Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Woyzeck (1979), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1982), and Cobra Verde (1987) — they made each other impossible to ignore and nearly impossible to endure. Kinski was explosive, capable of violence, and genuinely brilliant on screen. Fitzcarraldo, in which the protagonist hauls a 320-ton steamship over a hill in the Peruvian jungle — without special effects, in an actual location — earned Herzog the Best Director prize at Cannes in 1982. When Kinski threatened to walk off the set, Herzog, by his own account, threatened to shoot him. This story has been repeated so often that it has become myth; what is not myth is the film, which exists.

After Kinski died in 1991, Herzog moved into documentary and found there a register that suited something in his temperament. Grizzly Man (2005), about bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell, who spent thirteen summers living among Alaskan grizzly bears before being killed by one in 2003, became the film most audiences outside the art-house circuit know him for. It is not a nature documentary. It is a study in obsession and what happens when a person’s relationship to an idea is more powerful than their relationship to reality. Encounters at the End of the World (2007) — filmed in Antarctica — earned him his only Academy Award nomination. Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), filmed in the Chauvet Cave in southern France, explored what the oldest known paintings in human history say about the compulsion to represent.

He has also acted — most visibly in Disney’s The Mandalorian, where he played a recurring villain with the precise, slightly removed quality of someone doing a very good impression of themselves. His 2022 memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, and his 2021 novel The Twilight World — a fictionalized account of Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who kept fighting in the Philippine jungle until 1974 because no one had told him the war was over — clarified what his six decades of filmmaking had been arguing: that there is a form of loyalty to a reality that has already disappeared, and that cinema is one of the few languages capable of rendering that loyalty visible.

There is a recurring critique of Herzog’s work that is harder to dismiss than his admirers often acknowledge. His concept of “ecstatic truth” — the idea that poetic, dramatic, even staged elements can reveal truths that strict documentation cannot — has produced some of cinema’s most distinctive images. It has also produced a body of work in which the director’s authority over what the camera shows is total. In Grizzly Man, he chose not to play the audio recording of Timothy Treadwell’s death, placing the headphones over the woman beside him and watching her face instead. This is widely considered the right decision; it is also a decision that consolidates the filmmaker’s control over what the audience is allowed to witness. His Rogue Film School, which ran from 2009 to 2016, taught aspiring directors to pick locks, read Virgil in Latin, and understand that filmmaking sometimes requires taking things that are not offered. The critique is not that these ideas are wrong. It is that they produce a cinema in which the director’s vision is so dominant that the subjects — particularly in the documentaries — sometimes seem less like collaborators than material.

His documentary Ghost Elephants (2025), following South African naturalist Steve Boyes in search of a potentially undiscovered elephant species on Angola’s highland plateau, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in August 2025 and arrived on US screens in February 2026, then on Disney+ and Hulu in March. Critics awarded it 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. Bucking Fastard, which premiered in Venice on September 3, 2026, stars Kate and Rooney Mara as English twin sisters who, unable to agree on which man they both love, resolve the problem by digging a tunnel through a mountain in search of a country where the question does not arise. The film is drawn from the real story of twins Freda and Greta Chaplin. This month, Herzog receives the Donostia Award for lifetime achievement at the San Sebastián International Film Festival.

An animated adaptation of The Twilight World is in production — the story of a man who kept fighting a war that had been over for decades, because his loyalty to a reality that had disappeared was more powerful than any evidence presented to the contrary. Herzog has been making films about exactly that kind of person since 1968. The remarkable thing is that the films have not yet run out of new things to say about him.