Early and mid-career: 1962–2005 Herzog, along with
Rainer Werner Fassbinder,
Wim Wenders, and
Volker Schlöndorff, led the beginning of the
New German Cinema, which included documentarians who filmed on low budgets and were influenced by the
French New Wave. He developed a habit of casting professional actors alongside people from the locality in which he was shooting. His films, "usually set in distinct and unfamiliar landscapes, are imbued with mysticism." Herzog says his youthful experience with Catholicism is evident in "something of a religious echo in my work". In 1971, while Herzog was
location scouting for
Aguirre, the Wrath of God in
Peru, he narrowly avoided taking
LANSA Flight 508. Herzog's reservation was cancelled due to a last-minute change in itinerary. The plane was later struck by
lightning and disintegrated, but one survivor,
Juliane Koepcke, lived after a free fall. Long haunted by the event, nearly 30 years later, he made a documentary film,
Wings of Hope (1998), which explored the story of the sole survivor. Herzog and his films have been nominated for and won many awards. His first major award was the
Silver Bear Extraordinary Prize of the Jury for his first feature film
Signs of Life (
Nosferatu the Vampyre was also nominated for Golden Bear in 1979). Herzog won the Best Director award for
Fitzcarraldo at the
1982 Cannes Film Festival. In 1975, his movie
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 the Cannes Festival. Other films directed by Herzog nominated for Golden Palm are:
Woyzeck (1979) and
Where the Green Ants Dream (1984). His films have been nominated at many other festivals 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, Herzog and his half-brother Lucki Stipetić won the
Bavarian Film Award for Best Producing for the film
Cobra Verde. In 2002, he won the Dragon of Dragons Honorary Award at the
Kraków Film Festival. Herzog once promised to eat his shoe if
Errol Morris completed a film project on pet cemeteries that he had been working on, to challenge and motivate Morris, as he perceived Morris to be incapable of following up on the projects he conceived. In 1978, 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. Herzog suggested that he hoped the act would serve to encourage anyone having difficulty bringing a project to fruition. In the winter of 1974, German-French writer
Lotte H. Eisner, a friend and mentor of Herzog's since the late 1950s, fell gravely ill. Herzog walked from
Munich to
Paris, believing that she would not die if he did so. During these travels, which took him three weeks, he kept a diary that was eventually published as
Of Walking in Ice. Eight years later, the 87-year-old Eisner allegedly complained to Herzog of her infirmities and told him, "I am saturated with life. There is still this spell upon me that I must not diecan you lift it?". He says that he agreed to do so, and she died eight days later. Werner Herzog moved to Los Angeles with his wife in the late 1990s. He said of the city, "Wherever you look is an immense depth, a tumult that resonates with me. New York [City] is more concerned with finance than anything else. It doesn't create culture, only consumes it; most of what you find in New York comes from elsewhere. Things actually get done in Los Angeles. Look beyond the glitz and glamour of Hollywood and a wild excitement of intense dreams opens up; it has more horizons than any other place. There is a great deal of industry in the city and a real working class; I also appreciate the vibrant presence of the Mexicans."
Later directorial career: 2006 onwards 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.
Grizzly Man, a documentary directed by Herzog, was awarded the
Alfred P. Sloan Prize at the 2005
Sundance Film Festival. He seemed to attract danger even in more suburban settings. In 2006, Herzog was shot with an air rifle in the abdomen while on Skyline Drive in Los Angeles. He had been giving an interview on
Grizzly Man to
Mark Kermode of the
BBC. Herzog continued the interview without seeking medical treatment, stating "it's not significant". It was later revealed that the shooter was a crazed fan. Regarding the incident, Herzog later said, "I seem to attract the clinically insane." In a 2021 episode of
Diminishing Returns podcast covering Herzog's film
Stroszek, presenter
Dallas Campbell called this incident a hoax, claiming to be friends with the director of the piece and that the incident was "set up". Herzog's April 2007 appearance at the
Ebertfest in Champaign, Illinois, earned him the Golden Thumb Award, and an engraved
glockenspiel given by a young film maker inspired by his films.
Encounters at the End of the World, set in Antarctica, won the award for Best Documentary at the 2008
Edinburgh International Film Festival and was nominated for the
Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, Herzog's first Oscar nomination. In 2009, Herzog became the only filmmaker in recent history to enter two films in competition in the same year at the
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 also provided the narration for the short film
Plastic Bag, directed by
Ramin Bahrani, which was the opening-night film in the Corto Cortissimo section of the festival. Herzog completed a documentary called
Cave of Forgotten Dreams in 2010, which shows his journey into the
Chauvet Cave in France. Although generally skeptical of
3D film as a format, Herzog premiered the film at the
2010 Toronto International Film Festival in three dimensional form and had its European premiere at the 2011
Berlinale. Also in 2010, 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. '' in Berlin|alt=Herzog's star on the
Boulevard der Stars in Berlin Herzog has narrated many of his documentary films. In 2011, Herzog competed with
Ridley Scott to make a film based on the life of British explorer
Gertrude Bell. In 2012, 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. E. Lawrence and
Jude Law to play
Henry Cadogan. The film was completed in 2014 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. E. Lawrence.
Queen of the Desert had its world premiere at the 2015
Berlin International Film Festival. In 2015, Herzog shot a feature film,
Salt and Fire, in
Bolivia, starring
Veronica Ferres,
Michael Shannon, and
Gael García Bernal. It is described as a "highly explosive drama inspired by a short story by
Tom Bissell".
Acting and other endeavours Dissatisfied with the way film schools are run, in 2009, Herzog founded his own Rogue Film School. For the students, Herzog has said, "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't mean just purity of life, but the raw, stark-naked quality of life. And that's what makes young people more into a filmmaker than academia." Notable alumni include
Keirda Bahruth, Nir Sa'ar,
Bob Baldori,
Sean Gill,
Frederick Kroetsch, and
George Hickenlooper. Herzog was selected to be the president of the jury at the
60th Berlin International Film Festival in 2010. In 2010, he 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". In the episode, he played a fictional cameo of himself filming a documentary about the series' cast of characters and their actions during the 2008 election of
Barack Obama. Continuing with voice work, Herzog played Walter Hotenhoffer (formerly known as
Augustus Gloop) in
The Simpsons episode "
The Scorpion's Tale", which aired in March 2011. The next year, he also appeared in the
eighth-season episode of
American Dad!, called "
Ricky Spanish". He lent his voice to a recurring character during the
fourth season of the
Adult Swim animated series
Metalocalypse. In 2015, he voiced a guest character Old Reptile, an affiliate of Shrimply Pibbles' for Adult Swim's
Rick and Morty. He appeared in person opposite
Tom Cruise as the villain Zec Chelovek in the 2012 action film
Jack Reacher. Herzog gained attention in 2013 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 their It Can Wait driver safety campaign. The film, which documents four stories in which texting and driving led to tragedy or death, initially received more than 1.7 million YouTube views and was subsequently distributed to over 40,000 high schools. In July 2013, Herzog contributed to an art installation entitled "Hearsay of the Soul", for the Whitney Biennial, which was later acquired as a permanent exhibit by the
J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. In late 2013, he voiced some of the English-language dub of
Hayao Miyazaki's
The Wind Rises. In 2019, 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. Herzog accepted the role after being impressed with the screenplay, although he said he had never seen any of the
Star Wars films. In June 2022, Herzog published his debut novel, titled
The Twilight World, telling the story of
Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who had refused to surrender for decades while hiding in the jungle of a Philippine island. Herzog had met Onoda in Tokyo more than two decades before, and the two had discussed the jungle; Herzog used jungles as settings of many of his important works. Herzog said his novel was a fictional account of Onoda's ordeal of being stranded in a jungle fighting a war that had officially ended. He has said, "Most details are factually correct; some are not". ==Film theory==