TSPDT

Key Production Countries: West Germany, Germany, USA, UK, France, Canada
Key Genres: Documentary, Culture & Society, Drama, Adventure Drama, Biography, Short Film, Adventure, Avant-garde/Experimental, Natural Environments, Jungle Film, Psychological Drama, Anthropology
Key Collaborators: Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus (Editor), Joe Bini (Editor), Peter Zeitlinger (Cinematographer), Thomas Mauch (Cinematographer), Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein (Cinematographer), Popol Vuh (Composer), Lucki Stipetic (Producer), Klaus Kinski (Leading Actor), Brad Dourif (Leading Character Actor), Ernst Reijseger (Composer), Peter Berling (Leading Character Actor), Henning von Gierke (Production Designer)

"Werner Herzog is regarded as one of the most eccentric figures of das neue kino. His films feature inspiring landscapes and controversial actors (the flamboyant Klaus Kinski, the strange Bruno S.) at odds with their world. Herzog is also well known for the making of his films, whether hypnotizing the entire cast in Heart of Glass (1976), dragging a boat through the Amazon jungle for Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), or feuding with actor Kinski… One of the leading figures of the New German Cinema, he has remained a radical individualist and a cinematic visionary for over forty years. His films disturb by their questioning of the bases of human civilization and its values." - Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film, 2006

"Fond of shooting in difficult locations, he can seem as eccentric and driven as one of his heroes. Recently he appears to have found it difficult to continue making films, but his visionary work of the 70s constitutes a high point of the modern cinema." - Geoff Andrew (The Director's Vision, 1999)

"It was immediately clear that Herzog possessed a quick sense of narrative; a withdrawn, mobile camera; and a dark, inquisitive humour... As attention fell on Herzog, so his pursuit of extremism became a little more studied; it began to seem more zealous than natural... Herzog pictures were events in the seventies, but they became very hard to see, Fitzcarraldo was the last film to get wide screenings." - David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2002)

"One of the most influential filmmakers in New German Cinema and one of the most extreme personalities in film per se, larger-than-life Werner Herzog quickly gained recognition not only for creating some of the most fantastic narratives in film, but for pushing himself and his crew to unprecedented lengths, again and again, in order to achieve the effects he demanded." - Nathan Southern (Allmovie)

"Werner Herzog, more than any director of his generation, has through his films embodied German history, character, and cultural richness. While references to verbal and other visual arts would be out of place in treating most film directors, they are key to understanding Herzog. For his techniques he reaches back into the early part of the twentieth century to the Expressionist painters and filmmakers, back to the Romantic painters and writers for the luminance and allegorization of landscape and the human figure." - Rodney Farnsworth (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)

"The auteur theory of directorial supremacy promulgated by the Cahiers du Cinéma boys seems tailor-made for the philosophically inclined Herzog. Indeed his single-mindedness in getting his visions onto celluloid has sometimes more resembled the compulsive tic of an incipient madman, particularly when twinned with the complementary mania of actor Klaus Kinski, whom Herzog, despite his better judgment, and at some considerable risk to what remained of his own sanity, persisted in using as his alter ego on screen." - Mario Reading (The Movie Companion, 2006)

"Herzog exerts total control over his work, which he also produces and writes. His films are deeply personal and thoroughly uncompromising. Although he once stated that "film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates," much of his work remains beyond the grasp or interest of mass audiences. But he is increasingly admired by a widening horde of filmgoers as one of the most creative and exhilarating artists on the international film scene today." - The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994

"One of the best of the new wave of German filmmakers, Herzog has already mastered themes of illusion, delusion, alienation, and hypocrisy." - William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978)

“Filmmaking is athletics over aesthetics”, says the indefatigable Werner Herzog, whose astonishing body of work is evidence of a director with the physical and psychological fortitude of an iron-man triathlon runner. Herzog’s is a cinema of extremes of climate, circumstance and human endurance.” - Jessica Winter (The Rough Guide to Film, 2007)

"There are certainly laws and elements that make a film more accessible to mainstream audiences. If you've got Tom Cruise as a strongman, I'm sure it would have larger audiences, but it wouldn't have the same substance." - Werner Herzog

"I cannot work fast enough. I cannot cope fast enough, really. And just releasing a film is hard." - Werner Herzog