Werner Herzog

Trivia

• Mauch worked with Herzog on ten films: starting with Signs of Life and Last Words and ending with Fitzcarraldo.
• He is proud of never using storyboards and often improvising large parts of the script, as he explains on the commentary track to Aguirre, The Wrath of God.
• His treatment of subjects has been characterized as Wagnerian in its scope, as Fitzcarraldo and his later film Invincible (2001) are directly inspired by opera, or operatic themes.
• Herzog's films have received considerable critical acclaim and achieved popularity on the art house circuit.
• 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".
• In 2009, Herzog became the only filmmaker in recent history to enter two films in competition in the same year at the prestigious Venice Film Festival.
• In 1978 when the film Gates of Heaven premiered, Werner Herzog cooked and publicly ate his shoe, an event later incorporated into a short documentary Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe by Les Blank. At the event, Herzog suggested that he hoped the act would serve to encourage anyone having difficulty bringing a project to fruition.
• Herzog once promised to eat his shoe if Errol Morris completed the movie project on pet cemeteries that he had been working on, in order to challenge and motivate Morris, whom Herzog perceived as incapable of following up on the projects he conceived.
• Herzog was honored at the 49th San Francisco International Film Festival, receiving the 2006 Film Society Directing Award.
• In 2002 he won the Dragon of Dragons Honorary Award during Kraków Film Festival in Kraków.

Quotes

• “I have never left my culture. It doesn't matter whether I film with Australian aborigines or in Antarctica.”
• “I can tell those apart who can milk a cow, I mean with their bare hands. Sometimes people can tell by looking at someone, 'Aha, this must be a drug dealer or this must a lawyer.”
• “Only 30 minutes from where I live, there is a completely hidden and forgotten archive. Nobody even knows that this exists here.”
• “I love my movies as they are. I let them develop their own lives.”
• “It fills me with joy to see Dieter (Dengler) again.”
• “I just hope it's a small one. I only travel light. It's got to fit in my hand-held luggage.”
• “We had some ranting about the meaning of nature, ... And Jewel is more defending Treadwell's position, that there is harmony in the universe and the only disturbing element is human beings. I don't see it that way.”
• “Erik Nelson [Herzog's producer] understood that I would see something in this, that something about me complements Treadwell, ... He instantly understood that we could collaborate, even though Treadwell had been dead for eight months.”
• “We are still doing somersaults for it. It's the usual pandemonium that makes moviemaking an odd profession, and I am the lion tamer.”
• “You should look straight at a film; that's the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.”