Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog (Munich, 1942) grew up in a remote valley in the Bavarian mountains. Until the age of eleven, he did not even know that cinema existed. He started developing film projects when he was fifteen and, as no one was willing to finance them, he worked night shifts as a welder in a steel factory during his last years at high school. He also started to travel on foot. He was seventeen when he made his first phone call and nineteen when he produced his first film. He dropped out of college where he was studying history and literature. Since then, he has written, produced, and directed some seventy films, published books of prose, staged about a dozen operas, acted in films, and founded his own Rogue Film School. Outstanding among his productions is the cult film Fitzcarraldo (1982), for which he received the Best Director award at the Cannes Festival. He has recently co-directed with Clive Oppenheimer the documentary feature film Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds (2020), which explores the connections between science, history, and mythology by way of a journey that follows the trail of meteorites.