WERNER HERZOG
“YOU THINK I’M THIS OBSESSED, MANIC, TEUTONIC, GLOOMY FELLOW… MY WIFE WILL TELL YOU THAT I’M A VERY FLUFFY HUSBAND!”
They say get them while they’re young. For Werner Herzog, that doesn’t seem to be an issue at all. “I have tonnes of emails from 15-year-olds,” he reveals. “It’s the very young ones who discover my films.” Thanks to the internet, the German filmmaker’s back catalogue is widely available to a new generation of viewers. Of course, it helps when you’re currently starring in Disney+’s superb Star Wars TV series, The Mandalorian.
Playing ‘The Client’ who sets Pedro Pascal’s bounty hunter on his mission, Herzog is quite perfect. His acting forays are rare – a villain in Jack Reacher, films for Harmony Korine, a bit-part in sappy Robin Williams movie What Dreams May Come – but there’s something pleasurable about seeing him on screen, even just hearing that unique Bavarian accent.
Certainly, it’s no surprise that he’s narrated his documentaries, whether pushing the forefront of 3D technology in Cave Of Forgotten Dreams, travelling to Antarctica in the Oscar-nominated Encounters At The End Of The World or exploring the world of animal activist Timothy Treadwell in Grizzly Man. Yet this is just a fraction of an endlessly fascinating career that is absolutely – like the name of the film school he once set up – rogue.
Raised in an isolated village in Bavaria, long mountain walks and a 15-page encyclopedia entry encouraged him to be a filmmaker. He liberated a camera from the Munich Film School and made his first short when he was 20. His debut feature, Signs Of Life, came six years later, in 1968, the beginning of a famed period of work that saw him venture to unforgiving terrain on films like Aguirre, The Wrath Of God and Fitzcarraldo, two of five films with the explosive Klaus Kinski.
More recently, he’s worked in American cinema, but always on his terms – films like with Christian Bale, the remake of Abel Ferrara’s with Nicolas Cage, and , with Willem Dafoe. They’re all maverick talents – though none able to hold a candle to the relentlessly busy 77-year-old. Last year alone,.
