Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog is a German filmmaker, actor, opera director and author, born in 1942, regarded as one of the leading figures of the New German Cinema movement that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s. His films frequently follow ambitious or obsessive protagonists pursuing impossible goals, people with unusual talents in obscure fields, or individuals set against the indifference of the natural world, a thematic thread running across both his fiction and documentary work. Herzog is known for an improvisational, often physically demanding production style, favoring real locations and difficult shoots over studio artifice, and for narrating many of his own documentaries in a distinctive reflective voice. He has described his goal as reaching what he calls ecstatic truth, a deeper emotional or poetic truth he argues can matter more than plain factual accuracy in documentary filmmaking. Across a career spanning fiction features, documentaries and opera direction, Herzog has remained one of the most internationally recognized and imitated stylists in art house cinema.