50 Fun Facts About Werner Herzog

In which German city was Werner Herzog born in 1942?

Munich. Days after his birth a bomb destroyed the house next door, so his mother fled with her sons to a remote village in the Bavarian mountains.

Which actor played the drug-addicted detective Terence McDonagh in Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans?

Nicolas Cage. His corrupt cop works a New Orleans still reeling from Hurricane Katrina and keeps seeing iguanas that nobody else can.

What did Herzog famously cook and eat in public after Errol Morris finished Gates of Heaven?

His shoe. He had vowed to eat it if Morris ever finished the film, and chef Alice Waters helped him cook it at her restaurant Chez Panisse for Les Blank's camera.

In Fitzcarraldo, what does the title character try to haul over a hill in the Amazon?

A steamship. Herzog refused to fake it with a model, so crew and native extras really dragged the vessel up a muddy 40-degree slope with a system of pulleys.

Grizzly Man chronicles the life and death of which bear enthusiast?

Timothy Treadwell. He spent 13 summers among the grizzlies of Alaska's Katmai National Park, convinced they trusted him, until one killed him and his girlfriend in 2003.

Which Star Wars series featured Herzog as a mysterious character called The Client?

The Mandalorian. He admitted he had never seen a Star Wars film and said it didn't matter: the quality of the screenplay is his only test for taking an acting role.

Herzog played the villain known as the Zec opposite Tom Cruise in which 2012 film?

Jack Reacher. His crime boss is a survivor of a Siberian gulag, and Herzog said he accepted because a 'badass, bad guy' was a part he knew he could do.

What is the legendary goal of the conquistadors in Aguirre, the Wrath of God?

The city of El Dorado. The search ends with Aguirre alone on a drifting raft, his men dead and monkeys swarming over it, still planning his new empire.

Which classic vampire film did Herzog remake with Kinski in 1979?

Nosferatu. The 1922 silent had to rename Bram Stoker's characters for copyright reasons; with the novel in the public domain, Herzog's vampire is Count Dracula again.

Which documentary about Kinski did Herzog release in 1999?

My Best Fiend. Herzog returns to the flat his family once shared with the actor, who locked himself in its bathroom for two days, screaming and smashing the fittings.

What does Herzog, the surname the director took in place of his birth name Stipetić, mean in German?

Duke. It was the surname of the father who had left the family, and he adopted it because he felt it had more dramatic flair for a filmmaker.

How did the young Herzog get his 35 mm camera?

He stole it from the Munich Film School. Herzog has never accepted the word theft: he called it a necessity, saying he had a natural right to a tool to work with.

What night job did Herzog work during high school to fund his first featurettes?

Welder in a steel factory. No production company would back a schoolboy's projects, so he went to class by day and earned the money himself at night.

To which city did Herzog walk in 1974, believing it would keep his mentor Lotte Eisner alive?

Paris. He walked for three weeks through the winter, convinced she would not die as long as he was on his way, and she lived for years afterwards.

While being interviewed by the BBC in 2006, Herzog was hit in the abdomen by what?

An air rifle pellet. It struck him mid-conversation with the critic Mark Kermode, and an unfazed Herzog simply carried on with the interview about Grizzly Man.

Which Herzog documentary about Antarctica earned him his first Academy Award nomination?

Encounters at the End of the World. Herzog vowed it would not be a film about 'fluffy penguins', yet its most haunting scene follows one penguin waddling inland towards certain death.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams takes viewers inside which French cave, discovered by explorers in 1994?

Chauvet. Herzog says he generally dislikes 3D, but he shot the film that way because the painters had used the bulges and hollows of the rock walls.

Which country did the young Herzog flee to when his US student visa trouble left him facing deportation?

Mexico. He worked in the charreada, the local rodeo, and made a living smuggling television sets across the border.

In a 2004 mockumentary by screenwriter Zak Penn, Herzog sets out to film which legendary creature?

The Loch Ness Monster. Herzog plays himself in the spoof, in which his producer hires a 'cryptozoologist' behind his back and ends up pulling a gun on him.

Herzog's first film, a 1962 short about bodybuilders, takes its title from which mythical strongman?

Herakles. He intercut the bodybuilders with footage of a deadly crash at the Le Mans motor race, and later dismissed the whole film as stupid.

Herzog's first feature, Signs of Life, won a Silver Bear at which festival?

Berlin. The debut also earned a German federal film prize, and the award money helped Herzog pay for the films that followed.

Which Herzog documentary follows a US Navy pilot shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War?

Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Herzog took Dieter Dengler back to the jungle to act out his own capture, and later retold the escape as the feature film Rescue Dawn.

Which actor was originally cast as Fitzcarraldo but had to leave the shoot with dysentery?

Jason Robards. He was months into the shoot when he flew home ill, and his doctors forbade him to go back to the jungle, forcing Herzog to recast his lead.

Which rock star's Fitzcarraldo role was written out of the script when he left to go on tour?

Mick Jagger. He had already filmed for months as the hero's loony sidekick, Wilbur, when the lead actor's illness halted the shoot and left him no time to start again.

Fitzcarraldo dreams of building what in the Peruvian city of Iquitos?

An opera house. Obsessed with the tenor Enrico Caruso, he plays scratchy records of him to the jungle and plans to pay for the building with a fortune in rubber.

Which Les Blank documentary chronicles the troubled making of Fitzcarraldo?

Burden of Dreams. In it Herzog denounces the jungle around him as 'vile and base', a land created in anger.

For which 1976 film set in a Bavarian village did Herzog have the cast perform under hypnosis?

Heart of Glass. Herzog had almost every actor hypnotised before takes, wanting the villagers, lost without the secret of their ruby glass, to seem like sleepwalkers.

Near the end of the Fitzcarraldo shoot, a native chief made Herzog what offer about his raging lead actor?

To kill him. The star's tantrums had worn out everyone on location, and Herzog says he declined only because he still needed him for a few more shots.

Which band composed the soundtrack for Aguirre, the Wrath of God?

Popol Vuh. Florian Fricke's band, named after the Maya creation myth, built the film's eerie choir-like opening and went on to score many more Herzog films.

Which Herzog documentary takes Juliane Koepcke back to the Amazon, where she alone survived a 1971 air crash?

Wings of Hope. Koepcke was 17 when lightning struck the plane; she fell about two miles still strapped to her seat, then walked out of the jungle alone.

Which Herzog film about a 19th-century foundling won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury at Cannes?

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Herzog gave the lead to Bruno S., a street musician who had spent much of his life in institutions and had never acted before.

What was the name of the manifesto Herzog read in 1999 before a public dialogue with Roger Ebert?

Minnesota Declaration. Its opening point dismisses cinéma vérité as reaching only 'the truth of accountants', against which Herzog sets a deeper, ecstatic truth.

What did Herzog call the alternative teaching venture for young directors he founded in 2009?

Rogue Film School. Herzog's advice to applicants was to get life experience first, as a bouncer in a sex club or a warden in an asylum, rather than study technique.

Herzog's debut novel The Twilight World is a fictionalised account of which figure?

Hiroo Onoda. In Tokyo to direct an opera, Herzog was asked whom he would like to meet and named the soldier who had fought on in the Philippine jungle for 29 years.

Which actress ultimately played the explorer Gertrude Bell in Herzog's Queen of the Desert?

Nicole Kidman. Herzog first wanted Naomi Watts, who was still attached when Robert Pattinson signed on as T. E. Lawrence, before Kidman took over the part.

In 2011, Herzog voiced drug-company boss Walter Hotenhoffer in an episode of which animated sitcom?

The Simpsons. His pharmaceutical executive takes a keen interest in Grampa after a desert flower extract makes Springfield's grumpy old people unnaturally cheerful.

Herzog voiced the mysterious German visitor Castorp in the English dub of which Hayao Miyazaki film?

The Wind Rises. Castorp befriends the young aircraft designer at a mountain resort, speaks openly against the Nazis and then has to flee the secret police.

Herzog's 2013 short From One Second to the Next, funded by phone carriers, warned about what danger?

Texting while driving. AT&T's It Can Wait campaign approached Herzog, and his 35-minute film tells the stories of four crashes that ended in tragedy.

Herzog had two films competing for the 2009 Golden Lion, including Bad Lieutenant, at which festival?

Venice. His second entry was My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, which left Herzog competing against himself for the festival's top prize.

Herzog's 2011 documentary Into the Abyss interviews a death-row inmate shortly before his execution in which US state?

Texas. The film examines a triple murder for which one young man was executed and another jailed for life, and Herzog says plainly that he opposes the death penalty.

Herzog's 2016 documentary Lo and Behold examines the birth and the future of which technology?

The internet. Herzog talks to the pioneers who built it and to people it has harmed, and keeps putting one question to them: does the internet dream of itself?

In Grizzly Man, what does Herzog advise Jewel Palovak to do with the audio recording of the fatal bear attack?

Destroy it. After listening through headphones on camera, he tells her never to hear the tape, warning it would be 'the white elephant in your room all your life'.

Which movement in film is Herzog considered a pioneer of, alongside Fassbinder, Wenders and Schlöndorff?

New German Cinema. Its young directors answered a stagnant post-war film industry by working on small budgets and writing and producing their own films.

Which US city did Herzog make his home, calling it the American city 'with the most substance'?

Los Angeles. He and his wife tried San Francisco first, but after a few years he wrote it off as a pretty place for tourists and moved south.

Raised in a remote Bavarian village, Herzog says he was 17 before he first did what?

Made a phone call. His childhood home had no telephone and no running water, and he says he did not even know what a banana was until he was twelve.

Herzog has said his "very first intellectual fascination" at 12 or 13 was with what?

Cave paintings. He says the fascination never left him, and decades later he was allowed to film inside a cave that is sealed to the public.

A young Werner Herzog reached the south of which country, and fell ill, trying to travel to the Congo?

Sudan. Just 18, he fell very ill near the Congolese border and scrambled back to Egypt, where engineers building the Aswan dam found him; he later thanked God he never got in.

Herzog staged Lohengrin at Bayreuth, the German festival devoted to the operas of which composer?

Richard Wagner. Herzog later went behind the scenes of the same festival for his documentary The Transformation of the World into Music.

Herzog's diary of his 1974 three-week walk to see Lotte Eisner was published under what title?

Herzog walked from Munich to Paris believing that Eisner, his gravely ill friend and mentor, would not die if he did so.

Which 1977 Herzog film follows a German street musician who emigrates to the dairy lands of Wisconsin?

Stroszek. He leaves with two fellow misfits to chase the American dream, only to find Wisconsin lonelier and bleaker than the city slums he left behind.