Werner Herzog Trivia
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50 free Werner Herzog trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Werner Herzog is the filmmaker who walked from Munich to Paris to save a friend's life, hauled a 320-ton steamship over a hill without special effects, and calmly finished a BBC interview after being shot with an air rifle. This quiz covers the whole story: his childhood in a Bavarian village with no running water, the five volcanic collaborations with Klaus Kinski, the documentaries from Grizzly Man to Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and the late-career detour into voicing cartoon villains and playing The Client in The Mandalorian. It is written for film fans who have seen a few Herzog pictures and want to test how deep their knowledge really goes. Early questions are approachable (which actor starred in Aguirre?), while the later ones dig into festival prizes, the Minnesota Declaration and the strange details of his life on the road. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Herzog and his major films, and each question carries the sentence that supports it, so if a fact surprises you, you can see exactly where it comes from.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which German city was Werner Herzog born in 1942?
Munich
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.
Q 02Which actor played the drug-addicted detective Terence McDonagh in Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans?
Nicolas Cage
Nicolas Cage. His corrupt cop works a New Orleans still reeling from Hurricane Katrina and keeps seeing iguanas that nobody else can.
Q 03What did Herzog famously cook and eat in public after Errol Morris finished Gates of Heaven?
His shoe
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.
Q 04In Fitzcarraldo, what does the title character try to haul over a hill in the Amazon?
A steamship
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.
Q 05Grizzly Man chronicles the life and death of which bear enthusiast?
Timothy Treadwell
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.
Q 06Which Star Wars series featured Herzog as a mysterious character called The Client?
The Mandalorian
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.
Q 07Herzog played the villain known as the Zec opposite Tom Cruise in which 2012 film?
Jack Reacher
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.
Q 08What is the legendary goal of the conquistadors in Aguirre, the Wrath of God?
The city of El Dorado
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.
Q 09Which classic vampire film did Herzog remake with Kinski in 1979?
Nosferatu
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.
Q 10Which documentary about Kinski did Herzog release in 1999?
My Best Fiend
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.
Q 11What does Herzog, the surname the director took in place of his birth name Stipetić, mean in German?
Duke
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.
Q 12How did the young Herzog get his 35 mm camera?
He stole it from the Munich Film School
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.
Q 13What night job did Herzog work during high school to fund his first featurettes?
Welder in a steel factory
Q 21Herzog's first feature, Signs of Life, won a Silver Bear at which festival?
Berlin
Berlin. The debut also earned a German federal film prize, and the award money helped Herzog pay for the films that followed.
Q 22Which Herzog documentary follows a US Navy pilot shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War?
Little Dieter Needs to Fly
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.
Q 23Which actor was originally cast as Fitzcarraldo but had to leave the shoot with dysentery?
Jason Robards
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.
Q 14To which city did Herzog walk in 1974, believing it would keep his mentor Lotte Eisner alive?
Paris
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.
Q 15While being interviewed by the BBC in 2006, Herzog was hit in the abdomen by what?
An air rifle pellet
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.
Q 16Which Herzog documentary about Antarctica earned him his first Academy Award nomination?
Encounters at the End of the World
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.
Q 17Cave of Forgotten Dreams takes viewers inside which French cave, discovered by explorers in 1994?
Chauvet
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.
Q 18Which country did the young Herzog flee to when his US student visa trouble left him facing deportation?
Mexico
Mexico. He worked in the charreada, the local rodeo, and made a living smuggling television sets across the border.
Q 19In a 2004 mockumentary by screenwriter Zak Penn, Herzog sets out to film which legendary creature?
The Loch Ness Monster
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.
Q 20Herzog's first film, a 1962 short about bodybuilders, takes its title from which mythical strongman?
Herakles
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.
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.
Q 24Which rock star's Fitzcarraldo role was written out of the script when he left to go on tour?
Mick Jagger
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.
Q 25Fitzcarraldo dreams of building what in the Peruvian city of Iquitos?
An opera house
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.
Q 26Which Les Blank documentary chronicles the troubled making of Fitzcarraldo?
Burden of Dreams
Burden of Dreams. In it Herzog denounces the jungle around him as 'vile and base', a land created in anger.
Q 27For which 1976 film set in a Bavarian village did Herzog have the cast perform under hypnosis?
Heart of Glass
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.
Q 28Near the end of the Fitzcarraldo shoot, a native chief made Herzog what offer about his raging lead actor?
To kill him
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.
Q 29Which band composed the soundtrack for Aguirre, the Wrath of God?
Popol Vuh
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.
Q 30Which Herzog documentary takes Juliane Koepcke back to the Amazon, where she alone survived a 1971 air crash?
Wings of Hope
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.