Werner Herzog Filmography

Encounters at the End of the World

Crew: Director, Narration Writer, Screenwriter, Sound/Sound Designer

Actors: Werner Herzog

Synopsis: Werner Herzog, director of such acclaimed documentaries as Grizzly Man and Little Dieter Needs to Fly, offers his unique perspective on the South Pole in this film profiling the Antarctic community of McMurdo Station. Located on Ross Island, McMurdo Station is the headquarters of the National Read More

The Grand

Actors: Woody Harrelson, Cheryl Hines, David Cross, Dennis Farina, Richard Kind

Synopsis: Incident at Loch Ness director Zak Penn takes the helm for this mockumentary that finds film and television star Woody Harrelson entering the Grand Championship of Poker in hopes of saving his late grandfather's popular hotel casino from a scheming real estate developer. As the wrecking ball Read More

Mister Lonely

Actors: Diego Luna, Samantha Morton, Denis Lavant, James Fox, Melita Morgan

Synopsis: When a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) living in Paris falls for a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) during a performance at a retirement home, the lovestruck pair retreats to a seaside castle in the Scottish highlands populated by a commune of reclusive impersonators. Read More

40 x 15

Synopsis: Director Olivier Jahan offers an glimpse into The Director's Fortnight, a sidebar of the Cannes Film Festival conceived by a group of filmmakers known as the Société des Réalisateurs de Films who sought to counter the academism of the main part of the world-renowned festival. Pierre-Henri Deleau Read More

Rescue Dawn

Crew: Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Christian Bale, Steve Zahn, Jeremy Davies

Synopsis: Acclaimed filmmaker Werner Herzog returns to direct his first feature since 2001's Invincible with this dramatic action film inspired by his own 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly and detailing the escape efforts of a German-American pilot who was taken as a prisoner-of-war after being Read More

The Wild Blue Yonder

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Brad Dourif

Synopsis: Planet Earth has been decimated, and as mankind searches space for a new planet to inhabit, a race of aliens attempt to make a new home on the now-inhospitable planet abandoned by the human race in director Werner Herzog's strange sci-fi saga. Filmed in collaboration with NASA Read More

Grizzly Man

Crew: Director

Actors: Timothy Treadwell, Amie Huguenard, Warren Queeney, Willy Fulton, Sam Egli

Synopsis: Filmmaker Werner Herzog adds another real-life character to his growing pantheon of people who walk a fine line between visionary genius and madness in this documentary. Timothy Treadwell was a self-styled authority on bears who, starting in 1990, would spend as much time as possible each year in Read More

The White Diamond

Crew: Director, Producer

Synopsis: Werner Herzog once again turns his eye on the beautiful and dangerous wilds of the Amazon in this documentary. Dr. Graham Dorrington is a scientist who specializes in designing experimental aircraft, and in 1992 he invented a unique man-powered airship intended to travel into the Amazon canopy of Read More

Incident at Loch Ness

Crew: Producer

Actors: Werner Herzog, Kitana Baker, Gabriel Beristain, Russell Williams, David Davidson

Synopsis: A handful of filmmakers looking for the fabled sea serpent of Loch Ness get a look at another sort of monster in this witty mock documentary. Under commission from producer and screenwriter Zak Penn, notoriously eccentric German filmmaker Werner Herzog travels to Scotland to shoot his latest film Read More

Wheel of Time

Crew: Cinematographer, Director, Screenwriter

Actors: The Dalai Lama (XIV), Takna Jigme Sangpo, Mattieu Ricard, Thupten Tsering

Synopsis: Celebrated filmmaker Werner Herzog turns his attention to one of the largest Buddhist gatherings in the world in this documentary. Each year, thousands of Buddhist pilgrims travel to the village of Bhod Gaya in India (the place where the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment) to take part Read More

Invincible

Crew: Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Tim Roth, Jouko Ahola, Anna Gourari, Max Raab, Jacob Wein

Synopsis: Werner Herzog returned to dramatic filmmaking for the first time in a decade with this historical drama, based on a true story, about a man who rose to fame and fortune in 1932 as the Nazis rose to power in Germany, only to renounce his career in order to stand beside his people as a symbol of Read More

Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet

Crew: Director

Actors: Markku Peltola, Kati Outinen, Marko Haavisto Ja Poutahaukat, Ana Sofia Liano, Pelayo Suarez

Synopsis: Seven internationally respected filmmakers offer different perspectives on time and fate -- some witty, some somber -- in this omnibus film, with the stories linked by performances from jazz great Hugh Masekela. Dogs Have No Hell by Aki Kaurismaki follows one man's unusual journey as he celebrates Read More

Wings of Hope

Crew: Director

My Best Fiend

Crew: Director

Actors: Werner Herzog

Synopsis: To say the working relationship between director Werner Herzog and actor Klaus Kinski was often stormy strains the boundaries of understatement. Kinski's tirades against Herzog are the stuff of legend -- Kinski's scabrous autobiography All I Need is Love features a number of venomous rants against Read More

Julien Donkey-Boy

Actors: Ewen Bremner, Chloë Sevigny, Werner Herzog, Evan Neumann, Joyce Korine

Synopsis: In his second directorial effort, writer/director Harmony Korine embraces the hyper-realist aesthetic of Lars Von Trier's Dogma 95 film movement, which mandates handheld photography using only available lighting, among other restrictions. As in the controversial Gummo (1997), Korine Read More

Little Dieter Needs to Fly

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Dieter Dengler, Werner Herzog

Synopsis: While growing up in desolated post-WW II Germany, all Dieter Dengler, the son of a Nazi slain during the war, dreamed about was becoming a pilot. At age 18, he left his country with only a few cents to his name and emigrated to the U.S. Landing in San Francisco, he worked odd jobs until he was Read More

Die Nacht der Regisseure

Actors: Leni Riefenstahl, Wim Wenders, Margarethe von Trotta, Detlev Buck

Synopsis: Utilizing computer-generated effects and creative splicing to place Germany's most famous living directors in a fantasy movie house, filmmaker Edgar Reitz takes an innovative approach toward exploring the history of German cinema. In this magical theater, directors such as Leni Riefenstahl, Detlev Buck Read More

Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices - The Composer Carlo Gesualdo (1560-1613)

Crew: Director, Producer

Synopsis: The troubled life of sixteenth century composer Don Carol Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa is explored by filmmaker Werner Herzog in this film shot on location in Italy and featuring interviews with Gesualdo Consort director Gerald Pace, Il Complesso Barocco musical director Alan Curtis. From his sexual Read More

The Transformation of the World Into Music

Crew: Director

Bells From the Deep: Faith and Superstition in Russia

Crew: Director

Synopsis: In this short documentary, legendary German filmmaker Werner Herzog lightly touches on the varieties of religious and related beliefs which enrich, enliven or distort the lives of so many Russians. Whether it is exploring the ancient mysticism of Russian Orthodoxy and the extreme asceticism it Read More

Schneeweissrosenrot

Actors: Paul Getty III, Dennis Hooper, Leonard Cohen

Synopsis: By now, few will remember the tragic kidnapping of the grandson of the man who, in the '60s, was the world's richest man, J. Paul Getty. Getty, a paranoid and miserly man, refused to pay ransom for his handsome, ne'er do well grandson, J. Paul Getty III. He may have believed that the boy Read More

Echos aus einem dusteren Reich

Crew: Director

Actors: Michael Goldsmith

Synopsis: Idi Amin Dada was not the only leader of a newly independent African nation who was accused (on the basis of reliable evidence) of bizarre practices. The former French colony known as the Central African Republic was governed from 1966 to 1977 by a man known as Jean Bedel Bokassa. After he was Read More

Lektionen in Finsternis

Crew: Director

Synopsis: Straddling a line between documentary and science fiction, Werner Herzog's Lektionen in Finsternis is an epic visual poem set in the burning oil fields of Kuwait following the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War. Herzog, as much a daredevil as a documentarian, took his small crew in a helicopter and Read More

La Donna Del Lago

Crew: Director

Synopsis: Based on Sir Walter Scott's narrative poem "The Lady of the Lake," opera composer Gioacchini Rossini's La Donna del Lago follows a pair of lovers through the pitfalls of feudal Scotland. This video production was recorded in 1992 at the Teatro alla Scala in Italy, and features director Werner Read More

Jag Mandir

Crew: Director

Schrei Aus Stein

Crew: Director

Actors: Vittorio Mezzogiorno, Mathilda May, Stefan Glowacz, Brad Dourif, Donald Sutherland, Al Waxman

Synopsis: Werner Herzog's cinema of obsession (Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo) has always owed some of its emotional expressionism to the post-World War I genre of German mountain films (The Blue Light, The White Hell of Pitz-Palu), in which German mountain climbers are compelled to scale the Read More

Gekauftes Gluck

Actors: Wolfram Berger, Werner Herzog, Mathias Gnädinger

Synopsis: These days, things have gotten a little out of hand even in the Swiss countryside. At least, this is what Windleter (Wolfram Berger) thinks, on his farm in the mountains. Even the local girls are a little too forward for him. When he goes to Zurich on a brief jaunt, he visits a "girlie bar" there Read More

Es ist nicht leicht ein Gott zu sein

Actors: Edward Zentara, Alexander Filippenko, Ann Gote, Hugues Quester, Christine Kaufmann, Anne Gautier, Andrei Boltnev

Synopsis: Financed in West Germany and filmed in the Soviet Union, Hard to Be a God (Es Ist Nicht Leicht Ein Gott Zu Sein) is set some thousand years or so in the future, when all forms of hostility and aggression have been purged from the earth. A group of space travellers stumble upon an alien Read More

Giovanna D'arco

Crew: Director

Actors: Renato Bruson, Susan Dunn, Vincenzo La Scola

Synopsis: Werner Herzog directs and Riccardo Chailly conducts the Teatro Communale di Bologna in this famous story of Joan of Arc. ~ All Movie Guide Read More

Cobra Verde

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Klaus Kinski, King Ampaw, Jose Lewgoy, Salvatore Basile, Nana Agyefi Kwame II

Synopsis: Director Werner Herzog, as usual, has spared no one -- especially himself -- in bringing this story of 19th-century African slave trading to the screen. Klaus Kinski plays an enterprising young Brazilian who after impregnating the three daughters of his plantation-owning employer, is sent to West Read More

Chroniques Nomades

Crew: Director

Synopsis: Because it was made for French television, Herdsmen of the Sun has escaped notice in most of the "official" lists of credits for director Werner Herzog. In the manner of his earlier obsessive, location-filmed studies of strange and distant cultures (Fitzcarraldo comes most readily to mind), Herzog Read More

Tokyo-Ga

Actors: Werner Herzog

Synopsis: In this intriguing documentary, award-winning German director and producer Wim Wenders combines clips from one of his favorite directors, Ozu Yasujiro (see the tribute to Ozu, Ikite wa Mita Keredo.. by Inoue Kazuo), with actual scenes from the sprawling, crowded megalopolis of Tokyo to discover Read More

Room 666

Actors: Jean-Luc Godard, Steven Spielberg, Michelangelo Antonioni, Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Synopsis: In this unusual documentary based on a series of identical questions addressed to world-famous directors such as Werner Herzog, Steven Spielberg, and Jean-Luc Godard, director Wim Wenders placed each of his colleagues one-by-one in a single room, gave them one reel (11 minutes) of time to look Read More

The Dark Glow of the Mountains

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Ballade Vom Kleinen Soldaten

Crew: Director

Synopsis: This is the story of the civil war in Nicaragua - between the government of Nicaragua and the CIA-backed Miskito Indians. ~ Tana Hobart, All Movie Guide Read More

Gasherbrum - Der Leuchtende Berg

Crew: Director

Wo Die Grünen Ameisen Träumen

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Bruce Spence, Wandjuk Marika, Roy Marika, Ray Barrett, Norman Kaye

Synopsis: In a slightly padded but well-acted and relevant drama, an Australian mining company and a group of aboriginals go to court to settle a dispute over sacred land that the company wants to mine. When the Ayers Mining Company sets out to begin construction of its mine with bulldozers and Read More

A Man of Flowers

Actors: Norman Kaye, Alyson Best, Chris Haywood, Sarah Walker, Julia Blake

Synopsis: The Australian Man of Flowers stars Norman Kaye in the title role. A painter, Kaye has earned his nickname from his beautifully rendered flower portraits. He uses his artistic skills as a means of channelling his repressed sexual yearnings, especially his feelings towards nude model Alyson Best. Read More

Fitzcarraldo

Crew: Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Klaus Kinski, Jose Lewgoy, Miguel Angel Fuentes, Paul Hittscher, Claudia Cardinale

Synopsis: German filmmaker Werner Herzog has never done anything by halves. When Herzog tackled Fitzcarraldo, the story of an obsessed impresario (Klaus Kinski) whose foremost desire in life is to bring both Enrico Caruso and an opera house to the deepest jungles of South America, the director boldly Read More

Werner Herzog in Peru

Synopsis: This documentary includes an interview with German filmmaker, Werner Herzog. ~ All Movie Guide Read More

Burden of Dreams

Actors: Werner Herzog, Klaus Kinski

Synopsis: Documentarian Les Blank, who filmed Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, trained his cameras on Herzog again, as the eccentric German filmmaker made his epic, Fitzcarraldo, in the Amazon rainforest of Peru. Herzog's production is in trouble right from the start. He begins filming with Jason Robards Read More

God's Angry Man

Crew: Director

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe

Synopsis: While he was struggling to complete his first feature-length film, documentarian Errol Morris was discussing his problems with his friend and mentor, the acclaimed German director Werner Herzog. In a moment of frustration, Herzog blurted out that if Morris ever actually finished the movie he kept Read More

Nosferatu the Vampyre

Crew: Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Klaus Kinski, Isabelle Adjani, Bruno Ganz, Roland Topor, Jacques Dufilho

Synopsis: For Werner Herzog's 1979 remake of F.W. Murnau's classic 1922 silent horror-fest Nosferatu, star Klaus Kinski adopts the same makeup style used by Murnau's leading man Max Schreck. Yet in the Herzog version, the crucial difference is that Nosferatu becomes more and more decayed and desiccated as Read More

Woyzeck

Crew: Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Klaus Kinski, Eva Mattes, Wolfgang Reichmann, Willy Semmelrogge, Josef Bierbichler

Synopsis: Controversial German director Werner Herzog helmed this cinematization of Woyzeck, playwright Georg Büchner's anti-military tale of depersonalization run amok. Utilizing the more grotesque elements of German expressionism, combined with his own sense of the outrageous, Herzog plunges us directly Read More

Stroszek

Crew: Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Bruno S., Eva Mattes, Clemens Scheitz, Wilhelm von Homburg, Burkhardt Driest

Synopsis: Can anything be bleaker than the shabby slums of Berlin? Yes, argues director Werner Herzog in Stroszek: try Wisconsin sometime. Bruno S.. stars as an ex-mental patient who dreams of the so-called promised land of America. He aligns himself with like-minded prostitute Eva Mattes and elderly Read More

La Soufriere

Crew: Director

Synopsis: In 1977, the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe was faced with seemingly unavoidable destruction when La Soufriere, a large and active volcano on the island, came to life and was expected to explode. Guadeloupe was quickly evacuated, but one man, an elderly hermit, refused to leave his tiny campsite Read More

Mit Mir Will Keiner Spielen

Crew: Director

How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck?

Crew: Director

Synopsis: German filmmaker Werner Herzog examines several alien cultures at once in this short documentary. How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck finds Herzog visiting Lancaster County, PA, for the 1976 World Championship of Livestock Auctioneering, where men compete to show who can talk the fastest as they Read More

Heart of Glass

Crew: Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Clemens Scheitz, Sonja Skiba

Synopsis: Heart of Glass (Herz aus Glas) is essentially a treatise by Werner Herzog on the power and importance of art. Director Herzog was known to put his actors through the wringer to get the results he wanted. In this film, Herzog decided that the best way to get his people to dance to the crack of his Read More

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser

Crew: Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Bruno S., Brigitte Mira, Walter Ladengast

Synopsis: German director Werner Herzog's internationally acclaimed "breakthrough" film is based on the famous story of mysterious 19th-century child genius Kasper Hauser. As played by Bruno S., Hauser shows up unannounced in the middle of a village square, frightening the populace with his bizarre Read More

Die Große Ekstase des Bildschnitzers Steiner

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Synopsis: In this documentary, the dramatic ski-jumping exploits of Walter Steiner are explored, along with his life-story and the philosophy which motivates him. Steiner is a Swiss woodcarver who experiences something resembling bliss in the confrontation with fear which is a feature of ski-jumping. One Read More

Aguirre, the Wrath of God

Crew: Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Klaus Kinski, Cecilia Rivera, Ruy Guerra, Helena Rojo, Del Negro, Daniel Zacapa

Synopsis: The most famed and well-regarded collaboration between New German Cinema director Werner Herzog and his frequent leading man, Klaus Kinski, this epic historical drama was legendary for the arduousness of its on-location filming and the convincing zealous obsession employed by Kinski in playing the Read More

Fata Morgana

Crew: Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Synopsis: The term which has become this film's title, Fata Morgana, refers to mirages, and is an apt title for this storyless, hallucinatory work shot in the deserts of North Africa. It is a rhythmic, musical succession of images and short scenes. One of the images is a pianist and drummer who play Read More

Behinderte Zukunft?

Crew: Director

Land of Silence and Darkness

Crew: Director, Producer

Synopsis: This moving documentary by director Werner Herzog (Fitzcarraldo, and Aguirre, the Wrath of God) enters into the world of Fini Strabinger of Bavaria, who is both deaf and blind. Fini has made a career of helping others who are similarly afflicted, teaching them sign language and taking them on Read More

Even Dwarfs Started Small

Crew: Composer (Music Score), Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Synopsis: Even viewers who've seen Freaks won't be completely prepared for Werner Herzog's bizarre Even Dwarfs Started Small. The film is set in a dismal mental institution, wherein dwell several midgets, dwarfs and other "oddities." Sick of being tormented and exploited by the so-called normal people of Read More

Massnahmen Gegen Fanatiker

Crew: Director

Signs of Life

Crew: Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Peter Brogle, Wolfgang Reichmann, Athina Zacharopoulou

Synopsis: A soldier is assigned to guard a fortress on a remote Greek island and finds himself unable to cope with the crushing boredom of the task in this interesting drama, an early film by renowned-director Werner Herzog. The story is set during WWII and concerns a soldier who was wounded and stationed Read More

Letzte Worte

Crew: Director

Spiel Im Sand

Crew: Director

Herakles

Crew: Director, Editor, Producer, Screenwriter, Sound/Sound Designer

2000 Years of Christianity, Episode 9: God the Burdened

Crew: Director

Synopsis: Werner Herzog helms God the Burdened, episode nine of the 2000 Years of Christianity documentary series, which investigates and explores the archaeology of Christianity and how its landscape evolved and shifted over the course of several centuries. This episode begins in the infamous year 1492 Read More