He was born in Munich in 1942, when Germany had begun to lose the war. Werner Herzog lived a poor childhood in the postwar period. He was not enthusiastic about the first two films he saw, but one day he decided to be a filmmaker, he stole a camera to shoot his first film and then, with a lot of determination and no small amount of trouble, he managed to fulfill his dream.
At 81 years old, he is one of the most prestigious directors in German cinema thanks to films as personal and particular as The Dwarves Started Small Too (1970), Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Fitzcarraldo (1982) and Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979). Herzog is also an actor and writer and is now publishing his memoirs Each one on the side of him and God against all (Blackie Books, with translation by Marina Bornas Montaña / L’ Atra Editorial, in Catalan), where he recalls the life of him and his cinema. Both, life and cinema, full of anecdotes.
Herzog’s story begins before his birth, when his parents, Dietrich and Elizabeth, were studying at the Faculty of Biology. “They became convinced National Socialists relatively soon,” the director says bluntly. “My mother soon turned her back on politics and National Socialism, perhaps because she realized that it would inevitably lead to disaster.” His father’s case was different: “Her conversion of him to Nazism was probably as authentic as it was opportunistic, because it allowed him to progress more quickly at university.”
The couple separated and Elizabeth moved with Werner and his brother, Till, to Sachrang, a small town near the Austrian border, where the children grew up in misery: “In summer we had no shoes and clothes and food were very scarce.” There she saw the future filmmaker’s two first films, “projected on a sheet.” “In the first one there were some Eskimos building an igloo. The second showed some pygmies building a suspension bridge with vines over a jungle river. Neither of them impressed me.”
The hobby would arrive later, when the family returned to Munich. There he settled in a small boarding house. Klaus Kinski, whom Herzog directed in five films, lived in the same hostel. Herzog was 13 years old, and Kinski, about 26. Despite his young age, the future filmmaker realized that the actor was quite eccentric: “Instead of furniture, he had the entire floor covered with dry leaves that reached up to his height. of his knees and slept with them. “He never wore clothes at home and refused cutlery to eat.”
Kinski was kicked out of the boarding house for his rude behavior, so Herzog admits in the book: “I knew what I was getting into when I started working with him 15 years later.”
The filming of Aguirre, the Wrath of God was not a bed of roses. The film tells “the campaign of some Spanish conquistadors in the lowlands of the Amazon in search of the legendary country of gold, El Dorado.” Herzog rode in a boat with the difficulties that this entails, because “we did not know what awaited us at the next bend in the river.” The film rolls were lost. The team ran out of food. Kinski “turned his anger on the highland Indians and beat her Vietnamese wife by pushing her down the stairs.”
Despite the problems that Kinski caused, Herzog directed the actor on four other occasions. Things didn’t get better. “Kinski was crazy. We planned to kill each other on several occasions, although I only threatened to actually shoot him once, when he picked up his things two weeks before the end of filming and loaded them on a boat to abandon us.
Despite everything, Herzog remembers the good part: “I must say that Kinski could be extraordinarily generous and helpful and that we lived moments of deep camaraderie.” The director also has words of affection for his ex-wives, his brothers and his friends. In his memoirs he also reviews his delirium for cave paintings, hypnosis or hiking and sprinkles these hobbies with endless anecdotes lived in corners of half the world.
