Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog (his real surname is Stipetić) was born in Munich on September 5, 1942, and grew up in a remote village in the Bavarian mountains. During his childhood, he never watched films or television and never used a telephone. He had his first telephone conversation at the age of 17. He began traveling, always on foot, from the age of 14. During his high school years, he worked night shifts as a welder in a steel factory to fund his first films. In 1961, at the age of 19, he made his first attempt at directing, and in 1963, he founded his own production company, Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, in Munich. That same year, he won a scholarship for film studies at the University of Pittsburgh, but after a few weeks, he left and started traveling in the USA and Mexico, while also participating in a project to establish a utopian community in Guatemala. In 1965, he won the Carl Mayer Prize for the script of his first feature film, "Signs of Life," which he filmed in 1968 in Greece, on the island of Kos. Since then, he has directed over 50 films, many lyrical operas, and has written books.