Regarded as a pioneer of New German Cinema, his films often feature ambitious protagonists with impossible dreams,[1] people with unusual talents in obscure fields, or individuals in conflict with nature.

[2] His style involves avoiding storyboards, emphasizing improvisation, and placing his cast and crew into real situations mirroring those in the film they are working on.

He has since produced, written, and directed over 60 films and documentaries such as Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), Heart of Glass (1976), Stroszek (1977), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1982), Cobra Verde (1987), Lessons of Darkness (1992), Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997), My Best Fiend (1999), Invincible (2001), Grizzly Man (2005), Encounters at the End of the World (2007), Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), and Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010).

When he was two weeks old, his mother took refuge in the remote Bavarian village of Sachrang in the Chiemgau Alps, after the house next to theirs was destroyed during an Allied bombing raid in World War II.

Around this time, he knew he would be a filmmaker and learned the basics from a few pages in an encyclopedia which provided him with "everything I needed to get myself started" as a filmmaker—that, and the 35 mm camera he stole from the Munich Film School.

During Herzog's last years of high school, no production company was willing to take on his projects, so he worked night shifts as a welder in a steel factory to earn the funds for his first featurettes.

[14][15] After graduating from high school, he was intrigued by the post-independence Congo, but in attempting to travel there, reached only the south of Sudan before falling seriously ill.[16] While already making films, he had a brief stint at the University of Munich, where he studied history and literature.

[18] Herzog, along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders and Volker Schlöndorff, led the beginning of the New German Cinema, which included documentarians who filmed on low budgets and were influenced by the French New Wave.

Long haunted by the event, nearly 30 years later he made a documentary film, Wings of Hope (1998), which explored the story of the sole survivor.

Grizzly Man, a documentary directed by Herzog, was awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.

[39] The film was completed in 2014 with a different cast: Nicole Kidman as Gertrude Bell, James Franco as Henry Cadogan, Damian Lewis as Charles Doughty-Wylie, and Robert Pattinson as a 22-year-old archaeologist T. E. Lawrence.

[40] In 2015, Herzog shot a feature film, Salt and Fire, in Bolivia, starring Veronica Ferres, Michael Shannon and Gael García Bernal.

"[43] Notable alumni include Keirda Bahruth, Nir Sa'ar, Bob Baldori, Sean Gill, Frederick Kroetsch, and George Hickenlooper.

[45][46][47] In 2010 he expanded his reach by performing a voiceover for an animated television program for the first time, appearing in The Boondocks in its third-season premiere episode "It's a Black President, Huey Freeman".

In the episode, he played a fictional cameo of himself filming a documentary about the series' cast of characters and their actions during the 2008 election of Barack Obama.

[citation needed] Continuing with voice work, Herzog played Walter Hotenhoffer (formerly known as Augustus Gloop) in The Simpsons episode "The Scorpion's Tale", which aired in March 2011.

Herzog gained attention in 2013 when he released a 35-minute Public Service Announcement-style documentary, From One Second to the Next, demonstrating the danger of texting while driving and financed by AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and T-Mobile as part of their It Can Wait driver safety campaign.

The film, which documents four stories in which texting and driving led to tragedy or death, initially received more than 1.7 million YouTube views and was subsequently distributed to over 40,000 high schools.

[49] In July 2013, Herzog contributed to an art installation entitled "Hearsay of the Soul", for the Whitney Biennial, which was later acquired as a permanent exhibit by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

[50] In 2019, Herzog joined the cast of the Disney+ live action Star Wars television series The Mandalorian, portraying "The Client", a character with nebulous connections to the Empire.

[53] In June 2022, Herzog published his debut novel, titled The Twilight World, telling the story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who had refused to surrender for decades while hiding in the jungle of a Philippine island.

Onoda, a WWII Japanese soldier who was deployed in 1944 to Lubang, a small Philippine Island, where he conducted warfare for twenty-nine years.

Mark Harris of The New York Times wrote in his review: "The movie and its making are both fables of daft aspiration, investigations of the blurry border between having a dream and losing one's mind.

In 1999, before a public dialogue with critic Roger Ebert at the Walker Art Center, Herzog read a new manifesto, which he dubbed Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema.

It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization" and that "facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

[66] What exactly goes on at the rogue film school has been clouded in secrecy, but director and writer Kristoffer Hegnsvad report from his stay there in his book Werner Herzog – Ecstatic Truth and Other Useless Conquests: "The first thing you notice is his enormous presence.

His self-confidence sends shockwaves through a room every time he opens his mouth or make eye contact; he adopts a stance of exalted calm, as though he has achieved some kind of mastery – not just over his own mind, but over the capriciousness of the world" ".

In 2018, he held "Filming in Peru with Werner Herzog", a twelve-day workshop in the Amazonian rainforest, close to the locations for Fitzcarraldo, for new filmmakers from around the world.

Regarding Herzog's influence on him, Morris quoted Gabriel García Márquez's reaction to reading Kafka for the first time: "I didn't know you were allowed to do that.

Suggested reading includes the Poetic Edda as translated from Old Norse by Lee M. Hollander, Bernal Díaz del Castillo's Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (The True History of the Conquest of New Spain), and the 888-page report published by the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy.