Werner Herzoz and daring to try

Werner Herzog is celebrated as one of the most influential and innovative filmmakers of our time, but his ascent to acclaim was far from a straight trajectory from privilege to power. Abandoned by his father at an early age, Herzog survived a WWII bombing that demolished the house next door to his childhood home and was raised by a single mother in near-poverty. He found his calling in filmmaking after reading an encyclopedia entry on the subject as a teenager and took a job as a welder in a steel factory in his late teens to fund his first films. These building blocks of his character – tenacity, self-reliance, imaginative curiosity – shine with blinding brilliance in the richest and most revealing of Herzog’s interviews. Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed presents the director’s extensive, wide-ranging conversation with writer and filmmaker Paul Cronin. His answers are unfiltered and to-the-point, often poignant but always unsentimental.

One of my favorite Herzoz films is The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) set in 1828 and one I shall never forget. When is the last time you’ve seen a film that you know you will never, ever forget? Where indeed are those stories today that a reader or audience will say, “I will never, ever forget this story.”

Herzog possesses that rare, paradoxical combination of absolute clarity of conviction and wholehearted willingness to inhabit his own inner contradictions, to pursue life in spite of the risks.

A certain self-reliance that permeates his films and his mind, a refusal to let the fear of failure inhibit.

“There is nothing wrong with hardships and obstacles, but everything wrong with not trying.” – Werner Herzoz

Not all of his films are classics. Herzoz has had his failures.What artist has not? Failure is not the worse thing to happen. What is far worse is not honoring talent, not listening to the inner callings of stories waiting to be born.

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by Catherine Ann Jones

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