Werner Herzog
speaker
545 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 1 Jul
Werner Herzog’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And of course, since I lived in the same boarding house with him, directly with him, and saw the tornado laying waste to the entire apartment, so I knew what was coming at me when some nine or ten years later I invited him to play the leading part in Agere, The Wrath of God. I knew it was going to be difficult, but I said to myself, so what?
The real task now is, since he's such an incredible actor, since he has such a presence and dynamic and authority on the screen, I have to domesticate the wild beast somehow. All his crazy attitudes should not explode outside of the screen during a dinner or after dinner where he opens fire at a hut full of extras. It shouldn't happen. It should be all somehow organized for the screen itself.
And I think that that was my achievement.
No, not partially successful. I was successful because I made five films with him. And they all, when you look at them and forget about Kinski and forget about his private crazed personality and his egomania, forget about all this. There are five films out there that have something that you normally do not see in a movie. a presence and an intensity of a leading character that's unprecedented.
I have only a few precedents are there, like the young Marlon Brando, for example. And no matter how difficult it was to tame him, to domesticate the beast, it doesn't matter. The only thing, the only, only thing that counts, what do you see on a screen?
Yes, but that was the most serious thing that ever happened. And, of course, it is serious. And you have to cope with it. And I threatened Kinski. Actually, there are wild rumors about it that I had a gun in my hands. And so that's not true. But I threatened him immediately. And he understood this was not a joke anymore. And he had to be disciplined from now on.
And through all the other films I made with him, never anything of this magnitude ever happened.
Yeah.
We didn't talk that much. My mother, it was obvious, she was very early on embarrassed about having been misguided. And she practically, of course, she had to raise all alone three children. There was no money. My father never paid.
paid anything to support us and she became a completely different person and of course it was always lingering out there and of course I was fascinated by what happened to Germany how is it possible that within a few years such a cultured nation lapses into transforms into a world of barbarism
Yes, and it happened to many other educated families. There was no one spared. I mean, Germany was almost 100% Nazi. The dissidents, yes, they were out there, but they ended up in concentration camps very quickly.
In a way, yes. But of course, in this village, there were also Nazis.
Yes, there were also Nazis. Well, much later, it took some time. I thought, I didn't even know what Germany was. It was the valley where we grew up in this remote place and the waterfall in the gorge behind the house. That was our world. And of course, the daily struggle. We had no running water. You had to go to the well with a bucket.
We didn't have any running water in the house, so my shower was the ice-cold water of the waterfall deep in the gorge, and hardly any electricity. I didn't know of the existence of cinema until I was 11. I think the first time I noticed that there was something like Germany, I must have been seven or eight years old. For me, the world was around me and that was it.
And of course, I started to question and I started to understand how does chaos and barbarism invade a fairly organized country. And that's why I wanted to go to the chaos of Eastern Congo after its independence, which I never reached and I probably wouldn't have survived it.
Yes.
My mother and my father was always outside of my life. I hardly knew him.
Yes, but not very much. It was fairly laconic and she said, look at me, that's me now. And I did a very, very severe mistake in my life. And my character had to readjust. I'm a different person. I think differently now. And so I accepted it. And, for example, she was never a racist, never deep into Nazi ideology at all.
It is more the aftermath and the restrictions. For example, I noticed that we were hungry. That was the only thing that was really hard to take. Otherwise, that we lived in very deep poverty. I didn't notice. It was a normal thing. And everyone around us was impoverished. And so it was nothing really special. Only much later I understood what poverty meant.
But that I had gone through it never affected me.
Showing 501–520 of 545 · page 26 of 28
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