Werner Herzog looks back in ‘Every Man for Himself and God Against All’

Werner Herzog describes his dramatic narration in films as a “stylized voice.” At home with his wife, he says, “I am a mild-mannered, fluffy husband.”

Lena Herzog

German filmmaker Werner Herzog’s earliest memory is of war. He was 2 and a half in April 1945, and his mother woke him up in the middle of the night, wrapped him in blankets and rushed outside to watch the Allied airstrikes against the German city of Rosenheim, which was 40 miles away.

“The entire sky [was] pulsing slowly, red and orange,” Herzog says. “I knew all of a sudden there is something out there. There’s a world out there. There is war out there. There’s a conflagration out there, and I became curious.”

Herzog has traveled the world for decades, making movies about intense personalities and extreme conditions. His 1982 film Fitzcarraldo, which was shot in the Amazon jungle, tells the story of an European opera lover in Peru who tries to bring a steamship over a mountain. His 2005 documentary, Grizzly Man, followed a man who lived in Alaska among grizzly bears — until he was eaten by one.

Sometimes work has put Herzog in direct danger. He filmed the 2016 documentary Into the Inferno at the edge of an active volcano, where, he says, “blobs of lava came down on us, raining down — some of them very large, the size of a car, the size of a truck.”