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.
In , when Herzog was 19, he started work on his first film Herakles. He has also published over 12 books of prose and directed many operas. Even his failures are spectacular". His mother was Austrian with Croatian ancestry, while his father was German. 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.
He recounted that his family had "no toys" and "no tools" and said that there was a sense of anarchy, as all the fathers of the village's children were absent. When Herzog was 12, he and his family moved back to Munich. His father had abandoned the family early in his youth, but he later adopted his father's surname which is German for "duke" as he thought it sounded more impressive for a filmmaker.
The incident scarred him for life. At an early age, he experienced a dramatic phase in which he converted to Catholicism , which only lasted a few years. He started to embark on long journeys, some on foot. 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.
It was just a necessity. I had some sort of natural right for a camera, a tool to work with". 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.
