Werner Herzog

Herzog started young. Nineteen, to be exact, when he began work on Herakles in 1961 (TMDB). That early restlessness set the tone for a career that's never really slowed down — over sixty feature films and documentaries across six decades, which is a number that stops you when you actually think about it. The breakthrough that put him on the international map was Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), a film about a Spanish conquistador descending into megalomania on a raft in the Amazon — and one of those rare movies where the chaos onscreen and the chaos behind the camera feel genuinely inseparable. The 1970s were extraordinarily productive: The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), Heart of Glass (1976), Stroszek (1977), and Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) all arrived within that single decade (TMDB). Then came Fitzcarraldo (1982), the film where Herzog famously had a real steamship hauled over a real Peruvian mountain — don't look for a CGI explanation, because there isn't one — and Cobra Verde (1987), which closed out his notorious collaboration with actor Klaus Kinski (Wikipedia). His documentary work is where a lot of newer audiences find him, and it's every bit as intense as his fiction. Grizzly Man (2005), built around Timothy Treadwell's own footage from the Alaskan wilderness, is the kind of film that makes you question what it means to watch someone's life unravel in real time. Encounters at the End of the World (2007) and Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) followed, each one pushing into some remote physical or historical extreme (TMDB). Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009) showed he could work inside genre conventions without losing himself in them. He's also acted in films — a side of his work that doesn't get enough attention — and has directed operas and published more than a dozen books of prose (TMDB).