‘I had to invent cinema’: Werner Herzog on how growing up in poverty made him the filmmaker he is

Herzog is considered one of the greatest documentary filmmakers of all time. So what are his secrets?

When Werner Herzog was growing up in rural Bavaria in the 1940s, there were no movies — at least not in his world.

His family had no running water, no flushing toilet, and no telephone; it wasn’t until he was 17 that he made his first phone call.

He didn’t even know that films existed until he was 11, when a traveling projectionist passed through his family’s remote mountain village.