Do we like Werner Herzog?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing harmful turned up in his own words, but a couple of contested takes on set culture and no documented charity work keep him short of the top.
Herzog's story starts in hunger. He was about two weeks old when Allied bombs hit Munich in 1942, and his mother took him and his brother to a remote Bavarian village with no running water and little food. He has said “I was hungry as a child”. He saw his first film at 11, when a travelling projectionist turned up, and the family went back to a bombed-out Munich a year later.
The Cannes stoush is the recent bit of drama. A rep told Variety the film was invited as an official selection and the filmmakers declined. Reports pointed to Herzog being unhappy it was offered a non-competition slot, and sources cited by World of Reel said he was more worried about his stars, the Mara sisters, than his own awards prospects. The A.V. Club tipped Venice as the next stop.
On the harm check, the record is thin in a good way. We found no campaigning against LGBTQ+ people, migrants or climate science, and nothing on vaccines. The closest things are chats with Piers Morgan in 2024, where he said 'woke' culture had made sets better for women but that he disliked some of it, and agreed intimacy coordinators are unnecessary. In a 2017 Rolling Stone interview he called Donald Trump “a very significant novelty”, which reads as fascination rather than endorsement.
On how he treats people, the only dark thread is his famously fraught history with Klaus Kinski, and that is mostly Herzog's own retelling. He told Piers Morgan he believed Nastassja Kinski's abuse allegations against the actor, and that Kinski did monstrous things. His casting of Bucking Fastard was gentler: a joint letter to the Mara sisters, then one-on-one meetings. We found no allegations of mistreatment aimed at Herzog himself, and no court cases.
Lately he has become a bit of an elder statesman against the algorithm. Accepting the Donostia prize at 84, he urged young people to guard their inner selves and said to be careful with AI. In a 2025 Fortune interview he said he doesn't own a mobile phone, and he defended heartland Americans, whom he described as good people who are overlooked, while saying he is outraged by the term 'flyover states'.
The good stuff is mostly art and honours rather than charity, and that is honestly the thin part of the file. No charity or humanitarian programme turned up in what we read. He keeps making work, including a nature documentary about the search for elephants in Angola, and took the Donostia award while saying he has no plans to retire.