Werner Herzog is a German filmmaker, actor, opera director, and author. Regarded as a pioneer of New German Cinema, his films often feature ambitious protagonists with impossible dreams, people with unusual talents in obscure fields, or individuals in conflict with nature. His style involves avoiding storyboards, emphasizing improvisation, and placing his cast and crew into real situations mirroring those in the film they are working on.

Herzog was born Werner Stipetić in Munich, German Reich on 5 September 1942, the son of Elisabeth Stipetić and Dietrich Herzog. 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, his older brother Till and younger half-brother Lucki grew up without running water, a flushing toilet, or a telephone. 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. He never saw films, and did not even know cinema existed until a traveling projectionist came by the one-room schoolhouse in Sachrang.