Werner Herzog, the great German filmmaker, began directing films in 1962 when he was 20 years old. In 1972, at 30, when he made Aguirre, he had already directed nine films (he also acts, narrates, scores the music, writes the script, edits and produces movies, with different parameters for each of the 50 films he has been part of).
Herzog was fascinated with the challenge that nature presents to man, especially wildernesses. Before Aguirre he had made Fata Morgana (1970) where he tried to capture mirages on the Sahara desert. His Fitzcarraldo (1982) was also filmed in the upper Amazon and its great feeder rivers, was a return to this obsession. "Cobra Verde" (1987) found him back in South America and in Ghana, West Africa making an historical film about Dahomey and the slave trade. Herzog's Scream of Stone (1991) is on Cerro Torre, a notorious mountain of death in Patagonia, Argentina. Last year he made a wilderness documentary on Toklat Grizzlies in Alaska and the naturalist who had studied them for years and then was eaten by them.
