Director: Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog has made more than sixty films across fiction and documentary and treats the distinction as unimportant. His stated doctrine is ecstatic truth, the idea that a fabricated detail can be more honest than an accurate one, which makes his documentaries argumentative in a way the form usually avoids.

The fiction work is defined by physical extremity. Fitzcarraldo required hauling an actual steamship over a hill without effects, and Aguirre was shot in the Amazon with a lead actor, Klaus Kinski, whom Herzog has said he considered shooting.

The later documentaries, Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the World and Cave of Forgotten Dreams, are narrated in a voice that has become its own genre. He is also, unexpectedly, a reliable character actor.