Jungle Madness
WERNER HERZOG, THE FORTY-year-old German filmmaker, isn’t one to be daunted. When a dwarf actor injured himself on the set of the director’s ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ (1969), Herzog, in order to encourage the cast and get the movie back on schedule, promised to jump into a gigantic cactus when shooting was finally finished. (He did.)
When the German film historian Lotte Eisner was sick and in a Paris hospital, Herzog decided to walk from Munich to the French capital, thinking that when he arrived there, she would be out of danger. (She was.) And when, in 1976, the volcano on the Caribbean island of La Soufriere seemed ready to erupt, and the inhabitants were shipped off to safety, Herzog sailed onto the island to film an extraordinary documentary about the one man who had refused to leave. (La Soufriere didn’t explode, but who was to know?)
However, Herzog’s most recent film, ‘Fitzcarraldo,’ almost proved his undoing. The movie, which takes place at the turn of the century in the Peruvian Amazon, tells of a man named Fitzcarraldo (played with irremediable frenzy by Klaus Kinski) who, so obsessed with raising money to build his own opera house in the jungle, decides to move a 320-ton steamboat over a steep hill from one river tributary to another in order to gain access to an inaccessible region of valuable rubber trees. Aided by hundreds of mysteriously motivated Indians, Fitzcarraldo oversees the amazing project: his boat is laboriously, moved, foot by foot, over the hill, only to be unmoored by the Indians on the other side of the river bank. From there, it winds up careening into the raging rapids; the Indians view this as an act designed to appease the evil spirits of the river. Fitzcarraldo, his mission a failure, refuses to give up his operatic obsession. He salvages the damaged but still-floating boat and sails it proudly into the port of Iquitos, with a visiting opera troupe performing grandly on its deck.
Five years in the making (or unmaking, as it almost turned out), ‘Fitzcarraldo’ was plagued by a border war between Peru and Ecuador, a plane crash, feuding Indian tribes, a disastrous rainy season and illness. The original Fitzcarraldo, Jason Robards, came down with amoebic dysentery and was forced to go home; his sidekick in the film, Mick Jagger, couldn’t return to the set because of the Rolling Stones’ 1981 American tour. Undaunted, Herzog started again from scratch, rewrote the script, brought in Klaus Kinski to play the lead role and somehow managed to finish the film –– wresting, like Fitzcarraldo himself, success from failure. (Herzog’s trials and tribulations are revealingly documented in Les Blank’s ‘Burden of Dreams,’ a film about the making of ‘Fitzcarraldo.’)
“There were days when I had the feeling that there was a curse on the whole project.” Herzog said during our conversation in New York in September. “The real achievement of the film is that I finished it—that I would not stop, that I would not be scared away.”
In 1973, you made ‘Aguirre, the Wrath of God,’ which was set in the Peruvian jungle. And now you’ve returned there for ‘Fitzcarraldo.’ One of the characters in this new film says that the jungle is full of “lies, demons, illusions.” Why are you fascinated with it?
In the film, the old missionary tells Fitzcarraldo that he finds it hard to get the natives away from the idea that our everyday life is only an illusion behind which lie the realities of dreams. So when I refer to the illusions or dreams or hallucinations or demons of the jungle, I’m actually talking about an intensified form of reality. . . . And it’s a better part of reality, by the way [laughing]. All of a sudden, an event that hundreds of persons have witnessed is converted into some sort of mythical, distorted, dreamlike story – —it’s quite amazing. And you have to deal with these kinds of fantasies; they’re part of the vapor that is sweat out by the jungle. That’s what I like about the jungle, even though it just hits back at the idiot who comes in and wants to make a film there.
You’ve made films in the jungle as well as in the desert and on a volcanic island. What is it about these elemental landscapes that draws you to them?
These landscapes are extreme ends of what our planet is all about. And they have an enormous visual force. You can stylize and direct the desert and the jungle. Both of them are very good characters, and you can modify them as you would human characters.
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