Werner Herzog - A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin

by Paul Cronin

  Years later José Koechlin, a friend of mine from Peru who had helped raise part of the budget for Aguirre, came to visit me in Munich and suggested I return to the jungle and make another film. “Everyone’s waiting for you there,” he said. I knew I couldn’t go back without the right story. José then told me the true tale of Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald, a fabulously wealthy real-life rubber baron from the late nineteenth century who had a private army of four thousand men and drowned at the age of thirty-five in a boating accident. The history of the rubber era in Peru didn’t interest me, nor was Fitzcarrald a particularly compelling character; he was just another ugly businessman. It was thin stuff for a film, save for one detail José happened to mention: Fitzcarrald had once dismantled a boat into hundreds of pieces and, over a period of several months, carried it overland from the Ucayali River to the Madre de Dios River, where he set about reassembling it, which is how he was able to bypass a series of rapids and take control of a territory almost the size of Belgium. That absolutely fascinated me. Inspired by the rubber barons who built the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus just before the turn of the century, I came up with the idea of Fitzcarraldo wanting to finance the construction of his own opera house. When I wrote the screenplay and listed the characters on page one, the first name wasn’t Fitzcarraldo, it was Enrico Caruso, though you only ever hear his voice in the film. I eventually pieced these three elements – Fitzcarrald, Caruso and Carnac, which became a ship moved overland – together into a single story. The question was: how do I move a steamboat, all 340 tonnes of it, in one piece for more than a mile across a mountain, in the primeval forest, several hundred miles away from the nearest town?

  I was working with Twentieth Century Fox on Nosferatu at the time, and after reading a seventeen-page treatment the studio wanted me to sign a contract for a package deal that would have included Woyzeck and Fitzcarraldo, especially once Jack Nicholson expressed interest in playing Fitzcarraldo. I was certain that a Hollywood studio would never get involved in anything as wild as moving a steamboat over a mountain in the middle of the jungle; it was too far outside their horizon of thinking. The executives even suggested I use a miniature boat and fake mountain, and film in the botanic gardens in San Diego. But using models was out of the question for me. Fitzcarraldo is set in an invented geography, but I knew I had to do it for real. For months I sat through insufferable and endless meetings with financiers in Los Angeles before deciding to start pre-production with my own money, which was enough to get things moving. I knew that the way to carry through a project of this size was to pull the train out of the station so everyone could get an idea of its scale, speed and direction. Once there was some momentum, people would jump on board. The film ended up costing $6 million, much of which hadn’t been secured by the time shooting began.

  Even before filming started you had been in the jungle for some time.

  Pre-production took more than three years. In the film you see a rusty old boat that Fitzcarraldo fixes up. We found it in Colombia, but it had sat on dry land for twenty-five years and had such huge holes in its hull that it was beyond repair. We tugged it to Iquitos in Peru with six hundred empty oil drums stuffed into its belly to keep it afloat, and used it as the model for two identical boats we set about building. One had to be constructed in such a way that it wouldn’t break apart while being pulled over the mountain. While it was sitting on the mountainside, we could be shooting with the other boat in the rapids, which we had to reckon might sink. Constructing the identical twin ships was a long and arduous procedure because there wasn’t a single dock in Iquitos where we could work, so we had to build a primitive wharf. We also had to construct a camp for hundreds of extras and a small crew. I spent a lot of time either in the jungle or travelling up to America or Europe to collect things we needed, or trying to raise more money, which is why pre-production took so long.

  Then, once shooting finally started and we had shot about 40 per cent of the film, which took about six weeks, Jason Robards became ill with amoebic dysentery. Before shooting had begun, his lawyer had requested we install a second radio station and a heart–lung machine in the camp, then fly in an American doctor with modern medical equipment and have an aeroplane ready at all times to be able to get him out of there quickly. It was all utterly ridiculous, not least because the kind of machinery they requested would never have functioned properly in the jungle because of the humidity and unreliable electricity. Beyond that, our financial situation would never have permitted it. Robards went back to the United States, and the entire production came to a halt while we waited for him. Then, after a few weeks, his doctor categorically forbade him to return to the jungle. Although the insurance company accepted our claim, this was an absolute catastrophe for us. Practically everything we had in the can included Robards, so none of it was of any use.

  In the meantime, Jagger – who played Fitzcarraldo’s devoted and deranged sidekick, an English actor named Wilbur who forever spouted Shakespearean soliloquies, including the opening lines from Richard III – had to honour his commitment to a Rolling Stones concert tour, so I decided to write his character completely out of the story. Mick Jagger is, after all, irreplaceable. I liked him so much as a performer that anyone else in the role would have been an embarrassment. Jagger is a truly great actor, something few people have noticed. I was backstage at a Rolling Stones concert many years ago and saw him talking with someone about a particular brand of whisky he liked and that should have been in his dressing room, but wasn’t. All of a sudden, in the middle of this argument, there was an announcement on the loudspeaker: “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the Rolling Stones!” I watched Jagger stop in mid-sentence and leap a few steps onto the stage, where, in front of a crowd of thousands, he gave the most demonic performance I have ever seen.

  I appreciated Mick’s attitude during the filming of Fitzcarraldo. On the first day of shooting there was a general strike in Iquitos, so things were at a standstill. Everyone was afraid to leave the hotel, but Mick had a car we rented for him which he insisted on using to drive actors and extras to the location. He knew how important that first day was for everyone. I liked that he knew the value of real work; he’s a professional in the best sense of the word. Everything was a great adventure to him, and having to make the film without Mick is one of the biggest losses I’ve ever experienced as a director. Robards didn’t have the intensity of Kinski; he was more of a warm-hearted Fitzcarraldo, so the two versions would have been different. I like the film today, but would also have liked the Robards/Jagger version.

  With Robards gone you thought about playing the role of Fitzcarraldo yourself.

  I would have played the part only as a last resort, and would have been a credible Fitzcarraldo because what he has to do in the film was almost exactly what I had to do as its director. There wasn’t much of a borderline between this fictional character and me. I wouldn’t have been undignified in the role, but would never have been as good as Kinski. Thank God he did it. It was actually Mick Jagger who advised me not to play the part. I flew out from the jungle, completely exhausted, and met with Kinski in a hotel in New York. I was devastated by everything that had been going on in Peru and thought he was going to scream at me, but he was very supportive and opened a bottle of champagne, saying, “I knew it, Werner! I knew I would be Fitzcarraldo! When does filming start? When can I try on my costume? When do we leave for Peru?” I had contemplated Kinski playing the role from the start, but reached a false conclusion, the same one everyone else probably had, which came from the fact that in every one of his films Kinski never showed a spark of humour. I also decided against him because I knew he had no stamina. Today, when I look back, it’s unthinkable that anyone else might have been Fitzcarraldo.

  I truly liked Kinski for the attitude he brought to that hotel room, though once he arrived at the site where the boat was to be pulled over the mountain and saw how steep the terrain was, his heart sank. He was convinced it couldn’t be done, and
became the strongest negative force on the film. At one point, when the river was swollen and I was sitting in my hut, gazing at the fast-flowing current, watching the water level rise, a small delegation arrived that had obviously been sent by Kinski. They told me to be calm, that they were here to protect me from my own madness and folly, that I should abandon the film, or at least continue to flatten out the mountainside. We had already turned a gradient of sixty degrees into one of forty. “I’m the only one who’s calm,” I told them. For a time not a single person was on my side. The question I kept hearing was, “Why don’t you just rewrite the script and cut out this whole thing of pulling a ship over a mountain?” My response was always the same: to do so would mean losing the central metaphor of my story.

  In an interview from the time you said that if you were to make a film like Fitzcarraldo again, “there would be only ashes left of me.”

  One of the cameramen asked what I would do if the entire negative were lost in an aeroplane crash. I told him I would start all over again tomorrow, that I would go through everything once more.

  With Robards and Jagger gone and production halted, it was vital to get the film up and running as quickly as possible. We had already booked the opera house in Manaus, where several key sequences of the film were to be shot, and if we didn’t get going immediately the boats would have been immovable because of the imminent dry period. There were other things to deal with, like making it clear to the five hundred Indians who had already spent two months working on the film that their efforts hadn’t been for nothing, and the fact that our encampment was at risk of being devoured by termites. About ten days’ voyage further up Río Camisea from where we were working lived the Amahuacas, a nomadic tribal group who had repelled all attempts by missionaries and the military to contact them. That season was the driest in recorded history and the river had virtually dried out. A group of Amahuacas were forced to move downriver, further than ever before, probably in search of turtle eggs. In silence and total darkness they attacked three locals who were extras in the film and who were fishing for our camp, shooting gigantic arrows through the neck and leg of one of the men, something you see in Les Blank’s documentary Burden of Dreams. The man’s wife was also hit, in her abdomen, with three arrows, leaving her in critical condition. It was too risky to transport them anywhere, so we performed eight hours of emergency surgery on a kitchen table. I assisted by illuminating her abdominal cavity with a torch, and with my other hand sprayed repellent at the clouds of mosquitoes that swarmed around the blood. Thirty of our native extras left on a retaliatory raid to push the Amahuacas back into their own territory, but they never made contact. My hut was on the edge of the camp and was the most exposed, so the Indians insisted on posting six guards with bows and arrows at the foot of my bed and beside my hammock.

  There were also inevitable complications with getting the boat up the mountain, not least because every spare part – as well as everything from generators, sinks, refrigerators, an entire makeshift radio station, ovens and kitchen equipment, to material for costumes, sewing machines, food, livestock and crates of mineral water – had to be shipped in from Iquitos. Then, once we actually got the boat to the top, there was no water in the tributary on the other side, so it sat there for six months. I hired a family with five children and a couple of pigs to live inside it until we returned, at which point we spent a couple of weeks getting shots of the ship moving down the other side of the mountain. Filming in Iquitos was difficult because there was no infrastructure. Phoning long distance was practically impossible, there were power cuts twice a day, and the dirt road from town to our offices was basically a swamp, so most taxi drivers refused to make the journey. Those who did had cars which were rusted through and falling apart. We held on to the doors to keep from falling out, and instead of a steering wheel some of them used a pair of pincers to steer.

  By pulling a real boat over a real mountain were you after realism?

  When the boat is crashing through the rapids it jerks the gramophone, and we suddenly hear opera playing. The realistic noises fade away to reveal Caruso singing, and the whole thing becomes a dream-like event. Once the boat starts to move up the mountainside, there are fewer and fewer people in shot; it’s almost as if the boat were gliding by its own force over the top of the mountain. Had we shown anyone in frame, the endeavour would have been realistic, an event of human labour. As it is, in the film the whole thing seems to have been transformed into an opera of fever dreams and pure imagination, a highly stylised and grandiose fantasy, part of the vapour sweat out by the jungle. The film challenges the most basic laws of nature; boats aren’t meant to fly over mountains. Fitzcarraldo’s story is the victory of weightlessness and fantasy over heaviness and reality, and the elation that follows. He defies gravity head on, and by the film’s end I hope audiences feel lighter than they did two hours earlier.

  You set yourself a daunting engineering task.

  Some people expressed doubt about what we were doing, and one of the loudest accusations against me was that I risked people’s lives during production. The fact is, I was careful about everything. I hired a team of engineers from the University of Bremen who travelled to Peru and examined the condition of the soil, the gradient of the mountain and tractive power of the boat. They made calculations and drew up plans, but their solutions – one of which was to place the ship on inflated air cushions – weren’t feasible. I then hired a Brazilian engineer who supervised the logistics of dragging the boat; he’s the one in Burden of Dreams who says we have a 30 per cent chance of pulling the boat over the mountain. He quit the production because once in the jungle, he said that a twenty-degree angle was all the technology would allow for, insisting there was a real danger that our dead post – drilled into the ground to take the weight of the boat – would be pulled out of the ground if we went ahead. He was convinced the whole thing was a disaster waiting to happen. When he left, I took things into my own hands and halted production for two weeks. I had a much more stable hole dug for the dead post and sank a huge tree trunk about thirty feet into the ground, letting it stick out by only two feet. It isn’t difficult to calculate the force of physical objects, like the boat against this post, which by the time we had finished could have comfortably held something like ten times the weight of the steamship. We also brought in a heavier and more substantial pulley system. The margin of safety was extravagant.

  I wish we had recorded everything in Dolby stereo because the noises the ship made when moving over the mountain were stunning. Steel cables sound unhealthy and sick when close to breaking point; no sound engineer could ever have invented what we heard on location. An overstressed cable glows red hot inside from the pressure. The only thing to do is to release as much tension as possible and get out of the way, because when it snaps under such circumstances it becomes a gigantic, deadly whip. I was careful not to allow anyone to stand next to the ship – particularly behind it – when it was being pulled up the mountain. The Native Indians demanded that if they had to be close to this enormous object for a particular shot, then I had to be there as well, which I acceded to immediately. The rear of the ship was sealed off from the rest of the set, and if the cables holding the boat had broken, it would have slid down the mountain without harming anyone. No one was ever at risk while it was moving. No one means no actor, no technician, no extra.

  We had seven hundred Indians who provided pulling force by revolving the turnstiles we had constructed, but I also imported a Caterpillar bulldozer from Texas that spent weeks clearing a path up the mountain. The power of the turnstiles operated by the Indians was real, but more symbolic than anything else; the largest amount of physical power came from this Caterpillar. There are primitive physical laws behind what we did on that mountain. Given the fact that we had a pulley system with a ten-thousand-fold transmission, theoretically speaking I could have dragged the boat over the mountain with my little finger. It would have taken very little strength, though I wo
uld have had to pull the rope about five miles to move the boat five inches. I think it was Archimedes who said it’s possible to hoist the earth off its hinges if you have a pivotal point and lever sticking far enough out into the universe. The real Fitzcarrald moved a far lighter boat from one river system to the next, but he disassembled it into little pieces, then had engineers reassemble it. There was no precedent in technical history for what we did. The obvious problems were the steep inclination and landslides caused by torrential rains, which meant the boat kept on sinking into the mud. No one will ever need to do again what I did. I’m a Conquistador of the Useless. Actually, a few years ago I was in the archive of the Vatican library and discovered that the obelisk in St Peter’s Square was erected in the same way I pulled the ship over the mountain. I devised my own method all those years ago, but it turns out the same ideas were being used back in 1586.

  People still believe Indians were killed when the boat was dragged up the mountain.

  There is a shot in Fitzcarraldo where the boat finally starts edging up the side of the mountain before slipping back again and crushing a couple of Indians. I’m proud the scene is so well staged that some people think the Indians really died and that I had the audacity to film their bodies, deep in the mud underneath the boat. Thankfully Les Blank got that shot he used in Burden of Dreams, where we see them emerging from underneath the boat, laughing, then washing themselves in the river. Some of the wilder accusations were triggered by images that looked too convincing.