Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo

by Werner Herzog

  Iquitos, 19 May 1981

  A day of shooting yesterday that was plagued by pressure and tension, of a very uncomfortable sort. Gisela asked me toward evening to shoot the rooster that sits on the perimeter wall and crows, preventing anyone from sleeping in the costume depot. She gave me a bow and arrow she had brought along from Camisea. I had just drawn the arrow on the bowstring when the whole thing flew apart around me with a loud crack. The bowstring had snapped and struck my wrist. By the time I had repaired the bow, the rooster was gone, and I fired the arrow into the trunk of a banana plant, where my rage drove it in so deep that it will probably remain stuck there forever. The arrow will be a sort of rage cast in concrete.

  A man at a stand in the market was counting fish, then counting them again and again. Out by the Nanay a truck with a flatbed trailer has been stuck in the river for weeks. Now that the water level has gone down, it is on dry land. All the air has gone out of the tires, whose wheels are rusting, and the trailer, which has no wheels at all, is sunk into the drying, fissured mud, holding the cab from behind as if with an iron fist. Marines are waiting for a bus that is sure not to show up today. I saw an Indian marine who had been posted in the blazing sun to guard the officers’ quarters. He found the one patch of shade for his head, cast on the dusty square by a transformer box on a light pole. An hour later, when I passed by again, the soldier had moved slightly as the shade had shifted. A woman came by wearing a tight dress through which her breasts showed distinctly. One of her nipples was covered by a coin she had stuck in her bra.

  Iquitos, 20 May 1981

  Shooting at the railroad station. I had slept for only an hour because I was trying to get a long-distance call through. It was already getting light outside when I lay down for a while. Piercing sun all day. I was dripping with sweat from the heat, as if I stood in a shower. At night looking at rushes, some of the worst I have ever seen, but I also know that can be misleading.

  Iquitos, 21 May 1981

  Last night a terrible thunderstorm took us by surprise. First the lights went out in the whole city while I was out on the motorcycle. I sought shelter in the Don Giovanni café. Soon there was a half meter of water in every dip in the streets. When I got to my hut at night, pillows I had left stacked up were scattered all over the porch, and in my room the mosquito netting had been ripped down. The rain had driven diagonally through the window onto my bed. Uli’s cabin had its roof torn off and blown into the neighbor’s yard.

  The toucan we had been keeping in a cage for Don Aquilino’s house and which has now been put into one of the empty rabbit hutches has been uttering hoarse cries all morning long. The cat is sneezing. Every morning when I go out on the porch I find the green, ugly skins of lizards, which the cat leaves lying around like empty sausage casings. One time I found next to the feet of a lizard a large quantity of light green eggs, like fish eggs. The lizard’s four legs framed the ovaries, but otherwise hardly anything was left but a piece of ugly skin.

  Iquitos, 22 May 1981

  While I was sitting in Huerequeque’s bar, next to me a pig kept rubbing with rapt persistence against a case of beer. Then it disappeared behind the counter. A broom is lying on the ground as if felled by an assassin. I studied a wall calendar from which the month of April had not been torn off yet: Swiss mountains with a springlike alpine meadow in the foreground. Dandelions, apple trees in bloom, spot-less cows grazing, and behind them snowy peaks, a world wreathed in mysteries, a world that does not exist for me anymore. How often I used to study calendar pictures down to the smallest detail, trying like a detective to figure out the exact date and time when the picture was taken. Looking at a picture of the Hamburg harbor, I examined the models and years of the parked cars, figured out which ship was being loaded with what and where, found a church tower with a clock that showed the time, compared the angles of the shadows: all these pieces of information, when checked against the harbor’s logbook, would make it possible to determine the day and exact time, as well as the photographer’s position and the lens he had used. The picture could serve as evidence in court for a major case, evidence sufficient for a conviction.

  A young woman in Huerequeque’s bar had heard that I had been on a volcano that was about to explode, and I told her about La Soufrière, making a comparison with the atom bomb over Hiroshima for the sake of clarity—explaining how much more powerful the apparently inevitable catastrophe would be. Atom bomb? she asked. She did not understand. To clarify, I explained that at the end of the Second World War the Americans had dropped it over Japan. But she did not know what the World War was, either. I found that striking, and with a joke brushed aside two world wars, several continents, and a whole world whose reach does not extend to these parts.

  I went through the daily reports and was devastated to see how little we have accomplished. What they call in English crowd control is almost impossible here; we were shooting under the utmost time pressure, with the light fading fast, but more and more curious onlookers kept crowding onto our set. One young man darted repeatedly into the frame, and as I ran toward him, I slipped on some slimy boards and took him down with me in a running tackle. Without any resentment he struggled to his feet and went on his way, muttering to himself.

  Iquitos—Camisea, 23 May 1981

  Back at our camp in the jungle. I found the insects I had collected in a film canister rotting, and threw them away. My mosquito net was gone, and Gloria told me she had caught the pilot’s mechanic about to walk off with my small metal suitcase containing the radio and my most important possessions; he had it wrapped in a blanket and was clearly planning to steal it. He also tried to rape her, she said.

  In Camisea I saw many new faces. I inspected the jungle swath we had cleared, and immediately had work stopped on the dead post, the muerto, which has to hold the entire weight of the ship on the slope; I wanted to film the actual work tomorrow. Laplace thinks the slope is too steep. Kinski looked at the site and announced that my plan was completely impossible, prompted by madness. He is becoming the epicenter of discouragement. On closer inspection it became clear to me that no one is on my side anymore, not a single person, none, no one, not a single one. In the midst of hundreds of Indian extras, dozens of forest workers, boatmen, kitchen personnel, the technical team, and the actors, solitude flailed at me like a huge enraged animal. But I saw something the others did not see.

  I scrambled up the cleared swath again, all alone. Up above, where the Caterpillar has sliced fifteen meters into the mountain, where it was originally almost vertical, moisture is oozing out of the sidewall, and farther down bare ledge is protruding. I saw a Machiguenga leaning his face against the rock. He was catching droplets of fresh spring water in his mouth, and then, like a thirsty animal, licked the rest of the moisture off the rock. I waited until it welled up again and followed his example. I saw our dreamy boatman lying on the floor in his hut. He was wearing faded gym shorts and playing the harmonica, while reading that same old letter over and over. Outdoors night was falling. When I stepped outside, it was lurking among the trees.

  Camisea, 24 May 1981

  A good day’s work, but the sense of desolation in me keeps growing. When the alarm went off this morning, I could not make myself wake up for a long time, and then did not know where I was.

  Camisea, 25 May 1981

  Did a lot of shooting. Fitz with the phonograph, boats with Indians who board the ship. In the midst of Kinski’s bellowing and raving, which brought all work to a standstill, I stood like a silent rock wall and let him crash against it. Ultimately this was the only right and productive thing to do for the sake of what will appear on the screen, because in this way the craziness inside him can be shaped into form. But no one on the set grasps this, no one in the team, and of the actors only Huerequeque has a glimmer—the man who never stood in front of a camera till now. Meanwhile I have the impression that the Indians are plotting something against Kinski. In the evening I went to Kinski’s hut to confront him, a
nd caught him naked, just coming out of the shower. To my surprise, I found him perfectly calm and understanding. He urged me again to do the Paganini film; he recognizes that he cannot keep his eye on the big picture where he himself is involved as the lead actor.

  Camisea, 26 May 1981

  I had ball bearings under my feet and was therefore moving very fast and very lightly without needing to take steps. At a construction site where tar was being steamrolled onto the ground they were angry with me for that. A murder had taken place, and the perpetrator was trying to cover it up by setting fire to a trolley car, but I provided the decisive evidence. It turned out that on this particular day the backs of all trolley cars had been set on fire, so that the rear half of each one was charred. In a banquet hall I participated in a game of chance, probably bingo, with people I did not know; they had taken an excursion from a rural area into the city. Usually the place received busloads of older folks, lower-middle-class types. The buffet table was set up in a huge square, and people were fighting, with unconcealed, repulsive greed, to get close to it. Kinski, who was there as a waiter, became so rude that most of the guests left. All of humanity was in a bad way, for more and more trolley cars were burning, and no one had any ideas. The thought of revenge began to take root in me; it did not matter against whom. Something attacked me at the entrance to my hut, pushed me down, and stabbed me through my shirt in front, into my shoulder. Whether it was a large spider or something else, I could not make out in my surprise, but at any rate the wound stung and immediately became infected, and I began to roll on rollers under my feet.

  Working on the winches on the slope, and meanwhile we filmed the Campas hauling a pulley for the block and tackle up the hill. It weighed over five hundred kilos. The system seems to be sufficiently sturdy, but I am not sure I trust the steel cables. The physical specifications were meaningless once we started shooting the first attempt to haul the ship uphill and I saw its keel digging straight into the ground, while its hull groaned and rumbled, its whole form warped out of shape and threatening to break apart. We cheered each other up, but I am worried about Kinski, because when we are dragging the ship uphill, he will be just a kind of extra, and given his inadequate supply of human compassion and depth, he will use the only means still at his disposal to make himself the center of attention again, which is to get sick. I was betting with myself.

  Today I sent Segundo, the boatman, off to fetch Kinski and Paul for a dynamite explosion we had planned for the site. But instead of Kinski, suddenly Quispe, the Quechua from the highlands, was standing before me in rubber boots, indicating with his thumb and index finger that he just wanted a brief moment to speak with me. Since I was in the middle of a debate with Mauch just then over a complicated camera movement, I told him to speak, but only if it was important. At that he came even closer and without saying anything made the distance between his thumb and index finger even smaller, as small as a kernel of rice. Una preguntita, he said, just a tiny question. What was it, I asked, turning in midsentence toward him. Was it true, he asked, that I needed him as an actor for the scene, or had I meant Kinski? The boatman had not been sure.

  Camisea, 27 May 1981

  Water is raging through the camp. It rained so hard in the morning that everything is paralyzed except the water, which is rushing in streams toward the river, becoming more and more powerful, more brown and malevolent. The curtain of rain almost completely hides the bend in the river. The forest is growing dim, opening itself up to receive the cloudburst from above in deathlike rigidity. The early part of the day will vanish like nothing. We sit and stare at the river, which refuses to rise.

  Miguel Vazquez, our Mexican special-effects man, was thoroughly in his element yesterday. It seems to me he is always happiest when he is tying sticks of dynamite together with gaffer tape to form thick bundles and attaching the fuses with fine copper wire. His voice at such times takes on a jubilant resonance, and his roundish face wears an expression of cautious bliss.

  I talked to Mauch about Kinski, saying we had to be prepared for him to get sick, and as if this were all part of a prearranged game, at that very moment Paul came in and told me that K. had a bad case of the flu and actually looked so wasted that he was afraid it might be something much worse. I asked whether the doctor had been to see him. Yes. Did he have a fever? No, said Paul. I told him not to worry for now, and I mustered all my patience and listening ability and went to his hut. I found Kinski on his porch, dressed, but wobbly and making a show of courageously resisting impending collapse. So I sat down, looking concerned, and listened to him for an hour as he complained that the rooster had woken him up at five in the morning; that someone had thrown away an empty beer can close to his hut, of all places; and that a light a hundred meters away had been left on all night; that all these vile tricks could not possibly be the result of mere stupidity, but had been perpetrated on purpose. He said he was going to raise holy hell, not only here but all over America. I told him I found all these skunks with their petty mean-ness positively uninspiring, and it cheered him up to hear that; while I was away in Iquitos, he said, they had even dumped garbage right by my hut. Kinski then invited me into his cabin, and together we pulled his bed to one side. He asked me what I thought this stuff by the head of the bed was. There was something resembling a piece of flatbread, disgustingly moldy, and I knew immediately what it was, but I had to act as though I had no idea. I knew the story of the crazy card games played during our absence, in one of which the prize for the winner was one night with the hooker, and I knew who had won and had gone looking for an unoccupied bed. When some of the others came by with flashlights to applaud the consummation of the bet, the winner had beat a hasty retreat and had probably forgotten to clean up the mess. Kinski guessed with a certain amount of perspicacity that someone had been lying in his bed and had thrown up there, and I confirmed his supposition halfheartedly and lied that I still found it hard to believe that anyone in the camp could be so debased. Maybe it was a slime mushroom from the wilds all around us, I suggested, and while Kinski lost himself in platitudes about the wildness of nature, I called for a cleaning squad, which immediately went to work. By the time I left, Kinski had forgotten that he was deathly ill.

  Camisea, 28 May 1981

  A confused night with contradictory instructions from Walter, Laplace, and Vignati as to where the ship should be tied up, since the river was racing, even though the level had hardly risen. Laplace had warned us against positioning the Narinho diagonally to the current to keep it from being forced against the gravel bank, which happened after all. In addition, the chata, to which no one been paying attention in all the confusion, broke loose from its anchorage and in the dark drifted unnoticed five kilometers downstream, all the way to Shivankoreni, with its tons of freight, the steel cables and parts for the enormous block-and-tackle system. In addition, Laplace is now going to leave for good. He told me Walter had chewed him out so hatefully that he could not take it anymore, and Walter had ignored Laplace’s warnings that the main support post was not anchored firmly enough. With this humidity the concrete in the hole needed twenty days to set, and besides the support should have been anchored in such a way as to prevent it from lateral shifting, which would have taken even more time. So he was washing his hands of the responsibility, because if the support came shooting out of the ground with several hundred tons tugging on it and many men were on a platform with the winch, they would be hurled into the air as if by a rocket, and there would certainly be many fatalities. Furthermore, the ship would slide backward down the slope, and that would be curtains. Nothing could persuade him to stay, not even the indisputable and unavoidable necessity of digging out the muerto and replacing it with a new one that would be so big and sunk so deep that it could handle a load of several thousand tons, ten times the weight of our steamboat. Laplace will be going, come what may, and he gave me to understand, with several subtle hints, that he was going because Walter was impossible to get along with, and b
esides, he was not sure he was really up to the task. The ship was quite a monstruo, a monster, with which he would be better off not getting involved. I made two decisions: no matter how long it took, I would have the deadman post replaced with an absolutely foolproof construction, and I would assume complete responsibility for hauling the ship over the mountain. The physics are known and easy to understand: the weight of the ship, the angle of the slope, the conversion of forces in the block-and-tackle system, the losses due to friction, and the remaining imponderables have to exclude the possibility that the main support might not hold, and when the ship is pulled up the ridge there must never be people on or behind it. Kinski screamed that I was a madman, and what I was trying to do was criminal, and I just told him that if the ship broke loose no one would be in danger, and all I would be doing was destroying a ship in a grand cataclysmic event. But that was not the purpose of this exercise, I said, I was here for the sake of a different vision, to which I was committed.

  At noon Paul took me aside and suggested bringing the Caterpillar to the gravel bank and partially filling in the river so that the water would be dammed up and would give us a better starting point for the beginning of the traverse. On the one hand, this sounds like a good idea, but it also indicates that Paul seems to be mentally prepared for an initial attempt at something previously rejected as impossible.

  We did a lot of shooting today. The young Campa boy known as El Comandante had caught himself a frog, and I asked him what he meant to do with it, and he said it was his lunch. Les Blank, who had his hair cut in a little hamlet on the Urubamba, was advised by sym-pathetic lighting technicians, when they saw how terribly he had been shorn, to hire a lawyer and sue the barber. In the evening I finished reading a book, and because I was feeling so alone, I buried the book on the edge of the forest with a borrowed spade.