Fitzcarraldo

Come see us live! Oct. 8th and 9th at the Caveat Theater in Manhattan! Head to cheerfulearful.com/podlifeevents.com and click on our show dates for tickets! They say one man's dream is another man's nightmare, but what if your nightmare is the leading man of your dream? Join Chris and special guests Casey O'Brien and Mille De Chirico of "Dear Movies, I Love You" as they head down river with Werner Herzog's "Fitzcarraldo", a Sisyphean endeavor to bring a Sisyphean endeavor to the silver screen. Check out https://www.squarespace.com/WRONG to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using WRONG. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 1:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a Sisyphean journey into the heart of the Amazon, captured by way of a Sisyphean journey into the heart of the Amazon. As always, I am Chris Winterbauer. My partner in crime, Lizzie Bassett, is on vacation this week, so we are joined by a couple of wonderful guests. Millie DeCherico is a film programmer, writer, and historian. Her book, TCM Underground: 50 Must-See Films From the World of Classic Cult and Late Night Cinema, is out now from Running Press. And Casey O'Brien is a filmmaker and producer. Millie and Casey together are co-hosts of the Dear Movies I Love You podcast,

• 2:37Chris Winterbauer?

  which you should absolutely go listen to right now. Stop this podcast if you have not listened to theirs yet. Welcome, both of you, to What Went Wrong.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Hi.

• 2:46Speaker 03

  Hi.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  Thank you for having us.

• 2:48Chris Winterbauer?

  We are thrilled. We had the opportunity to join you guys on your podcast, and we had to return the favor. And you two actually selected today's movie. So what made you choose, then at Soggs, Fitzcarraldo?

• 3:04Speaker 03

  I mean, Casey, I don't know. Thoughts?

• 3:08Speaker 02

  Millie, I feel like we were just trying to come up with, like, I don't know, we were kind of going more on like, the arthouse end of movies that something potentially could have gone wrong. And I mean, there's a whole documentary about what went wrong on this movie, which I'm sure everyone here is, in this chat, has seen. It's one of those, Millie and I always refer to like, our film school days as like, our shithead days, being like, a film school shithead. And like, where you only, the only movies you can say that you like are like, really highbrow, arthouse movies. And I would say Fitzcarraldo is definitely one of those, like, film school, arthouse movies that like, you hear about. And it's

• 3:51Speaker 02

  just sort of infamous, too. So I think that was sort of the two reasons why we wanted to do this, this one.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  And it's just such a story. Obviously, our podcast is entirely about these epic disastrous film productions. And this one feels like, I don't know if it's like top three, but it's definitely in, you know, the upper ranking of-

• 4:14Chris Winterbauer?

  The pantheon-

• 4:15Speaker 03

  Yes, of course.

• 4:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Disastrous film productions.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I feel like it's like, this one, Apocalypse Now, both of which have documentaries about the making of them. And, I mean, it's definitely way up there in terms of movies where it's like, you know, there was like disaster behind the scenes. And then it's also interesting then, like, a fully formed movie does get made out of that disaster. So that's sort of interesting to me.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  There is like, sort of this Russian nesting doll scenario of this film going on, where it's like, you can kind of sense that there was something going on while they're making the movie. And then they made a documentary about it, which of course is the Les Blank documentary, Burden of Dreams. And so it gets a little like, layers upon layers of this kind of meta narrative or something going on. So I think that creates a more, too, of a mythology around Fitzcarraldo. But I'm sure we'll discuss every single bit of it. But yeah, I think that's kind of the reason why we were like, let's go, let's do the big one, you know?

• 5:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Did you guys have any new thoughts, any new perspectives upon rewatching it for the podcast? Anything that strikes you that's different than your shithead film school days?

• 5:30Speaker 02

  I mean, when I was watching this, I was like, I think I've seen this movie like seven times.

• 5:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  I really like it, but I wouldn't even consider it like, one of my favorite movies. But I think I was shocked, or maybe surprised, and I'm like, this feels more prescient than ever with like, how many like, ambitious idiots will do anything to like, launch their dream, no matter how much money or lives they are wasting along the way. If they have a vision, it must be seen through to the end. And I think I'm thinking more like Silicon Valley type tech bros. But that was sort of a thought that was coming into my head when I was watching it this time, that I didn't necessarily think of before.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, it's so funny. So much of this movie for me is Klaus Kinski, of course, but also knowing, you know, Werner Herzog and his relationship. In my shithead phase, I was definitely all about that, like, tempestuous, insane relationship between those two, right? Like, I was like, oh, these are like wild guys and they're, you know, these like crazy actor and filmmakers and they're just doing all this crazy art. I was really fueled on the idea that they would like, you know, fight and yell at each other and stuff. I think now that a lot of time has passed since I've really kind of stepped into this world, I'm like, okay, I can kind of see them a little bit less in that vein

• 6:54Speaker 03

  and more just as people. Klaus Kinski is, you know, obviously such a legend in so many ways. But like, I also was looking at him in this movie being like, I could see him getting annoyed. I could see him being annoyed by being in this movie.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 7:11Speaker 03

  You know, and I kind of feel bad for him in a weird way, which is such an interesting idea that I never thought I'd think about. But then I also felt, it's like you just feel the years of this movie almost. And you're just kind of like, oh, yeah, man, they really like tried something and they just do not want to give up and everyone's fucking miserable. And you're just like, glad we have this on record.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  There is a like, real quality with this movie too, that it feels like, like the themes of the film are applied to the actual production of the film as well. I mean, that irony can't have been lost on Werner Herzog.

• 7:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep. Well, let's dive into all of it. As you guys mentioned, I think it's impossible to avoid the framework within which this movie exists. Specifically, as you mentioned, Les Blank's documentary, Burden of Dreams, moments from which I would argue are more prevalent on the internet than moments from Fitzcarraldo. I think people have seen the clip, for example, of Werner Herzog describing how the birds are not singing, they are screeching in pain, more than they have perhaps seen Klaus Kinski discussing Caruso in Fitzcarraldo. Similarly, I enjoy this movie. I think there is a romanticism. Apply to it or a fetishization, especially this idea, as you mentioned, a lot of film school folks, myself included back in film school, tend to romanticize the idea that terrible friction

• 8:29Chris Winterbauer?

  or conflict is the only crucible through which good art can be forged, which is just Yes. Obviously false. And you can look at a director like Sidney Lumet, for example, to see an example of how that's not necessarily true. But this falls into that milieu, as you mentioned, Casey, of men losing themselves in the jungle, right? The Misbegotten Quest movie, Apocalypse Now, Sorcerer, and it goes back all the way to Heart of Darkness, the book that Apocalypse Now is loosely based on and then uses the title for that documentary. But like you, Millie, I agree. I think Klaus Kinski, who we'll discuss in more detail later, is kind of uniquely suited for this lead role. And I do think the movie has some moments of odd transcendence, like when he plays Caruso on the boat for the locals as they go upriver, Fitzcarraldo and Molly forcing their way into

• 9:13Chris Winterbauer?

  this opera house at the beginning of the film after a thousand mile journey down the Amazon. And Fitzcarraldo's own delusions of grandeur being usurped by the natives who have their own idea of this religious purpose they can use this boat for, right? By sending it through the rapids Right. At the end of the film. As you mentioned, the movie is well documented in Les Blank's documentary, Burden of Dreams. And so my goal with this episode is not to regurgitate every fact from Burden of Dreams, but instead provide some of the caulkings that's missing in the cracks of that documentary, especially the lead up and development of the film. And as we mentioned, this movie was almost basically shot twice. And that's one of the reasons that it's such an infamous what went wrong production. But first, the details.

• 9:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Fitzcarraldo is a 1982 epic adventure film written and directed by Werner Herzog. It is very loosely based on the real story of Carlos Fitzcarraldo. It was produced by Walter Saxon and many more. It stars, as we mentioned, Klaus Kinski as Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, or as he's known in Peru, Fitzcarraldo, Claudia Cardenale as Molly, Jose Lugo as Don Aquilino, Paul Hitter as Captain Arinico Paul, Huerekeke Enrique Borquez as Huerekeke, Miguel Angel Fuentes as And David Perez Espinoza as Rio Tambo Chief, along with hundreds and hundreds of native peoples as extras and supporting characters in the film.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  There are so many people in this movie. That was another thing I noticed. I was like, there are, I cannot believe how many people showed up to just film this movie, but.

• 10:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, we'll talk numbers shortly. It's both remarkable and somewhat tragic at the same time. Sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, Conquest of the Useless by Werner Herzog, his book, Kinsky Uncut, the autobiography of Klaus Kinsky by Klaus Kinsky. I would like to add a disclaimer. Candidly, this is an atrocious book. Kinsky writes misogynistic pornographic accounts of his conquests. Big, big disclaimer. If you're gonna read it, just go in wide-eyed. This is not a book for the faint-hearted. I would not recommend it outside of resource purposes.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  Millie, have you read that?

• 11:18Speaker 03

  No.

• 11:21Speaker 03

  I have not. Kinda scared.

• 11:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Throw it on your Goodreads. Herzog on Herzog by Paul Cronin and Werner Herzog, My Best Fiend, the 1999 documentary about Klaus Kinsky, written and directed by Herzog, Burden of Dreams, of course, as we mentioned, and many, many more articles, retrospectives, and interviews with those involved in the film. So, Millie, Casey, how did one of cinema's quirkiest directors, a man obsessed with obsession, end up stuck in the South American jungle, broke and battered with little more than his muse and mortal enemy for company for the second time in a decade? And what went wrong? So, are you guys familiar with Werner Herzog's origin story?

• 12:00Speaker 02

  I mean, not really. I know he was a, was he like a soccer player? Am I making that up?

• 12:08Chris Winterbauer?

  He plays soccer in Burden of Dreams. That's probably not what we're gonna focus on for this episode.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  So, no, no, I don't.

• 12:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Millie, anything on your end?

• 12:17Speaker 03

  I mean, I know a little bit. I mean, I know that he grew up in like a little village, right?

• 12:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 12:24Speaker 03

  He had like a brother or something. I've seen like a couple of different documentaries about his upbringing, but I think it was like a remote village or something. It was like really kind of far out from the city, right?

• 12:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. So there are some interesting parallels between Herzog and the way that film was introduced to him and the native peoples of the Amazon and the way he introduced film to them. So like many in South America at the turn of the 20th century, when Fitzcarraldo takes place, our story starts an ocean away in Europe. Werner Herzog was born on September 5th, 1942 in Munich, but he grew up in Bavaria because his family fled Germany when their neighbors were bombed. When he was five years old, his father returned from the war, his parents separated. His father was a Nazi party member, his mother was briefly in the party, although Herzog says she was very embarrassed by that association, and his father was not particularly involved in his life. So as you mentioned, Millie, Herzog

• 13:18Chris Winterbauer?

  and his two brothers were raised by their mother in a very remote Bavarian village. They had a house with no running water. Herzog described it as an extremely impoverished childhood in which they were both very hungry very often. But he also described his childhood as, quote, "wonderful" because, quote, "it was totally separate from the rest of the outside world." And so I do think it's interesting how Herzog kind of romanticizes the isolation of certain groups of people, and that seems in keeping with the childhood that he had.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. That's so interesting because I sort of think of him as, when I lived in LA, I sort of thought of him as like Mr. LA because he like loves Los Angeles so much. And he's like very readily available for like Q&A screenings because I've seen him speak probably more than any other director like I've ever seen. So.

• 14:07Chris Winterbauer?

  He's very much a cultural icon now. And what's interesting is he didn't see his first movie until he was 11 years old, and he really didn't like it. So a traveling projectionist had come to town, so this would have been in the early 1950s, showed two short films, and I'll read the two Herzog quotes about these films. So, "I was not very taken with the first film, which was about Inuits building an igloo. It had a very ponderous commentary and was very boring, and I could tell that the Inuits were not doing a very good job." He was, of course, impressed with the technology of film and moving images itself. He said he was quite stunned that this sort of thing was possible. And the second film, which was about a tribe in Cameroon, building a bridge made out of vines across a river in the jungle, really stuck with him.

• 14:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Quote, "I was very impressed that they could build such a well-functioning bridge without any real tools," end quote. So I think we're starting to see fascination with man in extremes, producing things perhaps without access to modernity, maybe some themes of Fitzcarraldo showing up even early in Herzog's life.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:12Chris Winterbauer?

  A couple of years later, they moved back to Munich. They move into a boarding house with a few other families. Herzog shares one room with his mom and his two brothers. He's a loner. He'd lay on his back, he'd read for hours, but there were some things in the boarding house he couldn't ignore, because the owner of the property had a soft spot for starving artists, and at one point, she took in an aspiring actor. Any guesses what that actor's name was?

• 15:35Speaker 02

  Oh my god, was it Mr. Klaus Kinski?

• 15:39Chris Winterbauer?

  It was Klaus Kinski. Kinski was 16 years older than Herzog. The owner of the property fed him and did his laundry, too. Now, Kinski, at this point, had done theater, background work, a few minor film roles, but he was not successful as an actor. He was not established. For the next three months, he would play the part of, quote, "world's worst roommate." According to Herzog, Kinski once locked himself in the bathroom for two days straight and, quote, "smashed everything to smithereens: the bathtub, the toilet bowl, everything. You could sift it through a tennis racket," end quote. When Kinski's shirt collars weren't ironed the way he liked, he screamed and knocked down a door. And when a theater critic called him, quote, "excellent and extraordinary," Kinski threw

• 16:20Chris Winterbauer?

  hot potatoes in his face because he felt the praise was insufficient. So Kinski made a big impression in the young Werner Herzog's mind. At this time, Herzog is basically 13 or 14 years old. But Herzog says he wasn't scared. Instead, he was, quote, "in stunned amazement, like somebody watching a tornado wreaking havoc on the landscape. I was fascinated," end quote. And so I just want to point out fascination with men in extreme conditions and extreme men in those conditions. So Millie, do you still feel bad for Klaus

• 16:54Speaker 03

  No, I mean, of course not.

• 16:57Chris Winterbauer?

  We'll get into how they both describe their experience on this film. There are some funny dueling quotes that we'll get into.

• 17:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:03Chris Winterbauer?

  So it's around this time that Herzog starts writing and submitting screenplays to local producers and TV stations. And when he's 15, he wins a screenplay competition with a script he had written in just five days. So he's obviously very talented. He's very driven. He's a terrible student. He would skip school. He preferred to hitchhike, travel and wander. He went to Albania, Greece, North Africa, largely on foot or just catching rides left and right. He also apparently looked very young, which is unusual because when you watch Burden of Dreams, I feel like he's the most weathered and aged looking, you know, 30, 40 something year old in that film. But he says that he hit puberty very late. So his mom tried to support him. And when he would disappear for weeks on end, she would just call to school and say, he's got pneumonia. Like he can't come in, but she was really worried about him.

• 17:48Chris Winterbauer?

  So she tried to convince him to come back home with an apprenticeship in a photo lab. But Herzog wanted to direct. And so he made his first short film when he was 19. It's a experimental short called Heracles. You can find it online. It shows footage of young male bodybuilders intercut with rubble, explosions, F1 car crashes, very like 1960s MKUltra subliminal messaging style, you know, filmmaking. He then won the Carl Mayer Award for screenwriting in 1963, and he got a Fulbright Scholarship at the University of Pittsburgh. And then on the boat to America, he meets his future wife, Marcha Gromen. That then led to a wedding in 1967. He lasted three days in Pittsburgh, attempted to work at NASA, absconded to Mexico,

• 18:32Chris Winterbauer?

  worked on a rodeo gig, helped illegally transport one gun across the border. And by 1965, he's back in Germany. So he has lived a lifetime in a very short period of time.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  It's so interesting hearing that stuff because we touched upon this with like film school, like how it's like this is how you're supposed to make movies like Fitzcarraldo. But also you're kind of taught like, oh, to be a real artist, to be a true filmmaker, you have to like be a person like Werner Herzog, which was always hard for me because I'm like in bed by like 9pm.

• 19:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And Herzog maybe, but where that bed is, is very much up for debate on any given night.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  Sure, truly.

• 19:11Chris Winterbauer?

  I do think, I would say to any aspiring filmmakers out there, Fitzcarraldo is not how you should make a movie, as we will get into here.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 19:19Chris Winterbauer?

  So in 1966, he finds financing for his first feature, Signs of Life. It's based on that award-winning screenplay. The IMDb logline reads, "Three wounded soldiers are removed from battle and given the task of looking after a fortress in a small coastal town. However, the pressures of isolation take their toll on the men. It was shot in Greece, it won the Silver Bear at the 1968 Berlin Film Festival, and Herzog is now, critically speaking, on the map. He's 26 years old, he's got an award-winning film, and then he releases his first documentary in 1970, The Flying Doctors of East Africa, about doctors who bring medical care to remote communities in Africa. And so what's a little unusual is he's doing both a narrative and documentary early in his career. Then he makes his most controversial film yet.

• 20:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Have you guys seen Even Dwarf: Started Small?

• 20:05Speaker 03

  No.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  I haven't either.

• 20:07Chris Winterbauer?

  So the movie was, it seems like probably influenced by, you know, Todd Browning's Freaks, for example, and it features a cast entirely made up of little people. These little people are in an institution, this was shot on the Canary Islands, and this institution is run by another little person, the headmaster, and there's a rebellion and the headmaster ends up trapped up in the higher levels of the institution. And then there's this kind of like chaotic orgy of destruction that takes place as all of these little people rebel and commit these increasingly subversive acts throughout the movie. And I'd like to read a quote about the film from film critic Adam Gross. "But for all its virtues, the film is deeply troubling, and not just because of all the on-screen mayhem.

• 20:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Its portrayal of dwarves as objects of existential horror verges on exploitative." Herzog, for his part, denies this accusation. He claims that all of the little people that worked on the movie felt empowered to do so, and that they were even grateful for the work and the opportunity to be in the film.

• 21:10Chris Winterbauer?

  I pointed out because in my mind, this marks the first time that Herzog begins using non-actors in ways that would be considered, at the very least, controversial. And this is a trend that will continue up to and through Fitzcarraldo.

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• 23:07Chris Winterbauer?

  So over the next couple of years, he makes three more documentaries. Fata Morgana, which is, again, kind of like a tone poem. Images of people in the Sahara Desert, set to music by Leonard Cohen and a reading of the Mayan creation myth. It's Werner Herzog at his most elemental, you might say. Land of Silence and Darkness, which focuses on the deaf and blind community. And Behinderte Zungkuns is about children with physical disabilities. And so two things are crystallizing. Production difficulties are synonymous with Herzog. Run-ins with the military, his crew getting imprisoned, accusations of exploitation. And two, he's fascinated by big themes. Man versus nature, man versus reason, the human condition in extreme environments. Even his short films feel epic, and he's fascinated by outsiders and people with arguably

• 23:52Chris Winterbauer?

  unhealthy obsessions. Have you guys seen, for example, Grizzly Man?

• 23:58Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 23:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. Right. So it's a very difficult documentary to watch. It is about a young man, Timothy Treadwell, who was a conservationist and who was candidly obsessed with bears. And he tries to live with brown bears in Alaska. And he has all this footage, and Herzog compiles it, and he's very fascinated by Treadwell and the sentimental view that he has of nature. And spoiler alert, spoiler alert, skip ahead if you're gonna watch Grizzly Man. Treadwell ends up mauled to death by the very creatures that he is so enamored by, that he is so, his obsession kills him at the end of the film.

• 24:33Speaker 03

  It's so funny, because when we're talking about his, this personality type is developing. And when we're in this, like, early period, he just reminds me of guys that I went to college with. They were kind of these adventure traveler types, you know? Love the idea of being dropped into, you know, places that have travel bans. And, you know, just kind of like, doing these like renegade things of like, they would kind of like drop all their classes and then disappear for a semester, and they'd be like in these insane, remote, dangerous locations. And maybe they would be taking photographs or making little documentaries. But they were just kind of fly by the seat of their pants guys.

• 25:19Speaker 03

  And they always had this allure, unfortunately.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  I was gonna ask Millie, were you attracted to these men?

• 25:25Speaker 03

  I mean, come on, who wouldn't be, right? Like, you're like, oh, he's got a Bowie knife on his thigh and he's wearing like, you know, he's always like coming to class like REI gear and stuff. I mean, it just was like, yes, of course you're like, there's this mythical quality to guys like this. And so it's almost kind of like Herzog as their patron saint in a lot of ways. Cause he's like really living it, right? And it also kind of weaves into the whole idea of him being accused of being exploitative to different cultures. Right? It's kind of like, he feels like he just has like free reign to kind of go anywhere. And I guess as a young man, didn't understand the kind of implications of that. But yeah, I mean, it's all kind of painting this bigger picture for me, of course.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, one thing I noticed watching Fitzgall this time was this quote right at the top, where they're trying to get in the opera and Molly says, he hasn't got a ticket, but he has the right. Which I feel like is kind of like the Werner Herzog way. He's like, I'm not allowed there, but I have the right to be there, you know?

• 26:26Chris Winterbauer?

  We'll get to that. Yeah, there's an interesting quote that ends Burden of Dreams or comes near the end of Burden of Dreams. And I do think Herzog views his dreams as so large that they are a necessity to realize. And the methods of that realization are controversial. So all the while Herzog is gearing up to make his next narrative feature. It will be the story of an obsessive and power hungry man who stops at nothing to realize his dreams. And Herzog plans to film it in the Peruvian Amazon. And that movie is not Fitzgallardo, it is Aguirre, The Wrath of God. Have you guys seen Aguirre, The Wrath of God?

• 27:01Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 27:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  This was the first Herzog movie I ever saw. This was like a film school classic.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 27:07Chris Winterbauer?

  It is. It's kind of the OG Fitzcarraldo, for those in the know. So the main character, played by Klaus Kinski, is a mutinous Spanish conquistador with delusions of grandeur named Lope de Aguirre, who goes into the jungle, he's the second-in-command of a larger expedition, in search of El Dorado, the fabled city of gold. By the end of the story, he is floating completely alone down the Amazon on a raft full of the bodies of his former crew, who are all dead mostly because of his decisions. And he's still making these big delusional declarations about his future. He's gonna conquer Mexico, all of Spanish America, because he cannot accept that he has failed, and his boat is overrun by monkeys. So, 27-year-old Herzog's putting the movie together, and he knows exactly who to cast in the lead

• 27:52Chris Winterbauer?

  role. That guy that he lived with back in Munich years earlier. So by now, Kinski was much more established. He'd appeared in several German and American films, as well as some spaghetti westerns. And so Herzog offers Kinski the part, and not long after, he gets a wild phone call in the middle of the night. Quote, "Between 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning, the phone rang. It took me at least a couple of minutes before I realized that it was Kinski who was the source of this inarticulate screaming. And after an hour of this, it dawned on me that he found it the most fascinating screenplay and wanted to be Aguirre." End quote. And for some reason, inarticulate screaming at 4:00 in the morning didn't make Herzog withdraw his offer for Kinski to play the part. And he just said, "Great, let's go together to the Amazon." I do want to point out, because

• 28:36Chris Winterbauer?

  this will be a theme in this episode, that Kinski had a very different perception of how that phone call and offer went. Here's what Kinski wrote in his journal about the early calls and meetings with Herzog about Aguirre. "I haven't the foggiest idea what he's talking about, except that he's high as a kite on himself for no visible reason, and he's enthralled by his own daring, which is nothing but dilettantish innocence. When he thinks I finally see what a great guy he is, he blurts out the bad news, explaining in a hard-boiled tone about the shitty living and working conditions that lie ahead. He sounds like a judge handing down a well-deserved sentence, and licking his lips as if he were talking about some culinary delicacy. He crudely and brazenly claims that all participants are delighted to endure the unimaginable stress and deprivation in order to follow

• 29:17Chris Winterbauer?

  him, Herzog. Why would they all risk their lives for him without batting an eyelash? He in any case will put all his eggs in one basket in order to attain his goal, no matter the cost. Do or die, as he puts it in his foolhardy way. And he tolerantly closes his eyes to the spawn of his megalomania, which he mistakes for genius." End quote. So like, not the greatest working relationship or shared perspective between these two men, but they decide, "Let's go to the jungle and shoot a movie together." Now, you both are very knowledgeable about film productions and how challenging they are, and how difficult it can be to make a movie with people that you like, let alone you don't like. So could you foresee some problems with these two men getting together to make a movie in the middle of the jungle?

• 30:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it just sounds like, this sounds like my worst nightmare. I mean, I don't like even getting on an airplane, but the idea of going to like, the jungle to shoot a film, sounds like so horrific.

• 30:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. It's not a fun one. So the cast included more than 200 people, including natives to the Amazon. The production involved filming on rafts, riding over rapids. We're not going to get into everything today, but Kinsky especially struggled with the living conditions. He frequently wrote about how he felt Herzog was putting the lives of the cast and crew in danger. And his journal entries swing back and forth between his awe for the jungle and his hatred for Herzog. But, as he puts it, "Herzog sticks to me like a shithouse fly." End quote. And Kinsky sticks to Herzog. So according to Herzog, 10 days before the end of the shoot, Kinsky got into an argument with the sound assistant and demanded that he be fired. Herzog says that Kinsky was at fault. This basically leads to a confrontation in which Herzog says that he threatened to shoot Kinsky,

• 30:59Chris Winterbauer?

  and Kinsky says that actually, Kinsky threatened to shoot Herzog because Kinsky had the gun. Regardless of who was gonna shoot who, neither of them shot each other. They finished the movie, and Aguirre: The Wrath of God was released in 1972. And of course, it's Herzog's first international hit. It's a critical darling. It gets a wide release in the United States in 1977. And over the next few years, he continues to write, direct, produce. His reputation internationally grows. And as you mentioned, Millie, there's this romanticism around his character. That bowie knife on the thigh, motorcycle diaries, college bro.

• 31:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:35Chris Winterbauer?

  As Time put it, "But he keeps doing it, and keeps demanding nearly as much of his actors as of himself." End quote. So I would have to imagine that Herzog is very aware of the growing mythos of Herzog as he is becoming a bigger and bigger filmmaker.

• 31:52Chris Winterbauer?

  So he gets a studio involved. Aguirre is successful, along with 1975's The Enigma of Casper Hauser and 20th Century Fox decides to invest in one of Herzog's films. They pay him to create two versions of Nosferatu: The Vampire, which is released in 79, and Millie, you're nodding. Who stars in Nosferatu: The Vampire?

• 32:13Speaker 02

  Kinski.

• 32:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Klaus Kinski. They were like, you know what? Let's get the band back together.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  He looks good, though, as Nosferatu. I mean, he's got the face for that.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  That face.

• 32:26Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. So they didn't just do Nosferatu. They also made a movie called Wojsek, which is a wartime drama together. And I believe these films were released in the same year and shot roughly back to back. They, again, didn't kill each other. We don't have time to go into them, but they went about as smoothly as you would expect. Both films are released in Europe. They make it to the United States, and Nosferatu in particular is called a film of astonishing beauty and daring, the most ambitious collaboration between Hollywood and new German cinema to date. And so Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog, despite being unable to stand one another, continue to find that their greatest successes occur when they work together.

• 33:07Chris Winterbauer?

  So Casey, you mentioned another film in which a director headed to the jungle and lost his mind with a crew, released in, I believe, the late 1970s, early 1980s?

• 33:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Which one?

• 33:18Speaker 02

  Apocalypse Now?

• 33:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Now Coppola had been inspired, in part, by Herzog's work on Aguirre, and he had just finished shooting his most ambitious project to date, the 14-week-turned-year-long shoot that nearly killed him and Martin Sheen in the jungle Apocalypse Now. He was in post-production, recovering from hernia surgery, and Herzog was keeping him company.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  Oh, they were hanging out?

• 33:43Chris Winterbauer?

  They were hanging out. Yeah, they're hanging out. Yeah. Herzog writes about this extensively, how he was introduced to certain things by Coppola's father and how he was watching as Coppola got pillows brought to him all day and would complain about them. It's very funny in Herzog's diaries. I would have killed to just be sitting in that room as Coppola and Herzog. discussing their relative challenges in the jungle, making their movies and realizing their genius. It would be incredible. So Herzog at this time is also writing a script, or at least writing about writing it. Quote, "It is hard to buckle down to work, to shoulder this heavy burden of dreams, working on the script driven by fury and urgency." End quote. It was a story loosely based on a man named Carlos Fermin Fitzcarraldo.

• 34:27Chris Winterbauer?

  He was an Irish-American Peruvian rubber baron, active in the late 1800s, and Herzog didn't really care about him. He once told the LA Times, "He was a rubber baron, very average. It's the stupid, uninteresting story of a man who exploited a vast area." In another interview, he described him as, quote, "Just another ugly businessman at the turn of the century." But there was one detail about Fitzcarraldo's life that completely captured Herzog's imagination. Any guesses, Millie and Casey, as to what that detail might be?

• 34:55Speaker 03

  Well, I think it's that he put a boat over a mountain.

• 34:59Chris Winterbauer?

  That is exactly right. How could you know? He had successfully crossed between two parallel rivers by taking apart his boat, carrying it over land, and reassembling it on the other side. One important note, that boat weighed 30 tons. We will get to how much Werner Herzog's boat weighed. So Herzog, who had long been obsessed with the idea of monoliths and how men moved them around. He has a quote about the Brittany coast, this place called Karnak, where there are these huge prehistoric stone blocks. And he just thought, how could men have moved these? Again, back to his childhood. How did they create a bridge out of vines without modern tools? He's very obsessed with that.

• 35:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Years later, when his friend shared the story of Fitzcarraldo and his boat, Herzog connected the two ideas and then added the element of opera. That was kind of the third component to make this stew simmer.

• 35:52Chris Winterbauer?

  So from the start, he decided he wanted to shoot on location in the Amazon and pull a real boat over a mountain. Needless to say, this made the movie a tough sell, both to actors and studios. There was one actor who would probably do it. Any guesses?

• 36:09Speaker 02

  Is that our friend?

• 36:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Our friend.

• 36:11Speaker 02

  Our best fiend?

• 36:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Our best fiend, Klaus Kinski. When Erzog first imagined Fitzcarraldo, the face of this blond, bug-eyed maniac flashed into his mind, Klaus Kinski. But then Erzog remembered, I hate Kinski, Kinski hates me, and we almost killed each other the last time we worked in the jungle. The movie ended with us threatening to shoot each other in the head. So, years later, Erzog would say, "I dismissed the possibility because I knew it was going to be difficult. It would take a long time. It was beyond my imagination that Kinski could hold out that long and that he could carry a film that long under such circumstances." Instead, he decided to pursue another man, who would be known shortly, although this movie had not come out yet, for playing an individual losing his mind slowly

• 36:54Chris Winterbauer?

  in a colder environment. A hotel, actually. Any ideas as to who this actor was?

• 37:01Speaker 02

  Hmm, is that Jack Nicholson?

• 37:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Jack Nicholson.

• 37:05Speaker 02

  Wow, I didn't know he was a part of this.

• 37:07Chris Winterbauer?

  He never was actually a part, but he was interested in playing Fitzcarraldo.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  His conversations.

• 37:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 37:12Speaker 03

  Doesn't surprise me that he'd be involved, but not involved. Do you know what I mean?

• 37:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, Jack Nicholson, you mentioned that Werner Erzog, Casey, is an LA man now, or seems to be.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Jack Nicholson is very much an LA man, and he did not want to go to South America for months to endure hardship in the jungle. Erzog said, quote, "Nicholson only took parts that left him free to watch Los Angeles Lakers games," end quote.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  Jack's my guy. This is great.

• 37:38Chris Winterbauer?

  That sounds like a good life to me. He said that Nicholson actually took him to a Lakers game in his private jet and tried to convince Erzog to make the movie on a set with a miniature boat. Doesn't exactly sound like the Erzog way.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  Make it here, man.

• 37:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, man. I can't do a good... That was pretty good. I cannot do a Jack Nicholson impression.

• 37:56Speaker 02

  It was not good.

• 37:56Chris Winterbauer?

  So 20th Century Fox is pushing for the same thing. Now, the financing on this movie is very murky, and you guys have seen Burden of Dreams. I feel like every 20 minutes in Burden of Dreams, Erzog is terrified, the money is running out. He must go back to his backers to find... You know, they're just always running out of money. But at the beginning, it seems like 20th Century Fox, who had a relationship with Erzog and French studio Gaumont, were planning on taking on the movie as a co-production. And there may have been some early German financial backings as well. Now Herzog writes about this big meeting that they have at the studio in LA, where basically, there's this assumption that he's gonna use a plastic ship. And he says, "No, it's gonna be a real steamship, and it's going over a mountain."

• 38:35Speaker 03

  Duh.

• 38:36Chris Winterbauer?

  It has to be. Exactly. And it's at this point that he realizes that there's no actual signed contract between Gamot and Fox. And I think that this could be read two ways. Number one is Herzog realizes his financing is much shakier than he may have considered, but it also means that if Fox drops out, it doesn't mean that his French backing will necessarily drop out too. So he still has them kind of independent of one another. So less than a week later, he flies to Brazil. This is in 1979, where members of his crew are already hard at work to realize his dream. They'd found this rusty old steamboat in Colombia, which they would use to portray the Molly Aida, the boat in the movie, when Fitzcarraldo and Molly first buy it before it's repaired. It's so full of holes that

• 39:21Chris Winterbauer?

  they actually have to fill it with hundreds of empty oil drums and float it all the way to Peru. Pre-production also involves scouting location, they're constructing camps for the cast and crew, building two additional ships using the Colombian steamboat as a model. And then Herzog arrives in Peru, where they're gonna shoot at the end of June in 1979. And just a couple days into his stay, he says, in his journal, "Gloomy mood this morning. Call it quits after so many months of work," end quote. Little did he know, he's about halfway through the entire multi-year process of Fitzcarraldo. So, rain, flooding, mud, snakes, mosquitoes, he knew all of those would come from his time on Aguirre. But this time would be different. He'd be going deeper into the jungle

• 40:03Chris Winterbauer?

  because he had to find two parallel rivers separated by a mountain that was just right, not too tall, not too wide. He's making significant changes to the physical environment because he needs to pull the ship over the mountain and clear the jungle to do so. He's gonna involve hundreds more extras than he'd ever used before. And the movie itself was synonymous with the murder and exploitation of native people. Fitzcarlo was a real person. So he first sets up camp in northern Peru, where there are rising tensions over a decades-long border conflict with Ecuador. Peru's basically in the midst of a revolution, transitioning from a military dictatorship to a democracy. There's still a very strong military presence. It's amplified in the region to protect a controversial oil pipeline. Then you've got friction between military, native tribes,

• 40:48Chris Winterbauer?

  as well as between the different tribes. Then you've got religious sects, missionaries, and foreign oil companies, all competing for influence in the area. And he decides, "This is where I'm gonna make a movie." And it also didn't help that he was German. There was a foreign anthropologist going around showing gruesome images of World War II concentration camps, according to several crew members, and basically telling them, "That's how Germans work." End quote. So he was making headlines locally in Europe and the United States. Now, there were a lot of missionaries, anthropologists, and some left-leaning magazines that reportedly supported the, specifically, Aguaduna people's opposition to the project. And the Aguadunas feature heavily in "Burden of Dreams", in particular, the first half. According to some sources,

• 41:32Chris Winterbauer?

  one of the local tribal councils of the Aguadunas people initially supported the production. But then there was a coup, a new head took power, and he believed the movie would cause division and disrupt their way of life. Herzog, though, said that their way of life was more in keeping with modernity than they let on, and that, quote, "The tribe was probably among the most sophisticated tribes in the Peruvian jungle. They operate speedboats, own transistor radios, and hold John Travolta dance contests." End quote. A big theme in this episode, guys, is gonna be Herzog kind of ignoring what I would call the observer effect, right? The phenomenon in physics where, by simply observing something, you are actually changing that thing. Like, for example, when you check the air pressure of your tire and a little bit of air comes out. As Herzog kind of both insists that he's not disrupting the Amazon,

• 42:16Chris Winterbauer?

  and behind him, trees are being leveled, and, you know, the natives are interacting with film cameras, etc. So, there's a bit of a blind spot here. There are a lot of rumors flying around, too, that he's building a canal that would flood the native land, that he had destroyed crops, that he was working with the Peruvian military, that he was dealing weapons, that he had imprisoned native people and was forcing them to work. And one source claimed that Herzog, quote, "ordered soldiers to intimidate a village assembly by firing over their heads." End quote. Now Herzog said it was all a miscommunication. He was working on uncultivated government land. The tribe that he spoke with about pulling the ship was happy to help, that he gave them a contract and he'd be paying them about twice as much as they would have earned from, say, a lumber company. Although, to be clear, working on a Werner Herzog movie

• 43:01Chris Winterbauer?

  and working for a lumber company are both very dangerous jobs, as will be borne out by this episode. So, you guys mentioned a documentary about the making of this film. Are you familiar with director Les Blank at all? Yes. Yes. Long story short, Les Blank connected with Werner Herzog sometime in early 1979. He got connected by way of Tom Luddy, who's a filmmaker, co-founder of the Telluride Film Festival, American Zoetrope member. Tom Luddy tells him Werner Herzog's gonna eat his own shoe. Literally, because he lost a bet with Errol Morris about Errol Morris finishing his movie Gates of Heaven. According to Herzog, he had told Errol Morris, "The day I see your finished work, I'm gonna eat my shoe." Now, Morris has actually debated this and said

• 43:45Chris Winterbauer?

  he does not remember this happening at all. Regardless, Herzog decides he's gonna go to the Chez Panis restaurant in Berkeley and he's gonna eat his own shoe. So, Les Blank says, "I wanna film this. I wanna turn it into a documentary." It becomes a 21-minute short film. Yes. It becomes kind of like a shithead film school student iconic project. I'm guessing that through the process of shooting this, Les Blank and his editor Maureen Gosling realize, "Oh, my gosh, Werner Herzog's going to South America to shoot this incredible project." So in October of 1979, they arrive in Peru to start filming Burden of Dreams. Not long after their arrival, the situation escalates to serious threats and warnings.

• 44:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Herzog and his crew abandon their camp. On the 1st of December 1979, a group of the Aguadunas burn it to the ground. Some sources estimate the damage to be at $80,000, but for Herzog, the money wasn't the main issue. It's that it wasted so much time. Months have passed, and it would take him almost a year to find another shooting location that would be as suitable as the one that they had already built.

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• 45:55Chris Winterbauer?

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• 46:36Chris Winterbauer?

  So his journal entries picked back up in July of 1980. And by this point, I would have quit this movie if I had been involved. I don't know about you guys, but I would have been I mean. out. Like, there's no way.

• 46:47Speaker 02

  I did want to hear your thoughts on this, Chris, just because you're a filmmaker. And like, I mean, I feel like every film I've made, there's been a point where I'm like, this is too hard.

• 46:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  I want to quit. But I can only imagine, I would not have made it even this far.

• 47:04Chris Winterbauer?

  I think what's interesting, and Millie, you know that. Especially as a film historian, momentum, right, is the key to any film, which is why film studios are so reluctant to shut down a production, even in the midst of drastic change, be it the replacement of a director or an actor. Because the minute you lose momentum, you lose your crew, you lose your locations, and it is extremely difficult to start back up again. I'm sure, again, that you, Millie, are familiar with a number of examples where you just have to keep going, because if you stop, you are dead.

• 47:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, let's get serious. Werner Herzog, he's got big Virgo energy, for one, okay? He's not just gonna give up on a thing. He's gonna figure it out, you know? But also, there is this, like, he's obsessed with the quest, right? It's the quest of the thing. Yes, there are production implications and money lost and these, like, practical concerns about stopping a project midway, right? And just personally feeling like something is a waste of time would plague anyone, right? But it's also like, that's just his personality. His personality is like, I'm doing this and I don't give a shit. Like, it's gonna happen. And it goes back to his whole, like, you know,

• 48:19Speaker 03

  adventurer-seeking, obsessed with like man versus nature, and he's, you know, he's not gonna give up. It never occurred to me at all, in learning about this film and the mythology around him, it never occurred to me that he would give up, ever. I was like, oh, I would give up, but he wouldn't. He just wouldn't.

• 48:38Speaker 02

  I do feel like there is an element to him that is sort of unbothered by all of the insanity around him.

• 48:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he never seems ruffled when he's on camera in Burden of Dreams.

• 48:49Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  But if you, like, watch the Apocalypse Now documentary, I think it's called, is it Heart of Darkness or Hearts of Darkness?

• 48:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Hearts of Darkness.

• 48:57Speaker 02

  In that, Francis Ford Coppola, there's a quote I always think of in that. He's like, maybe if I jump off a tall building and break both my legs, I won't have to finish this movie. And I'm like, I relate to that sensation. But like Werner Herzog, he is like, he's just, yeah, unflappable.

• 49:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:13Chris Winterbauer?

  You mentioned extreme tourism, right? Basically, Millie, as a phenomenon. And there's an adrenaline junkie quality. And I do think Herzog is a believer, whether he's right or not, in the idea that through hardship greatness will be born. And in Burden of Dreams, for example, they discuss how the very remoteness of the location is desirable for the mere fact that that will elicit performances from his actors and qualities from his crew that would be otherwise impossible to stimulate in a more studio environment. Yeah. Again, whether or not that's true is debatable,

• 49:55Chris Winterbauer?

  but it's certainly a mantra or a belief system that Herzog very much adheres to. Yeah. And it's interesting that in the search for reality, or a reality in which to base his dreams in, he is also disrupting the reality of so many other people as he arrives. And there is an interesting tension that's explored in a little bit in Burden of Dreams and more in the criticisms of the film, which you guys can read online. All right, so let's get back to the second attempt at production of three attempts. So, summer of 1980, they start rebuilding their camp in southern Peru this time. And Herzog makes a new deal with the native people in this region. According to Burden of Dreams,

• 50:40Chris Winterbauer?

  he'd promised the tribe, at least one of the tribes that he was working with, that he would help them become legal owners of their land, which they were not. But first, he needs a new leading man because Nicholson is officially out of the movie. So as late as December of 1979, the LA Times had reported that Jack Nicholson was still in the mix for the lead of FitzGeraldot, but he had not been successful in convincing Herzog to shoot in California. And according to producer Walter Saxon, Nicholson had also wanted $5 million for the part. I also read $3.5 million. Regardless, the entire movie was going to cost $6 million, so there was no way that that was going to happen, even if they shot it in Los Angeles. Saxer says they then replaced Nicholson with Warren Oates,

• 51:23Chris Winterbauer?

  who was best known for his role in The Wild Bunch in 1969. And you guys would recognize him from Badlands and The Heat of the Night and more. But Herzog says that didn't work because Oates got sick and passed away from cancer before shooting began. I don't think that that's entirely true. He didn't pass away until 1982, but it's entirely possible he was sick and unable to travel and, you know, probably didn't want to go and risk dysentery or malaria on top of a cancer diagnosis. So Les Blank claims that Oates dropped out two weeks before shooting was to start because, quote, "I think Oates's wife was freaked out by the possibility of dangers in the jungle, probably with good reason," end quote. You think? So Saxer says that it was documentary director Errol Morris, who then recommended that Herzog cast Jason Robards.

• 52:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Robards was an established actor, as I'm sure you all know. He'd won the Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role twice, All the President's Men. He plays Ben Bradley, Washington Post editor who oversaw the investigation of Watergate, and Julia, opposite Jane Fonda, semi-biographical film about writer Lilium Hellman. And he had also worked with the very famous Italian actress Claudia Cardinale, who Herzog had cast as Fitzgerald's lover Molly. Now, Cardinale was sometimes referred to as the Italian Brigitte Bardot. She broke out in the late 50s and she was in a bunch of highly acclaimed Italian films: Fellini's Eight and a Half, Visconti's The Leopard, Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, and she'd worked with Robards on that film.

• 52:48Chris Winterbauer?

  So for the role of Wilburn, who's a character that does not appear in the final film, he is Fitzgerald's mentally challenged assistant he chose. You guys have seen Burden of Dreams, do you remember?

• 52:59Speaker 03

  Mick Jagger, right?

• 53:00Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger and kind of Klaus Kinski doppelganger a little bit Mick Jagger. They look, they got a little bug-eyed mania.

• 53:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, they do.

• 53:11Speaker 02

  That's an unkind comparison to Mick Jagger, I think, but...

• 53:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, he's an odd-looking fella.

• 53:15Speaker 03

  He can take it, Casey, come on.

• 53:18Chris Winterbauer?

  He's fine, that's right. Now, Jagger had acted. He'd been in some avant-garde experimental films, but the general consensus up to this point, with no offense to our friend Harry Styles, is that his acting was not great. Like our friend Harry Styles, and he had a lot of personal things going on at this point.

• 53:36Speaker 03

  Take him down, Chris, take him down.

• 53:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Sorry, I apologize.

• 53:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Terry Stiles catching strays, I'm sure he's lovely. That was rude. So after six more months of pre-production, Jagger, Cardinale, and Robards make their way to Peru throughout late 1980, early 1981. They settle into camp. And this camp, again, no running water, nothing but Apache radio to connect them to the outside world. They're hundreds of kilometers from the nearest city or airport. All food and supplies have to be delivered by a small plane. Right next door was a completely separate camp for the native people cast in the film, most of whom were also far from their homes. And Herzog again discusses this in the documentary and tries to explain it as we didn't want to contaminate them with our Western culture. They should be among themselves. Again, as they're disrupting the Amazon and destroying much of the environment

• 54:24Chris Winterbauer?

  for the purposes of making the movie. So again, it's a very tricky thing that he's trying to balance. In fact, later in the project, Herzog would bring sex workers to the production, according to him, to prevent the men in his crew from seeking sex with the local tribeswomen. And again, you can see that in Burden of Dreams.

• 54:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's also that crazy story about the two women in the tribe that were fighting each other in Burden of Dreams where they're like, I guess they were fighting over the same guy. And there's the famous scenes of the two girls that are just in the background, holding these knives. And it just really is like, wow, it's very tense on this set.

• 55:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Very tense. And that's before Kinsky has shown up as well.

• 55:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, the production itself was very international. Cinematographer Thomas Mauch was German, along with Herzog. Walter Sacks is Swiss. The sound recording crew is from Brazil. The special effects team is from Mexico. One thing I think is very impressive about a lot of this crew, they're European and they all speak English, Spanish, German, French. I mean, incredibly multilingual, which as somebody who speaks decent English and terrible Spanish, I am very impressed by that fact.

• 55:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was actually impressed that Werner Herzog spoke Spanish.

• 55:42Chris Winterbauer?

  He does. Yes. He addresses a number of the locals in Spanish in the documentary.

• 55:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I feel, there was this moment where I was like, well, that's the least he could do at this point.

• 55:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 55:51Speaker 03

  At least speak a little bit of the language.

• 55:55Speaker 02

  Take some Duolingo lessons before he goes on set.

• 55:58Speaker 03

  Right. I mean, but I could see, I don't know, maybe in a different time, in a more modern time, that director wouldn't have been able to speak Spanish.

• 56:05Chris Winterbauer?

  No, no. He's obviously an autodidact. The way that he self-taught on so many things is very impressive.

• 56:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Herzog, despite the multilingual nature of the cast, I think for commercial reasons, most likely, and the universality maybe of the language, decides to shoot the movie in English and not Spanish. I don't know if Kinsky could speak Spanish. Kinsky could speak English, and he speaks German, obviously. So principal photography begins in January of 1981, and right away Herzog seems to like Jagger a lot more than Robards, probably because Jagger was finding it easier to adapt than Robards, who was 59 years old at this point in time.

• 56:43Speaker 02

  I can't really imagine Jason Robards out in the jungle. He just seems like such an urban.

• 56:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 56:49Speaker 02

  Like, I don't know.

• 56:50Chris Winterbauer?

  You can see footage of him both in Burden of Dreams and online on YouTube in some of the, you know, 40% or so of the film that they shot. And to your point, Casey, Walter Saxon later said, "It looked like, how do I say, a grandfather who has escaped from an old age home." And just imagine this guy pulling a ship up a mountain, end quote. So Jagger, on the other hand, even though he had lived a life, quote, "where everything is organized by other people," as Herzog put it, "adapted really quickly." So Jagger apparently found the circumstances very funny and was like very bold, as opposed to Robards, who was really shocked when he landed in Akitos in Peru. So two days into shooting, there's a big labor strike. Now, Robards and German actor Mario Adorf, who had been cast to play the captain originally, he would not be in the final film,

• 57:36Chris Winterbauer?

  were scared to drive to the production site because they were worried that strikers might literally shoot them for, quote, "scabbing" along the way. Herzog then wrote in his journal that they were, quote, "cowards whose real problem stems from their appalling inner emptiness," end quote, and went on to, went on to praise Jagger, who had apparently been crisscrossing the city, shuttling crew to the site. He decided to shoot without them. Quote, "A rainbow that suddenly appeared in the sky behind Mick during the first shots gave me courage," end quote. So he's got his new muse, Mick Jagger, and then... The next five to six weeks are brutal. The rain is heavy and unpredictable. The river is constantly rising and falling. A lot of the time, the river is just too low, so the boats would get stuck in the mud. Shooting had to get postponed.

• 58:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Other times, the region would flood. The airstrip would become unusable. The food actually had to be airdropped from the sky into the camps. When they did manage to shoot on the water, it was so turbulent that the cameras, which were mostly handheld, would come close to going overboard. Everything was spread out. The logistics were really complicated. The generator for batteries was kept across the river. So two times a night, a crew member would have to use a canoe, go across the river, refill it with gasoline. And the only problem was it required very pure diesel, which was very hard to come by. And if they didn't use pure diesel, the generator would go out and they'd have to fly in a new supply. Then they had the problem of getting the film to New York. A two-flight, day-and-a-half ordeal that had to be done three times per week to get the film developed.

• 59:05Chris Winterbauer?

  And of course, when you have film that's been shot in a canister, you can't open it to light because that'll overexpose everything and your film will be ruined. But there was a lot of cocaine coming out of South America into the United States. And so custom was saying, "We have to open these cans in order to make sure there's not cocaine in them." So they eventually were able to convince the officers to check the cans in a darkroom. And that's how they were finally able to ship the film from Peru to the United States. That's not even getting started on the frequent injuries. One of the cameramen ends up on crutches when a piranha bites off half his toe.

• 59:40Speaker 02

  A piranha?

• 59:40Chris Winterbauer?

  A piranha. A local woman develops diarrhea and dies, which just goes to show you things that we take for granted as being easily solvable here are much more dire when you're in a remote situation and circumstance. A man from one of the inland tribes allegedly stole one of the production canoes and he took it over the rapids. He didn't know how to swim and he drowned. Everyone who still is alive is starting to get on Herzog's nerves and Robards and Adorf are getting more and more concerned about their safety. So the crew has to widen that treetop platform. If you remember the treetop platform that Kinsky stands on for that big aerial shot, which really annoys Herzog because he's like, "The platform wouldn't be that big. Why do we need to make it that big?" It's like, "Rider, just make it bigger for them. They're scared."

• 1:00:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Jagger's then-wife, model Jerry Hall, comes to set. Jagger takes photos of her in a swimsuit for Vogue, which annoys Herzog. Quote, "It is disturbing to me to see our background used for commercial purposes." End quote. While he's making a movie, which is going to be released for commercial purposes, I will point out.

• 1:00:43Speaker 03

  That's his art, Chris. There's a difference, okay?

• 1:00:46Chris Winterbauer?

  There is. And it is an interesting tension with film, right? Where does the commerciality began and the art end and vice versa?

• 1:00:53Speaker 03

  Oh, totally.

• 1:00:53Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:54Chris Winterbauer?

  By mid-February, Robards is out. He has caught amoebic dysentery, which sounds miserable.

• 1:01:00Speaker 03

  God. God awful.

• 1:01:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he flies home to see a doctor. He reportedly refused to see doctors in South America. This doctor then advised him not to return to the production. And a couple of months later, the New York Times reports, quote, "Mr. Robards has initiated legal proceedings against Mr. Herzog's film company and refuses to speak publicly about his experience in Peru. He has told friends, however, that there was no physician or refrigerator on set. There was a physician, but it was not an American physician, and that the cast was subjected to dangerous scenes involving rides in rafts over rapids and flights in unsafe planes." True. "No telephones, no electricity." True. His agent blamed the, quote, "hazardous conditions under which Fitzcralder was made" for Mr. Robards' illness. Presumably true. Herzog, meanwhile, is scrambling.

• 1:01:47Chris Winterbauer?

  He has shot 40% of his movie. This is the second time he's tried to start it up. And now he has no leading actor and can't use any of the footage that Robards is in. So he can basically use reaction shots, establishing shots, shots of the tribespeople. Initially, he says, "Okay, Mick Jagger can do it. I love him as Fitzcarraldo's assistant, Wilburn, so it's not a stretch to imagine him as Fitzcarraldo." And he says, "Okay, Mick, you're in the leading role." And he's like, "Mate, I gotta go back on tool. This isn't gonna work out." He's basically saying, "I make all my money as part of The Rolling Stones. I am not going to continue to make your art house movie." So Jagger is out. And at this point, Herzog decides he's gonna cut Wilburn's

• 1:02:29Chris Winterbauer?

  character entirely, which is why we do not see Wilburn in the finished film. Adorf, then, Mario Adorf, throws his hat in the ring for Fitzcarraldo, but Herzog says no. He doesn't think he's the right fit, and he fires him a couple of months later anyway. So he's out now, too.

• 1:02:42Speaker 03

  What a bummer. Like, everything's falling apart and he's like...

• 1:02:46Speaker 02

  Werner, I got you, buddy. I'll be the lead. And he's like, no.

• 1:02:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Not only does Herzog say no to him, Herzog says, if necessary, I will be Fitzcarraldo.

• 1:02:54Speaker 03

  I will do it. Exactly. It's, it goes back to the hubris of it all, which is just like, well, you know what? I'll just, I'll be him if I have to.

• 1:03:03Chris Winterbauer?

  To his credit, he did say that that was his last resort.

• 1:03:09Speaker 03

  Maybe he just should have been him the entire time, because this is the thing that is so funny about this. I mean, as much as this is such a disaster and there was actual horrible things happening. His attitude towards all of this is so funny to me because it is that total hubris of the white guy thing going on where he's just like, oh, these movie stars from Hollywood can't like get with the program down here. Like, why do they want doctors? And, you know, like,

• 1:03:38Chris Winterbauer?

  It's inner emptiness, Millie. Inner emptiness.

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  He's like, so they get bit by a piranha once in a while? Like, who gives a shit? Like, he's like, come on, what are you like, what are you, a pussy? Like, that's his whole, like, attitude towards everything, because he's the adventure guy. And I'm just like, this is like Jason Robards, who was in like the classic Hollywood system. He doesn't know anything about this world, dude. Like,

• 1:04:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Such a good point, Millie. It's a studio system actor. And the studio system could be brutal. But it was brutal within a contained environment, which is very different.

• 1:04:13Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:04:14Chris Winterbauer?

  I, I think you raise a great point, which is, one of the things we talk about often on this podcast is, the challenge of film is that it is an art that you cannot complete alone. It is only achieved through the agency of others.

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:04:25Chris Winterbauer?

  And the barometer for what should be acceptable cannot simply be, I would be willing to do it myself, which is a barometer that I believe Herzog more or less takes. He, to his credit, is willing to put himself in these situations. However, that does not mean that everybody else necessarily can or does feel comfortable, as we learn, putting themselves in said situations. But he did know that perhaps there was one other person who would be crazy enough to put himself in these situations. As he wrote in his journal, "The only other one who could also be Fitzcarraldo would be Kinsky. He would certainly also be better than I, and after all, there was some discussion with him in the very early phase of the project, but it was always clear that he would be the last

• 1:05:10Chris Winterbauer?

  one who could see such an undertaking through to the end." So, he reaches out to Klaus Kinsky, and Kinsky apparently gloated. As Kinsky wrote, quote, "Months ago, I told Herzog that he could go fuck himself, and I hung up on him. So he began Fitzcarraldo without me, using someone from New York, Mick Jagger, as Fitzcarraldo's best friend. Now Herzog shows up in L.A. and begs me to star in his movie. After some weeks of shooting with the guy in New York, Herzog, even with his moronic brain, must have realized that the result was all garbage and that he had to start all over again from scratch," end quote. Not exactly true. Robards dropped out. It doesn't seem that what he filmed was garbage, but Kinsky has a very strong perspective on what Herzog needs in his movies to make

• 1:05:54Chris Winterbauer?

  them good, and that is Klaus Kinsky.

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• 1:07:40Chris Winterbauer?

  It's unclear if Herzog had offered Kinsky the role before Robards, but Kinsky was right about one thing. Herzog was going to have to start from scratch. And that means that he would need more money. And as we mentioned, money was a recurring topic in his journal entries for the past two years. July of 79, money troubles. August, there is no money left. After the first camp was burned down that winter and before pre-production resumed the following summer, quote, "I was so broke, I had nothing to eat. In Iquitos, I sold two bottles of American shampoo at the market and bought four kilos of rice." End quote. The winter of 1980. Henning, the credited production designer, was supposed to come tonight with money, but I hear he is not coming until Saturday. We have nothing left here, and it is urgent that we get food supplies up to the Camessi, buy tools in Lima, and pay the workers.

• 1:08:25Chris Winterbauer?

  A couple of months later, quote, "Lucky," who is Herzog's younger half-brother, and Millie, that might be who you're referring to. He runs his production company when you were referring to his brother. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Flew back to Munich by way of Miami to get money. He has a report on the first day, a personal report from me to the partners, and the medical forms for the insurance company. Without those items, there can be no action in the bank accounts. All right, there's about five weeks of footage left to reshoot, and Herzog credits his brother Lucky for coming up with the money, and Lucky is a credited producer on the film, to continue. He gives a meeting to all the financial backers and insurers in Munich. I don't know what he tells them, but he presents a rescue plan and quote, Herzog says, "I was asked if I still had the strength to reshoot the film.

• 1:09:09Chris Winterbauer?

  I said that if the film failed, all my dreams would be at an end, and I didn't want to live as a man with no dreams." End quotes. Per your comment, Millie, he did not see failure as an option. As Thomas Malk wrote in American Cinematographer Magazine, 20th Century Fox had backed out of this project a while back. Lloyds wasn't willing to insure them, so a group of smaller British companies made an insurance pool, and they had to then cover a loss of $1.5 million or so. Gaumont, if you remember from earlier in our conversation, the French company did stay on board and they were joined by German company Filmfallei Althuren to finance it as a co-production. Mauch also said that support came from the Bavarian Film Development Council, German television and a bunch of smaller companies too.

• 1:09:53Chris Winterbauer?

  The total budget, again, was around five and a half to six million dollars. Production resumes pretty quickly. Robards is out by early February and by mid-April, everybody's back. Les Blank, Maureen Gosling are back to continue filming Burden of Dreams. Kinsky shows up on his best behavior. Just kidding. Several crew members and Herzog himself claimed that Kinsky was very dedicated and professional while the cameras were rolling. I do think his performance is very good. Yeah. But not between takes. Herzog would go on to describe him as, quote, "the strongest negative force on the film." Of course, you can see a lot of these outbursts in Burden of Dreams. I'll read one quote. It's a famous quote from the movie.

• 1:10:34Chris Winterbauer?

  "You can't escape of this fucking, stinking camp because you never know when they call you, because you have to be here, because you're paid for it. You are under contract, so you can't just go. It means you're completely captured here, completely. So you go from there to there, from there to there. That's all you can do." End quote. Which, yes, Klaus, that is how film productions work. You are stuck there because they're paying you to be there. They're just, I mean, again, he's yelling at Saxor. "You can't tell me whether I can scream or not. You can lick my ass. I'm going to smack your face." According to Herzog, Kinsky was really concerned about hygiene. He may have been a hypochondriac. He apparently requested mineral water for bathing. He used hand sanitizer after touching the native people's hands. And he insisted on washing the bowl that they used to eat the masato out of,

• 1:11:19Chris Winterbauer?

  before he ate the masato, which was yuca fermented with saliva. Kinsky's outbursts and Herzog's criticisms were not just about living in the jungle. Kinsky was freaking out about everything. When the team was fitting his costume and tinting his hair, according to Herzog, Kinsky was screaming, "Not even my hairdresser is allowed to touch my hair." Herzog writes, quote, "He never knows his lines." And then Kinsky writes, "Over and over again, I refuse..." To stick to Herzog's hair-raisingly crappy script or take his amateurish direction. I never rehearse a single scene. I say roll them and I only shoot once. But of course, in behind the scene footage, you can see at least one scene that involves rehearsals and multiple takes. And despite the fact

• 1:12:02Chris Winterbauer?

  that Kinsky said that Herzog was a terrible director and a worse writer, Kinsky gave Herzog his screenplay to read. So Herzog writes, quote, "Kinsky gave me his screenplay to read, all 600 pages of it. He wants me to direct the film. One glance at the script makes it clear that Kinsky's project is beyond repair. There is half a page of fucking, then half a page of fiddling, and so on for 600 pages. The whole thing adds up to one enormous Kinsky ego trip. He will have to do this one himself." End quote. So again, just these two men, this dynamic is so wild to me. Just the the the competing ego trip, the competing narratives, the unreliable narrators. It's I just can't imagine what it would be like to live on this set.

• 1:12:46Speaker 03

  Can I ask you both, since you're both filmmakers, you don't have to name names, obviously, but have you ever had anything that resembles this type of relationship on a set? Like, did you ever have? Were you ever part of a movie where you just like, couldn't stand this person and you fought all the time? It's just, I'm just curious.

• 1:13:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Casey?

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  Chris?

• 1:13:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Not not on a no, not not on a feature film. And the movies I've made were relatively simple, you know, especially compared to something like Fitzgerald. I shot a commercial once, kind of early out of film school. That was a big opportunity for me. And the cinematographer didn't care, like, did not care about it. Just this was a payday. He just let his a camera operator shoot it himself. He did not care. And then would pretend to me when I would ask him to do something, he would just lord his experience. He was much more experienced than me, but he would lord that over me and use it as a as a back, you know, against me. And I was poorly equipped to handle it. I didn't handle it well. The commercial did not turn out well. I was very stressed. And that's one of the reasons I don't like shooting commercials at all. But he was a dick, but nowhere near

• 1:13:51Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:13:51Chris Winterbauer?

  what is going on here.

• 1:13:53Speaker 02

  I had, I wouldn't say, he was not as bad as Klaus Kinsky, but the lead in my senior thesis film in film school was this. Older man, he was in his sixties and he was the lead. And this movie was like very self-serious. It was like a total Terrence Malick ripoff. But after every direction I would give him, I'd be like, okay, you're gonna kneel by the side of this bed and like pray. And he'd be like, seriously? Seriously. He would, he would say seriously after like every direction I would give him. And he was constantly arguing with me and I'm like 20 years old.

• 1:14:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:14:29Speaker 02

  And I've never directed anything before. And on the last day of shooting, he's like, uh, can I get a piece of paper and a pen? And I was like, sure. And he wrote on this piece of paper, this like contract. And he was like, if you do not get me a finished film in three months, you owe me $10,000. And I was like, I was like, this is not gonna be done in three months. Like, it's just not. And he was like, well, I don't know. It was like this whole thing and we like pushed it to like a year, I think. But the contract still was that I would owe him $10,000. And it was like, he was just a maniac on set.

• 1:15:12Speaker 02

  And he was saying like gross sexual stuff to the women, like the other like 19 year olds on set. And it was a nightmare and it was hard because I wasn't equipped to deal with like a maniac like that. You know?

• 1:15:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was gonna say, I mean, the only time I had ever experienced anything resembling this was in film school. And just being, you know, agreeing to shoot other students' movies. And, you know, you're like on a student set. It's not like a huge production like this. But just the unpreparedness of certain folks and just the idea of them having that fire to wanna finish something. It doesn't matter if it's like it's at your cost or not. And then the egos of other people not wanting to be there or like having different requirements. Oh my God, I can't even tell you. My experience pales in comparison to what this is. I mean, this is insane.

• 1:16:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I do think that what you're mentioning, Millie, is important in, in two senses. One, there is the Incongruity of the fact that film school is an environment in which however many 20, 50 aspiring auteurs are forced to subjugate themselves to one another in order to realize each other's projects, that's actually a very valuable exercise because what you quickly learn is many of the best elements of your movie are ideas that come from the very smart people around you. And if you can learn to embrace that, you will be a better filmmaker for it. Now, as you guys I'm sure know, maybe the most famous story of Fitzgerald is that eventually, one of the locals or a group of the locals offered to kill Klaus Kinski

• 1:16:46Chris Winterbauer?

  for Herzog. And that Herzog politely declined. That is apparently true. I do think what's more interesting is that there was one person who was completely unfazed by all of this. And that was the one actress on set, Claudia Cardinale, who said that Kinski was afraid of her and that she loved working with Werner Herzog. Quote, "I like crazy people. Otherwise, it's a bore. And with Werner, it was really an adventure. We didn't know if every day we were arriving on set, it was an adventure, but we were actors and technicians all together. When it's too easy, I'm not interested. It was really very dangerous but exciting."

• 1:17:29Chris Winterbauer?

  End quote. Claudia, the biggest badass of them all. Who'd have thought?

• 1:17:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, but she didn't have any scenes in the jungle. She's in Akidos in like fancy houses for most of the scenes.

• 1:17:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, that's true. But she was still there. She was still in it. She still had scenes. She still had scenes with Kinski. She still had to ride on a raft with him multiple times, you know? I think she had a proximity that I don't think I would be able to put on a brave face and return with that perspective, even if I had a very small role.

• 1:17:59Speaker 03

  It's hilarious how she likes crazy people.

• 1:18:06Speaker 02

  She's dealing with two of them.

• 1:18:07Chris Winterbauer?

  I think there's a, like we've said, there's a romantic quality to the madman that pushes the boundaries of what's acceptable. And I'm, I do think a lot of people who are attracted maybe to the arts in part like it because you're allowed a little more leeway with shedding etiquette that you wouldn't be allowed to in other environments. And they abuse that fact, perhaps, not talking about Herzog or anyone in particular, just more some people I went to film school with. But let's talk about what was dangerous about this part of the film shoot. So Robards has later said, he told the Washington Post, quote, "We lost a lot of people, illness, accidents. Herzog wanted that sort of location. I said to him once, I don't want to die making this film," end quote. And again, once Kinsky replaced him, Kinsky was apparently furious to discover that the shoot felt just as dangerous

• 1:18:52Chris Winterbauer?

  as Aguirre. Quote, "Once again, our lives are constantly put at risk because of Herzog's total ignorance, narrow-mindedness, arrogance, and inconsideration, which threatened to bring about the collapse of the shooting and the financing," end quote. Strip away the color commentary. Many of those things are true. The way in which Herzog decided to film this did put people in harm's way, and it did threaten to collapse the financing multiple times, which he writes about. The production dragged on, the conditions at the camp deteriorated. Many of the native extras had signed on for three months of work, but the shoot stretched to eight months of work, and there were accidents happening all the time around them. There were two plane crashes. One person was paralyzed from the waist down. Five more were hospitalized. A woodworker who had been clearing trees was bitten by a poisonous snake, whose venom was known to cause cardiac arrest. The production

• 1:19:37Chris Winterbauer?

  team had an antidote, but the man realized he wouldn't make it back to the camp, so he amputated his own foot with a chainsaw, and he survived. Now, Thomas Mauch, the cinematographer, said, quote, "It has been said that Herzog was placing his crew and people in constant danger. This is an exaggeration. I put myself into difficult situations often enough, but never at the request of Herzog," end quote. Now, to that point, he has said that the toughest sequence to shoot was the boat traveling through the rapids. Now, I'm sure you guys noticed, there is one notable miniature shot in the film, which is when the boat is going through the rapids, that is a 10 to 1 scale model filmed in slow motion to try to give you the sense of scale, and that

• 1:20:21Chris Winterbauer?

  was shot back in Munich on a soundstage. And one thing that's really cool is, he was using such a long lens that they had to actually open the soundstage doors and move the camera outside, but it was snowing outside. So in the background, right, the subject is like a steaming jungle with water, and then in the foreground, there are actually snowflakes going down past the camera lens as they were trying to shoot that shot. Then they had to do a shorter focal length and move it back inside. But a lot of that footage was real. Again, Herzog writes, "I was of the opinion that it would be good to have Kinsky and Paul there on the boat as it crashed through the rapids." Now, let's talk about what happened on the rapids. So, Kinsky and Paul came along without much hesitation. "Kinsky took me aside, and in one of our rare moments where we revealed

• 1:21:05Chris Winterbauer?

  ourselves, he told me that if I went down with the ship, he would go with me." End quote. "As they crashed their way through the river, Thomas Malk was standing, Herzog was keeping him upright and on board by holding on to his belt. But then Malk fell, and the camera tore the webbing between his fingers. He had to get stitches without any sort of painkiller, because it all had been used to treat two locals who had been recently shot with arrows." "The next day, after Malk was all stitched up, Herzog suddenly remembered that they had left one of their cameramen on a rock in the river."

• 1:21:40Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:21:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Quote, "Next morning at breakfast, I look around and cannot see Klausmann. And all of a sudden, I ask if anyone had seen him last night, and no one had. We had forgotten him on that rock the day before. I took a boat and went over to the rapids as fast as I could, and saw him sitting there, hanging on this rock. He was very angry, and rightfully so." End quote.

• 1:22:01Speaker 03

  Oh, my god. I think about this instance a lot, because the way that, I've seen an interview with Herzog, like, maybe from, I don't know, 15 years ago, talking about this, and he's like, "Oh, he was really mad, but then he forgave me." I would be like, "You left me in the jungle, alone."

• 1:22:23Speaker 03

  Overnight, on a rock, like, not even like on the land, like, you're on, I'm on a rock.

• 1:22:30Chris Winterbauer?

  And the river rises and falls, right, with its water level, as we have learned?

• 1:22:35Speaker 03

  Yes. I would have gone home. Like, I would have gone home and never talked to him again. And that would be that. I just could not, I mean, I just couldn't even, I mean, imagine spending the night alone in the jungle, like, without anything.

• 1:22:50Chris Winterbauer?

  I know, I can't, I can't.

• 1:22:52Speaker 02

  I mean, it just kind of goes to show, like, how much insanity is going on that you could just forget again, you know?

• 1:22:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:00Chris Winterbauer?

  It's nuts.

• 1:23:00Speaker 03

  Oh, my goodness.

• 1:23:02Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, let's talk about the biggest set piece of the film, perhaps the most dangerous scene to film, which is, of course, pulling the ship over the mountain. The distance between the two rivers was about 2 kilometers. The mountain was about 150 feet high. The ship itself was over 100 feet long and weighed over 200 tons. In Burden of Dreams, they say 300 tons. I also read 200 tons. Regardless, it's about 10 times heavier than the actual ship that Fitzgerald used in real life. Now, they're using, as you've seen in the documentary, a large caterpillar tractor and heavy steel cables to inch this up the hill, centimeter by centimeter, but it would repeatedly get broken down and stuck in the mud, and then parts would have to be flown in from Miami.

• 1:23:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, the natives could not come in contact with the main cable, because if it snapped when you were around it, it could whip you and literally kill you. You also can't shoot sound, and as you've noticed, I'm sure, watching this movie, most of the movie is dubbed or uses automated dialogue replacement to replace the dialogue of the actors, because the environment was often way too noisy to capture good sound.

• 1:24:07Speaker 02

  I feel like that is a Hertzog staple, or a lot of his movies are like that.

• 1:24:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, that's right. I mean, Aguirre is completely dubbed. I think this is less distractingly dubbed, but I think it was a consequence of the environments in which he was shooting, in which it's very difficult to get a usable track. So, the native people were still put in danger even though they were not around the main cable. In the documentary Burden of Dreams, you can see a Brazilian engineer quit the production after he tells Herzog that the system for pulling the ship is putting people's lives in danger. That engineer calculated a quote "70% chance of catastrophe." Oh my god. And one of the actors tells the camera in the documentary, "If we have to push the boat, the owner should be there behind it too. If we die, he should die too."

• 1:24:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, nobody died, to be clear, shooting this scene, but some people were fooled upon the film's release by the scene in the movie where you can see two native men getting crushed to death in the mud under the ship. Herzog said in a later interview, quote, "It was claimed these Indians really had died, and I had the audacity to actually film their bodies deep in the mud underneath the boat." End quote. In Burden of Dreams, you can see the men get up, move around, smile, and talk after the scene wraps. Again, nobody died shooting that scene. Principal photography wraps in November of 1981, and this is how Kinsky documents the end of the shoot in his journal. "This afternoon, shortly before my plane is to take off, Herzog shows up at the airport. He hugs me and thanks me. I'm gonna toss my cookies." End quote.

• 1:25:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Just great. So the movie's filmed in English, dubbed in English and German. The music was done by German music collective Popol Vuh, which, according to Herzog, was really just founding member Florian Fricka, who was a keyboardist and electronic music pioneer, who would just layer instrument upon instrument in these tracks. And so it was mostly a one-man operation. They had also composed the music for Aguirre, if you guys noticed the similarities in the sound. It feels very Vangelis to me, like very 80s synth with some piano. The film was edited by German editor Biata Menke Jellinghaus. She edited 20 Werner Herzog films, including his first feature Signs of Life, and this was the last film she edited, and I love this quote.

• 1:26:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Herzog says she, quote, "disliked the end product of all his films." She'd tell him, quote, "You should have done it much better, shooting it. What did you do? What did you do?" End quote. Herzog talks about how he didn't like yes people. And I do respect that. And I like that she just brutally went to work on his projects. Now, to give you a sense of her editing style, Herzog says he remembers an instance when she watched a strip of film backwards at five times the speed and based on just that, decided to throw the whole thing out. She apparently refused to go to all of his premieres, except even Dwarfs started small. That was one of the few of his movies that she liked. And Herzog has said he learned more from her than anyone else in the film business. All right. Fitzcarraldo is released almost exactly 10 years after Aguirre,

• 1:27:03Chris Winterbauer?

  The Wrath of God, is shown at Cannes at the end of May 1982. Again, the Kinsky drama. Kinsky writes in his journal, "Tonight is the so-called gala premiere of Fitzcarraldo. I'm already wearing a repulsive tux, which feels like a straitjacket in a nut house. This is the last time. Tomorrow morning, I'm gonna dump it in the trash. But no one comes to drive me to the gala premiere. Herzog and his cohorts went there alone. Without me, without Fitzcarraldo. That would be reason enough to beat the shit out of them." End quote. One famous producer who was at the party, producer Roger Corman, remembers, quote, "I was at the big party for the film with the director, Werner Herzog, and he said to me, 'That crazy Klaus Kinsky.

• 1:27:46Chris Winterbauer?

  We have him at a hotel two blocks away and he won't walk the two blocks. He wants us to send a limousine. And we were short for money. And I said, 'You're right.' A few minutes later, Klaus came up to me at the party and said, 'Werner is too cheap.' I said, 'You're absolutely right, Klaus.' I agreed with both of them because they were both right." And I think that's the only way that you could possibly deal with both Kinsky and Herzog, which is you either have to agree or disagree with both of them at the end of the day. Now Herzog wins Best Director at Cannes. The film was nominated for the Palme d'Or. The reviews were generally positive. Referencing the early news stories about exploitation and inhumane conditions, The New York Times tells its readers to, quote, "Forget everything you've heard so far about Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo."

• 1:28:29Chris Winterbauer?

  It says the movie may well be a madman's dream, but it's also a fine, quirky, fascinating movie. It's a stunning spectacle, an adventure comedy, not quite like any other, and the most benign movie ever made about a 19th-century capitalism running amok. Roger Ebert compared it to Apocalypse Now in 2001. He called it, quote, "a quest film in which the hero's quest is scarcely more mad than the filmmakers. Movies like this exist on a plane apart from ordinary films." End quote.

• 1:29:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, a lot of the reviews give a lot of credit to the movie precisely for the conditions under which it was made. And this is, I think, what's very interesting about this project, and I'm not sure if you guys agree, but what's very interesting about the existence of "burden of dreams", which is that the mythos around the movie has become bigger than the movie itself. But I think that was also true when the movie was released. So Howard Davis and Dylan Jenkins argued, quote, "Herzog stressed how the process of filming was an almost superhuman task under such arduous conditions. This claim is reinforced in all the extratextual materials preceding the film's commercial release in the United States: Articles in Film Comment, American Film,

• 1:29:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Rolling Stone, and Les Blank's Burden of Dreams. This kind of publicity can hardly have escaped the attention of even the most casual of filmgoers. It created a myth around the film that was subsequently converted into a marketing strategy." End quote. Another example I found of this, Michael F. Brown's critical examination of the movie, which does point out kind of the imperialist tendencies of the film production itself, still says things like, quote, "To make the film, Herzog had to overcome Indian attack, defection of the principal actors, and the reluctance of a 320-ton steamship to ascend a 40-degree slope in the heart of the jungle." End quote. Another way of saying that might be, "Herzog provoked native attack, chose a location which led to the

• 1:30:31Chris Winterbauer?

  infection of his lead actor, and attempted to force a 320 steamship up a 40-degree slope in the heart of the jungle." So it's interesting. Interesting how much of what happens to Herzog in the criticism of the film, or the embrace of the film, is presented as he overcame such incredible natural obstacles, not Herzog created a system of incredible obstacles that he would have to overcome in order to create the environment in which he felt the film could succeed. So I think that's a slightly different way of looking at it. I'm curious what you guys think about that approach.

• 1:31:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think that sort of narrative about the film is what you hear about when you watch this movie, or before you watch this movie. And it is funny that like, at the end of the film, Fitzcarraldo fails at, or he goes through this journey and essentially fails

• 1:31:28Speaker 02

  at what he first tried to do. But then, at the end of the movie, he's kind of like, well, I'm just gonna do it anyway and get rewarded for this crazy thing I did.

• 1:31:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:31:39Speaker 02

  Based not on any sort of like merit, you know? And so I feel like that does sort of like mirror Herzog a little bit in that he gets all this credit for this movie based on these like horrible things he did, but it's like, he doesn't really have any accountability for it. Or it's like, he gets rewarded for that, rather than like, held accountable for it. Does that make sense?

• 1:32:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Sure. I think both are true. I think he would say he was held accountable for it. He makes reference of people coming up to him and criticizing him in the street. He tells a story about being in Munich and a man ran and kicked him and said, "That's what you deserve, you pig."

• 1:32:18Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 1:32:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Meaning in reference to the film and the way it was, in which it was made. And it caused, I think, a lot of turmoil in his life. He sued Jason Robards for the remainder of his salary that he was paid on the film. Robards sued him. And I think the film was very controversial for a long time. And I actually think the distance from it, per your point, Casey, is what has like given us a bit of the rose-colored goggles as we look back on it now.

• 1:32:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just mean that I feel like he was kind of like anointed, or at least when I was in my shithead phase in film school, it was like, he's a genius because he did all these like, only a genius would go to these depths, you know, to create a film like this.

• 1:32:56Speaker 03

  Right. I think obviously Fitzcarraldo, the character, does this in the film, where he has this goal of bringing the opera to this very remote location.

• 1:33:09Speaker 03

  But wants credit for the toil of it in a way, you know what I mean? Where it's like, well, the goal is the goal something that maybe you should be examining? Like, do we need the thing? Do we need the big thing that you want? Cause I do agree with you a bit, Chris, on the first point, which is that there's a moment where you're like, man, I feel bad for him, but it's also like, you brought it on yourself, dude. Like to make a movie in this extremely harsh location. I see as an artist, why you didn't want to do a plastic model in Hollywood? Or like, you know, there's this story that he tells, I think it's in Burden of Dreams where he, the studio back when Jack Nicholson was still involved somehow, was like, oh, you should shoot it.

• 1:33:54Speaker 03

  We have a good jungle here. We could just shoot it on the set.

• 1:33:57Speaker 02

  Or we could go down to San Diego or we could, yeah, exactly.

• 1:33:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. And he was like, good jungle. Like, what are they talking about? Blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, I would never, I would have, I need to shoot it, you know, where it's supposed to be set. But it's that feeling of, you know, I, I, I, I think you brought a lot of this on just for having this asinine goal at the end of the day. Right? You know, and I don't know, I, I do want people to do their art, but I also am like, to what end? To what end?

• 1:34:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know if it's ever worth someone getting bit by a piranha making a movie. You know, it's like, I don't know if Werner Herzog would be like, yeah, all those people died kind of related to making this movie, but this movie is so important that it was worth it somehow.

• 1:34:45Speaker 03

  Right. And like, and your shithead edgelord phases, of course, you're like, oh, man, this is awesome. This movie exists and like, people were getting

• 1:34:52Speaker 02

  People die.

• 1:34:52Speaker 03

  Bit by piranhas and they almost, you know, shit themselves to death while they made this movie. And you're like, but you know, after a while, age, perhaps you're like, wow, really? That happened? That sounds so irresponsible.

• 1:35:07Speaker 02

  I wouldn't go to those lengths for our podcast, Millie. I'm sorry, I just wouldn't.

• 1:35:11Speaker 03

  I'm with you. I'm with you.

• 1:35:13Speaker 02

  Okay, good.

• 1:35:15Chris Winterbauer?

  I think an interesting way of thinking about it, if I could encourage our audience, might be, it can be very tempting to admire the lengths to which an adherence to reality or an idea of reality is demanded by a director. Christopher Nolan with something like Interstellar comes to mind or Herzog with this film. But at the end of the day, the thing that necessitates that adherence to reality is itself a fiction. The story of Fitzcarraldo is made up. Like, it's pastiche, a bric-a-lage. Like, it's not real. And like you said, Millie, it's not, at the end of the day, necessary. It's art, it's desirable, but it is one man's dream, at the end of the day. And a dream is not reality.

• 1:36:00Chris Winterbauer?

  And the presentation of film is the manipulation of some reality to present, you know, another reality. So there are many ways that you can achieve that. And Herzog has his own, you know, approach, and he achieved a specific effect through that approach. And like you said, it's a question for everybody. Like, is that approach worth it? Is it desirable? Is it ethical? Is it moral? I don't have the answers to those questions, but they're definitely worth asking as you watch this movie. So let's talk about the legacy of the film just briefly. So the film, I think, is, in a way, the story of the movie exceeds the reach of the film itself. It's a bit like Ishtar to me, where more people talk about Ishtar than have seen Ishtar, similar to Fitzcarraldo.

• 1:36:45Chris Winterbauer?

  In 2022, Herzog wrote in his memoir that he and his team were able to help the, and I'm going to pronounce this as best I can, Chivankoreni people claim their territory after the film was released. But it's really difficult to confirm if Herzog was a driving force of this reality, or if it was part of a simpler, larger movement toward land recognition that timed out in his favor. To be clear, many, if not most, of the native groups that worked with the production saw no immediate progress in land recognition rights following the release of Fitzcarraldo. Now Herzog and Kinsky would work together one more time because they simply had not had enough of each other. That's 1987's Cobra Verde, a 19th century period piece about a slave trader that again

• 1:37:29Chris Winterbauer?

  took them to Ghana and South America, this time by way of Brazil and Colombia. And again, it was the subject of a documentary, Location Africa, by Steph Gruber. This was a breaking point in the relationship. Cinematographer Thomas Malk actually quit that production before it was done and had to be replaced. Now, Klaus Kinski, it's important to note, despite being considered by many a legend on screen, and I do think his performances are singular and unique, really revealed himself to be as vile inside as out by way of his autobiography, his own words, which was originally titled All I Need Is Love. It was re-released as Klaus Kinski Uncut. It was released in English in 1988, then quickly pulled from publication because it's

• 1:38:13Chris Winterbauer?

  frankly so pornographic. He died in 1991. His daughter, Pola Kinski, later came forward and stated that her father had sexually abused her from ages five to 19 and raped her multiple times. And she has said that she specifically came forward because she was tired of hearing people describe her father as an artist and a genius despite his disgusting predilections. On the other hand, Werner Herzog has aged into kind of this oddly cherished weird grandfather figure I find in film and pop culture. He's kind of this curiosity. I think a lot of people view him with the same fascination as he views his subjects, you know, thinking of Grizzly Man or one of my favorites, that Penguin Running the Wrong Way and Encounters at the End of the World.

• 1:38:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Is it possible that the Penguin is insane? Does he know that he runs? Like, it's just, it's so absurd. There's something absurdist about him, and it's very charming and it's very disarming. In case you've seen him in film screenings, I'm sure he's very charming in person in kind of a weird offbeat way.

• 1:39:13Speaker 02

  Well, I will just say, like, his Q and As are the best run. Like, he has a microphone and people come, and then like, there's another microphone across from him and people will come up and ask their question and he'll have like a one-sentence answer and then it's like the next person. Like, it's like very efficient.

• 1:39:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. So, I do want to point out, even though I think he has this cuddly quality to him now, what I learned, especially in researching this episode, is that he has consistently pushed the boundaries of film in ways that were extremely unsafe and even fatal for those that worked with him. And now Herzog is quick to point out that in all of his films, none of the actors that he's worked with have ever been injured. And that's true if you limit it to speaking roles or starring roles, but if you extend it to extras and crew, it could not be further from the truth. So I want to end with a quote that comes at the end of Burden of Dreams that I think is really illuminating, because I think in Burden of Dreams it's presented a little romantically, but I think on closer inspection, it's a little more complicated. So Herzog says, "It's not only my dreams.

• 1:40:12Chris Winterbauer?

  My belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. And the only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry, or painting, or literature, or filmmaking is all about. It's as simple as that." End quote. But I do think a crucial distinction that's omitted is that of those mediums, filmmaking is the only one that cannot be done alone. And that the dream requires the engagement of other people in order to bring to life. So with that, Casey, Millie, I have to ask you, at the end of every episode, we have to say, "What went right?" So from your perspective, what went right in the making of Fitzcarraldo?

• 1:40:55Speaker 02

  Millie?

• 1:40:56Speaker 03

  Geez.

• 1:40:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Who would like to jump on the grenade first?

• 1:41:01Speaker 03

  I think what went right in the making of Fitzcarraldo is that we just have this document of this time period, but also this moment in film history, which is that you just have, there's so many layers upon layers of what it took to make something like this. And the idea that there was the movie, but then also the documentary, the Les Blank documentary, and just having a mythology to reference any time, even in film school, or when you're learning production, or you're just learning about the craft of filmmaking,

• 1:41:45Speaker 03

  you just have this document of this weird-as-hell film production. It brings up so many questions. And I think that's important. As a filmmaker, I think you should be looking at stuff like this and wondering about the ethics of filmmaking, and sort of having relationships with your crew and with your actors. And this kind of stuff, it just feels like... As much as it's a crazy story and it's like a lore, like a Hollywood or like a filmmaking lore, I think it also is just good to like have as a way to bring up questions about filmmaking and, and the power of ideas and you know, that kind of stuff. I don't know. I just, it feels like

• 1:42:27Speaker 03

  important, like a historically important document or something.

• 1:42:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:33Speaker 03

  If that's not too bold, right? I don't want to be too bold, but that's, you know.

• 1:42:37Chris Winterbauer?

  I would love a documentary on every film ever made. Like that would be so fun because they're always so fascinating. That's why we make this podcast. So I completely agree with you, Millie. I think that's a great selection.

• 1:42:47Speaker 02

  I think from a filmmaking point of view, it's very hard to separate like the mythology from the actual film itself and to watch this movie as like a standalone film sometimes can be difficult, but I've seen this movie so many times now that I was actually able to do it on this last viewing, more so than I had in the past. And the shot

• 1:43:10Speaker 02

  of them successfully moving that damn boat up that hill.

• 1:43:17Speaker 02

  In that moment, I was like, this is pretty breathtaking. This is like a visual poem. All the work and pain that went into this movie in that singular moment, and the characters were kind of experiencing that at the same time as I, the viewer, I'm experiencing it. It was like a very interesting emotional moment for me, watching this movie, knowing what went into it and seeing this part worked. And then also understanding that it's like, it couldn't have been shot in San Diego. We couldn't have used a model to get this shot. And not that it's

• 1:44:00Speaker 02

  worth it because of that shot, but I think I was able to just enjoy that.

• 1:44:07Speaker 02

  One shot in this movie, a lot, this last viewing. And so I think they got that right.

• 1:44:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, very good. And I will give mine to Werner Herzog, for whom he gets every what went right and what went wrong with this project because it all starts and begins with him. And I find him to be a very interesting character. I think a lot of what interests me about him has less to do with the philosophical questions he raises, some of which I think are interesting, some of which I think become word salad, if you really listen to them carefully. But he does, through his actions and his filmography, like you said, Millie, force us to really think about, what are the ethics of filmmaking? When does empowerment stop and exploitation begin? At what point does the observer become the observed or the subject of the film?

• 1:44:55Chris Winterbauer?

  And again, I'm reminded of the end of Grizzly Man and spoiler alerts when Herzog is given permission to listen to the footage of Treadwell's death and we watch him reacting to said footage and that kind of becomes an emotional focal point at the end of the movie. So I do think Herzog as a kind of larger than life character, and this being one of, like you mentioned, because of the existence of Burden of Dreams, this is in a way, becomes his origin story, even though Aguirre was really the origin story. I think that's really interesting and I think it's really interesting to talk about. I think it's really fun to talk about. I think it's challenging to talk about. And so I will give my what went right and my what went wrong to Mr. Werner Herzog,

• 1:45:40Chris Winterbauer?

  a polarizing figure, and I am not 100% sure how I feel about him either upon deep diving him. Millie and Casey, thank you so much for joining us on What Went Wrong. Is there anything aside from your wonderful podcast, Dear Movies, I Love You, please go listen, guys, that you guys would like to plug for our audience?

• 1:45:58Speaker 03

  No, I, I think, yeah, listen to the podcast, listen to the episode that you guys are on. We're on every Tuesday on Exactly Right Network and you can get that anywhere you get podcasts, so.

• 1:46:10Speaker 02

  That's right. It's a, you know, it's a love letter to movies. It's about enjoying film, both low, low, low brow and the highest brow and everything in between. And it's also kind of about film culture, you know, like movie theater etiquette and like what snacks are appropriate for inside the movie theater, stuff like that.

• 1:46:32Chris Winterbauer?

  That's a thorny subject. I feel like you're gonna get some real strong opinions on that one.

• 1:46:36Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 1:46:38Chris Winterbauer?

  My wife is all about dumping M and M's into her bag of popcorn. So that's the big one. It's great. It's great.

• 1:46:44Speaker 03

  Big fan, big fan.

• 1:46:45Speaker 02

  So yeah, check it out.

• 1:46:47Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, guys. Go listen to Dear Movies. I love you. Casey and Millie, thank you so much for joining us.

• 1:46:53Speaker 03

  Thank you. This is awesome. We really, really appreciate it. Yeah.

• 1:46:56Speaker 02

  This was so fun. My dearest patrons, what will follow will be the worst Werner Herzog impression you've ever heard. A mere approximation of genius, but I must prostrate myself at your feet. Your sacrifice allows me to create. My dreams are realized because of you. Adam Moffat, Adrian Pan Correa, Angeline Renee Cook, Ben Schindelmann, Blaise Ambrose,

• 1:47:32Speaker 02

  Brian Donahue, Brittany Morris, Brooke, Cameron Smith, C. Grace B., Chris Liel, Chris Zaka, Christopher Elner. When I think about people who...

• 1:47:49Speaker 06

  Don't listen to this show. The enormity of their flat brain astounds me. David Friskalanti, Darren and Dale Conkling, Don Scheible, Ellen Singleton, M. Zodiac, Evan Downey. Film it yourself. This is something I always believed in. Galen and Miguel, The Broken Glass Kids, Grace Potter, Half Gray Hound, Jake Killen, James McAvoy,

• 1:48:29Speaker 06

  Jason Frankel, Jen Mostramarino, Jerome Wilkinson, J.J. Rapido, Jory Hillpiper, Kay Kanaba, Kate Ellington. I worry about the sanity of our patrons. I don't mean that he or she may believe that they are Lenin, but rather why they would give money to a podcast. Amy Olgeslager McCoy, Lance Stater, Lan Relad, Leah Bowman, Lenna, Lydia Howes, Matthew Jacobson,

• 1:49:12Speaker 06

  Michael McGrath, Nathan Centeno, Polly Ho Yen, Rosemary Southward, Rural Juror. It is my understanding that this is a reference to American television. I have no interest in television. Deeper truths can only be found in film, my films. Sadie, Just Sadie, Scary Carrie, Scott Gerwin, Somon Chinani, Steve Winterbauer, Suzanne Johnson, The Provost Family, where I assure you, the Os, they sound like Os.

• 1:49:58Speaker 06

  Tom Kristin.

• 1:49:59Chris Winterbauer?

  And Zach Everton. Wow. Thank you, Werner Ertzog. Had you grown up in Australia, or maybe South Africa, that's definitely what you would have sounded like. Guys, thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of What Went Wrong. Next week, we are covering... This is Spinal Tap. So excited to jump into one of my favorite music-related films of all time. Thanks again, guys, for listening. We hope to see you in October at our first live show. And as always, go watch some movies.

• 1:50:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Go to patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast to support What Went Wrong and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman. Research for this episode provided by Jesse Winterbauer, with additional editing from Karen Krupzow.