Exotic birds … Werner Herzog upon the set of Fitzcarraldo. Photograph: Jean Louis Atlan/Sygma/Corbis
“Caracas, 21 June 1979: No one came to meet me. My passport was confiscated immediately because I had no visa.”
- Fitzcarraldo
- Release: 1980
- Country: Rest of the cosmos
- Cert (UK): 15
- Runtime: 158 mins
- Directors: Werner Herzog
- Cast: Claudia Cardinale, Klaus Kinski
- More on this pellicle
So began the most illustrious trial of Werner Herzog. The guide now works in something approaching the mainstream but, as the 1970s became the 80s, he was still among the last great wild cards of cinema. At the time, he was newly arrived in South America to start production on Fitzcarraldo – the giddy and occasionally brilliant saga that actually managed to make more demented the supposedly true story of a 19th-century Irish rubber baron who set out to construction an opera house in the Amazon and ended up hauling a steamship over a mountain.
The quote comes from Herzog’s diaries of the mythic two-year hit in the jungles of Peru, just published in the US, excerpted in the New York Times and picked up by blogs including the IFC Daily. All proof, if needed, that I’m not the only one fascinated by this epic folly of a movie – a grand mission statement in which an supremacy young director flung himself into a comically hostile terrain, endangering career and health in the name of a notion of art that seemed quaintly old-fangled exactly at the time.
But vivid while the first-person, present-tense account of the production (the camp being burned down by means of troops in the midst of a border war and crew members cutting not upon their feet after snakebites, etc) steadily is, one of the most striking aspects about the book is the apparent weight it gives to Herzog’s stay prior to the discharge with none other than Francis Ford Coppola. The American manager was then in San Francisco recovering from a hernia operation. Not only does this provide some beautifully deadpan Herzogian moments (”Coppola did not like the pillows and complained all afternoon”) – the pairing takes upon the body a special significance because of his host’s other ailment, the still-fresh trauma of making Apocalypse Now.
Thirty years later the parallels are marked: feral jungle locations and any other film-maker riding shotgun to capture the unfolding mania for documentaries that would later end up rivalling the main event (Hearts of Darkness put on the one hand, Burden of Dreams on the other). Most telling of entirely, each director was stuck wrangling famously deranged actors – for Coppola it was Brando, for Herzog Klaus Kinski – who were becoming preternatural personifications of the madness and menace surrounding the projects.
Not that Herzog took the state of Coppola as a portent of things to come and returned himself to Europe on the first available flight. Then again, even had he seen his own future laid up in a hospital bed there in San Francisco, he would probably still have left for Peru. The wilful beckoning of fate is each inherent part of the do business. And interestingly, be it so the experience of making Fitzcarraldo certainly didn’t leave him unscathed, he presently returned behind the camera, continuing formerly there to seek out the ungenerous. In contrast, as a film-maker Coppola seemed forever diminished by his time in the Philippines. Similarly, one more of his cast in Apocalypse Now, Dennis Hopper, found himself future unglued after using his post-Easy Rider clout to disappear to (guess where?) Peru and emerge years later with the grimly addled The Last Movie.
All so deeply Conradian, eh? But the thing is, it’session important not to overegg here and be deprived of sight of to which extent stupid a chunk of Fitzcarraldo is. Nor how it’s not entirely the mark of greatness for the scars of production to be quite so visible, and that a film like The Last Movie is in fact a whole lot more appealing in theory than pursuit. But in 2009, when a deadening cloud of politeness has settled over so much of movie agriculture, it’s refreshing to be reminded that it’s at least possible on account of insanity (in the very best sense of the word) to bleed into what we see on screen.
