Ten years after they first worked together on Aguirre, the Wrath of God, writer/director Werner Herzog would reteam with star Klaus Kinski for the fourth time, though it wasn’t originally envisioned that way. In fact, I doubt Herzog would say much of Fitzcarraldo was how he originally envisioned it. This ambitious piece of genius cinema would take he and Kinski back into the Peruvian jungle for a film that seems to have been cursed from the start, but even curses are meant to be broken given the proper enchantment.
Kinski came aboard the project, replacing original star Jason Robards, playing the lead role of Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (aka Fitzcarraldo), an opera-loving Irishman determined to bring the opera to the jungles of Peru. Alongside him was to be his assistant Wilbur (Mick Jagger), but as production was delayed and Robards fell ill with dysentery, the production almost fell to pieces. Herzog ultimately had to rewrite the lead roles and reshoot four months of work already completed.
At one point Herzog considered taking over for Robards himself, but eventually decided on Kinski. The role of Wilbur was excised entirely as Jagger had to hit the road with the Stones and Herzog couldn’t see anyone else playing the part. I’ve only seen the snippets made available of Robards and Jagger in the film (see here), but having seen the maniacal Kinski as the driven madman that is Fitzcarraldo I can’t say I would ever want to see it in the hands of anyone else.
Now, when I say “madman”, that almost seems a little harsh and short-sighted. Is it mad to be driven to do something no one else would conceive? Is it mad to want to share your passion with others, hoping they too will find the joy you find in it? Perhaps eccentric is the more apt description of Fitzcarraldo, or a man blinded by his own dreams. The same could certainly be said of Herzog whose dream of realizing this film into existence holds eerie parallels with the film itself.
Herein lies the conundrum of Fitzcarraldo, a matter of where does the film end and real life begin? The sheer audacity on display both from a story and filmmaker standpoint separates this film into a category with which few films share company. By all rights this was a doomed production of which Apocalypse Now seems one of only a few films worthy of comparison.
The jungle in which the production took place was fraught with dangers, stories of swollen limbs, pus-filled appendages and two of the native extras were attacked in the middle of the night — a woman shot through the stomach with a foot-long arrow and a man whose carotid artery was nicked as another arrow lodged in his throat. Both lived, as did the film and that authenticity beams through every scene as you feel as if you too are knee deep in the mud, willing Fitzcarraldo’s dream into a reality.
Speaking of said dream, faced with what seems like an impossible task, Fitzcarraldo benefits from his affair with a successful madam (Claudia Cardinale) who gives him enough money to buy a steamer ship. Fitzcarraldo devises a scheme in which he will take advantage of the last portion of the Amazon yet to be exploited for its rubber. Rapids on the adjacent river, however, make exploiting the land near impossible, though Fitzcarraldo has a plan. He’ll float up a parallel river and pull the steamer over a mile-long stretch of land, thereby allowing him to avoid the rapids, make his fortune and bring Enrico Caruso to the jungle.
Yes, it’s a crazy plan, but crazy is the new normal in a Herzog film and the control over which he manages this story, the natives he casts as extras and his ability to focus Kinski’s wild talents into a performance for the ages is what makes this film a masterpiece. Well, that and the fact Herzog turned his nose up at the idea of using miniatures to showcase the feat of pulling a steamboat over a mountain in the jungle. Instead he was determined to pull an actual steamboat over a mountain in the Peruvian jungle.
The task at hand grows even more insane once you consider Fitzcarraldo is based on a true story, but in real life the ship only weighed 30 tons as opposed to the three hundred Herzog’s weighed. Oh, and the real ship was pulled over the mountain in pieces, not in its entirety, a feat a Brazilian engineer told Herzog there was a 70% chance the cables would snap and kill several of the cast and crew… The engineer walked away from the production while Herzog continued on.
The ambition of Fitzcarraldo is, of course, compelling. You can watch Les Blank‘s Burden of Dreams (watch here) or read Herzog’s “Conquest of the Useless“, which is an abridged version of Herzog’s diary from the making of the film, and the stories and challenges prove endlessly fascinating, but the filmmaking on display is of equal magnificence.
The more Herzog films I watch the more I find myself noting his use of sound and music. His guerilla style approach to filmmaking definitely creates a strong level of documentarian-style authenticity, but the music feels just as much a part of the environment as anything else. With Fitzcarraldo, Herzog again used Popol Vuh to score the film and as the otherworldly sounds fill the soundscape it’s just as powerful hearing the boom sounds of trees cracking and the hull of the steamer ship crashing into the rocks.
While I may never be able to separate the making of Fitzcarraldo from the film itself, it’s one of those instances where the two run so closely together I’m not sure you would ever want to separate them. Not only that, it’s not as if knowing the challenges the production faced takes away from the story, especially considering both the real and dramatic challenges were quite similar.
Fitzcarraldo takes pleasure in life’s small triumphs, reveling in our accomplishments even when facing massive defeat. It shows how much of our life is out of control, how much we can control and how much we should simply leave up to fate. Through great ambition and great failures can come some of our greatest work and this is a film that exemplifies just that.
Fitzcarraldo is available on Fandor.com right now and will be released on Blu-ray as part of a new, limited edition set of Werner Herzog films, releasing on July 29, 2014. For purchasing information click here.
