WHAT WENT WRONG - Fitzcarraldo

Episode Date: September 1, 2025

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 for more information.

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 Sisyphian journey into the heart of the Amazon, captured by way of a Sisyphian 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, 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. Hi. Hi. Thank you for having us.

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 Ven-Etsoggs Fitzcaraldo? I mean, Casey, I don't know. Thoughts?

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 art house 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 referred 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 high brow art house movies. And I would say Fitzgerald is definitely one of those, like, film school art house movies that, like, you hear about. And it's just sort of infamous, too. So I think that was sort of the two reasons. why we wanted to do this, this one.

And it's just such a story. Obviously, your 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 the pantheon of disastrous film productions. 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 than like a fully formed movie does get made out of that disaster. So that's sort of interesting to me.

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 less blanked. 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 more two of a mythology around Fitzcaraldo. 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? Yeah. 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?

I mean, when I was watching this, I was like, I think I've seen this movie like seven times. Wow. 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. 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 and more just to this 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. Absolutely. 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 did not want to give up and everyone's fucking miserable and like you're just like glad we have this on record. 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. Yeah. 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, less blanks 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 Fitzgeraldo. Similarly, I enjoy this movie. I think there is a romanticism applied 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 or conflict is the only crucible through which good art can be forged,

which is just obviously false. And you can look at a director like Sydney 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 will 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 up river, Fitzcaraldo and Molly forcing their way into this opera house at the beginning of the film after a thousand mile journey down the Amazon. and Fitzgerald'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 at the end of the film.

As you mentioned, the movie is well documented in Les Blanks' 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 cocking 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. Fitzgerald is a 1982 epic adventure film written and directed by Werner Erzog.

It is very loosely based on the real story of Carlos Fitzcarald. It was produced by Walter Saxer and many more. It stars, as we mentioned, Klaus Kinski as Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, or as he's known in Peru, Fitzgerald. Claudia Cardinali as Molly Jose Lugoy as Don Aquilino Paul Hitcher as Captain Orinico Paul Werekekeke, Enrique Borquez as Weirkekeke, Miguel Angel Fuentes as Cholo

and David Perez Espinoza as Rio Tambao-Chief along with hundreds and hundreds of native peoples as extras and supporting characters in the film. There are so many people in this movie. There was another thing I noticed. I was like, I cannot believe how many people showed up to just film this movie. 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 Vrner Ertzog, his book, Kinski Uncut, The Autobiography of Klaus Kinski by Klaus Kinski. I would like to add a disclaimer. Candidly, this is an atrocious book. Kinski writes, misogynistic pornographic accounts of his conquest. Big, big disclaimer, if you're going to read it, just go in wide-eyed. This is not a book for the faint-hearted. would not recommend it outside of resource purposes. Millie, have you read that? No. Have not. Kind of scared.

Throw it on your goodreads. Herzog on Herzog by Paul Kronin and Vener Erzzog, My Best Fiend, the 1999 documentary about Klaus Kinski, 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 corkiest 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 Ertzog's origin story? I mean, not really. I know he was a, was he like a soccer player? Am I making that up?

He plays soccer in Burden of Dreams. That's probably not what we're going to focus on for this episode. So no, no, I don't. Millie, anything on your end? I mean, I know a little bit. I mean, I know that he grew up in like a little village, right? Yes. 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? Exactly. So there are some interesting parallels between Ertzog and the way that film was introduced to him and the native peoples of the city. the Amazon and the way he introduced film to them. So like many in South America at the turn of the

20th century, when Fitzgeraldos takes place, our story starts an ocean away in Europe. Werner Ertzog 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 Herzlach says she was very embarrassed by that association. and his father was not particularly involved in his life. So as you mentioned, Milly, Hurtzog 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. That's so interesting, because I sort of think of him as, when I lived in L.A., I sort of thought of him as, like, Mr. L.A. 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. 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 Ertzog quotes about these films. So I was not very taken with the first film, which was about Inuit's 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. 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 Fitzcaraldo showing up even early in Herzog's life. Yeah.

Yeah. A couple 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? Oh, my God. Was it Mr. Klaus Kinski? It was. Klaus Kinski. Kinski was Skii.

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 hot potatoes in his face because he felt the praise was insufficient. So Kinski made a big impression in the young Werner Ertzog's mind. At this time, Ertzog 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 Kinskills? No, I mean, of course not. We'll get into how they both describe their experience on this film.

There are some funny, dueling quotes that we'll get into. 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 screen. 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, 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. 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, MK Ultra, subliminal messaging. style filmmaking. He then won the Carl Mayer Award for screenwriting in 1963, and he got a full Bright scholarship at the University of Pittsburgh. And then on the boat to America, he meets his future wife, Marcha Groman. That then led to a wedding in 1967. He lasted three days in Pittsburgh, attempted to work at NASA, absconded to Mexico, worked on a rodeo gig, helped illegally transport

one gun across the border, and by 1965, he, He's back in Germany. So he has lived a lifetime in a very short period of time. 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 Fitzgerald. 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 9 p.m. Yeah.

And Herzog may be, but where that bed is is very much. up for debate on any given night. Sure, truly. I do think, I would say, to any aspiring filmmakers out there, Fitzcarldo is not how you should make a movie, as we will get into here. I agree. So in 1966, he finds financing for his first feature, Science 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 19th. 1968 Berlin Film Festival, and Ertzog 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 the narrative and documentary early in his career. Then he makes his most controversial film yet. Have you guys seen even dwarfs started small? No. I haven't either. 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 just 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 Groves. But for all its virtues, the film is deeply troubling, and not just because of all the on-screen mayhem. 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. 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.

So over the next couple of years, he makes three more documentaries, Fatamorgana, 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 Erzog had his most elemental, you might say. Land of Silence and Darkness, which focuses on the deaf and blind community, and the Hinderté Zunkovs 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 unhealthy obsessions.

Have you guys seen, for example, grizzly man? Yes. 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 going to watch Grizzly Man. Treadwell ends up mauled to death

by the very creatures that he is so enamored by, that his obsession kills him at the end of the film. It's so funny because when we're talking about his, this personality type is developing. And when we're in this 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. And they always had this allure, unfortunately. I was going to ask, Millie, were you attracted to these men?

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 and, like, R.E.I. 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.

a lot of ways because 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. Yeah. Oh, one thing I noticed watching Fitzgerald this time was this quote right at the top where they're trying to get in the opera. And, 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.

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 Ertzog views his dreams is 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 Fitzcaraldo, it is Aguirre, the wrath of God.

Have you guys seen Aguirre the wrath of God? Yep. Yes. This was the first Herzog movie I ever saw. This was like a film school classic. Yes, it is. It's kind of the OG Fitzcaraldo 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 going to 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 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 three and four in the morning,

the phone rang. 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 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 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 Ertzog about

about. I haven't the foggiest idea of 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 dilatantish 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 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? 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. 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 Kinski especially struggled with the living conditions he frequently wrote about how we 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 Kinski sticks to Herzog. So according to Herzog, 10 days before the end of the shoot, Kinski got into an argument with a sound assistant and demanded that he be fired. Herzog says that Kinski was at fault. This basically leads to a confrontation in which Herzog says that he threatened to shoot Kinski. and Kinski says that actually Kinski threatened to shoot Herzog because Kinski had the gun. Regardless of who was going to 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, 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. So he gets a studio involved. Aguirre is successful, along with 1975s, The Enigma of Casper Houser, 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? Kinski.

Klaus Kinski. They were like, you know what? Let's get the band back together. He looks good, though, as NOSFRI. I mean, he's got the face for that. That face. That's right. So they didn't just do Nosphato.

They also made a movie called Woysec, 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 Nostfratu 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 Ertzog, despite being unable to stand one another, continue to find that their greatest successes occur when they work together. 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. Yeah. Which one? Apocalypse Now. Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Now, Coppola had been inspired in part by Ertzog'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. Oh, they were hanging out? They were hanging out. Wow. That's cool. Yeah. Hertzberg writes about this extensively, how he was introduced to certain things by Coppola's father and how he was watching his 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 are 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 Ferdemine Fitzcarald. 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 L.A. 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 Fitzcaraldo's life that completely captured Herzog's imagination. Any guesses, Millie and Casey as to what that detail might be. Well, I think it's that he put a boat over a mountain. 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 Ertzog's boat weighed. So Herzog, who had long been a... 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. Years later, when his friend shared the story of Fitzgerald and his boat, Ertzog connected the two ideas and then added the element of opera. That was kind of the third component to make this stew simmer. 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?

Is that our friend? Our friend. Our best fiend? Our best fiend, Klaus Kinski. When Erzog first imagined Fitzgeraldo, the face of this blonde, bug-eyed maniac flashed into his mind. Klaus Kinski. But then Herzog 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, Erzzog 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 in a colder environment, a hotel, actually. Any ideas as to who this actor was? Hmm. Is that Jack Nicholson? Jack Nicholson. Wow, I didn't know he was a part of this. He never was actually a part, but he was interested in playing Fitzgeraldos. There's conversations. Yes. Doesn't surprise me that he'd be involved, but not involved. Do you know what I mean?

Yes. Yeah. Well, Jack Nicholson, you mentioned. that Werner Ertzog, Casey, is an L.A. man now or seems to be. Jack Nicholson is very much an L.A. man, and he did not want to go to South America for months to endure hardship in the jungle. Hurtzog said, quote, Nicholson only took parts that left him free to watch Los Angeles Lakers games, end quote. Jack's my guy. This is great. 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 Ertzog to make the movie on a set with a miniature boat. Doesn't exactly sound like the Ertsog way. Make it here, man. Yeah, man. I can't do a good. That was pretty good. I cannot do a Jack Nicholson impression. That was not good.

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, Herzog 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 Herzog 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 L.A. where basically there's this assumption that he's going to use a plastic ship. And he says, no, it's going to be a real steamship and it's going over a mountain. Duh.

It has to be. Exactly. And it's at this point that he realizes that there's no actual signed contract between Gamma and Fox. And I think that this could be read two ways. Number one is Herzog realizes his financing is much shape. 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 Mali Aida,

the boat in the movie, when Fitzcaraldo and Molly First buy it before it's repaired. It's so full of holes that 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 going to 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 you know,

He's about halfway through the entire multi-year process of Fitzcaraldo. 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 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 going to involve hundreds more extras than he'd ever used before. and the movie itself was synonymous with the murder and exploitation of native people. Fitzcarald 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, as well as between between, the different tribes. Then you've got religious sex, missionaries, and foreign oil companies all competing for influence in the area. And he decides, this is where I'm going to 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 the 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, one of the local tribal councils of the Aguoruna's 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 contest. End quote. A big theme in this episode, guys, is going to 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 Ertzog kind of both insists that he's not disrupting the Amazon and behind him, trees are being leveled and, you know, the natives are interacting with film cameras, et cetera. 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 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-Uritschag movie 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 Ertzog sometime in early 1979. He got connected by way of Tom Lutty, who's a filmmaker, co-founder of the Telluride Film Festival, American Zoetrope member. Tom Lutty tells him, Werner Ertzog is going to eat his own shoe, literally, because he lost a bet with Erl Morris about Erl Morris finishing his movie, Gates of Heaven. According to Herzog, he had told Arrow Morris, the day I see your finished work, I'm going to eat my shoe.

Now, Morris has actually debated this and said he does not remember this happening at all. Regardless, Herzog decides he's going to go to the Chey Peney's restaurant in Berkeley and he's going to eat his own shoe. So, Les Blank says, I want to film this. I want to turn it into a documentary. It becomes a 21-minute short film. Yes, I see this. It becomes kind of like a shithead film school student, iconic project. I'm guessing that through the process of show,

shooting this, Les Blank and his editor, Maureen Gosseling, realize, oh my gosh, Verna Ertzog'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. Herzog and his crew abandoned their camp. On the 1st of December, 1979, a group of the Aguadunas burn it to the ground. Some sources escalates, to 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. 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 out. Like, there's no way. 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. Yeah. I want to quit. But I can only imagine, I would not have made it even this far. I think what's interesting, and Millie, you know this, 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 real estate. 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 really are familiar with a number of examples where you just have to keep going, because if you stop, you are dead. Yeah, let's get serious. We're in a Herzog. He's got big Virgo energy, for one, okay? He's not just going to give up on a thing. He's going to 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's 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, adventurer-seeking, obsessed with, like, man versus nature. And he's, you know, he's not going to give up. It never occurred to me at all in learning about this film and in 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. I do feel like there is an element to him that is sort of unbothered by all of the insanity around him. Yeah, he never seems ruffled when he's on camera and burdened. of dreams. Yes. But if you watch the Apocalypse Now documentary, I think it's called, is it Heart of Darkness

or Hearts of Darkness? Hearts of Darkness. 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. Yeah.

You mentioned extreme tourism, right? Basically, Millie is 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. Again, whether or not that's true is debatable, but it's certainly a mantra or a belief system that Herzog very much adheres to. 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 Ertsog makes a new deal with the native people in this region. According to Burden of Dreams, 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 his latest December of 1979, the LA Times had reported that Jack Nicholson was still in the mix for the lead of Fitzgeraldow, but he had not been successful in convincing Ertsog to shoot in California. And according to producer Walter Saxer, 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.

Sakser says they then replaced Nicholson with Warren Oates, who was best known for his role in the Wildbunch in 1969, and you guys would recognize him from Badlands in 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' 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. 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 Lilliam Hellman. And he had also worked with the very famous Italian actress Claudia Cardinale, who Herzog had cast as Fitzgeraldos lover, Molly. Now, Cardinale was sometimes referred to as the Italian Bridget Bardot. She broke out in the late 50s and she was in a bunch of highly acclaimed Italian films. Phelini's 8 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. So for the role of Wilburn, who's a character that does not appear in the final film, he is Fitzgeraldos' mentally challenged assistant. He chose. You guys have seen Burden of Dreams.

Do you remember? Mick Jagger, right? That's right. Rolling Stones front man, Mick Jagger, and kind of Klaus Kinski doppelganger a little bit, Mick Jagger. They got a little bug-eyed mania. Yeah, they do.

That's an unkind comparison to Mick Jagger, I think. Well, he's an odd-looking fella. He can take it, Casey. Come on. 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 Stiles, is that his acting was not great, like our friend Harry Stiles, and he had a lot of personal things going on at this point. Take him down, Chris. Take him down. Sorry.

I apologize. Derry Stiles catching strays. I'm sure he's lovely. That was rude. So after six more ones 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 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, tribes women. And again, you can see that in Burden of Dreams.

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 were, 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. Very tense. And that's before Kinski has shown up as well. Now, the production itself was very international. Cinematographer Thomas Mauch was German, along with Herzog, Walter Saxer is Swiss, the sound recording crew is from Brazil, the special effects teams 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. Yeah, I was actually impressed that Werner Herzog spoke Spanish. He does, yes. He addresses a number of the locals in Spanish in the documentary. Yeah, I mean,

there was this moment where I was like, well, that's the least he could do at this point. Right. It's at least speak a little bit of the language. Take some duolingo lessons before he goes on set. Right. I mean, but I can 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.

No, no. He's obviously an auto-dial the way that he's self-taught on so many things is very impressive. Yeah. 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 Kinski could speak Spanish. Kinski could speak English, and he speaks German, obviously.

So principal photography begins in January of 1981, and right away, Ertsog seems to, like, Jagger a lot more than Robarts. probably because Jagger was finding it easier to adapt than Robards, who was 59 years old at this point in time. I can't really imagine Jason Robards out in the jungle. He just seems like such an urban... Yes. Like, I don't know.

You can see footage of him both in Burden of Dreams and online on YouTube in some of the 40% or so of the film that they shot. And to your point, Casey, Walter Sakser 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 Herzlach 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, 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 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's constantly rising and falling. A lot of the time, the river's just too low, so the boats would get stuck in the mud, shooting had to get postponed. 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 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 dark room 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 cameraman ends up on crutches when a piranha bites off half his toe.

A piranha. A piranha. A parana. 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 Ador for getting more and more concerned about their safety. So the crew has to widen that treetop platform, if you remember the tree top platform that Kinski 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, Friner, just make it bigger for them.

They're scared. 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. That's his art, Chris. There's a difference, okay? There is. And it is an interesting tension with film, right? Where does the commerciality began and the art end and vice versa?

Oh, totally. By mid-February, Robards is out. He has caught amoebic dysentery, which sounds miserable. God. God awful. 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 months later, the New York Times reports, quote, Mr. Robards has initiated legal proceedings against Mr. Ertzog'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 and rafts over rapids and flights and unsafe planes. True. No telephones, no electricity. True. His agent blamed the, quote, hazardous conditions under which Fitzgeraldor was made for Mr. Robard's illness. Presumably true. Herzog, meanwhile, is scrambling. 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 tribes people. Initially, he says, okay, Mick Jagger can do it.

I love him as Fitzcaroldo's assistant, Wilburn, so it's not a stretch to imagine him as Fitzcaraldo. And he says, okay, Mick, you're in the leading role, and he's like, mate, I got to go back on tour. This isn't going to 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 movies.

So Jagger is out, and at this point, Erzog decides he's going to cut Wilburn's character entirely, which is why we do not see Wilburn in the finish film. Adorf, then, Mario Adolf, 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 months later anyway, so he's out now, too. What a bummer. Like, everything's falling apart, and he's like, Werner, I got you, buddy. I'll be the lead, and he's like, no. Not only does Herzog say no to him.

Hurtzog says, if necessary, I will be Fitzgerald. 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. To his credit, he did say that that was his last resort. 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...

It's inner emptiness, Millie. Inner emptiness. He's like, so they get bit by a piranha once and a while. Like, who gives us shit? Like, he's like, come on. What are you? Like, what are you? 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 Roe. who was in like the classic Hollywood system. He doesn't know anything about this world, dude. Like, 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. Yes. 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. Right. 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 Fitzcaroldo would be Kinski. 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 one who could see such an undertaking through to the end. So he reaches out to Klaus Kinski, and Kinski apparently gloated. As Kinski wrote, quote, months ago I told Herzog that he could go fuck himself, and I hung up on him.

So he began Fitzcaraldo without me, using someone from New York, Mick Jagger, as Fitzcaroldo'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 Kinski has a very strong perspective on what Herzog needs in his movies to make them good, and that is Klaus Kinski.

It's unclear if Erzzog had offered Kinski the role before Robards, but Kinski 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 did nothing to eat. In Ikitos, 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 Camusie, buy tools in Lima, and pay the workers. A couple months later, quote, Lucky, who's 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 accredited 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.

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 a German company Filmfalae Al-Turen 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. The total budget, again, was around $5.5 million.

production resumes pretty quickly. Robards is out by early February and by mid-April. Everybody's back. Less blank. Moraine Gosseling are back to continue filming burden of dreams. Kinski shows up on his best behavior. Just kidding. Several crew members and Herzogs himself claim that Kinski was very dedicated and professional while the cameras were rolling. I do think his performance is very good. 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, 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 Saxer. 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, Kinski 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 before he ate the masato, which was Yuka fermented with saliva. Kinski's outbursts and Erzog's criticisms were not just about living in the jungle. Kinski was freaking out about everything. When the team was fitting his costume and tinting his hair, according to Herzog, Kinski was screaming, not even my hairdresser is allowed to touch my hair. Herzog writes, quote, he never knows his lines. And then Kinski 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 him and I.

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 that Kinski said that Herzog was a terrible director and in a worse writer, Kinski gave Herzog his screenplay to read. So Herzog writes, quote, Kinski 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 Kinski'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 Kinski 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 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. 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. Casey? Chris? No, not on a feature film, and the movies I've made were relatively simple,

you know, especially compared to something like Fitzcaraldo. 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 lured his experience. He was much more experienced than me, but he would lor that over me and use it 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 while. 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 no. nowhere near what is going on here. I had, I wouldn't say, he was not as bad as Klaus Kinski, but the lead in my senior thesis film in film school was this older man, he was in his 60s, and he was the lead. And this movie was like very self-serious. It was like a total Terrence Malick rip-off. But after every direction I would give him, I'd be like, okay, you're going to kneel by the side of this bed and like, pray.

And he'd be like, seriously? seriously. 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. And I've never directed anything before. And on the last day of shooting, he's like, 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 going to 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. 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? Yeah, I was going to 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 want to 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. Yeah, I do think that what you're mentioning, Millie, is important in two senses. One, there is the incongruity of the fact that film school is an environment in which, however many,

20, 50, aspiring autos 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 Fitzcaraldo is that eventually one of the locals or a group of the locals offered to kill Klaus Klaus Kemp. Kinski 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 Cardinali, who said that Kinski was afraid of her and that she loved working with Werner Ertzog.

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. End quote.

Claudia, the biggest badass of them all. Who'd have thought? Yeah, but she didn't have any scenes in the jungle. She's in Akitos in like fancy houses for most of the scenes. Yeah, that's true, but she was still there. She was still in it. 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. It's hilarious how she likes crazy people. She's dealing with too. I think there's a, like we've said, there's a romantic quality to the mad man that pushes the boundaries of what's acceptable. And 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 of 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 Kinski replaced him, Kinski was apparently furious to discover that the shoot felt just as dangerous as a gear.

Quote, once again, our lives are constantly put at risk because of Herzog's total ignorance, narrow-mindedness, arrogance, and in consideration, 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 that 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 team had an antidote, but the man realized he wouldn't make it back to the camp,

so he amputated his own forest. foot with a chainsaw, and he survived. Now, Thomas Mauch, the cinematographer, said, quote, it has been said that Erzog 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 notice there is one notable miniature shot in the film, which is when the boat is going through the rapids, that is a 10 to one scale model filmed in slow motion to try to give you the sense of scale, and that 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, Kertzog writes, I was of the opinion that it would be good to have Kinski and Paul there on the boat as it crashed through the rapids. Now, let's talk about what happened on the rapids. So, Kinski and Paul came along without much hesitation. Kinski took me aside in one of our rare moments where we revealed 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 onto 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 Mouk was all stitched up, Herzog suddenly remembered that they had left one of their cameramen on a rock in the river. Quote, next morning at breakfast, I look around and cannot see Klausman. 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.

Oh, my God. I think about this instance a lot. Because the way that I've seen an interview with Hurtzog 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, overnight, on a rock. Like, not even like on the land. Like, you're on, I'm on a rock. And the river rises and falls, right?

With its water level, as we have learned. Yes. I would have gone home. Like I would have gone home and never talk to him again. And that would be that. I just couldn't, I mean, I just couldn't even, I mean, imagine spending the night alone in the jungle without anything. I know. I can't. I can't. I mean, it just kind of goes to show like how much insanity is going on that you could just forget again, you know? Yeah. It's nuts. Oh my goodness. 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 two 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. Now, the natives could not come in contact with the main cable, because if it snapped when you're 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. I feel like that is a Herzog staple or a lot of his movies are like that. 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. 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. 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 Kinski 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 going to toss my cookies, end quote.

Just great. So the movies filmed in English, dubbed in English and German. The music was done by German music collective, Popolvu, which, according to Herzog, was really just founding member Florian Fricka, who was a keyboardist, an 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 80 synth with some piano.

The film was edited by German editor, Biatta Menka Jellinghouse. 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. 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 said he learned more from her than anyone else in the film business. All right. Fitzcaraldo is released almost exactly 10 years after Aguirre, the Wrath of God, is shown at Cannes at the end of May, 1982. Again, the Kinski drama.

Kinski writes in his journal, Tonight is the so-called gala premiere of Fitzcaraldo. I'm already wearing a repulsive tux, which feels like a straight jacket in a nut house. This is the last time. Tomorrow morning, I'm going to 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 Fitzcaroldo, 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 Kinski, 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 Kinski 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 Palm Door. 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 Ertzog's Fitzgeraldo.

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.

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 it'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 Dilwyn 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, Rolling Stone, and Les Blanks'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 confirmed. 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 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 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. 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, Fitzcaroldo fails at, or he goes through this journey and essentially fails.

at what he first tried to do. But then at the end of the movie, he's kind of like, well, I'm just going to do it anyway and get rewarded for this crazy thing I did. Yeah. 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. 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? Yeah. 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. Oh, wow. Meaning in reference to the film in 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 remaining. 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 given us a bit of the rose-colored goggles as we look back on it now.

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. Right. I think obviously Fitzgerald, the character does this in the film, where he has this goal of bringing the opera to this very remote location, 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? Because I do agree with you a bit, Chris, in 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 a burden of dreams where he, the studio back when Jack Nicholson was still involved somehow, was like, oh, you should shoot it.

We have a good jungle here. We can just shoot it on the set. Or we could go down to San Diego. Yeah, exactly. And he was like, good jungle. Like, what are they talking about? 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 think you brought a lot of this on just for having this assonine goal at the end of the day, right? You know, and I don't know. I do want people to do their art. But I also am like, to what end? what end, you know? Yeah, I don't know if it's ever worth someone getting bit by a piranha making a move.

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. Right. And like, and your shithead edge lord phases. Of course you're like, oh, man, this is awesome. This movie exists and like people are getting 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. I wouldn't go to those lengths for our podcast, Millie. I'm sorry, I just wouldn't. I'm with you. I'm with you. Okay, good. 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 Fitzcaraldo is made up.

Like, it's pastiche, a bricolage. 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. 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 Herzluck 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 Fitzgeraldo. 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 as I can, Sivan Korenny 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 Kinski 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 took them to Ghana and South America, this time by way of Brazil and Columbia. 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 Skinsky, 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 Koskinski Uncut. It was released in English in 1988 and quickly pulled from publication because it's frankly so pornographic. He died in 1991.

His daughter, Polakinski, later came forward and stated that her father had sexually abused her from ages 5 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 Ertzog 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, is it possible that the penguin

is insane? Does he know that he runs? Like, it's just, it's so, 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. Well, I will just say, like, his Q&As are the best run. Yeah. 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.

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, Herzogga 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, 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 is presented a little romantically, but I think on closer inspection, it's a little more complicated. So Herzok says, it's not only my dreams. 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 Fitzcaroldo. Millie? Who would like to jump on the grenade first? I think what went right in the making of Fitzcaroldo is that we just have this document

of this time period but also this like moment in film history which is that you know you just have there's so many layers upon layers of like what it took to make something like this.

And the idea that there was the movie, but then also the documentary, the less blank documentary, and just like having a mythology to reference anytime, you know, even in film school or when you're learning production or you're just like learning about the craft of filmmaking,

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 was just

good to like have as a way to bring up questions about filmmaking and the power. And the power of ideas and, you know, that kind of stuff. I don't know. I just, it feels like important, like a historically important document or something. Yeah. If that's not too bold, right? I don't want to be too bold, but that's, you know.

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. I think from a filmmaking point of view, it's very hard to separate like the mythology from the actual. 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 of them successfully moving that damn boat up that hill, 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 showing. shot in San Diego. We couldn't have used a model to get this shot. And not that it's worth it because of that shot, but I think I was able to just enjoy that one shot in this movie a lot, this last viewing. And so I think they got that right. Well, very good. And I will give mine to Werner Ertzog, 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? And again, I'm reminded of the end of Grizzly Man. And spoiler alerts, when Herzog has 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 Burrude, 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 Ertzog, 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. No, I think, yeah, listen to the podcast. Listen to the episode that you guys are on. We're on every Tuesday on an exactly right network, and you can get that anywhere you get a podcast. So 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. That's a thorny subject. I feel like you're going to get some real strong opinions on that one. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. My wife is all about dumping M&Ms into her bag of popcorn. So that's like the big one. It's great. That's very popular. Big fan, big fan. So yeah, check it up. All right, guys, go listen to Dear Movies I Love You. Casey and Millie, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. This was awesome. Thank you. We really, really appreciate it, yeah.

This was so fun. My dearest patrons, what will follow will be the worst Bernard 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 Pang Correa, Angeline Renee Cook,

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the O's, they sound like O's. Tom Kristen 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. Go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong. And check out our website at what went wrongpod.com. What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer.

Editing Music by David Bowman. Research for this episode provided by Jesse Winterbauer with additional editing from Karen Krupsaw.