by Paul Cronin
Several accidents occurred during filming, but none of these were directly related to the actual shooting of the film. Many of the Indians had come from the mountainous areas and couldn’t swim. I would sometimes see them taking our canoes out into the middle of the river, so I decided to move the boats up to higher ground and even chain them together. One day I was coming round a bend of the river in a speedboat and saw a great tumult on the riverbank. I immediately knew something had happened and realised that a canoe had capsized just moments before, so I dived down and tried to find the two young men who were in the water. One of them reached the shore, but the other drowned. Three days later, after consulting with the tribal chief, his fifteen-year-old wife remarried. Soon after that one of our aeroplanes was taking off from the jungle runway when its wheels tossed up a branch that became stuck in the tail section, immobilising altitude control. The aeroplane continued to climb very steeply until it stalled. Everyone survived, but some people sustained serious injuries. At our infirmary, where we had a doctor who specialised in tropical diseases, we were able to treat over a thousand locals who had nothing to do with the film, though an elderly woman and two children died of anaemia.
Naturally there are some things I have to take responsibility for. During the filming of the scene where the boat moves through the rapids, the assistant cameraman Rainer Klausmann was sitting, with a camera, on a rock in the river covered with moss and surrounded by turbulent water. It hadn’t been easy to reach this spot, let alone stabilise a camera there. We got the shots we wanted, during which the boat smashed against the rocks so violently that the keel was completely mangled. Just past the rapids the boat ran aground on a sandbank, and we frantically tried to free it because the dry season was approaching and we knew the water level would sink even further, preventing any kind of rescue of the ship. We all had a lot on our minds and eventually made it back to camp for the night. Next morning at breakfast I couldn’t find Klausmann, and asked if anyone had seen him last night. No one had. We had forgotten him on that rock the day before. I jumped into a boat and went over to the rapids as fast as I could, and saw him just sitting there, shivering with cold, hanging on to this rock. He was very angry, rightfully so. Klausmann had attracted bad luck even before that. Near Iquitos there was a dead branch of the river, the kind of place where normally you would find piranhas, but because all the townsfolk and children would go there to swim, we did too. One afternoon we were in the water and all of a sudden I heard a scream and saw Klausmann scrambling to shore. A piranha had bitten off the top of one of his toes. He was on crutches for weeks.
At one point I had a deep scratch on my finger; in Burden of Dreams you see I have white gaffer tape wrapped around it. Soon afterwards a red streak appeared under the skin, running from the finger past my elbow all the way to the armpit. Our doctor casually asked, “Are you allergic to penicillin?” I told him I didn’t know. “Let’s test it,” he said, and scratched my skin with a needle. Immediately I had a wild reaction; my entire body was covered in red patches the size of large coins and my ears turned purple and swelled up. He would have killed me on the spot with an injection into a vein. Later, one beautiful day I was walking on the deck of one of the boats, looking out into the jungle, and leant on a section of railing that had been recently repaired but not properly screwed back on yet. It gave way and I fell directly into the water, right in between the hulls of the two identical ships, which were about thirty feet apart. At that same moment an eddy started pushing them together. I swam out of there as fast as I could, otherwise I would have been crushed.
Claims about your treatment of locals were made during the extended period of pre-production.
Months before we had even brought the cameras down into the jungle, the press tried to link me to the military regime and make me out to be a major force in the exploitation of local Indians. In fact, the soldiers were constantly arresting us because for a time I had no official permits to move the ships along the River Marañón. I didn’t have this paperwork because I felt it was better to ask the Indians who actually lived on the river, rather than the government in Lima, for permission. When we got to Wawaim – which was in the vicinity of where we wanted to pull the ship over the mountain – we talked at length to local inhabitants who were happy to help. They signed a contract that detailed what was required of them and how much each person would be paid for this basic exchange of services. They earned about twice as much as they would have working for a lumber company.
At the time there was a power struggle going on within the larger communities of Indians in the general area; there were opposing political factions, and our presence became the pretext for each side to claim areas of influence. The main opposition to us came from some distance away, from an unofficial tribal council of Aguarunas [Consejo Aguaruna y Huambisa] that insisted it represented all the indigenous groups in the area, though many Indians where we had established our camp had no idea the council even existed, and those that did wanted nothing to do with it. There was never one voice for the Aguarunas, despite what this council said, which tried to make a name for itself by blaming us for the oil pipeline and generally being responsible for the military presence. They spread bizarre rumours, including that we planned to cut a canal between the two river systems and leave several communities stranded on an island, and wanted to take everyone back with us to Europe. They also said we wanted to do things like rape the women and use their bodies for grease. It didn’t help that almost from the start the press said we were smuggling arms and had destroyed the Indians’ crops during filming. But at that point we were in the early stages of pre-production, and this was all months before a single frame had been shot.
Outsiders arrived, trying to incite the Indians against you.
A political propagandist from France turned up and showed the local Indians photos of Auschwitz victims, piles of skeletons and corpses. He was one of several activists who flocked to the area, the kind of doctrinaire zealots and left-wing ideologues of the 1968 revolution who make up the Diaspora of Shattered Illusions, still hoping to fulfil their failed dreams. One of the Indian leaders showed me material given to them and explained that the Frenchman had tried to convince the Indians that this is how Germans treat everyone.
After several months of pre-production, the military build-up on the border had become scary. One time we passed downriver near one of the army’s encampments and a shot was fired over our heads, so we rowed to shore and were held captive for a few hours. This was the first time I had real doubts about whether we should stay in this area; I eventually made the decision to abandon the camp we had built and find another shooting location, which meant going in search of a specific and rare configuration of geography, because I had precise requirements when it came to locations for the film. Most of the tributaries of the Amazon are something like ten miles apart, with 8,000-feet mountains in between, but I needed two rivers that ran parallel, almost touched each other and had a mountain in between them that wasn’t too big, but not too small either. We looked at aerial shots and spoke to pilots and geographers, concluding that there were only two suitable places in the whole of Peru. The first was the site we had just evacuated; the second was more than a thousand miles to the south, in the middle of the jungle, about eight hundred miles south of Iquitos, where Río Camisea and Río Urubamba are divided by an elevation more than six hundred feet high. I hadn’t actually found the second location before I moved out of the first camp, but could see that our presence was becoming the focus of something unpleasant, even dangerous. We definitely didn’t belong.
A few people stayed in the first camp, and I maintained our medical outpost for the locals because I felt that as long as I could pay for a doctor, one should remain there. I also hoped that by doing so things would fall into place, but after the camp was almost entirely evacuated a group of Aguarunas from the tribal council, who lived some distance away, set the place on fire. They brought press photographers along with them;
it was clearly a media stunt. Around that time – I don’t recall whether it was before or after – the border war between Peru and Ecuador broke out in the immediate vicinity.
A tribunal in Germany attempted to try you, in absentia, for your crimes.
They accused me of torturing and imprisoning Native Indians, which were such bizarre accusations that even some of the press who normally loved this kind of stuff weren’t interested in what was being said. There were suggestions that we had occupied an area where Indians had never been exposed to the white man, but it was obvious to anyone who cared to look that we hadn’t invaded a tribe of untouched natives. The Aguarunas were relatively sophisticated and, politically speaking, the best organised tribal group in Peru. At one point they expressed their concern to me about the film because they didn’t want the world to see an outdated representation of Native Indian life. None of them was surprised by the technology we brought down there. They communicated via shortwave radio, watched kung-fu videos and smoked Lucky Strikes. Most of the men had served in the army and flown in helicopters, and a good number spoke Spanish. In Burden of Dreams you see some of the Aguarunas wearing John Travolta disco-fever T-shirts.
The only serious lingering allegation was that I had four Indians arrested by the military, so I went to the town of Santa María de Nieva to uncover the facts for myself. It turned out all four men existed, but none had even the remotest contact with the production of the film. One of them had been imprisoned for about a week because of his unpaid bills in every bar in town. I asked Amnesty International to look into reports of human-rights abuses, and they spread word that I wasn’t the cause of any problems, though the media didn’t take much notice. Typical of the climate was a report in Der Stern magazine. A photographer was sent to the jungle set, where he took at least a thousand pictures, none of which were published. Instead, the magazine ran photos from their archives of naked Amazon Indians spearing fish, hinting we had intruded into a sanctuary of “uncontaminated” natives. The fact is that had we been the cause of even a single arrest, I would have scrapped the whole film during pre-production.
You said earlier that the best way to fight a rumour is with an even wilder rumour.
At one point the Italian press exploded with a story that Claudia Cardinale had been run over by a truck and was critically injured. A journalist from Italy somehow reached me on the phone in Iquitos; it sometimes took forty-eight hours to place a call down there. He was hysterical, so I calmly told him I had just eaten dinner with Claudia and she was fine, but the rumour mill kept grinding and reports of her injuries started spreading globally. Two days later the same journalist reached me from Rome yet again. “Sir, please don’t repeat what you’ve written so far,” I said after a flash of inspiration. “The truth is actually much more serious than that. Not only was Claudia Cardinale badly injured when she was hit by the truck, the driver was a barefoot drunkard who raped his unconscious victim in the presence of onlookers.” There were twenty seconds of silence, then he hung up, and from that moment on there wasn’t another word about any of it.
Hopefully this book will help demolish certain untruths.
No, let this book serve other purposes. I can best argue against the stories with the film itself. There is a moment when Fitzcarraldo tells of a lonesome trapper and frontiersman who was the first white man to see Niagara Falls, at a time when the Pilgrims had only just arrived. Upon relating what he had seen, the man was called a liar. “What’s your proof?” he was asked. His answer was simple: “My proof is that I have seen them.” I – and many others – were eyewitnesses to what happened during the making of Fitzcarraldo. We know the truth. In almost every story the media came up with, I was acquainted with a Werner Herzog who had very little to do with the real me. So be it.
In recent years there has been a slew of these other Herzogs, sometimes dull, occasionally rather intelligent: from a fake and quite awful impersonation of me reading a children’s book, to an equally fake but amusing pastiche involving me reading a letter I wrote to Rosalina, my cleaning lady. Although the recorded voice is a poor rendering and the author of this piece actually identified himself, a good number of people asked if it really was me. No matter how wild the caricature, I never deny such things – which are proliferating at speed thanks to the Internet – and in the case of the cleaning lady I explained I was actively pursuing her deportation back to Nicaragua. I feel safe from the world knowing that between the rumours and me is a strong shield of false Herzogs. The parodies and misperceptions protect and serve as unpaid bodyguards, so I do my best to keep the rumours alive. Let them sprout and grow, let the mythology mushroom. I want more of these doppelgängers, these stooges, however crazed, to do battle out there. They take the brunt while I get on with my work.
There are shots in Burden of Dreams of you and Kinski on the boat as it moves through the rapids.
At one point the fourteen steel hawsers broke simultaneously under the enormous thrust of the water, and the boat – with two people on board, the cook and his pregnant wife – took off through the rapids with nobody to steer it. Unfortunately no camera had been set up to film this, so over a period of several days we winched the ship back into position. We set up three cameras and filmed it careening through the rapids again, this time without anyone on board. There was no one to steer, and it crashed into the rocks left and right. I was watching from the cliffs and decided it looked safe enough to do it again with people on the ship. It was, in fact, some members of the crew who strongly suggested we do another round of filming through the rapids. Kinski was immediately eager; he always had good knowledge of what would work well on screen, and knew this was a moment he should be involved with. I was hesitant, and in this case he actually pushed me.
Seven of us got on board, with three cameras. Les Blank was also with us. We used two belts to strap Jorge Vignati and his camera to the wall behind the helm; when we hit a rock he was jolted into his straps so hard he broke a couple of ribs. Beat Presser hit his head on the second camera, which was screwed to the deck, and suffered a concussion. Thomas Mauch and I were with Kinski. One impact was so violent that the lens flew out of the camera like a bullet. I tried to hold Mauch with one arm, and with the other grabbed onto an open doorframe, but we flew through the air. Mauch was still hanging on to his camera and banged his hand down onto the deck, splitting it apart between two fingers. Two days before, all our anaesthetic had been used during emergency surgery on the two Indians hit by arrows. As we had hired a group of Peruvian lumbermen and oarsmen, we were advised by a local missionary to have two prostitutes stationed in our camp, otherwise the men would chase after the women in the next settlement. While we sewed up Mauch’s hand without anaesthetic, one of these women consoled him in his agony. She buried his face between her breasts and told him how much she loved him.
Once the boat had passed through the rapids we all got off, and almost immediately it dug itself into a gravel bank. The anchor pierced the hull, and the keel twisted up like the lid of a sardine can around its key, but the boat was so solidly built – with its reinforced steel lining and protective air chambers – that it didn’t sink. We tried to pry it loose from the sandbank, but had to face the fact that the boat couldn’t be moved until the next rainy season, which was half a year away. We were prepared for something like this to happen because it wasn’t all that unlikely the ship would sink in the rapids. The speed of the water was more than forty miles an hour and there were whirlpools everywhere. Our back-up was the second boat sitting on the mountain, which we planned to bring down the other side into the river, then continue filming with it. Unfortunately the water level had dropped to the lowest ever recorded, from forty feet to two feet, which meant we couldn’t drag the ship down into the other river because there was literally no water there. All of a sudden both ships were immobilised until the next rainy season.
Why do the Indians help Fitzcarraldo?
They are on a mythic mission, one Fitzcarraldo
never quite comprehends. For much of the film the audience is left in the dark about their true motivations; we never really understand why they are toiling and going to all this trouble to tow the ship over the mountain. Only when it hurtles through the rapids does everything make sense. The Indians are as obsessed as Fitzcarraldo; they just have different dreams. While his is to build an opera house, they want to rid themselves of the evil spirits inhabiting the rapids, and are convinced that sacrificing the boat by cutting it loose and sending it through the rapids will lift the curse over their land. It will be their salvation. “They know that we are not gods,” says Huerequeque, “but the ship has really impressed them.” The Indians win and Fitzcarraldo loses, though ultimately he rises to the occasion and – through the power of his imagination and creative spirit – converts this defeat into some kind of triumph. At the end of the film, though we know that Fitzcarraldo has bankrupted himself, it’s obvious he’ll be up to mischief before long. This is someone who has always stood his ground, and perhaps might finally finish his trans-Amazon railway, abandoned years before.
Did your work with the Indians have any lasting effect?
Our presence in that part of the jungle was ephemeral yet to some degree helpful because it meant attention was focused on the problems of Native Indians in the Peruvian rainforests. When we shot the film we were conscious of wanting to do more for them than just provide financial remuneration. Some wanted to be nurses, so I asked our doctor to provide training. The younger men dreamt of buying Honda motorcycles because they loved riding them when they were in the army, but there were no roads in the jungle, so that didn’t seem too useful. The Indians’ canoes were too small to transport crops, including their cocoa harvests, to the nearest market. Travelling merchants would buy things from the Indians at low cost and make profits reselling this merchandise downriver, so our builders and carpenters showed them how to build larger boats.
