by Paul Cronin
When he saw the state of these men – who had been held captive for more than two and a half years – Dieter immediately began making plans to escape. The camp was heavily guarded, but he saw that an opportunity arose every time the guards put their weapons down and went to eat in the kitchen. Eventually Dieter put his plan into action, which led to a gun battle that left five guards dead. The prisoners, split into two groups, ran barefoot into the jungle. Dieter ended up the only survivor. After his friend Duane was killed, he threw caution to the wind and set fire to an abandoned village, hoping to attract the attention of nearby aircraft. After a series of incredible coincidences he was finally spotted by an aeroplane and hoisted into a helicopter. The crew didn’t recognise him as one of their own and, afraid they might have picked up a North Vietnamese soldier on a suicide mission, a huge marine threw himself on Dieter, nearly crushing him. The marine almost fell out of the chopper in horror when he pulled out a half-eaten snake Dieter had stuffed down his shirt. It had been five months since his aeroplane had been shot down; he was down to eighty-five pounds and probably had no more than a day to live. Dieter was the only American POW to escape from North Vietnamese and Laotian captivity, and remains one of the most highly decorated soldiers in American history.
While Dieter was still recovering in hospital, his mother was flown over from Germany; it was the first time she had been in an aeroplane. She brought a box of apples with her and handed out fruit to her fellow passengers, but when dinner was served by the airline staff she refused to eat because she had no money and thought she had to pay for it. When the admiral who met her at the airport realised what had happened, he immediately ordered some food be brought from the nearest canteen. Dieter’s mother was allowed to stay in the admiral’s house, but at five o’clock the next morning an alarm went off because she had lowered herself down on a rope to clean the windows. It was her way of showing thanks. The following morning another alarm went off because she was seen behind the house showering with a garden hose. She just wanted to save water.
How did Dieter handle home life after his experiences as a prisoner?
He developed certain safeguards, but never had to struggle for his sanity and wasn’t consumed by the problems you see among some Vietnam veterans, men who returned home completely destroyed inside. Dieter was a unique man with extraordinary survival instincts, alongside great integrity and pride, and wasn’t affected by his experiences as much as most other people would have been. He was tortured by having sharp pieces of bamboo put under his fingernails, and one of his arms was bound so tightly that it was unusable for six months, but he still refused to sign the propaganda declaration that denounced American military action, something almost every other POW did. “I love America,” Dieter kept saying. “America gave me wings.” During the war his grandfather had been the only person in his village who hadn’t voted for Hitler, and because of this was dragged through the streets by an angry mob and accused of being a traitor. If his grandfather could endure such treatment, said Dieter, he could too. Although he was imprisoned and tortured, he never looked at his captors with disgust. He respected them, something I have always admired.
Being held prisoner was clearly the event that shaped him, but Dieter had such a difficult childhood amidst the devastation of post-war Germany that he was well prepared for his jungle ordeal. He possessed all the qualities that make America so wonderful: self-reliance and courage, a readiness to take risks, a kind of frontier spirit. He grew up in a remote area of the country, and as a child saw things that made no earthly sense. Germany had been transformed into a dreamscape of the surreal, which is what we see in the film, those endless images of bombed-out cityscapes. Like me, Dieter had to take charge of his life from an early age, and we connected because as children we had both experienced things that children shouldn’t, like real hunger, though things weren’t as bad for us as they were for him. Dieter – whose father was killed at Stalingrad – would peel wallpaper from the walls of bombed-out houses, and his mother would cook it because there were nutrients in the glue. Until the day he died, Dieter refused to see himself as a hero. “Only dead people are heroes,” he would say. One time after he spoke in detail about the tortures he experienced during captivity, my wife asked him, “How do you sleep at night? Do you have nightmares?” “You see, darling,” he said nonchalantly, “that was the fun part of my life.” When we screened Little Dieter Needs to Fly at the Telluride Film Festival, Dieter flew over in his singleengine Cessna, and the first night slept in the cockpit. One evening I was with him from eight o’clock until two the following morning, and he proposed – I swear to God – to eight consecutive women in total exuberance. The women all loved him for his intense charm and joy, even if they turned him down flat. He took the eight refusals with grace, then proceeded to get completely drunk and slept outside the door to our apartment because he had forgotten his key and didn’t want to wake us up.
I like the United States for embracing someone like Dieter, a quintessential immigrant who came to America not just to find a job, but as a man with a big dream. Not only did he fulfil that dream, he was punished for it, then finally redeemed. The day we filmed the sequence on the aircraft carrier, I asked him to wait on the pier because I wanted to put the camera up on the bridge and get a shot of him walking into the ship for the first time. I went to the bridge, told the captain who I was, and explained what film we were making. “Dieter Dengler?” he asked. “You can place your camera here, but please give me five minutes.” Almost immediately every officer on board scrambled onto the gangway, formed a line and saluted Dieter as he walked up. This was more than thirty years after his escape from the jungle. He died of Lou Gehrig’s disease a few years after Little Dieter Needs to Fly was released, having battled the disease like a warrior. I filmed his funeral in Arlington National Cemetery and included the footage as a postscript on the DVD of the film. What I continue to find wondrous is that Dieter emerged from his experiences without so much as a hint of bitterness; he was forever able to bear the misery with great optimism. Dieter had such an impressive and jubilant attitude to life, able to brush his experiences aside and deal with them, never making a fuss. He has been a role model for me, and even today when I am in a complicated situation I ask myself, “What would Dieter do?”
How is Little Dieter Needs to Fly stylised?
The substantial elements are real. The two thousand pounds of rice, two thousand pounds of flour, six hundred pounds of honey and one thousand gallons of drinking water in vacuum-sealed plastic barrels really were there under the floorboards of his house. Dieter slept easier knowing it was all stashed away. Even years after returning home he thought about opening a restaurant where he could eat all the food he wanted. Also true is that when he was half dead in the jungle, a bear who had followed him for days came so close he could smell its foul breath. I was careful about representing Dieter’s reality on screen, but did ask him to become an actor playing himself. Everything in the film is authentic Dieter, but to intensify him some of the stories were scripted, rehearsed and carefully orchestrated. It was my job as director to translate and edit his thoughts into something profound and cinematic, which meant trimming away everything that didn’t fit, however interesting. Sometimes during filming Dieter would focus on some little detail and miss the bigger picture; I had to push him to condense a story that rambled on for almost an hour into only a couple of minutes. “Please, Dieter,” I would say, “you have to be more disciplined. Stick to the essentials. Cut away everything that isn’t important.” There are a couple of scenes in the film that were shot at least five times until we got it right.
The film starts with Dieter visiting a tattoo parlour in San Francisco and looking at an image of Death whipping a team of horses up from Hell through fire and brimstone. He tells the tattoo artist he could never put that design on his body because for him it was different. “It didn’t look like that to me,” he says. “It was the angels who steered the horses. Death
didn’t want me.” Although he had hallucinations when he was near death in the jungle, Dieter never had any intention of getting a tattoo; the whole thing was my idea. Then we cut to him driving to the home that he built with his own hands on Mount Tamalpais, north of San Francisco. When he gets out of his car, Dieter repeatedly opens and closes the car door before walking to the front door, which he again opens and closes. Eventually he goes inside. This is a scene I created after he casually mentioned that his experiences in the jungle made him appreciate being able to open a door whenever he wanted. I was intrigued by the many images of open doors on the walls of his home, all of which were really his. “They were a bargain,” he said, “only ten bucks each.” I told him we had to shoot a scene and make this truth visible. “Open and close your front door a couple of times,” I said, “then talk about the door as a symbol of freedom.” He hesitated and said, “I’ll look weird to my buddies.” What finally convinced him was when I told him how charming the ladies would think it was. From this moment early in the film the audience is irrevocably with Dieter, very much on his side. In our conversations, whenever he would describe his dreams to me, the image of a jellyfish – dancing in a kind of slow-motion transparent movement – floated into my mind, so we went to the local aquarium and filmed the sequence where he explains what death looked like to him. These ethereal, almost unreal creatures express his dreams perfectly, though it was all my idea.
One of the best examples of stylisation in any of my films comes at the end of Little Dieter, the scene shot at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson, Arizona, an aeroplane graveyard with tens of thousands of mothballed aircraft sitting in rows, as far as the eye can see; nothing but aircraft from horizon to horizon. Dieter talks about the nightmares he had immediately after his rescue, and how his friends would take him from his bed at night and pack him into a cockpit, where he would sleep. He says that inside an aeroplane is where he felt safe. All this is true, though I chose the base because of the stunning visuals. Dieter had never been to Davis-Monthan, and his line “This is heaven for pilots” was scripted by me.
Wasn’t it a bit much to march Dieter back through the jungle with his hands bound behind his back?
Dieter loved Asia and its people, and had been back to the jungle many times since the war. Soon after we shot the film he even returned to the village near where he had crashed, and where the engine from his aeroplane was displayed on a pedestal, as some kind of trophy, a souvenir of his failed sortie.
The Laotian authorities weren’t too happy about us filming in their country because apparently they’re still grumpy about the fact that Dieter shot and killed five Laotians during his escape, so we filmed in jungle areas of Thailand at the border and on the Mekong River instead. By the time we made the film many of the metal panels of his aeroplane had long since been turned into cooking pots by local villagers, but some of the fuselage was still at the crash site; we knew exactly where to find it, and Dieter insisted on swimming across the Mekong to clandestinely film some scenes at the site. I planned to go with him, carrying a small digital camera, but in the end prudent members of the crew advised us against it. I did also wonder whether including images of whatever remained of the aeroplane in the film would provide us with any significant insights. The German television network wanted me to shoot reenactments of the events Dieter was talking about with actors, but I knew it would more effective if Dieter did everything himself. He always exuded such sanity that it was never a problem for him to run through the jungle with his hands tied behind his back, led by a group of locals hired from the nearest village. The line “This is a little too close to home” was scripted. The scene was a safe and effective way of getting something special from him. He insisted on playing the part, and rushed off into the forest, surrounded by these gun-toting men, with the cameraman and me running behind. Perhaps it was his way of chasing the demons away.
I chose not to include anything overly violent in the film, and a few years later there were scenes we shot for Rescue Dawn – where Dieter was portrayed by Christian Bale – that even during production I felt shouldn’t be included. There is certain imagery I don’t appreciate: that of graphic violence, stark naked as it sometimes appears in real life, especially when perpetrated against the defenceless; such things are easier to stomach in stylised, comic-book form. I say this not because I find onscreen violence a particular danger to our children’s well-being and civilisation in general; it’s just that having to look at such things on screen is my Achilles heel. I have a tendency to faint when giving blood, and once passed out while watching the scene in The Passion of Joan of Arc when prison guards draw blood from Joan’s arm. As for censorship, I’m against it, though I would cut something from a film if it deeply offended the religious feelings of the majority of people in a country. I would never show the butchering of a cow in the release print of one of my films in India, but would never cut something if all it did was hurt the feelings of cat lovers in England.
Wings of Hope, another tale of horror in the jungle, is a sister to Little Dieter.
The film – which was dormant in me for many years – is the story of Juliane Koepcke, a seventeen-year-old German girl, the sole survivor of an aeroplane crash in the Peruvian jungle on Christmas Eve in 1971. Juliane’s mother was killed, along with ninety-four others. The aircraft was travelling from Lima to Pucallpa when it disintegrated over the jungle – probably after having been struck by lightning – less than an hour after taking off, and she sailed to earth still strapped to a row of seats. It was almost as if she didn’t leave the aeroplane; the aeroplane left her. There are several explanations of how Juliane’s fall was cushioned and she managed to survive a fall of nearly three miles. During particularly serious storms there are powerful updraughts, one of which might have caught the row of seats and driven it upwards. The seats might also have spun wildly as they fell, like a maple seed, because Juliane was sitting at one end of the row, and this may have slowed her. The dense lianas, intertwined with the tall trees, also probably broke her fall as she hit the ground. What’s astonishing is that after ten days the intensive search was called off, and on the twelfth day Juliane – who had survived on a pocketful of candies – emerged from the jungle. Her eyes were so bloodshot that local villagers thought she was a forest demon and fled when they saw her.
The fact that Juliane landed without being killed is a miracle, but her escape from the jungle was not; it was sheer professionalism. She was familiar with the environment because of time spent at the ecological station her parents had founded deep in the jungle. She must also have inherited some of her father’s dogged willpower. He was a biologist who wanted to do research in the jungle. After the war, without a penny or passport to his name, he dug himself into a cargo of salt on a freighter bound for South America as a stowaway, and walked across the entire continent until he reached Peru, which is where Juliane grew up. After the crash, she followed the water rather than waiting for help, which is what most people would probably have done. Juliane knew that a small creek always leads to a larger one and eventually a river, and eventually human beings, and that if she followed the shrieks of the Hoatzin bird she would end up at a large body of water. She never panicked when crocodiles splashed violently from the sandbanks and disappeared into the river in which she was wading. Her parents had taught her how to survive under such conditions; she knew that these animals, when on land, always flee from human beings and hide in the water, never in the jungle. She did everything right; everyone else, including me, would have fled into the jungle and inevitably perished. Wings of Hope isn’t just about Juliane’s ordeal; it deals with something deeper, touching powerfully on our relationship with nature and how to survive it.
The other reason for my fascination with the story is that in 1971 I was in Peru working on Aguirre, and was booked on the very flight that crashed. The girl who played Aguirre’s daughter was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl I found in Lima. We had a chaperone for her, but a fe
w days before the start of shooting her parents suddenly decided to withdraw their permission for her to be in the film. I flew from Cusco to Lima and eventually persuaded them otherwise, then found myself – alongside my wife, some actors and crew – in Lima. We had tickets to fly back into the mountains shortly before Christmas, but the flight was delayed by a day and a half due to repairs. More and more passengers were accumulating at the airport. I had to bribe an airline employee so I could get a boarding pass, but at the last minute my scheduled flight was cancelled. After a series of crashes the airline had only a single aeroplane left, which flew the inland routes in Peru, all in a single day. In the end, because it was already so late in the day, it was decided this aircraft would fly only to Pucallpa. I remember being in the departure hall surrounded by people who had made it onto the flight; there was jubilation because they knew Christmas would be spent at home. I had flown in that same aeroplane many times, back and forth into the jungle, and knew the crew who died on the flight. I would talk to the stewardesses and always sit by a window because I wanted to see the Andes and the beginning of the jungle. The airline was notorious for its crashes, and only months before two of the company’s pilots – who didn’t even have proper licences – missed the runway in Cusco and smashed into a mountain. One hundred and six bodies were retrieved from the wreckage, although the maximum capacity of the aeroplane was only ninety-six. An airline employee had sold an additional ten standing places in the aisle and pocketed the cash. It also turned out that the airline’s mechanics had repaired only motorcycles. Only much later did I discover that we were filming Aguirre a few rivers away from Juliane as she was fighting for her life.
