Lucki came to Lima from another world. The shockingly wealthy daughter of one of the top brass in Indonesia had wanted to marry him, and he was relieved to have eluded that fate. But there were no telephone communications. When he arrived, we didn’t know. There was no one to pick him up at the airport, no one manning our little downtown office. I had just set off for the jungle on the other side of the Andes. The rains were so heavy, though, that they canceled the flight. I returned to the city in the middle of the night and there ran into my brother, whom I hadn’t seen for years. The joy of the meeting is still palpable to me today. Lucki straightaway took the initiative, brought order to everything, and provided a functioning bookkeeping system, which wasn’t a straightforward matter as some agreements had been made with parties who couldn’t read or write and various documents had been washed away in tropical rain. He tried to bring the financing under control, but that was almost hopeless as there practically wasn’t any. The entire budget of the film was some $380,000, which was a joke for a big film set in a jungle in the middle of the sixteenth century complete with costumes, weapons, llamas, and rafts, not to mention some four hundred or so Quechua-speaking highland Indigenous extras. If you look at the film from the point of view of today’s “production values,” then I contend that no one would touch the project for anything less than fifty million dollars. The filming was done on three barely accessible Amazon tributaries, and the main actor was the maniacal wild man Klaus Kinski. We were constantly in financial straits, the cash flow from Germany was not functioning, transfers often took weeks to arrive. One night, when we were really up against it, Lucki went to Miraflores, the affluent suburb of Lima, and went from house to house offering a deal. Because practically everyone there had a dollar account in the States to keep money hidden from the Peruvian tax authorities, they were interested in getting outside money directly funneled into the United States. Lucki said he needed fifty thousand dollars’ worth of Peruvian soles right away. In return, he would have that sum wired from Germany to the United States with an extra 10 percent on top as a reward for so much trust; the sum would arrive within forty-eight hours. People in Lima had read about my project in the newspapers, but who was going to sign up for it in the middle of the night in response to someone knocking on doors? Lucki, though, had a natural gift of creating trust, which he knew better than to abuse. A very young entrepreneur, Joe Koechlin von Stein, took him up on the offer. He needed dollars because he was planning a rock concert with Carlos Santana. With no more guarantee than a handshake, he handed Lucki the soles the next day, and the project was saved for the time being. Meanwhile, my brother Till wired fifty thousand dollars from his own funds to Joe’s account in Miami. He too saved Aguirre, the Wrath of God, though he was secretly convinced he would never see his money again. After a long delay, he did. I am friends with Joe Koechlin to this day. He built the first eco hotels in the Peruvian jungle, that was his vision long before anyone had heard of the word “ecology.” He supported me later on my film Fitzcarraldo and was one of the producers of Les Blank’s documentary Burden of Dreams on the making of the film. Not long ago, in 2018, he was my host when I held a workshop with a large group of young filmmakers in his jungle lodge near Puerto Maldonado.
Aguirre, the Wrath of God is about a band of Spanish conquistadors in the Amazonian lowland searching for the fabled golden city called El Dorado. Lope de Aguirre leads a rebellion, and in his mad pursuit of power and wealth, the expedition turns into a catastrophic sequence of illusion and self-destruction. In the end, Aguirre is left as the last survivor on a raft covered with hundreds and hundreds of small monkeys, drifting into nowhere. From beginning to end, the filming was beset with uncertainty and risk. We all were living and drifting and shambling about on our rafts—the actors, the tiny technical crew of eight—and the real raft we were shooting was always one or two bends in the river ahead of us. We usually didn’t know what was waiting for us round the next bend. As we were filming, our entire stock of negatives disappeared without trace. We had an arrangement with a shipping firm in Lima that would send the exposed negatives to Mexico City, where they would be developed, but the Mexicans swore blind that nothing ever reached them. The negatives were all we had. Without them, everything was lost. We had two suspicions: possibly the Mexican print lab had made some disastrous mistake and treated the negatives with the wrong chemicals and wrecked them, so now they were pretending that they had never received them in the first place. Lucki objected that the Mexicans stood to earn from the job and must be presumed to be telling the truth. The second possibility was the shipping company in Lima, but they showed us waybills, all properly stamped, proving that our material had indeed left the country. There hadn’t been any stops either; there was nowhere the things could have got mislaid. Lucki wasn’t allowed into the customs area in Lima, but on impulse, he scaled a ten-foot wire fence, and behind one shed he found all of our still-sealed film canisters on a pile of rubbish. The sensitive material had been exposed to the sun’s heat for weeks. It turned out that the shippers had bribed the customs authority, hence the stamps, which allowed the shippers to collect their fee. Lucki picked up the canisters and carried them himself as hand luggage to Mexico. The situation all this time on set in the jungle was, of course, dire for me. I knew that everything we had done unrepeatably over many weeks was lost. There was only one thing for it: to carry on filming as though everything were all right. If the team had discovered that everything we had gone to so much trouble to shoot was presumably lost, then everything would have fallen apart. So I just carried on working even though I was completely aware of the folly of what I was doing. Only Lucki and I and the production chief on site, Walter Saxer, were in the picture, and we kept up an iron silence. From the perspective of most normal shoots, one would ask: Why was there no insurance? To which I would reply that we had so little money, we couldn’t afford insurance. Sometimes we had barely enough to buy food. Also, what we had shot was unique and not really repeatable.
I remember there sometimes wasn’t anything to eat, and at night, I and a couple of pals set out in dugout canoes to an Indigenous village to try to find food. Once, I swapped my good shoes for a bathtub full of fish; another time I left my wristwatch as payment. I remember one night we paddled out and met at a bend in the river. None of the three of us had managed to find anything. At four in the morning, we tied our canoes together and drifted downstream and cried.
From my brothers, from Lucki especially, I learned not just to inspire confidence but to reward it unconditionally. As an example, we were in North Korea in 2015 for my film Into the Inferno, which I made with the volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer all over the world. After a year of negotiating, Clive managed to obtain permission to film there, which was incredible by itself. There were limits, of course, to what we could shoot, and we were under the eyes of the security people the whole time. But we were allowed to film on the crater rim of Paektu Mountain. Because that volcano is right on the border with China, conditions were even stricter than usual. A lot of North Koreans attempt to flee across the border here, and there were lots of roadblocks controlled by soldiers. I noticed that their automatic rifles were all fitted with bayonets—not decorative bayonets of the kind you’d see in the guards of honor at Arlington National Cemetery but razor-sharp ones. We see North Korea as a threat because of its atomic bombs, but they also have a million men under arms. If these hordes of fanatical fighters were spread out and unleashed across the border in a such a way that fighter planes and machine gun emplacements couldn’t stop them, then the South Korean capital would be overrun in days. The infantry is a danger that no one seems to be aware of because we think it’s out of date.
We filmed on the crater that is venerated as the mythical origin of the Korean people; school classes and soldiers try to visit it at least once in their lives. While we were filming there with our expert, I suddenly heard giggling very close by and the stifled squealing of a young woman. I got the camera to pan around, and we filmed a group of soldiers taking pictures of one another with the crater lake. One young fellow had grabbed a cute female recruit around the waist and was tickling her under the arms. It was a pleasure to behold the merriment of the group, which showed an unexpectedly human side of the North Korean army. Then one of our minders took things in hand. We had to switch off the camera right away. I was informed that I had transgressed against the rules. The North Korean soldier is prepared at all times to shed his blood for his fatherland and for the beloved brother and leader of the people; nothing else was possible. What was especially heinous was that I had filmed soldiers in full uniform with their faces identifiable to the imperialist enemy; I was instructed to destroy my footage right away. The problem with this was that with our digital data storage we were technically in no position to do so. Not even the North Koreans could do that. Thereupon I was told our entire hard drive would have to be confiscated so the offending material could be destroyed. I countered that we had four days’ filming on it, and to do so would be a severe blow to the film. I made a counteroffer to keep the stored footage but offered a guarantee that I would never publish the material with the soldiers. “Guarantee?” came the reply. “You mean a fifty-page written guarantee you will tear up as soon as your plane has left North Korean air space?” I said that I didn’t operate like that. In many of my major films—as for instance, Aguirre, which was familiar to our handpicked minders—there had been no written contracts with any of my major collaborators, only verbal agreements sealed with a handshake. I had never been in breach of any such agreements. I also said that in the present case I could offer not one but three guarantees. “What are they?” I replied: “My honor, my face, and my handshake.” The unexpected happened. I was allowed to keep the hard drive. And for my part, I never used the material, and never will.
In addition to my brother Lucki, another person had his first great moment on Aguirre. This was Walter Saxer, a young Swiss from St. Gallen, who had gone out into the world and whom I had first come across during the preparations for my film Even Dwarfs Started Small on the Canary Island of Lanzarote. He ran a small hotel on the island and helped us find the car that was to drive around and around in circles. Not long after we started filming, and the car, a clapped-out thing from the fifties, had appeared in a lot of the footage, it broke down irretrievably, the engine block, I think it was. Within twenty-four hours, Saxer spotted a similar model somewhere on a country road, stopped it, and induced the owner to sell his motor. He was given some sort of replacement while Saxer built his old engine into our wreck overnight, even adapting it because it didn’t quite fit. I had never seen anything like it. Walter Saxer was just indomitable. There was nothing that was too risky for him. He despised anyone who didn’t work as hard as he did, which meant that the actors with their vanity often provoked him. During the Aguirre filming, he slept on the earth floor of a hut somewhere below Machu Picchu that belonged to a little hunchbacked Indigenous woman and her children who were surrounded by dozens of guinea pigs that were kept like chickens and, again like chickens, eaten. Later, I would sleep there myself. With him, I swam across the Urubamba River to free a mobile platform that had gotten tangled up on the other bank. I remember the slurping sound of a great whirlpool as it approached us. It was he who, when the production was in crisis, walked all night from our shoot in the gorge of the Huallaga River with three rapids one after the other and clambered up enormous slippery rocks all the way to the hamlet of Chazuta while carrying a briefcase. I saw him once work for sixty hours nonstop; afterward, I found him asleep on a pile of rocks.
Many of Kinski’s outbursts were directed against him, though still more were directed against me and probably against anyone and everyone. Kinski had demanded to be close to nature and nothing else. I had several times informed him in writing that we would not be able to film the first scene, as per the screenplay, on a glacier, but that we would begin with the descent of the army into the Urubamba Valley. In spite of that, Kinski brought with him down jackets, crampons, ice axes, ropes, tents, and down sleeping bags; we didn’t know what to do with them all. Then, on his instructions, we set up his tent in a clearing in the jungle, but that very first night it rained violently and he got very wet. The choleric raged into the early hours. He wanted to celebrate nature, yes, but not get wet. We then erected a roof of woven palm fronds over his tent, but he still got damp because his breath caused condensation to form on the inside of the canvas. More ranting, more inarticulate screaming. His rage was now directed against the highland Indigenous peoples, whom we had accommodated for a few days in a large barn once used for drying tobacco leaves. Saxer had got some very simple but comfortable bunk beds built with canvas. I walked up to Kinski and coldly and calmly allowed him to pour out his rage over me. The third night, there was no alternative but to put Kinski in the only hotel near the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu. Unfortunately, all its eight rooms were occupied. At that time, no accommodation existed at the end of the little railway line up from Cuzco; my friend Joe Koechlin’s beautiful hotel was yet to be built. What could we do? Saxer was able to talk the hotel owner into giving up his own room and slipping into a sort of broom closet for the night. But there in the hotel, Kinski’s rampaging continued all night. He kept the whole hotel awake. The maniac hit out at his fleeing Vietnamese wife and drove her down the stairs in front of him.
Walter Saxer was my production manager on Kaspar Hauser, Nosferatu the Vampyre, Woyzeck, Cobra Verde, and many more; he was involved in almost everything I did in those years. His greatest achievement, without a doubt, was Fitzcarraldo. The preparations went on for three and a half years. It was he who started the construction of the two identical ships, which required a whole infrastructure—in this case, a wharf in the middle of the jungle. He had camps built for the teams of Indigenous extras and the technical crew; he hired the extras, and technically he got the steamship up and over the mountain. One of the issues between us is the way in interviews I would talk about how I’d got the ship over the mountain when it was he and his crew who did that. In my interviews, I was not speaking literally but figuratively—pars pro toto—about the way a man is driven to hunt the white whale or carry a ship over a mountain. Let me spell it out here: in actual, technical terms, it was Walter Saxer who carried the ship over the mountain. But I also want to say that there was a crisis in the shoot when our Brazilian technician was afraid to drag the ship up the mountain because the prop— a deadpost for which the Spanish have the expressive term muerto—didn’t seem stable enough to support it. The Brazilian quit, afraid of his own courage, I think. I then assumed responsibility myself and had a new muerto knocked deep into the ground. Technically, Saxer was the man who did it. This new prop would have borne the weight of five ships. Films are collaborative enterprises; it is unfortunate that sometimes friendships break, and that’s what happened with Walter Saxer and me.