I accept that I can no longer jump off my right foot. It was a silly thing that happened when I leapt down out of the window, but in Mexico, one of the men in the arena, a great master of the lasso, assured me that this was part of life, this was pura vida. Euklides was his name. He shook me by the hand the first time I was thrown and bleeding out of my mouth because I’d almost bitten my tongue off when I hit the deck. His hand felt like a vise. What he meant wasn’t the purity of life, as with the early saints, but the sheer, brute, unpredictable, overwhelming presence of life. In memory of him, I later gave his name to a crippled twelve-year-old who runs a guesthouse in my 1987 film Cobra Verde and who is the only person not to be afraid of the bandit of that name, played by Klaus Kinski. The boy has a speech defect; stammering but proud, he gives his name: Euclides Alves da Silva Pernambucano Wanderley.
Because my jumping foot is my left anyway, I was able to go on playing soccer in Germany. My brother Till introduced me to Munich Black-Yellow, and I played either in goal or center forward. The other members of the team were taxi drivers, bakers, office workers, and I loved them all. Black-Yellow didn’t play in any of the official leagues, but we might have held our own in the fifth. My brother was a better goalie than I was. When he was fourteen, he caught the eye of a talent scout from 1860 Munich, which was the dominant local team before the rise of Bayern Munich, but my mother talked him out of a career as a professional sportsman. Black-Yellow was started by a pastry chef by the name of Sepp Mosmeir. I never met such a charismatic man. Sepp radiated unconditional warmth; he loved opera, and he had astonishing leadership qualities. We would do anything for him. But there was a shadow over him as well. When he was growing up in South Tyrol, he and his friends had clambered up an electrical pole by a railway line, and one of his friends had grabbed hold of the power line. The boy shook and shook for minutes on end and smoke started to pour out of him. Sepp described the sound it made when the boy’s charred body finally hit the ground. It made the sound of a sack of briquettes hitting the gravel ballast under the rails. Sepp’s wife, “Mrs. Moss,” died after long torments of cancer, and he suffered the same fate. I saw him shortly before he died. He left a gap in my life.
I moved from goalie to outfield player. At the Cannes Film Festival, I think it was 1973 when Aguirre was shown in the directors’ section called Quinzaine des Réalisateurs—the official festival had rejected the film—there was a game of actors against directors, and I was in goal. Most of the directors were unfit, and a few were so fat they could barely run, whereas the actors were generally in pretty good shape. Actually, we were hopelessly outclassed, but I kept out everything that came my way. Thereupon the actors changed their tactics. They allowed the directors to advance into their half, and then they would hit long balls over the top to where two or three of them would turn up in front of my goal unopposed. One of them was Maximilian Schell, who had once played on a Swiss national amateur eleven. I saw him chase down a long pass all by himself. Way outside the penalty area, I got to the ball first and lashed it away a split second before he got there, and then Schell smashed into me. He could have taken evasive action, but even in a friendly like this one, he was pretty intense. I saw stars. My elbow was dislocated and bent forward instead of back. It was another year before I felt over it. Schell and I bonded over this collision, and in his Oscar-nominated film called The Pedestrian, I have a little walk-on part.
From then on, I always played center forward even though most of the Black-Yellow team was faster or technically more gifted. But I had a quicker apprehension of movements in space and always had an instinctive nose for goal. That often drew the opposing defenders to me, which created space for my teammates. I could read situations, and those were the kind of players who always impressed me most, someone like the 1980s Italian defender Franco Baresi, who could intuit the collective intentions of the opposing forward line; no one matched the depth of his understanding of the game. As a forward, the Bayern Munich player Thomas Müller is the same species; he seems able to ghost into the area unopposed; he identified space like no one else, and no one seemed able to track his movements. In the way he could read a landscape, my grandfather was not dissimilar. Sepp Mosmeir played defense, and his dream of one day scoring a goal was never fulfilled. In the course of his farewell match, we were awarded a penalty. The whole team insisted he take it. Sepp Mosmeir scored. We led him from the field in tears. The referee had to suspend the game for several minutes.
I had my share of the usual soccer injuries, a cruciate ligament, for instance, and once, when I was still goalie, in a game against the Bavarian butchers’ guild, lots of hearty butchers’ apprentices went at us as if we were so many calves, and one of their strikers rammed me under the chin. I had caught the ball and was lying on the ground. When I came around, I didn’t want to leave the field and tried to tell the referee that I shouldn’t have been carded; it was the other fellow who had committed the foul, not me. The referee was shouting, but I couldn’t hear because of the buzzing in my head. Finally, he plucked at my shirt and pointed to the blood on it, which had to have been mine; I did at least understand that much. I had fourteen stitches put in my chin, but I didn’t have health insurance at the time and needed to keep the costs down, so I had them stitch me up just like that. In a similar way, I had a tooth pulled without the customary painkilling injection. To put it down to masochism on my part I think would be a mistake. I didn’t love pain; it was just something that was there in my frame of reference—the way I expected the world to be.
When we were kids in Wüstenrot, we fought a battle once with freshly hulled chestnuts, and I climbed up on the roof of a barn to be in a safe place from where I could see where the other kids were all hiding. I was sitting astride the gable when I heard my name called. I turned in the direction of the voice, and at that moment, a missile hit me in the eye. A lightning bolt went through me, and I remember sliding down the steep roof on my front. I plunged headfirst into a pile of agricultural machinery way below me; I can still see the iron rods and blades. My forearm broke, both bones. The doctor in Wüstenrot didn’t set the break properly. A week later, after agonizing pain, the cast was taken off and the whole thing reset.
My worst time, though, was a skiing fall near Avoriaz around Mont Blanc. I had been invited to show a film at the festival there and had borrowed a set of skis. I was interested in a breathlessly steep slope on which some athletes were making the foolish attempt to break the speed record on skis, which at that time stood at 220 kmh. For those speeds, the racers wore long aerodynamic helmets that went all the way down to their tailbones and a kind of spoiler on their calves. After my group had gone on, I stayed behind and studied the slope. Finally, I went down about two-thirds of it. The feeling was exhilarating. A mild rise on the other side helped slow you down at the bottom. That evening I talked about what I’d done, and people laughed because I thought I’d gone at probably 140 kmh. A couple of days later, we were back in the vicinity of the steep slope, and I said, “All right, I’ll prove it to you here and now.” Unfortunately, this was pure showing off on my part. This time I set off a few meters higher up. At such speeds, even a small unevenness on the surface has the effect of a shock to the suspension of a racing car; sometimes you’re an inch over the snow for twenty or thirty yards. I can remember two things: on my skis I flew past my brother Lucki and an Israeli producer, Arnon Milchan, both tall men, at eye level; and at that moment, I knew I was too high. I can see landing on the slope in slow motion; one of my skis shot away like a spear. To this day, Lucki is unable to describe what he saw. But evidently my ski boot stuck fast in the snow and I went over headfirst. I must have been thrown many yards up in the air on the steep slope, and it was about a hundred yards farther on that I came to a stop. The most immediate danger was that I might choke on my vomit. When I came around, I saw blood and vomit in the snow and heard someone groaning softly. It was me groaning. Two vertebrae were damaged in my neck, and my collarbone had become detached from my breastbone. Even though it was soft new snow, it had abraded my face, and one eye was hurt. I relate it in this much detail because I’m ashamed of the accident and because I am somehow also a product of my mistakes and misjudgments.
But then I was also fortunate in the same measure. In Urs Odermatt’s film Bride of the Orient years later, I played the villain; it must have been in 1987. In one scene, the foul monster I was playing flees from a desolate farm into the valley in his open jeep. There was a very narrow bridge over a gorge with a mountain stream. I drove pretty fast, but Odermatt the director said it didn’t look like anything much and asked if I couldn’t do it a bit faster. I put my foot down so hard on the next take that the jeep skidded on the sand edging the narrow forest road and crashed through the iron bridge rails. Miraculously, one of the iron rods ran through the engine and stopped the car dead in its tracks, and it merely bent down a little as though to tip me out like a load of rubbish. I have no idea how I managed to keep hold of the steering wheel. Admittedly, I struck the steering wheel with my side, which gave me a renal colic. A shocked Walter Saxer, who was in charge of the production, drove me to the nearest doctor. The Polaroid photos I have of the scene look unreal, hard to make sense of. A curious insect, which has mysteriously attacked a metal barrier. Far down are some very large polished rocks gleaming in the streambed.
I had another bit of luck during the last days of the preparations for Aguirre. Under intense time pressure, we had shifted the entire production to Cuzco in the highlands so as to begin shooting at the start of 1972 in the Urubamba Valley and in Machu Picchu. We had long delays and lots of trouble getting the costumes, helmets, and suits of armor for the conquistadors to the place. I had to keep shuttling from Lima to Cuzco and back. I always took the local airline, LANSA, because it was by far the cheapest. In our financial straits, there was really no other possibility. LANSA, though, had a notorious safety record. One of its only four planes had crashed; another was just scrap and pillaged for parts. In the end, the company was down to just one plane because its only other machine had flown into the side of the mountain next to Cuzco in 1970, and everyone on board was killed. Soon various irregularities came to light: the plane had a total load of 96 passengers and crew, but 106 bodies were found at the site. Airline employees had clearly sold an extra ten standing places. Then it turned out that while the captain could sort of fly, he didn’t have a valid pilot’s license, and I think it also emerged that the ground mechanics who did the maintenance were used to nothing bigger than mopeds. So there was one plane left that handled the internal flights, Lima to Cuzco and back, then Lima to Pucallpa to Iquitos and back, which was the jungle route. The airline had been stripped of its license to fly, but strangely enough, after a couple of months, it was back in business—with its one surviving plane. Martje, my wife, was there, helping on Aguirre and accompanying some of the actors from Lima to Cuzco. She was booked on the flight three days before Christmas, the last one before the approaching disaster. I had managed to get a ticket for the day after Martje flew for the flight that left early in the morning of December 23. It’s not easy to remember the events in their right order. Many travelers had besieged the airport to try and get back to their families for the holidays. I drove to the airport, but the plane wasn’t at the gate. Hours later, it was announced to us that there was some maintenance issue and that we should be patient; it would be ready soon. Then in the evening we were told that the plane was unable to fly that day, that we should present ourselves early on the morning of Christmas Eve. I was duly back at 6 a.m. The number of passengers had once more swelled with everyone from the previous day’s flight and those booked for that day, the twenty-fourth. The plane was still undergoing repairs. In the crush, I managed to slip an airline employee a twenty-dollar bill, so I and a small bunch of my people would be put on the flight. But the plane still didn’t show. I had a bad feeling from time to time. At long last, the plane came trundling up; it was almost midday, but to my disappointment, there was an announcement that as it was so late in the day it would be possible to execute only one flight, which would be the one into the jungle. The flight to Cuzco and the highlands was unfortunately canceled. I can still hear the cheers of the passengers who were booked to Pucallpa and Iquitos.
Thirty minutes later, the plane disappeared off the radar. The subsequent search for it went on for days. It ended up being one of the biggest searches ever undertaken in Latin America. Even an American woman astronaut who happened to be in Peru at the time joined in. People presumed the plane had crashed on the jungled slopes on the far side of the Andes, but there was no sign of anything there except clouds, storms, and rain. After ten days, the search was abandoned. On the twelfth day after the disappearance, a seventeen-year-old girl turned up, the only survivor, one Juliane Koepcke. She had been with her mother on the way to visit her father in the jungle. After the war, he had crossed the Alps on foot to get to Italy to find a ship to South America, where, as a biologist, he wanted to set up an ecological field station. The principles of ecology were still completely unknown at the time. He wasn’t able to find a ship in Italy, so he carried on walking and got to Spain, where he stowed away in a cargo of salt on a ship to Brazil. After he arrived, he crossed almost the entire continent on foot and got to the Peruvian jungle in a dugout canoe. He finally set up his experimental station, and Juliane later grew up there. That was where she was going on Christmas Eve Day 1971 in a miniskirt and flimsy shoes; the evening before, she had celebrated her high school graduation in the capital. The plane fell apart in a violent storm at an altitude of fifteen thousand feet. She sailed down on her row of three seats with no plane. Later on, she said that she hadn’t left the plane, the plane had left her. For a few weeks, she was a sensation all over the world, and then she completely disappeared from view to avoid the journalists disguised as priests or cleaning women who were sneaking into her hospital room in Pucallpa; it must have been terrible for her, having just lost her mother. The story of her incredible luck and her odyssey through the jungle caught deep inside me, not least because I had come so close to catastrophe myself. Twenty-six years later, I went looking for her and made a film with her on the very site of the crash; it was called Wings of Hope (2000). Her story is the extraordinary witness of a woman with more strength than I have ever seen in a man. Early in 1972, we filmed some of the early scenes of Aguirre on the three successive rapids of the Huallaga River, not realizing we were only a few streams away from the blundering path that Juliane, half dead, was taking through the jungle.
The crash left no traces in the jungle. Rather, fragments of the plane had come down over an area of fifteen square kilometers. That’s why it hadn’t been possible to see a crash site. From Juliane’s reports after her rescue by forest workers, it proved possible to reconstruct her eleven-day march and to find the area where the plane had come down. The first teams found broken suitcases and Christmas wreaths and presents hanging in the trees, a macabre, surreal setting for dangling human intestines.
In 1998 I sent two expeditions into the jungle to the area around the Pachitea River, but they came back empty-handed. Then I found one of the three forest workers who had rescued Juliane. He remembered the area well and set off alone to find the place. Going up the little Shebonya River, he trod on a stingray that was hiding under sand and shallow water, and its tail sliced through several layers of rubber on the heel of his boot. These rays are terribly poisonous; they are more lethal than most snakes. He lay for two days on a sandbank dying when, by chance, a canoe came by. The paddlers initially didn’t want to take him because he didn’t have any money to pay them. Finally, he gave them his rifle as payment, and they lifted him into their canoe. In this way, he was saved. I found the canoeists and bought the rifle off them. Juliane gives it to him in the film as her present on seeing her rescuing angel for the first time in many years. It was also he who led the fourth expedition to seek out the area of the crash. The wreckage hadn’t been carried away, only the bodies and body parts had been collected. On this last expedition, I went with my younger son, Simon, then eight years old. We had five macheteros ahead of us to clear a path through the jungle. We were well-equipped, but my son, to whom I then grew extremely close, fell ill; even so, we marched on for five more days. For two days, he was carried on the back of one of the macheteros. It was Simon who spotted the first fragment, an instrument panel from the cockpit, which I still have.
Later, my assistant Herb Golder had himself lowered on a steel cable to the spot; there were several woodsmen with him who cut down a few trees so we could land a helicopter. That spot became the camp for the shoot. My friend Herb Golder was my assistant on several films. In my film Invincible, he plays a very convincing rabbi. I had tested dozens of actors, and the only one who could play the scene with conviction and intelligence was Herb. Later, we cowrote a story he had been researching for many years, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, released in 2009. In his day job, Herb is a classics professor at Boston University. I have no one I can have such detailed arguments about antiquity with. But Herb isn’t all about book learning. He’s built like an oak and has black belts in various martial arts. When he opens his mouth, idle extras stop lounging around and prick up their ears. I ended up making the film in 2008 with Michael Shannon, the most gifted actor of his generation. Today he is a star. Before My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, he had played only small parts, and here I entrusted the lead to him. David Lynch was involved in the production, but it was more his producer, Eric Bassett, who did the work. At that time, David Lynch was barely interested in films anymore. He had withdrawn completely into Transcendental Meditation.