Many things in my life look to me like a high-wire act, even though most of the time I don’t even notice there are abysses to either side of me. It’s no coincidence that I am friends with Philippe Petit, who became famous when, shortly before the opening of the World Trade Center in New York, he ran a wire between the Twin Towers and danced his way across in giddying height. He had sought me out and found me when Signs of Life was shown at a film festival in New York City. At that point, his walk at the Twin Towers had been in planning for a long time. Just before our meeting, he had pulled off a secret coup at the deepest gorge in Europe in Savoy. One night he spanned a wire across the abyss, and at first light, he set himself to cross it; it was only by chance that he was spotted by a farmer who was driving his herd to pasture over a bridge. The farmer let his cows go, ran back to the village, and woke the policeman. By the time the two of them had reached the scene of the crime, there was nothing left to see. Philippe was gone. His assistants had quickly taken down the wire; only a few iron posts knocked deep into the ground were left to show where it had been. With the Twin Towers, he had with false papers inveigled himself into a team of welders years before and even founded a building firm to get a foothold in one of the unfinished towers. He gradually assembled a storehouse in his office for the steel wire and the various other bits and pieces he needed. From one of the flat roofs, he then shot an arrow with a fishing line attached onto the twin building. Assistants took up the line and attached a thin steel wire to it, to which, with more back-and-forth, a fine cable was attached. Finally, his heavy steel rope weighing several tons was pulled over onto the other building where Philippe had secretly soldered a heavy hook under some molding. At six in the morning, he went out on the rope. He was undisturbed, no one saw him, no one watched him until 410 meters beneath him a taxi driver happened to look up. A traffic jam developed that stretched many blocks northward. Police stormed both roofs, but they couldn’t get Philippe off his rope. Finally, he lay down flat on it to sleep, so to speak, because a police helicopter was whipping up the air dangerously.
Sometime after that in Paris, deep in the night, Philippe levered up a manhole cover and led me into his secret realm of subterranean tunnels and chambers. In one great chamber, there were thousands of skeletons in tidy stacks; in another, skulls from the time of the Black Death. Another night we set off with sixty yards of climbing rope and a hook; Philippe wanted to examine the roof of the Gothic church of St. Eustache in Les Halles, but we were interrupted by a famous singer and actor who was on his drunken way home, and we gave up our plan. When I opened the 1991 Viennale festival in Vienna, I had Philippe walk across between the antiaircraft gun tower and the tower of the Apollo cinema.
I may not have seen the chasms beside the way, but quite involuntarily, as though pursued by a curse, I seemed to draw misfortune as I worked on my films. In my very first feature film, Signs of Life, everything was fully prepared, the contracts drawn up, the costumes on location, when the Greek military staged their coup. Then suddenly rail connections were broken; flights didn’t fly; no one knew what had happened. I was unable to get in touch with anyone, so I drove from Munich to Athens practically nonstop. The border was still open. The ministry in charge of film permissions was closed; there were soldiers sleeping in the corridors. Through our Greek production director, I was told that all existing permissions had been revoked, and I could see for myself that while the junta was interested in all sorts of things it was not interested in foreign film productions. I took a chance and started shooting just a few days later than planned. But I was expressly forbidden to clear the harbor of the island of Cos of people or to bombard the promenade with fireworks. I did it anyway. The place was crawling with soldiers, but I was never arrested.
That was just the beginning of our problems. My lead, Peter Brogle, had been a tightrope walker in a circus before becoming an actor. He suggested that he might do some tightrope walking in the citadel even though it wasn’t in the script, and I thought that was an interesting idea, a way to show the delicate balance of the character. Every tightrope walker fixes his own rope, and while Brogle was busy doing that, at no more than six feet off the ground, a stone broke away, and he fell from a low parapet, breaking the bone in his heel. That’s really the most delicate part of the human foot, involved in all the dynamics of walking. Two weeks before the scheduled end of the shoot, we had to break off. My actor spent six months in the hospital and rehab until we could take up the work again. And even after that, Brogle needed a complicated piece of gear attached to his hip to be able to walk. We could only film him from the waist up, and we still hadn’t shot the scene on Crete with all the windmills. Then Thomas Mauch had a simple but brilliant idea: he filmed the boots and legs of an extra scaling the stony terrain, and for the continuation of his strides, we had Brogle standing by. As the camera pans upward, it briefly leaves the legs and catches the upper body and face of the character and follows him to the edge of the terrain behind which several thousand windmills are waiting.
The following films were all similarly afflicted. Right at the beginning of our journey to the Sahara, before we had even crossed into Africa, the cameraman Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein got his finger caught in some machinery, and the bone shattered into fragments that had to be strung on a steel wire. Then we were put in prison in Cameroon; why, I still don’t understand. We were on our way from there to the interior of the Rwenzori Mountains on the border of Congo and Uganda, but my cameraman and I both got so sick in the Central African Republic that we couldn’t move. We had to interrupt the shoot in Bangui and collect further material for it during the next two films. In Even Dwarfs Started Small, the fates smiled upon us, and we had nothing but good luck. That film is about a rebellion in an institution where the inmates smash everything to smithereens. All the objects were normal size for us, but because the actors were small, such a thing as a motorbike or a double bed appears monstrous. One of the lilliputians in the film was run over by the driverless car but sprang to his feet immediately and continued hurling plates at it. Another actor was engulfed in flames in the scene where the lilliputians in their lust for destruction pour petrol on the potted plants and set them on fire. I threw myself on top of him and managed to quench the flames; he had just a little burn on one ear. An insignificant detail from the shoot was much later got hold of by the media and blown up out of all proportion: I was said to have leapt into a cactus. Correct, I did. Because, when the man was on fire, I made a promise to the cast: “If you all get through this in one piece, I’m going to leap into a cactus field, and you can take pictures of it.” The field in question was right behind the main building. It was easier jumping into it off a ramp than getting out of it because the cacti were tall and closely packed and had long nasty spines, some of which spent the winter in the sinews in front of my knees.
I made a not dissimilar promise to my friend Errol Morris. I ate my shoes in front of an audience in a cinema in Berkeley, California, when Errol’s first film, Gates of Heaven, was released in 1978. Apart from me, no one had taken Errol particularly seriously because he had never completed anything. For instance, although musically extremely gifted, he had put his cello away in a corner from one day to the next; he had his doctoral thesis practically finished but never got around to submitting it; he had gathered thousands of pages of material on serial killers but never wrote the book. When he wanted to start his first film, he complained to me about the trouble he had raising money for it. I replied that his was the kind of project you could start with just a roll of film, everything else would fall into place by and by. The project was so substantial, I argued, that money was bound to follow it, like a street dog moseying along with its tail between its legs. But this time he had to finish what he’d begun. I promised him that the day his film was released in theaters I would eat my shoes, whatever pair I happened to be wearing at the moment. This anecdote also found its way into even the briefest of my biographies even though what mattered much more was that the film was extremely good. Roger Ebert included it in his list of ten best films ever made for the Sight and Sound poll; Aguirre, by the way, is also included.
Most things with Errol were up and down anyway. He had spent months in a godforsaken hole called Plainfield in Wisconsin while pursuing his research on serial killers. Plainfield was where the most notorious of all American murderers, Ed Gein, had operated. Hitchcock’s Psycho was inspired by him. Aside from his murders, in the course of which he would gut his victims as if they were deer and use their skin for lampshades and armchair covers, Gein had the habit of secretly excavating recently buried corpses. Errol noticed that the opened graves formed a ring, at whose center was the grave of Gein’s mother. Had Ed Gein also excavated his mother? We spent a long time going back and forth on this question. The only way of getting a conclusive answer was for Errol to dig her up secretly himself. If the body of his mother was still there, he had not; if it was missing, he had. I offered to help him. In a few months, I would be on my way from New York to Alaska to film, and halfway to the Canadian frontier, I arranged a rendezvous with Errol on such and such a date. I arrived in Plainfield with shovels and pickaxes, but Errol had lost his nerve. He had disappeared. My vain wait in Plainfield at least had one benefit. The car was having gearbox trouble, but there wasn’t a mechanic in Plainfield. A few miles away, there was a junkyard with a mechanic who scavenged cars for parts. I was thrilled by the premises and their owner, and a year later I was back there and persuaded the mechanic to play one of the principal characters in my film Stroszek. The junkyard and the grim flatness all around it was perfect for showing what happened to the American dream. Errol, who had never actually planned on filming in Wisconsin, was initially angry with me for having stolen his landscape. But I was a thief without loot. Then, because he liked the film so much, he made things up with me. We don’t see each other often, but we have a special kind of appreciation of each other.
Fate saved its hardest blows for Fitzcarraldo. Whenever I’m on particularly challenging shoots, I always have Luther’s 1545 translation of the Bible in a facsimile reprint with me. I draw comfort from the Book of Job and the Psalms. I also have Livy’s account of the Second Punic War from 218 to 201 BC, beginning with Hannibal’s departure from North Africa and his crossing the Alps with elephants, an enterprise of spectacular daring. After devastating defeats at Lake Trasimene and Cannae, Rome was facing destruction. In that almost hopeless position, Quintus Fabius Maximus was put in command and saved Rome and thereby probably also the West as we know it, which otherwise might have been Phoenician instead of Roman. His recipe was permanent retreat, always hesitating to give battle. Because that would have spelled the end. Fabius Maximus fought a war of quiet, implacable attrition. It got him the disdainful nickname of Cunctator, the delayer, the cowardly hesitator, and history has yet to do him full justice. Because Fabius Maximus knew exactly what he was doing even if it got him the contempt of the armchair warriors. Only Hannibal understood that Fabius was his doom. When a large contingent of reinforcements under his brother Hasdrubal was destroyed, Hannibal said: “I know the fate of Carthage.” Fabius Maximus is the greatest of my heroes, just ahead of Siegel Hans. And just after Siegel Hans comes Hannibal.
The preparations for Fitzcarraldo went on for more than three years in all. Originally, 20th Century Fox wanted to make the film. Jack Nicholson was impressed by my films and wanted to play the lead, but it soon became clear that he and 20th Century Fox intended to have the film shot in San Diego in the botanical gardens with a plastic scale model for the ship. It was the early eighties, we didn’t yet have the current digital box of tricks. Also, Nicholson only took parts that left him free to watch Los Angeles Lakers’ games. He took me to one in Denver in his private jet and tried to convince me that the San Diego solution was the simplest. In hindsight, I am a little surprised by the number of actors who were considered; another was Warren Oates, who would certainly have been interesting—cast against type—as Fitzcarraldo. He had a squishy “proletarian” face and had become known as the star of The Wild Bunch and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. There were ships to build, jungle camps to set up, but at a big meeting of all the parties plus lawyers, the representatives of 20th Century Fox were very cordial to me and called me by my first name. Then the suggestion was made that for safety’s sake the film be made in a “good jungle,” i.e., the botanical gardens. I asked politely what they thought a bad jungle was, and the atmosphere instantly froze. From that moment on, I was Mr. Herzog, and I knew I was on my own.
Later, I was asked many times why I hadn’t shot the film near the Peruvian jungle hub of Iquitos, with its hotels and airport, i.e., at a more convenient jungle location. But the terrain around Iquitos is so flat for the nearest three thousand kilometers that the height differential to the Atlantic is about one hundred meters. What we were looking for, on the other hand, was a place with two parallel Amazon tributaries with a narrow mountainous divide between them. But this seemed not to exist anywhere. The rivers in the jungle do flow in parallel often enough, but they are twenty-five miles apart, and the mountains are far too high. Finally, at the confluence of the Río Marañón and the Río Cenepa, we found an oxbow bend on the Cenepa that came close to the Marañón. There was a barrier that was only one hundred meters high. We would hoist the ship—which had yet to be built—from the Cenepa into the Marañón. A little downriver, the Marañón runs into the Santiago. The united rivers then burst through a line of mountains. The water course narrows in a gorge and creates the notorious rapids of Pongo de Manseriche, which at high water can be extremely dangerous. I kept a diary at the time, which I published years later as Conquest of the Useless. Here is a brief excerpt:
Saramiriza, 9 July 1979
A parrot at my feet is devouring a candle, holding it with the toes of one foot. A hen and her chicks came into the store, a wooden shack with a corrugated tin roof, where we were having some food fixed for us, and attacked the almost naked parrot, tearing one of its last arse feathers out and pecking several times at its sore bald arse. Afterward the hen wiped her beak clean on the ground. We are all still shaken from the terrifying impression of the rapids, and are behaving with almost mathematical punctilio toward one another. At the military outpost of Teniente Pinglo, none of the soldiers knew how high the water level was. They merely pointed out that a few days ago a boat with eleven men on board had disappeared without a trace. But the men had drunk too much aguardiente, sugarcane brandy, beforehand, and had not sailed into the gorge until nightfall.
After considerable reflection, we concluded that it had to be doable, because the Río Marañón was very shallow; the night before, the level had sunk by a good two meters, and in the morning we had found our boats so high and dry that we could hardly drag them into the water. What did not bode well was the Río Santiago. There must have been terrible downpours along its upper reaches to the north, and where the river joined the Marañón, it was alarmingly high. Before the first rapids, which formed an isolated prelude to the Pongo de Manseriche, a blast of bitingly cold air struck us, coming from the narrow passage between the mountains; here it would still have been possible to turn back. With the cold came a distant rumbling from the chasm, and no one understood why we sailed on, but sail on we did. Suddenly, we were facing a wall of raging water into which we crashed like a projectile. We received a blow so powerful that the boat went spinning into the air, the propeller howling in the void. For a moment, we hit the water vertically, and I saw like an apparition a second wall of water towering in front of us, which struck us even harder, twirling the boat into the air again, this time in the opposite direction. Before we entered the rapids, I had already secured the anchor chain so firmly that it could not fly overboard and get tangled in the screw, and the gas tank was fastened in place with iron clamps, but suddenly the battery, as big as a truck’s, went hurtling through the air. Or rather, for a moment it hovered in the air on its straining cables directly in front of my face, and my head collided with it. At first it felt as though my nose were broken at the root, and I was bleeding from my mouth. I wrestled the battery down so that it didn’t fly off anywhere else. Then came moments when there was nothing but waves all around and above us, but it was more the rumbling that I recall. Then I recall that we were through the rapids, drifting backward. On the steep jungle slopes to either side, monkeys screeched.
In Borja at the lower end of the Pongo, they did not want to believe their eyes, because no one had survived the passage when the water level was sixteen feet above normal, and our level had been eighteen. The village Pongeros clustered around us, not saying a word. One of them inspected my swollen face and said, “Su madre.” Then he let me have a swig of his aguardiente.
We had struck a deal with the nearby village of Wawaim. But there were political tensions between two rival camps of Aguaruna communities, and one of the groups, thirty kilometers downriver, took advantage of our presence to boost their profile. There was also a controversial oil pipeline across the Andes to the Pacific and a sudden dramatic increase in the military presence along its length. No one knew why, but we then found ourselves in the middle of a border war between Peru and Ecuador, where the line ran not far north of our camp in the Cordillera del Cóndor. Given these circumstances, I withdrew the entire team from the camp, leaving behind only a medical station to treat the local population. The camp was occupied by Aguarunas, who took advantage of the confusion and burned it down. They had invited reporters to witness it. I was away in Iquitos and received crackly, barely comprehensible radio communications from the camp. I recorded everything on a tape machine to be able to work out in peace what was going on. But I understood that it meant, for now, the end of the production.
It got worse. The Peruvian and soon the international media accused me of having ravaged the fields of the locals during the filming, of having had some of the Aguarana people imprisoned, of having violated their human rights, and various other nonsense. There was a public tribunal against me in Germany, and all that seemed to cast a shadow over the film. At that time, Volker Schlöndorff was the only person to fully back me up. I remember a press conference at the Filmfest Hamburg in front of avid journalists, where I was presenting documents that unambiguously confirmed my position, when suddenly Schlöndorff made his way to the front. His face was purple; I thought he had had a seizure. But he yelled at the journalists so loudly that I wondered where this slightly built man got such a thunderous voice from. Among all the directors of the New German Cinema, he is the only one with whom I have a personal friendship. Amnesty International later confirmed that in a small jungle town, Santa María de Nieva, long before the shooting got underway, four Aguarunas were taken in by the police for something or other, but that had nothing to do with us at all; they were accused by some local bar owners and shopkeepers of not having paid outstanding bills. But, of course, none of that made it into the press; it wasn’t “sexy.” The Aguarunas were portrayed as an almost pristine people living in paradisal harmony with nature when, in fact, they went around in Ray-Bans and John Travolta T-shirts. They had speedboats, used radios, and employed media consultants. I just had to forget about all that and set about building another camp two thousand kilometers away. Between the Río Urubamba and the Río Camisea, I found another suitable ridge between two rivers half a mile apart.
Every imaginable catastrophe, not just film catastrophes but actual catastrophes, befell me. When my lead, Jason Robards, got so sick halfway into the shoot that we had to fly him back to the States, that was only a “film catastrophe.” Then his doctors refused to release him back into the jungle. We had to reshoot, this time with Kinski in the lead and my brother Lucki somehow holding the disintegrating production together. He called all the financial backers and insurers to a meeting in Munich and gave it to them straight. He then presented his rescue plan. He saved the production. I was asked if I still had the strength to reshoot the film. I said that if this film failed all my dreams would be at an end, and I didn’t want to live as a man without dreams.
Our calamities were perfectly concrete and palpable. We suffered two plane crashes, each of them single-engine Cessnas, one with stores, the other with several Indigenous extras on board. The latter crash was caused by a twig flying up and getting caught in the elevator at the tail of the machine, causing it to loop the loop. Everyone in it was hurt, and one person was left paraplegic. That weighs on my heart to this day. We later set him up in a general store we built for him in his village to provide him with an income. One of our woodsmen was bitten by a snake, a shushupe, the most poisonous of all. He knew that his heart and lungs would be lamed within sixty seconds and that the camp with our doctor and the serum was twenty minutes away, so he picked up his chain saw and cut off his foot. He survived. Three of our local workers who had gone upstream on the Camisea to fish were ambushed by Amahuaca people in the dead of night. The Amahuacas were a seminomadic tribe based in mountain country ten days upriver. They had violently refused any contact with our civilization, but because we had been experiencing the driest dry season in living memory, they had followed the drying river course downstream, presumably hunting for turtle eggs. They shot our men with arrows almost six feet long and struck a man in the throat with a foot-long razor-sharp bamboo point. The young woman lying at his side was awoken by the gurgling sound, thought a jaguar had her husband by the throat, and grabbed a still-glowing branch out of the fire. At that moment, she was struck by three arrows that were probably also aimed at her throat. One drove into her stomach and broke off against her pelvis, and one just brushed the edge of her hip bone. The third member of the party had a shotgun, which he fired blindly into the dark. The attackers fled. The next morning, the unhurt man brought the two wounded parties back to our camp, and we decided to operate on them there and then because they would certainly have died if we had attempted to move them. Our doctor and the excellently trained local helper operated on the kitchen table, and I helped, holding a powerful pocket lamp to light up the stomach cavity of the woman. In my other hand, I held a can of insect repellent, with which I held at bay great clouds of mosquitoes drawn by the smell of blood. Both patients pulled through. The man who had arrived with the arrow through his neck and lodged in his shoulder could speak only in whispers after he was healed. Les Blank filmed him after the operation. He appears briefly in Burden of Dreams.
Just two days later, we filmed the unmanned ship—one of the two identical twins—being hurled through the rapids of the Pongo de Mainique. It bounced off the rocks on either side with such force that I saw the lens flying out of the camera. I tried to hold on to Thomas Mauch, the cameraman, but we went flying after the lens, and he struck the deck, the heavy camera still in his hand. The force of the collision split the webbing between his two last fingers deep into the palm of his hand. He too was stitched up by our gifted Indigenous assistant paramedic, who was extraordinarily deft with dislocations and stitching up wounds, and had once put Mauch’s dislocated shoulder back, but because all the anesthetics had been used up in the hourlong operations on the arrow victims and couldn’t be replaced for some time, Mauch suffered great pains. I held him in my arms, but that didn’t help much. Finally, I called in one of the two working girls we had employed, Carmen, who squeezed his head between her breasts and talked to him softly. She did it lovingly, magnanimously, and heroically. It may sound like a strange thing for a film production, but even the Dominican priest from the missionary station at Timpia, fifty kilometers downriver, had insisted that we have prostitutes in our company because otherwise, with the number of male woodcutters and canoeists, there was every risk of attacks on the local populations.
These sorts of events seemed to happen again and again. We had to get through the most violent rainy season in sixty-five years, which obviously affected the work and the resupplying of the camp by tiny planes landing on tiny mud airstrips; Walter Saxer personally took huge risks upon himself. One must realize that we were hundreds of kilometers from the next decent-size town, Pucallpa or Iquitos. Every nail, every bar of soap, every can of petrol, and almost every food item had to be brought here. The rivers swelled up to outrageous heights and carried away bushes and tree limbs and sometimes whole islands of great trunks. You couldn’t run a motorboat in them, and you couldn’t land a seaplane on them. Then the water level sank so drastically that we couldn’t get the ship back off the hillside into the Urubamba, where the average water level was eight meters but was now suddenly fifty centimeters. We could start up the work only six months later. This was exacerbated by confusions in my personal life and a deep feeling of isolation because, when we couldn’t move the ship up the hill for weeks, almost everyone privately gave up on the project. Being alone has never bothered me, but being alone in a crowd of people who had given up on me and doubted my sanity was difficult. One of the very few who didn’t lose faith was Lucki. My diary entries in my ever-shrinking script seemed to become undecipherable and microscopic, then ceased for almost a year in the jungle, the year of tribulations. But I was always prepared at any moment to confront anyone and everyone, whatever work and life threw my way.