While I was working on the preparations for Green Ants in Australia, I read in a newspaper that Bruce Chatwin was presenting his new book, On the Black Hill, in Sydney. I knew his extraordinary In Patagonia and also his short novel The Viceroy of Ouidah, about a Brazilian bandit in West Africa who becomes the greatest slave trader of his time and viceroy of Dahomey. In practically all of my films, I had devised the story line and written the script myself, but I had many times quietly pondered about this novel as the basis for a feature film. I got in touch with the publisher in Sydney. No, Chatwin was already back in the Outback researching a new book. I left my Melbourne number, from where I was organizing my shoot, and asked to be informed the moment Chatwin appeared on the radar. A week later, I got a call. If I phoned a certain number at Adelaide Airport, I might be able to contact him. To my surprise, Chatwin knew right away who I was; he knew a number of my films, and to my still greater surprise, he had my book about my walk to Lotte Eisner, Of Walking in Ice: Munich to Paris, in his rucksack with him. He was just on his way back to Sydney and thence to England. I asked him if he could possibly make a detour via Melbourne and delay his departure. He agreed without a murmur. He could be in Melbourne that afternoon. I didn’t know what he looked like and wondered how I would recognize him, and he said simply: “I’m tall and blond and look like a schoolboy. I carry a leather rucksack.” When I turned up to collect him with my host, Paul Cox, I picked him out a hundred yards away.
He straightaway—before we had even left the airport—launched into one story after another, and there followed a breathless marathon of forty-eight hours in which, completely wired, we told each other one story after another, but I had little chance of getting a word in edgewise because he talked a blond streak. But I do think I was maybe hard to replace as an opposite number, and we egged each other on; two-thirds of the time he talked almost automatically, and one-third of the time I did. Of course, we also ate and slept. He got my bed in Paul Cox’s house, and I slept on the sofa. I’ve heard since that on other occasions when he had strangers putting him up he would already be telling a story as he was getting out of the car and barely acknowledge his host with a nod. He was straightaway besieged by people who just wanted to listen to him. He and I had a beginning I can never forget.
Because I was partway through my new film, we agreed that I would tackle his story of the fictional slave trader Francisco Manuel da Silva at the earliest possible moment once the financing was in place. Cautiously, I asked him to tell me if anyone approached him to option the book. Another reason we had such direct communications was no doubt because we were traveling on foot. Or more precisely, because we weren’t backpackers who carry practically an entire household on their backs in the form of a tent, a sleeping bag, and cooking equipment; we walked long distances almost without baggage. The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot. In Bruce’s case, this was paired with his deep understanding of nomadic cultures and his conviction that all human problems stemmed from the forsaking of nomadism. It was only with the beginning of a settled way of life that you got towns, settlements, monocultures, and technology—all the things that are harmful to the prospects for humanity. Of course, there was no chance of turning back the wheel of progress. Bruce liked my ten commandments, my catalog of the sins of modern civilization—among them the first domestic pig, not to be compared with the first dog as a dog could be your companion on the hunt, and the first climbing of a mountain for the sake of it. Petrarch was the first person we know of who climbed a mountain, and from the letter he wrote in Latin about it, we can feel his shudder at having done something extraordinary, almost forbidden. Mountain peoples like the Swiss, the Sherpas, the Baltis—it never occurred to them to climb a mountain!
I was perhaps the only person with whom Bruce could talk readily about the sacred aspect of walking. My own walk from Munich to Paris to visit the gravely ill Lotte Eisner in the winter of 1974 had had something ritualistic about it, a way of putting off her looming death. At the time, she didn’t even know I was on my way for three weeks through the snow. When I arrived, as if by a miracle, she was almost healthy and had been released by the hospital. My walk had had something of a charm or sacrifice about it; it was a kind of pilgrimage. Eight years later, now eighty-eight, she summoned me back to Paris. She was almost blind, could hardly walk, and said: “I’ve had enough.” Could I not break the spell that prevented her from dying? She said it as a joke, but I could feel she really meant it, and I replied with an equally flippant gesture. The curse was now lifted. She died a week later.
Our way of walking, Bruce’s and mine, forces us to seek shelter, to throw ourselves at the mercy of strangers because of our utter defenselessness. I can’t remember he or I ever being turned away because there is a profound, almost a holy, reflex of hospitality that is only seemingly obliterated in our civilization. But there were many times in my life when there was no village, no farmhouse, no roof within reach. Then I slept in fields, in barns, and under bridges, and when it was raining and freezing and there was nothing but an empty hunting lodge or remote holiday cottage, then breaking into it was not a problem for me. I have often broken into locked-up houses, not causing any damage, because I always carry a little “surgeon’s kit” with me, a couple of wire rods with which I can open security locks. I will leave a note behind, thanking the owners, or I’ll finish the crossword puzzle on the kitchen table. In my unease with what is practiced in film schools all over the world, I started a thing called the Rogue Film School, a countermethod, a guerrilla school or hedge school where the only two things I actually teach are the forging of documents and the cracking of Yale locks. Everything else is instructions to dodge prevailing systems and make films out of yourself.
One day, I got a letter from Bruce saying that David Bowie was interested in acquiring the rights to The Viceroy of Ouidah. It seemed he wanted to play the lead himself. I called Bruce and said: “Good god, Bowie is completely wrong; he’s far too androgynous for your character.” Bruce shared my opinion, and I scraped together what money I could and bought an option on the novel. Kinski would play the bandit. Bruce was very impressed by Kinski, whom he’d seen in other films. Cobra Verde, as I called the film when it appeared in 1987, was to be the last of five collaborations between Kinski and me. At that time, Kinski was like a demon, driven by madness. Privately, he was already in another film, one of his own, about Paganini. Of course, he didn’t just call it Paganini but Kinski Paganini. He had been on at me for years to take on the directing, but his script, which was six hundred pages long, was, in the term of art, “beyond repair.” Right at the start of our shooting Cobra Verde in Ghana, he terrorized my cameraman to such a degree that the situation became unbearable. Kinski demanded that the man be fired even though he had known since Aguirre that Thomas Mauch was a world-class cameraman. It was inevitable that the shoot would stop, but Thomas Mauch saw that I couldn’t stand up for him, and he withdrew from the film. Deep inside me, I feel I betrayed him. I wish I could have summoned the loyalty to support him, but then the film wouldn’t have been made and, above all, the harm to all our other collaborators would have been irreparable. Working on films has its destructive aspect. If you look over the history of filmmaking, you will see the ground is littered with wreckage. It’s just as well that Thomas Mauch could deal with it. He later worked on projects for other directors and made films of his own. I never worked with Kinski again, but that was for other reasons. In five feature films I had brought out completely different characters in him, and now there was nothing left to discover. In Kinski’s favor, I must say that he could often be extraordinarily generous and supportive, and that we had times of deep comradeship. My film called My Best Fiend is evidence of that. He could be respectful and lovable to female costars. This was especially clear with Claudia Cardinale and Eva Mattes. He recognized the unique talent and aura of these actors. But the collaboration between the two of us was often maniacal to the point of endangering us. Each had plans to murder the other, but that was probably pantomime. One night I clambered up to his hut in a redwood forest north of San Francisco—the normal approach was on the other side—to attack him, but I didn’t feel quite so sure of myself, and when his sheepdog started barking, I took that as a welcome sign to retreat. Only once, on Aguirre, when Kinski packed his things and loaded them onto a boat to leave the shoot with two weeks to go, which was not possible because we were working on something that was bigger than both of us, did I actually threaten to shoot him. My voice was calm and I was carrying no weapons, but Kinski could tell that this was no empty threat. I had already taken his Winchester off him, which he occasionally liked to shoot off into space. That was perfectly allowable behavior in the jungle, and he thought he could ward off jaguars and poisonous snakes that way, but one evening, after the end of filming for the day, some thirty extras were playing cards in their hut and drinking aguardiente, and Kinski got an attack of rage because their distant laughter reached his isolated hut on a separate hillside and disturbed him. He fired off three shots at the offending hut, which had bamboo walls that were about as much protection as sheets of paper. It was pure chance that he hit none of the huddled bodies and only took off the top joint of one young man’s middle finger. On Fitzcarraldo, the Asháninka Campas were clearly afraid of his rampages, and they would sit on the ground in a circle, whispering. There were never loud disputes between them. One of their chieftains told me later that I had seen that they were afraid but that I wasn’t to think it was fear of the roaring maniac; it was of me because I was so quiet. He offered to kill Kinski for me. I politely declined, but I know they would have done it like that.
I invited Bruce to Ghana to the Cobra Verde shoot, but he wrote that he was so sick he could no longer travel. He had caught some extremely rare fungal infection that had spread through his bone marrow. The mold had only ever been found on a whale stranded in the Red Sea and on bats in a cave in Yunnan, China, which he had actually been to. Later, it turned out that the mold was actually a symptom of AIDS. I kept on asking him to visit, and suddenly his condition improved, and he asked if he could come in a wheelchair. I told him that the terrain and location were not suitable for that. I wrote: “But I can arrange for a hammock for you and six bearers plus a man with a big parasol as an escort like the local kings have.” That did it—he couldn’t resist. It turned out that he was still able to walk, although for only short distances. He wrote about his visit in his book What Am I Doing Here. He was especially impressed by the king we had in the cast, His Majesty the Omanhene of Nsein, Nana Agyefi Kwame II, who liked to appear in full regalia with a retinue of 350, including drummers, dancers, wives, and a court poet. For the film we had also hired some 800 young women to play the army of Amazons, who were drilled by the best Italian stunt coordinator, Benito Stefanelli, on a running track in Accra. Stefanelli, who had choreographed countless brawls in spaghetti westerns, was faced by an army of young women who were eloquent, confident, and almost impossible to control. Bruce witnessed a minor rebellion in our location in Elmina and describes the scene in his book with a kind of shocked alarm. As well as Kinski, I had this army of wonderful and difficult Amazons to deal with, and I remember an incident when the weekly pay was due to be delivered. After the end of filming, the women got changed in the courtyard of our fort, and I knew from experience that they did not then stand patiently in line to be registered and paid. They simply made a mass dash for the table with the money and paperwork on it, and everything ended in complete chaos. This time the local staff decided they would use the narrow tunnel-like passage between the courtyard and the outer gate as a kind of natural bottleneck to gain some control over the expected dash. Grave mistake. When it became known that the money was waiting outside, they all rushed to the heavy main gate, in which, quite deliberately, to restrict their numbers, a small door had been left open. Within seconds, several of the women had become jammed in the narrow doorway, and the pressure from behind was such that I could see some of those at the front had lost consciousness where they stood. There was nowhere for them to collapse, because of the crush behind them. They stood upright and were unconscious. Those pushing from the rear had no idea what was happening farther forward, and they shouted and yelled. I screamed vainly at the ones pushing because I understand that a few pounds of pressure from eight hundred bodies would make thousands of pounds of pressure on the ones at the front, a situation that could in seconds become deadly. This explains the occasional tragedies in soccer stadiums and the like. Outside at the table with the piles of banknotes—Ghana was then suffering from galloping inflation, and money needed to be brought in on wheelbarrows—there was one soldier standing guard. I shouted that he was to fire a shot in the air, but he was frozen with panic. I had to tear his rifle from him and fire it myself. Frightened, those pushing into the tunnel withdrew, and only then did four or five unconscious women slip to the ground.
Bruce’s condition worsened in the two following years without my even knowing how sick he was. In 1987 he made it to the Wagner festival at Bayreuth, where I was directing Lohengrin. He came with Elizabeth, his wife, having driven most of the way in his Citroën 2CV. I made a documentary film next in the southern Sahara about a nomadic tribe called the Wodaabe; there was an annual tribal meeting in the semidesert in Niger, where there was a kind of marriage market. Men, presumably the most handsome in the world, beautified themselves in daylong rituals, and the women then chose the most beautiful man with the greatest appeal. They would also get to pick one of the group of dancing men for the night, and if they weren’t happy with him, they sent him back. I had told Bruce about the edit of the film, and he wanted very much to see it. When Herdsmen of the Sun was finally finished, I got a call from Elizabeth from Seillans in Provence, where Bruce had retreated to an old house. He was very ill but still badly wanted to see my film. I got in my car and drove from Munich to see him. I had the film with me on a video cassette.
When I arrived, Elizabeth stopped me at the door and asked in a whisper if I was sure I wanted to go in because Bruce was dying. Although that gave me a moment to prepare myself, I did get a shock next. There was nothing left of Bruce but a bag of bones and those huge eyes shining from his skull. He could hardly speak. He asked to be left alone with me. His mouth and throat were covered with a pale layer of mold that had spread into his lungs. The first thing he said to me was “I’m dying.” I replied: “Bruce, I can see that.” He wanted me to end his torment. Could I kill him? I said: “Do you want me to brain you with a cricket bat or asphyxiate you under a pillow?” He was thinking more in terms of some fast-acting drug. Had he not discussed it with Elizabeth? No, she was too Catholic, impossible to ask her. He forgot about his request. He wanted to see the film now, and we watched the first fifteen minutes. Then he drifted away into unconsciousness. When he came around again, he wanted to see the rest, so we watched it all, bit by bit. They were the last images he saw. His legs—he called them his “boys”; they were now skin and bone—hurt him, and he asked me to arrange his boys differently, and I did so. Then he again came out of his semicomatose state and called out: “I have to be on the road again; I have to be on the road again!” I said: “Yes, Bruce, that’s where you belong,” and he looked at his legs and saw that there was nothing left of him, no body, just a flaming soul, and he said to me: “My rucksack’s too heavy for me.” I replied: “Bruce, I’m strong; I can carry your rucksack for you.” He watched the film until it was finished. After two days, he told me that he was embarrassed about dying in front of me, and I said I understood even though I wasn’t afraid of staying with him. When I finally left in accordance with his wish, he said in a moment of utter clarity: “I want you to have my rucksack, Werner; I want you to carry it for me.” I left him, and a couple of days later, Elizabeth took him to the hospital in Nice, where he died a few hours later. It was Elizabeth who sent me Bruce’s rucksack, which was in their house near Oxford. The rucksack isn’t a souvenir or a relic; I use it. Of all the things in my possession, this rucksack made of stout leather by a saddler in Cirencester is the most precious to me.
Less than two years after Bruce’s death, this rucksack was to prove its worth. I had started to make the feature film Scream of Stone. The idea for it had been Reinhold Messner’s, and the story line was about the race of two mountaineers up the hardest of all mountains, Cerro Torre in Patagonia. This mountain looks like a two-kilometer-high needle of granite crowned by a dome of ice and frozen snow. Very few mountaineers have made it up there, just the crème de la crème. On an average weekend, twice as many climbers scale Everest as have ever got to the top of Cerro Torre. In addition to the smooth, forbidding walls, there are the indescribable storms of southern Patagonia. Walter Saxer produced and contributed to the screenplay, which later turned out to be a problem, as in such cases I always like to adapt the story to my own way of seeing. This time, though, I met with stubborn resistance, and I was finally told that I had to proceed exactly as per the provided storyboards, which is something that a snowstorm and a cliff face might have other ideas about. The storyboards and the editing turned out to be the crux of the film, but I can live with that. Most films work that way. I would have wished, though, that the film was either all Walter Saxer’s or all mine, as it is not quite either’s.
In the film, our lead, Vittorio Mezzogiorno, wears the leather rucksack as a tribute to Bruce Chatwin. I used it when it wasn’t needed in a shot. In one sequence where the rivals have reached the dome just below the peak, the younger of the two falls in his harness and is killed. The part was played by a real mountaineer, Stefan Glowacz, who had won the title of Rock Master, a kind of unofficial world champion. Because of storms farther up the mountain, we had moved some of the shooting down into the valley. For more than a week, we could neither see the mountain nor get anywhere near it. Then suddenly there was a break. The clouds dispersed; there followed a still, calm night full of stars. In the morning, there was blue sky, sun, and nothing stirring. We were certain we could now shoot the difficult scene near the summit and had chosen a mushroom-topped mountain some way from the actual one that could be reached along a narrow snowy ridge. Only we had to be quick about it. We decided to send Stefan Glowacz, a climbing cameraman, and me as an advance guard by helicopter onto the ridge, and there Glowacz, in consultation with the cameraman and me, could start to deploy his rope and secure it. That way we would save some time, then within twenty minutes, the group of support climbers would arrive, set up camp for security, with tents, sleeping bags, ropes, and food. This was in violation of the cast-iron rules we’d laid down, but there was a brief meeting of the climbers, among them some of the world’s best, and we agreed that under the circumstances it was the right thing to do.
The helicopter flew us, the advance guard, up onto the ridge some ten minutes away. There we were set down, and the chopper turned away to collect the safety team. We had just taken a few paces on the ridge; on one side is a glacier in Argentina, going away from Cerro Torre, and on the other side is Chile. On either side, there are sheer drops of a thousand meters down almost vertical granite walls. Then out of the corner of my eye, I saw something odd. On the Chilean side way below us, there were rigid little clouds that looked like perfectly still balls of cotton. The air was so clear that you could see them almost a hundred kilometers away along the Pacific shoreline, but now, all of a sudden, all these white puffy balls were in a kind of silent uproar. They shot up from out of the deep toward us; they looked like nuclear mushroom clouds. I asked Glowacz, what did he think was going on, but he just stood there in astonishment. I had a walkie-talkie on which I straightaway called the helicopter. It was just a distant speck by now, but I saw it turn a circle and come flying back to us. When it was just near enough to touch, the first wave of the storm came up and buffeted the helicopter away.
Within seconds, we were in a whiteout. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, and there was a hundred-and-forty-mile-an-hour gale and a temperature of twenty below. We clung to one another and managed to reach a firm snow wall, where we dug ourselves in. We had just one ice axe among the three of us and Glowacz’s rope, which he needed for his scene, but no tent, no sleeping bags, no food. I had two chocolate bars in one of my pockets and Bruce Chatwin’s empty rucksack. We managed to dig out a tiny bivouac not much bigger than a wine barrel. Crouched in there together, we could feel reasonably safe because our breath and body warmth kept the temperature one or two degrees above freezing after we’d blocked up the entrance with chunks of ice. I sat on the empty rucksack so as not to lose too much warmth through contact with the ice. Later on, I heard a version claiming the rucksack had saved my life, but that can’t be right because my two companions survived without any rucksacks. Every two hours exactly, for seconds at a time to save the battery, I contacted our people down in the valley. I broke out the chocolate, so that everyone was free to eat their share when they needed. We spent all day and all the next night huddled together, and then our cameraman, who was a tough and experienced climber, started fading. We put him in the middle between us and made him continually move his fingers and toes because the extremities are the most vulnerable. He was still declining fast, and by the end of the night, he was in poor shape. When I switched on the walkie-talkie, which I kept warm in my armpit, he grabbed it and shouted that he wouldn’t survive a second night like this one.
That alarmed the climbers down in the valley. They put together two teams of four to try and get to us by two different routes. One team soon gave up in the face of the storm, poor visibility, and the icy cold. The second got to within a few hundred yards of us—vertically—but then the strongest man of all, the best Andean climber in Argentina, pulled off his gloves with his teeth and snapped his fingers to order a cappuccino. His comrades had to rescue him and carry him down almost as far as the glacier; then they were taken down a little farther by a small avalanche. There they too dug out a bivouac and felt safe; they had food, sleeping bags, and a gas cooker to boil snow. Up on the ridge, we forced ourselves to eat snow and kept our hands and feet moving. We spent the following day like that and another night. On the third day, the clouds parted a little, and the gale dropped, and the helicopter dared to come up but not land on the ridge. We lifted our invalid inside, then in seconds Glowacz swung himself on board, and I pulled myself up into the metal carrier basket. For a moment, I was standing up and ready to creep inside when our pilot shot off in a panic and sent me reeling backward. I grabbed one of the iron struts of the basket and crouched down, holding on for dear life. In the few minutes it took to get down into the valley, my naked fingers froze onto the metal so hard that I couldn’t get them off. Finally, one of our Argentines asked the ladies to retire and pissed over my fingers. They were able to move again. We had been on the ridge for fifty-five hours. The weather deteriorated and stayed bad for the next eleven days.