When Werner Herzog set off for the Peruvian jungle to make a film about a rubber baron dragging a ship over a mountain, nobody should have been surprised when things didn’t go well. The famously maverick director was no stranger to risk and misadventure. But few could have predicted the craziness that would befall Herzog in the jungle, or the audacious grandeur of the resulting film.
When original lead Jason Robards contracted dysentery with 40% of the film already completed, Herzon had to reshoot Fitzcarraldo with his frequent collaborator, the combustible Klaus Kinski. Fighting viciously with Herzog throughout the shoot and creating tension with the local tribespeople, all of this was nothing compared to the gargantuan task of hauling a 320-ton steamship over a hill during production.
These and all the other incidents, accidents and tragedies that befell Fitzcarraldo are already the stuff of legend, chronicled in several books and the riveting documentary Burden of Dreams. That the film is itself a masterpiece about personal obsession and misguided colonialism, with an epic sweep to match its subject, is all the more fitting.