Photos by AgNews

BY WERNER HERZOG

PHOTOS BY BEAT PRESSER

In 1979, Werner Herzog approached 20th Century Fox to fund a movie, based on a true story, about an overzealous rubber baron who wishes to stage an opera in the middle of the Peruvian Amazon. The producers loved the idea and were about to sign off when the discussion turned to a scene that involved pulling a steamship over a mountainous isthmus, from one river to another. “So you’re going to use a plastic model boat, right?” the backers asked Herzog. The director replied that the camera had to capture “a real steamship being hauled over a real mountain, though not for the sake of realism but for the stylization characteristic of grand opera.” He was met with icy stares, whereupon he realized that he alone would have to raise the money for the film. Over the course of the next two years, through perhaps the most difficult shoot in the history of cinema, he kept a production diary. After he penned the final entry, it sat unread for 20 years. Now, finally, it’s about to be published in book form. Here we present an excerpt from this diary, which will be released on June 30 as

Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo

. It’s one of the best books we’ve read so far this year, but that’s no surprise because it’s Herzog and everything he does is perfect because he’s perfect. Perfect perfect perfect.

CAMISEA, 22 APRIL 1981

We spent a cold, unpleasant night on the

Huallaga

in the Pongo, and got to work first thing in the morning setting up the cameras. From my vantage point, the ship’s pilotless trip through the rapids did not look particularly exciting, but after the ship had crashed four times into the cliffs on either side, I saw Raimund and Vignati on a promontory below me pounding each other on the back. Right near where they were standing the ship had ridden up on the cliff a bit, and I saw rocks splitting and dust rising from the friction. They must have filmed that special moment from close up, but there were too many other dead intervals, so we all had the same feeling, and it soon became apparent that we would have to repeat the whole thing, but with the cameras on board. Five volunteers offered to go on board, and I was of the opinion that it would be good to have Kinski and Paul there, too, provided they were willing to cooperate. I promptly went to get Tomislav, the pilot, and we took off below the Pongo from a cow pasture, while those who stayed behind began to move the

Huallaga

back up through the rapids.

Kinski and Paul came along without much hesitation. Kinski took me aside, and in one of our rare moments where we revealed ourselves, he told me that if I went down with the ship he would go with me. I replied simply that he knew how the ship was built, with steel reinforcement beams inside and separate buoyancy chambers; I had no desire to drown, and had taken technical measures against such an eventuality. We hastily shook hands. I grabbed the phonograph and asked Gisela for some sewing needles, because the record player had no needle. But then our departure was delayed considerably. I had learned from the pilot, who had radioed up to the

Huallaga

from the Indians’ camp, that people seriously wounded by arrows had just arrived from the upper reaches of the Camisea, and that emergency operations were already under way. I hurried to the first-aid station and saw a native man and a woman, both of whom had been struck with enormous arrows. They had been fishing for the camp three hours upstream by speedboat, and had spent the night on a sandbank. During the night they had been ambushed and shot at close range by Amehuacas. The woman had been hit by three arrows and almost bled to death. The wounds were close together. One arrow had gone all the way through her body just above her kidney, one had bounced off her hip bone, and the most life-threatening one was still sticking in her abdomen, broken off on the inner side of her pelvis. I spent several hours helping out while she was operated on, shining a powerful flashlight into her abdominal cavity and with the other hand spraying insect repellent to try to drive away the clouds of mosquitoes the blood had attracted. The man still had an arrow made of razor-sharp bamboo and almost thirty centimeters long sticking through his throat. He had broken off the two-meter-long shaft himself, and was gripping it in his hand. In his state of shock he refused to let go of it. The arrow’s tip, which looked more like the point of a lance, had spliced open one of his shoulders along the collarbone and was sticking crossways through his neck, with the tip lodged in his shoulder on the other side. He seemed to be in less immediate danger and was operated on only after the woman. Here is what had happened: the man, his wife, and a younger man, all three of them Machiguengas from Shivankoreni, who provide us with yucca, had gone up the Camisea to hunt. They were sleeping on a sandbank, and during the night the woman woke up because the man next to her was gasping strangely. Thinking a jaguar had got him by the throat, she grabbed a still glowing branch from the fire and jumped up. At that moment she was struck by three arrows. The younger man woke up; he had a shotgun with him, and, grasping the situation, fired two shots blindly into the night, since everything was happening in pitch darkness and complete silence. None of the three saw any trace of the attacking Amehuacas; they disappeared, leaving only a few footprints in the sand. Not until the next morning toward eleven did the wounded reach us in their

peke-peke

, which the younger man, uninjured, was steering; they came just as I was about to set out with Kinski and Paul.

Since in the meantime assistants more competent than I had shown up, I did not stick around when they laid the man with the arrow through his neck on a makeshift kitchen table and administered anesthesia. I could not in good conscience leave the others on board too long in the rapids, where the water level had begun to rise crazily just as I was departing. We landed by the Pongo, with mud flying, and had zero visibility as we taxied, because the dirty water had splashed all over the windshield. Added to that, we had a slight tailwind all the way to the end of the cabbage field.

The 320-ton steamship that was both the bane and realization of Herzog’s dreams.

Once on board, we got everything ready: Vignati with a camera up on the bridge, strapped to the back wall, and Paul in the role of captain. The real captain was there with him, as was Walter, so that Paul could take the helm during the moments when we were shooting, something he actually knew how to handle. Next to the bridge we anchored the phonograph and nailed down a small tripod for Beatus. On the mid-deck Kinski, Mauch, and I took our places to film Fitzcarraldo stumbling onto the deck half asleep. Juarez was positioned in relative safety farther upfront with the sound equipment, and Les Blank and Maureen had joined us at the last moment. Klausmann and Raimund had set up atop a cliff in the ravine.

From the moment we set sail we picked up speed, moving on an angle, and had several good collisions with the cliffs on either side, but then the

Huallaga

turned and moved much faster, heading downstream with the current. Walter called to me from up above that we were going to hit the side on the left, and we filmed Kinski again as the cliff approached with menacing rapidity; Kinski ran past us too soon, heading for the stern, so that Mauch had to pan to follow him, with the result that we absorbed the collision facing backward. I had one arm around Mauch, and was holding him steady, while with my other hand I clung on to a window frame, but the collision was so powerful that it knocked us off our feet and sent us hurtling through the air. I saw the lens jolted off the camera and sent flying.

Somehow we spun around our axes as we ourselves went flying, and Mauch, with one hand under the camera, landed flat on the deck, with me on top of him. Mauch immediately balled up in a fetal position, screaming. I immediately thought it was his shoulder again, but it was worse; his hand had been split between the ring finger and the little finger by the crashing camera, deep into the root of his hand. He also had a gash on one side of his forehead. Kinski yelped as if he were injured, though he had only banged his elbows a bit, but when he saw Mauch he quickly forgot about himself and helped out like a good sport as we provided first aid.

Below the rapids the ship ran aground on a sandbank. The prow had curled up like the top of a sardine can, the anchor had been driven through the ship’s side, and water was getting into the hull. Vignati had been buffeted around so violently in his harness that he had two cracked ribs, and when Beatus pulled his head away from his firmly fastened-down camera, he was thrown against it. He was very woozy and asked me several times whether we were going to shoot now. We decided we had to get Mauch to the doctor as fast as possible, so we set out in the speedboat as darkness was falling, since I did not want to fly with so little light. We completely forgot about the two men up on the cliff in the middle of the Pongo. Mauch and I lay down in the boat and looked up at the stars. We saw two satellites, and then fog settled over the river. Before it got completely dark we saw two condors on the bank.

During rehearsal Werner Herzog, Klaus Kinski, and actor Miguel Ángel Fuentes look over a contract stating that Fitzcarraldo now owns the ship Molly Aida.

Mauch was operated on by Dr. Parraga, with our extraordinarily skillful cook putting in the sutures. Since all the anesthesia had been used up during the almost eight hours it took to operate on the two people wounded by arrows, Mauch was soon in agony, and even analgesic spray did not do much good. I held his head and pressed it against me, and a silent wall of faces surrounded us.

Mauch said he could not take any more, he was going to faint, and I told him to go ahead. Then he thought he was going to shit in his pants from the pain, but he could not decide between the two options, and in the end did neither. On a hunch I sent for Carmen, one of the two prostitutes we have here because of the woodcutters and the boatmen. She pushed me aside, buried Mauch’s head between her breasts, and comforted him with her lovely soft voice. She rose above her everyday existence, developing her inner Pietà, and Mauch soon fell silent. During the operation, which lasted almost two hours, she said over and over, “Thomas,

mi amor

,” to him, while the patient yielded to his fate. As I stood watching, I felt a deep affection for both of them.

At night ten Campas came along to our camp to stand guard. Some of them were armed with shotguns, others with bows and arrows. They glided into the darkness of the jungle, and I did not see them again till morning, when they gathered by my cabin, talking quietly. I asked to be given the arrow that had gone into the woman’s hip and also the tip of the arrow that had been shot through the man’s throat. Both patients are doing relatively well; they will both live. I was able to exchange a few words with the man, who was hooked up to an intravenous drip; he could already whisper a bit. He had been incredibly lucky, because the lancelike tip had grazed his carotid artery but not severed it. I was amazed at the thickness of the extra-long arrow shafts and the sturdiness of the large feathers fastened to them.

This morning thirty men set out in the mist, almost all Campa warriors, in

peke-pekes

, all armed, to sail to the place where the attack had happened, follow the tracks, and, they said, apprehend the criminals to turn them over to the authorities. May Heaven prevent that.

Almost nothing is known about the Amehuacas; they live semi-nomadically along the upper reaches of the Camisea, about ten days’ journey from here, and apparently they had followed the river downstream while the water level was so low, presumably looking for turtle eggs, now in season. All attempts in the past by the military or missionaries to establish contact with them failed, because the Amehuacas never let themselves be seen, and attacked only by night. Nor could they be located from the air, because unlike all the other tribes they do not make clearings,

chakras

, which are cultivated for a few years before the tribe moves on. Yet quite a bit of their language is known, because about ten years ago a very sick Amehuaca boy came floating down on a balsawood raft and survived in the Atalaya hospital.

I tried to prevent the sortie, but very quickly a common resolve was reached. It was the women, by the way, who picked the warriors. So-and-so cannot go; he does not shoot well enough, they announced, and no one protested. Half the men had shotguns. Ten of them hunkered down in each of the large canoes. The only provisions they took along were bunches of green bananas. Their departure was quiet, almost casual. They disappeared slowly upstream amid the mist, water, and trees, which fused into a gray, unknown world like a vague vision.

I had a violent, absurd quarrel with Kinski about his mineral water, with which he wants to wash himself now. Otherwise peace and quiet. Suddenly Kinski started yelling again, but it had no connection to anything here. He was beside himself, calling Sergio Leone and Corbucci rotten vermin, no-good so-and-sos and cyclopean ass-holes. It took a long time for him to wear himself out. Then his yelling flared up again briefly, as he called Fellini a bungling idiot, a fat bastard. Then in late morning I finally got some sleep.

From the forthcoming book

CONQUEST OF THE USELESS: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo.

Copyright © 2009 by Werner Herzog. Translated by Krishna Winston. To be published on June 30, 2009 by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.