By the fourth or fifth take, enough mud had washed away to expose a tree stump at the slope’s bottom—and Carnel smashed his rib cage. (“The audience will never see Christian’s reaction unless you add a closeup.”) Herzog’s stated belief that his approach would create “an event-based dynamic, a feeling of being an observer dragged into the scene,” struck many of his colleagues as a cover for a lack of technique.

Bale took his notes, and on the third take both performances were substantially improved.

(By the end of the shoot, in October, he had lost almost thirty pounds.) To share this article with your friends, use any of the social share buttons on our site, or simply copy the link below. Also, I had a catalogue in my jacket pocket, which protected me. Herzog’s inspection of the burned village had left the soles of his bare feet black. The film was released as a DVD in November 2007. Herzog went on to direct a dramatized version of the story, Rescue Dawn, which stars Christian Bale as Dengler. Yet the film betrays no sign of its agonized gestation: the prevailing tone is deliciously languid and dreamy, and Fitzcarraldo’s labors evoke the Little Engine as much as Sisyphus. Zeitlinger explained, “When making a film, Werner tries to pretend as if nobody is around but him and the actors.”. “Have the camera plow past them, through the trees, and into the distance,” Herzog told Zeitlinger. “There’s an easier way to shoot this,” he said, adding sarcastically, “He has this concept of the camera being ‘part’ of the characters.”. “Perfect,” Herzog said. “How can you see the way a shot looks if you’re the stand-in?” White later muttered to himself. The emerging cloud was feeble. The sound engineer hadn’t yet carted up his heavy equipment.

Zahn walked outside again, more naturally this time, and Bale torpidly said, “We’ve gotta get out of here, Duane.” After a long pause, he added, “This will’ve attracted the attention of the Vietcong. “Did I invent that coup d’état in Greece?” Perhaps not, but in 1970, while making “Fata Morgana,” a fantasia on scorched African landscapes, Herzog went to Cameroon a few weeks after a coup attempt took place. “These conditions will last for five minutes at most.”, “It’s sublime,” Lena said, while taking photographs.

The water was strong, and Peter’s camera wobbled uncontrollably and teetered over. Although his script had described, among other things, Dengler’s nails being jammed with razorsharp bamboo, Herzog sensed that the producers were overly keen on such “Rambo”-style luridness; he refused to shoot any scenes of torture. It is the truth … The beheading would occur offscreen.

They were baffled by his ignorance of his own screenplay; Herzog told me that he hadn’t reread it once since writing it, three years earlier, because he wanted to “respond to the situation in the jungle” and “keep things completely fresh.” They were annoyed by continuity errors that Herzog considered “of no great consequence.” (“Werner, isn’t Christian supposed to have a rucksack in this scene?”) They were irritated when Herzog declared that someone’s unfinished makeup looked “good enough,” and that he couldn’t wait for it to be perfect, because he liked the way the tropical light was filtering through the treetops. In the documentary, Dengler recounts his escape in a transfixing monologue, vividly conjuring the horror of being lost in the jungle: sudden mud slides sent him and Martin careering down jagged mountains, and he woke up each morning covered with leeches. On the ground, there was a drip-covered cannister marked “SUGAR-FREE FAKE BLOOD.” “We won’t use too much,” he said. Yet, in so doing, it shifts our perspective. Kinski’s crazed state is distractingly palpable in the film, which was released in 1987. He grabbed Zeitlinger’s shoulder, and pointed to the dark horizon. “If it comes out, it comes out transformed.” Herzog remains close to his siblings: Tilbert, his older brother, an international-finance executive, who now spends much of his time on a yacht off Spain; Lucki, his younger brother, who lives in Germany, and has produced many of Herzog’s films; and Sigrid, his sister, an acting teacher, who also lives in Germany. Just another day at the office!’ ” She was concerned, however, about an infection that had developed in Herzog’s left toe. Marlton posted his bail, but Knapp still faces legal proceedings.

“Action,” he said. Gravity has given his mouth a permanent frown.

“At least the Inquisition was about keeping something together. Marlton had asked Herzog to watch a DVD of a movie that had impressed him, “The Rundown”—a wildly kinetic 2003 feature, starring Dwayne (the Rock) Johnson, the former wrestler, about a bounty hunter who scours the Amazon for buried treasure—in the hope that Herzog would agree to hire the film’s cinematographer. Herzog insists that the jump was merely a goof—a way of bonding with his actors, some of whom had injured themselves while filming. The disaster of Nazism, he said, informs his brooding world view.


Herzog, having spent his childhood clambering across the Alpine slopes of southern Bavaria, says that he has an uncanny talent for “reading a landscape,” and he could immediately spot the danger: his primeval nook was an ideal place for a bathroom break. He is gently messianic in his anachronistic habits.

It really feels like the jungle is swallowing everything, even the camera.”.

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In Herzog’s screenplay, flares attached to parachutes float down from the aircraft. Why has Herzog’s career been so consistently plagued by intrigue, peril, and disaster? Harry Knapp, who replaced Josef Lieck as first assistant director, developed various ruses to distract Herzog, in order to take footage that he deemed unnecessary. Marlton paid a substantial sum and flew home, leaving the other crew members behind. Herzog saw the prison-set dispute as part of a larger power struggle with Marlton, who, he said, had been frustrated when Herzog rejected his artistic suggestions. Later, she gave a German newspaper a quote that Herzog considers the most precise summation of his talent. The mood on the set was toxic.
Meanwhile, Harry Knapp, who said that he considers Herzog “a poet,” became the liaison between the director and the producers. They’re abusive and incompetent.

Speaking in German, the director discussed how to choreograph the sequence with his longtime cinematographer, Peter Zeitlinger, a burly Czech who appeared on location each day wearing a flowing white linen ensemble. In retaliation, the contractor had successfully petitioned the government to close the shoot. I believe that it was the right thing to do. “Here,” Herzog said. Sign Up For Our Newsletter “You may be a witness to the beginning of the end. This time, Herzog did not threaten Kinski with a gun, though a local Indian, appalled by the actor’s vile manners, offered to murder him. But Herzog refuses to separate himself from the action: he wants to feel what he’s filming. Dengler evaded capture and survived for weeks in the forest, on a diet of beetles and snakes, before being rescued by a U.S. Army helicopter.

The film score was written by German composer Klaus Badelt, after previously working with Herzo… It is the truth … Herzog began giving instructions to Bale and Zahn, who, exhausted from the climb, listened in silence. One day this February, he left a voice message. Lieutenant Dengler, played by actor Christian Bale, was captured and subjected to brutal torture. Herzog told Bale, “You have never seen anything like this on film before, Christian.

Captured and imprisoned in what may well be the most horrendous POW camp ever shown in a film, Dieter somehow managed to escape through the jungle — an odyssey that is, if anything, more gut-wrenching than his incarceration. “We spent the night outside, in two hammocks.

That is what fascinated me—to explore a human being whose view of death is so different, who does something inexplicable.” In the end, La Soufrière never blew up, baffling geologists. Herzog was being barraged by such complaints. “The production was shut down for six months. Herzog told a local Army officer that he would continue filming illegally, issuing a threat worthy of Pushkin. “Much more resolve, less melodramatic.” But Herzog didn’t like the way the actors had run off into the underbrush after saying their lines. A crew member glanced at the monitor and shook his head. “And the agency wants their client to be happy.” Endeavor, he implied, could make life difficult for Gibraltar if it tried to release a bastardized version of “Rescue Dawn.”. An accountant arrived on the set, then immediately quit, shocked by the financial mess. “O.K., O.K., let’s do it now,” Herzog said. He has a penchant for jaws-of-death metaphors. The producers were hardly penniless, she said: upon arriving in Thailand, she said, Marlton and other Gibraltar executives had “set up shop at the Oriental”—an expensive hotel in Bangkok. Herzog took the picture himself, during the filming of a 2000 documentary, “Wings of Hope,” about Juliane Koepcke, a female counterpart to Dieter Dengler; in 1971, as a teen-ager, she survived a jetliner crash in Peru and made it out of the jungle alone. “Do you know how Werner has been washing his muddy pants here?” she asked me later, in a lighter mood. He now considers the sequence one of the strongest he has ever shot. Herzog recalls his childhood with a curiously anthropological cast, as if he were the Alpine equivalent of a Trobriand Islander. The Aetherials seem to have taken a strange interest in women in particular. Some crew members worried that the sequence would still look slow on film, but Herzog was content. A U.S. fighter pilot's epic struggle of survival after being shot …

Although Knapp said that “Rescue Dawn” was “Herzog’s movie” and that his primary role was to “lend support,” he would also remind Herzog that certain choices—such as trimming action sequences in favor of dialogue-heavy scenes in the prison camp—would likely displease the producers. As he stretched his arms out for balance, Lena informed me that her husband was unusually low on energy that day. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Rivia's mother and daughters were taken by the Aetherials when the Candle District was attacked. (He says he’s great at picking locks.) Lena joked, “I wonder sometimes if it’s strange that I’ve gotten used to it: ‘Oh, there’s Werner standing in the middle of the river.

(The hauntingly alien landscape—in which even coral is spined with ice—is meant to represent the interior of a distant planet.)

In the middle of the interview, I was shot with a rifle by someone standing on his balcony. To revisit this article, select My⁠ ⁠Account, then View saved stories. Marlton was informed by the Thai police that he would be allowed to leave only if he paid five hundred thousand dollars in taxes that the production supposedly owed. Long before Raphael Warnock’s Senate run, the biblical call for freedom for the oppressed stirred Atlanta Christians to social action. “I have to work around them.” The enclave he had sequestered was filled with overgrown vines and rotting, semi-collapsed palm trees, and was partially hidden by a moss-slicked boulder. The sequence was shot the day after the decapitation scene.

And I know the ice can break easily.” When he was a few days old, he says, he was nearly killed after Allied bombs caused a skylight in his nursery to shatter; the shards fell around his bassinet but somehow did not injure him.

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