CONQUEST OF
THE USELESS
An Entry from the Production
Diary of Fitzcarraldo
BY WERNER HERZOG
PHOTOS BY BEAT PRESSER/ WWW.BEATPRESSER.COM
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.
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| hooohaaa, on Jun 11, 2009 wrote:
i believe that anonymous just gave anonymous a major zing there. | | Anonymous, on Jun 11, 2009 wrote:
different excerpt, and the copy of harper’s i have says june 2009. | | Anonymous, on Jun 11, 2009 wrote:
harper’s had an excerpt like a month ago. bush league. | | Anonymous, on Jun 11, 2009 wrote:
i can hear him reading this is in weirdo german monotone, which would put me to bed if what he was saying wasn’t so damn interesting | | Anonymous, on Jun 11, 2009 wrote:
film geeks worship everything herzog like emo film geeks worship donnie fucking darko*.
it’s okay but please... it’s not life changing or "deep" don’t kid yourselves. | |
| poozer, on Jun 11, 2009 wrote:
this was a wooly mammoth of a film and was worth every effort put into it by herzog and his crew. the scenes of building the pulleys and scaffolding wore me out just watching. | | Anonymous, on Jun 11, 2009 wrote:
How does your roommate have this book if it hasn’t been published yet? | | Anonymous, on Jun 11, 2009 wrote:
i recently watched fitzcarraldo, my first herzog film. the story and shooting are great. the best is considering how difficult of a shoot it must have been. no soundstages -- the jungle! real boat, real arrows, everything. it did take me a while to get used to klaus kinski’s eyes. | | Anonymous, on Jun 11, 2009 wrote:
My roommate has this book!!!! | | Anonymous, on Jun 10, 2009 wrote:
oh man!! Mauch sounds like a bad ass..he’s definately the right person to bring with you on a mission like that | | Anonymous, on Jun 10, 2009 wrote:
fuck michael bay its all about herzog!!!! | | Anonymous, on Jun 10, 2009 wrote:
fainting or shitting your pants...... at least he didnt do both and got some boob time. best injury ever. | | Anonymous, on Jun 10, 2009 wrote:
if the rest of it is as mental as this then im in. i would have loved to have seen the look on the backers faces when he told them that he would be taking the boat over a mountain. jaws would have hit the floor! | |
| joe bananas, on Jun 10, 2009 wrote:
This looks like an superb book, just from that short excerpt i think that i will have to give this a look. making movies properly risking hands and getting shot at by arrows! that is making a proper film. | | | < Previous 30 comments | |
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