‘Fitzcarraldo’: the 1982 movie that made a man cut off his own foot
Every film is a miracle. It doesn’t matter how good, how bad or how thoroughly spectacularly mid it is, the fact that it came together at all is less catching lightning in a bottle and more hundreds of people catching hundreds of lightning bolts while blindfolded, being guided by three people who each have different ideas about where the bolts will come from next.
Whether it’s The Room and Birdemic, or Sinners and The Shawshank Redemption, they might not be quite as miraculous as each other, but the fact that each of them was completed puts them in a tiny minority of blessed film projects. Although calling any film shoot blessed is pushing it somewhat, because no film is easy to make. Each of them wrings blood, sweat and floods of tears out of anyone passionate about them, but that said, anyone who’s ever worked on a film by Werner Herzog deserves a tiny bit more sympathy than most people who’ve ever worked on one.
After all, Herzog’s pictures are special cases. They are backbreaking labour even when compared with other film projects, and in the case of his 1982 fantasy epic Fitzcarraldo, I mean that entirely literally. After all, this is the film in which Herzog gave the go-to example of “psychopathic film director makes his entire crew suffer for his art”. It’s intensely difficult to be the most insane person on the crew when that crew includes literal Klaus Kinski, but still, Herzog found a way, the mad bastard.
What’s more, anyone involved in the picture really should have seen the whole thing coming. This is a story about a rubber baron from Peru (who gives the film its title) who needs to transport an entire steamship across the Andes. Y’know, those mountains that have very little in the way of running water, let alone enough to sail a steam ship through. Herzog saw that the source material had the actual rubber baron disassemble the ship first.
Herzog thought that was bitch tactics.
What made Fitzcarraldo such a horrible shoot?
Anyone with a passing interest in Herzog’s work knows the story here. This is the film where he made his crew drag a 320 steam ship up a steep hill in the Andes. The fact that said task only led to three injuries is something of a miracle, but the truth is, the ship story is only the first of a litany of ridiculous stories about the making of Fitzcarraldo. I mean, of course it was. Herzog may have outshone Kinski in one fit of madness, but no-one out-mads Klaus for long.
The bad blood between the two was so vicious that when a number of local tribes were drafted in to work as extras, one of their chiefs offered to kill Kinski on Herzog’s behalf. Herzog declined, after all, Kinski still had shots to shoot, but knowing what Kinski was like, one can imagine the great director strongly considering it. However, the most shocking story from the set of Fitzcarraldo has nothing to do with Kinski or Herzog, and everything to do with one Peruvian logger hired for the film.
The production of the film took place entirely in the jungles of the Andes, which are home to a lot of things that can easily kill a man. This logger found this out the hard way when he was bitten by a venomous snake while working on the film. According to Herzog, the logger thought quickly and reasoned that his best chance to live was to use his chainsaw to cut off his own foot before the venom spread. Jigsaw would be proud.
He did exactly that, and according to Herzog, survived the ordeal. Fuck the movie, that’s the real miracle here.