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WHY DID LES BLANK CALL HIS FILM BURDEN OF DREAMS?

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Cinema emboldens us. It helps us surmount everyday life and encourages us to take our hopes and desires seriously, to turn them into reality. When things were going badly I headed back to Germany in an attempt to hold together the film's investors. ?They asked me if I was going to continue. "Do you really have the strength and will?" I said, "How can you ask this question? If I abandon this project, I will be a man without dreams. I live my life or I end my life with Fitzcarraldo." It wasn't possible for me to allow myself private feelings of doubt while making the film. I never had the privilege of despair; had I hesitated or panicked for a single second, the entire project would have come tumbling down around me. The final film ended up basically as I had always hoped it would, with the exception of the Mick Jagger character. Months later Claudia Cardinale said to me, "When you came to Rome four years ago you explained your ideas to me and all the difficulties we would have to overcome. Now I've seen the film, and it's exactly as you first described it."

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If you watch Fitzcarraldo and have the courage to push on with your own projects, then the film has accomplished something. If one person walks outside after watching one of my films and no longer feels so alone, I have achieved everything I set out to achieve. When you read a great poem you instantly know there is a profound truth to it. Sometimes there are similar moments of great insight in cinema, when you know you have been illuminated. Perhaps, occasionally, I have achieved such heights with my own films.

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BURDEN OF DREAMS INCLUDES SCENES "FROM THE ORIGINAL VERSION OF FITZCARRALDO, WITH ROBARDS AND JAGGER.

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People are always asking me if they can visit my sets and shoot footage of me at work; I tell them they will experience nothing but an endless chain of banalities. I didn't invite Les to the jungle but he was eager to come down and make a film. At first I was reluctant to have a camera around because there is something distasteful about making films about filmmakers. I don't like being recorded while working. When you cook a meal at home and there is someone staring at your hands, suddenly you're no longer a good cook. Everyone functions differently when being observed, and filmmkers are usually pathetic embarrassments when they appear on film. I include myself here.

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Tom Luddy had shown me some of Les's films, and I loved them instantly, especially Spend It All, which has a scene where a man pulls his own tooth out with a pair of pliers, an image I borrowed for Stroszek. His films document the vanishing marginals of American life in the most vibrant ways. I also loved Les's cooking and general attitude to life. He turned out to be a healthy presence in the jungle. Most of the time he was like a southern bullfrog brooding behind a beer, unobtrusive, always knowing when he should turn on the camera and when there were .. significant moments to capture on film. What I really liked about Les was that he wasn't just monosyllabic; often he was zero-syllabic. He hardly ever spoke a word and somehow managed to blend into the environment. I was also persuaded by his argument that however confident I was about finishing the film, if everything fell apart then thanks to his footage there would at least be some record of this foolhardy quest.

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Les wasn't some court jester who adulated everyone, no matter what they were doing. He had an extraordinarily good eye and brought a considered subjectivity to what he was filming. He was just as interested in watching how the Indians would ferment yucca as he was documenting the production of Fitzcarraldo, and most of the time could be found in the camp where the natives did their cooking. One time at breakfast I explained to him that later in the day there would be a real event: for the first time in months we planned to move the boat up the mountain. "I'm not here to film events," said Les, and he didn't show up. That evening he told me he had spent the day filming an ant carrying a parrot feather. I always liked his attitude, and can look back at the diaries I wrote during production and find a world of observations completely different to what Les was documenting at the same moment.

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Werner Herzog? "Werner Herzog A Guide For The Perplexed" (2015)

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An extreme example is Matthew Whitaker, whom I first saw featured on 60 Minutes. Born prematurely, at twenty-four weeks, Matthew was not expected to survive. He defied the odds. But he became blind as a result of a condition known as attendant retinopathy. When he was three, his grand-father gave him a small electronic keyboard. Matthew immediately started playing it, easily sounding out songs he had heard, such as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." At the age of five, Matthew became the youngest student to be admitted to the Filomen M. D'Agostino Greenberg Music School for the blind and visually impaired in New York City. His teacher reported that the morn-s? after he attended a concert of her performing a Dvorak piano quintet, she heard him playing not only the piano part but all four parts for strings. Matthew now travels the world playing jazz professionally.

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Temple Grandin "Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions" (2022)

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For some reason the scene embarrassed Gavin, who resisted playing it with his shirt off. Hitchcock fobbed the actor off on writer Joseph Stefano, who was on the set. "Stefano persuaded him by encouraging him to use that very embarrassment as part of the scene," according to John Russell Taylor's book, "particularly when having an argument while half undressed."

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The embarrassing nature of the scene was aggravated by the fact that it was the first one Gavin acted with Leigh - and unlike, say, The 39 Steps, he and she were not supposed to be "meeting cute." "It isn't easy to say, 'Hello, nice to see you again,' and then hop in the sack and make love, remembered Leigh. "We were bound to be somewhat awkward. I thought we had begun to warm up and were progressing fairly well. "

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After some lackluster takes, Hitchcock beckoned the white-lingerie-clad actress over and complained, "I think you and John could be more passionate! See what you can do!" (According to Rebello, Hitchcock actually instructed Leigh "in discreet but descriptive terms" to "take matters in hand, as it were. Leigh blushed, acquiesced, and Hitchcock got a reasonable facsimile of the required response.") Then, almost as an afterthought. the director strolled over to Gavin and whispered something in his ear, too. tantalizing each performer by giving the other secret advice. "I wouldn't have put it past him to pull my chain, and then to pull John's chain," said Leigh, "just to get the desired results."

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Give Gavin credit: he was struggling with his role. Years later, when Leigh was researching her book Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller, Gavin told her that his chances weren't improved by the odor he detected on the set. Hitchcock's body odor? he wondered. Or perhaps the director's breath? Or maybe his cigar, as Hitchcock sat there, puffing placidly away, mere inches away from the performers pretending a love scene. And that's the way the tryst opening of Psycho plays: audacious bur awkward, provocative but cold, sexy with a whiff of BO.

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"In a strange way," Leigh argued later, Gavin's passivity "worked for the suspense. Real passion would have justified Marion's theft. But the lack of the complete abandon with Sam might have led some audience members to think, 'I wonder if he really loves her that much?' It made Marion even more sympathetic, which Hitch was very concerned about her being."

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During the filming, however, those who watched the dailies though: they were seeing way too much of the back of Gavin's head, according Rebello's book, whereas, under Hitchcock's more sympathetic tutelage. Leigh was exposing unprecedented parts of her anatomy - while achieving her most immortal performance.

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Leigh was a good sport, who got a kick out of the director's off-color limericks, puns, and pranks. Kim Novak had arrived on the set of Vertigo on the day of her semi nude scene (waking up from her "suicide attempt" in Scottie's apartment), to be greeted by a plucked chicken hanging from her dressing room; her unamused disgust undoubtedly wrecked any second chance Hitchcock might have been giving her. The worst jokes on Leigh seemed to come just moments before her most important scenes - and she found most of them terribly funny.

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Hitchcock had one running gag involving Leigh and Mrs. Bates -? Norman's mother - as he tested the various mummified skeletons created by the effects department. The director "relished scaring me," Leigh wrote in her memoir. "He experimented with the mother's corpse, using me as his gauge. I would return from lunch, open the door to the dressing room, and propped in my chair would be this hideous monstrosity. The horror in my scream registered on his Richter scale, decided his choice of the Madam."

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Hitchcock CARED about Leigh (and the character she was playing), a concern reflected in the way he helped her out, even acting from the sidelines, during the protracted car-driving interludes. In those scenes Marion wears a troubled, guilty face," according to the script, and the director "completely articulated for me what I was thinking," Leigh recalled. " 'Oh-oh,' h'd say, 'there's your boss. He's watching you with a funny look.' "

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The shower stabbing - Leigh's most demanding scene - was scheduled for the week of December 17-23, just before Christmas. "During the day," recalled Leigh, "I was in the throes of being stabbed to death, and at night vas wrapping presents from Santa Claus for the children."

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Darkness and light: Mrs. Bates's knife was a retractable prop. The bathroom, at the director's insistence, was lined with "blinding white tiles" and shining fixtures. Plenty of chocolate syrup, in a squeeze bottle, supplied the dark ?blood. A professional dancer stood by for the more intimate shots (Hitchcock had thrown a publicity lightning bolt when he announced he was planning a "rearview scene of Miss Leigh"), but Leigh herself appeared in most of the shots, wearing flesh-colored moleskin, though it occasionally peeled away under the watery onslaught.

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-Hitch and I discussed the implications [of the scene] at great length," remembered Leigh. "Marion had decided to go back to Phoenix, come clean, and take the consequences, so when she stepped into the tub it was as if she were stepping into the baptismal waters. The spray beating down was purifying the corruption from her mind, purging the evil from soul. She was like a virgin again, tranquil, at peace."

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(The shower as baptism" was an idea Hitchcock extrapolated from Robert Bloch's novel, where Mary Crane decides "that's what she was going to do right now, take a nice, long, hot shower. Get the dirt off as she was going to get the dirt cleaned out of her insides. Come clean, Mary. Come clean as new.")

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In addition to the scene of Arbogast climbing the stairs to meet Mother, Saul Bass had storyboarded the shower sequence, sketching the "high shot with the violins, and suddenly the big head with the brass instruments clashing," in Hitchcock's words - the cuts coming staccato and furious, each lasting mere seconds. The montage conjured up complete nudity and savage violence, even though, as the director tirelessly explained in interviews, it was all an illusion - giving "an impression of a knife slashing, as if tearing at the very screen, ripping the film," in the words of the script.

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Blond dripping hair, dark gaping mouth, blood spattering everywhere. It took seven days to collect the individual shots - seventy-eight pieces of film (Hitchcock could stipulate the exact number for interviewers). Pat Hitchcock O'Connell has said that her mother conceived the precise order of the images. Saul Bass later claimed that he was on the set and actually directed the scene, though of course he didn't - yet it was possible, if unprovable, that Bass was nearby (it would have been like Hitchcock to keep him around).

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The hardest shot was the last one of Marion, dead, "starting with the eye in full frame and gradually easing back to disclose the draped body still clutching the torn curtain, the running water, the entire bathroom," in Leigh's words. They filmed it some twenty times before Hitchcock was satisfied - and then during the postproduction, according to legend, Mrs. Hitchcock detected a blink from the actress, and a freeze shot was ordered.

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Norman Bates, of course, was Marion's costar in that scene. But Anthony Perkins had been let off for the week; he was safely on the East Coast when the shower scene was filmed. The knife-wielding Mother was actually a costumed "double" - stuntwoman Margo Epper. Hitchcock deployed slow motion to cover Leigh's breasts - "the slow shots," the director told Francois Truffaut, then "inserted in the montage so as to give an impression of normal speed." Leigh's lifeless eye was optically enlarged in postproduction, according to Rebello's book, "so that orb appeared to be a perfect 'fit' in the bathtub drain as his camera spiraled down the drain." All of Hitchcock's long experience and magicians hip went into these, his most spectacular forty-five seconds of terrifying illusion.

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After a Christmas break filming resumed on the second half of the film, with Arbogast going to meet Mother and meeting his maker instead, and Lila stumbling upon Mother in the basement.

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Mother herself was a piece of elaborate Hitchcockery. For the film to work, audiences had to think Mother was alive, right up to the climax. Paul Jasmin, an actor friend of Anthony Perkins, offered up his talent for doing an old-lady, Marjorie Main kind of voice; when Mother spoke, sometimes it was Jasmin, sometimes lines that had been looped by actresses Virginia Gregg or Jeanette Nolan (John Mclntire's wife). Hitchcock spliced and melded the voices together, keeping moviegoers guessing until Mother's actual "appearance" as a mummified corpse in a rocking chair. That bit of stagecraft was even more troublesome than the shower sequence.

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"First of all it was very difficult to get Mother to turn," Hilton Green recalled. "A prop man had to be squatting down on the back of his heels, out of sight, turning the chair in unison with the hitting of the light bulb, in sync with the movement of the camera. Trying to get all of that in one precise moment proved extremely tough. Oh, I've never seen Hitch so furious. He looked at the dailies and it wasn't the way he wanted." They had to try it again.

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Only the last voice, with Bates sitting forlornly in jail, his mind subsumed by Mother, is entirely female: "Virginia, with probably a little of Jeanette spliced in," according to Jasmin.

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Hitchcock paid more attention to Mother, some people involved in the production thought, than to Lila and Sam. Joseph Stefano kept arguing that the stars of Part 2 of Psycho deserved "a few seconds of silent memory" at the end, reflecting on what had happened to Marion, but the director was reluctant to stir the ashes. In order to keep the pace moving he cut dialogue Stefano had written for the pair, expressing their feelings of loss.

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That may be one defect of Psycho, and especially of the final scene (among the last Hitchcock filmed, in late January 1960): the psychiatrist's monologue dissecting the psyche of Norman Bates. The scripted version of sequence included exteriors outside the police building, a television crew broadcasting news of Bates's arrest, and a patrolman holding crowds back. Inside, an errand boy brings take-out coffee into the office of the Chief of Police. Sam asks Lila, "It's regular, okay?" and Lila answers pointedly, "I could stand something regular," followed by small talk that would give audiences a chance to decompress.

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Hitchcock didn't want the audience of Psycho to decompress. He wanted the final crescendo, then a quick coda. He shot the coda sequence virtually as scripted, before deciding to eliminate the atmosphere and small talk and focus purely on the psychiatric explanation of Norman's pathological relationship with his mother. Sam and Lila received only terse cutaways. After Simon Oakland, a smooth, authoritative actor, breezed through his lines, Hitchcock brought two months of photography on Psycho to a close on February 1, 1960.

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Patrick McGilligan "Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light" (2003)

Butchered to make a Roman Holiday

(Byron)

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I don't know if you're at all familiar with Florence.? Well, it's got nothing to do with it, but I thought it was a very good opening.

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Well, there's a housing estate just outside Welling Garden City. And a brand new housing estate, on which there dwelled a family: a wife and a husband.? And the wife was very petite, well-spoken, nicely mannered girl, known to her associates as Butch.

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And she had great troubles at this place because the roads weren't made, and there was a manhole outside her house in which her husband, when coming home from the fish shop? (and he frequented the OTHER place, Holmes's place) used to fall in regularly every night.

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And she badgered the county council to put a lid on this manhole so he wouldn't fall down. But they wouldn't, so she made one of her own, by cutting up an old boiler, which she had. And she put this manhole down over this open manhole.

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And of course, I don't know if you know anything about housing estates, but you can't DO that.? And they said, "You're interfering with the amenities."?

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The Amenities were the people living next door.? And they didn't want a manhole. And they asked this lady, Butch, and her husband to leave.

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And some neighbors were discussing it, and they said, "Why did nice lady called Butch leave?"

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And they said, "They made her leave because she made her own manhole in it."

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"Oh, Butch erred to make her own manhole lid, eh" which if you say it quickly, it sounds like "Butchered to make a Roman Holiday."

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I must point out it doesn't sound VERY much like it now that I come to think of it.

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Denis Norden 580625b

I love my partner, but the rumbling snores keep me awake. Any solutions for people like us?

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Sharing a bed with someone who snores can be a challenge. It's also a common one — up to half of adults in the United States snore regularly, some data suggests, and their partners can suffer. Experts say the first step to getting some rest is understanding what's causing the noise.

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When the muscles that keep your airway open become relaxed while you sleep, your airway can narrow, causing the soft tissues in your throat to vibrate with each breath, said Daniel Vena, an assistant professor of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School.

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"Those muscles go to sleep when you go to sleep," Dr. Vena said. Also, people who are overweight tend to snore because extra tissues in the tongue and throat can hinder airflow, he said.

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Congestion can also constrict an airway; some people snore because of a cold or allergies, said Dr. Kuljeet K. Gill, a clinical assistant professor of sleep medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

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For partners who snore regularly, the first step is to rule out obstructive sleep apnea. This is a potentially serious condition that occurs when the airway collapses enough during sleep that it blocks airflow, temporarily pausing breathing and causing people to wake up gasping for air. Untreated, sleep apnea can increase the risk for heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and certain cancers.

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Most people with sleep apnea snore, Dr. Vena said. But not all people who snore have sleep apnea, so get a proper diagnosis. A sleep specialist or an ear, nose and throat doctor should be able to help, said Dr. Omar G. Ahmed, an E.N.T. sleep surgeon at Houston Methodist Hospital. Lifestyle changes like losing weight or quitting smoking — or the use of continuous positive airway pressure machines — may also curtail snoring.

in addition, consider these tips:

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DISCOURAGE MOUTH BREATHING

If your partner has a blocked nose, he or she is probably breathing through the mouth instead, Dr. Gill said. That can lead to snoring, she added. To promote nose breathing while sleeping, your partner can apply nasal strips or clear the sinuses with a nasal rinse before bed. If there's a more permanent blockage, like a deviated septum or nasal polyps, surgery might be an option, Dr. Ahmed said.

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PROMOTE SIDE SLEEPING When sleeping on your back, gravity can cause your airway to narrow, which results in snoring, Dr. Vena said. To help your partner, try placing firm pillows behind his or her back, said Heather E. Gunn, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Alabama. Or you can make rolling over uncomfortable by sewing or taping tennis balls or other objects onto the back of a shirt, said Wendy Troxel, a senior behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation, a think tank whose research includes public health.

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TUNE OUT THE SOUND Covering your ear with a pillow is one way to stifle the noise, but you'd most likely need to adjust it during the night, Dr. Gunn said. Instead, try wearing earplugs, running a fan or playing white noise, she said.

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TRY A SLEEP DIVORCE If all else fails, try sleeping separately from your partner, perhaps in a spare bedroom (if you have one) or on the couch. A "sleep divorce" might seem bad for your relationship at first, Dr. Gunn said. But inadequate rest can also sink a relationship, Dr. Troxel said. Offset the time apart with quality time together during the day.

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Caroline Hopkins Legaspi

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What Baskerville might equally enjoy is a young Australian woman who calls herself Mrs Eaves and likes nothing more than to write all over her body in black marker pen and post the results on YouTube. The most popular video features Mrs Eaves (real name Gemma O'Brien) in gym gear, which leaves a lot of room to inscribe 'Write Here, Right Now' in different letter styles on her flesh, to the accompaniment of the Fatboy Slim song of almost the same name. She sums up her work thus: 'eight hours writing, five marker pens, three baths and two showers'.

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Simon Garfield "Just My Type" (2010)

Katayama gave a small party in March 1964, when total Nissan sales reached five hundred a month, the target that had been set when the company first opened its American operation. Gradually there was a little money for advertising. In the beginning there had been by American standards virtually nothing, simple black-and-white brochures printed in Tokyo with florid English-language descriptions of the cars. Katayama hired a Los Angeles advertising man named John Parker because he was young, did not cost much, and seemed bright. Parker was delighted to take the Nissan account, unlikely though the future for it seemed, because it? offered a rare entry into the automobile field. In the beginning it was fairl primitive work, convincing Tokyo, for example, that its handouts should be printed in America. The budgets were tiny perhaps $50,000 a year at the start. When Nissan needed to shoot still photos for advertising, Parker, his wife, and their son and daughter had served as models. For a long time there was no money for television. The first television commercial was shot in 1963 for a four-wheel-drive wagon called the Nissan Patrol. Parker had no television studio in his company and no film equipment. Hiring a friend who was an L.A. police photographer and who had a 16mm camera, he drove a Patrol into the canyons and they shot a sixty-second commercial for the vehicle; to save money Parker himself was again the model, his film debut. The next year they heard that Roy Rogers, the cowboy actor, liked the Nissan Patrol, and Parker called him up and asked him to do the company's first full-fledged commercial. "I can't offer you any money, Roy," Parker said, "but we'll give you a Patrol, two pickups, and all the glory a man could want." To his surprise Rogers was delighted to participate.? As the cars began to sell, there began to be a budget for TV ads.

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In the fall of 1964 Datsun made it into the list of the to ten importers for the first time, a list absolutely dominated by Volkswagen. VW had 63 percent of the import market with 307,000 cars sold, an average of over 25,000 a month. In July of 1965 Datsun's sales reached 1000 a month. Back in Japan sales were rising quickly, which allowed Nissan to keep cutting the price; success was begetting success. The American market now looked more and more promising, though VW still appeared awesome. Steadily Nissan and then Toyota gained on the other imports. In 1966 Nissan was sixth with total sales of 22,000,

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David Halberstam "The Reckoning" (1987)

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IN INTERVIEWS YOU CLAIMED NO KNOWLEDGE OF ABEL FERRARA AND HIS ORIGINAL BAD LIEUTENANT.

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Until this very day I haven't seen his film, nor any of his work. A few years after my Bad Lieutenant came out I met Ferrara for the first time, at a film festival, and though we sat down to talk, we didn't do it over a drink because apparently he has problems with alcohol, and I had no desire to provoke anything. It was actually wonderful that even before I started making the film there was accompanying thunder from this man, who said he hoped I would rot in Hell for remaking his film. It was good music in the background, like the manager of a baseball team running out to the umpire, standing five inches from his face, yelling and kicking up dust. That's what people really want to see. At that meeting with Ferrara we laughed so much I barely recall what we talked about.

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I agreed to do Bad Lieutenant only after the screenwriter, William Finkelstein, gave me a solemn oath his script wasn't a remake. The only thing that connects my film to Ferrara's is that one of the producers owned the rights to the title and was interested in starting a franchise; it was never a question of different "versions." The two films have nothing to do with each other, and the title - which was forced upon me: and which I told the producers would waft after the film like a bad smell - is misleading. Calling it a remake is like saying Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ is a remake of Pasolini's The Gospel According to St Matthew, though practitioners of "film studies" will surely be ecstatic to find a reference or two in my film to Ferrara's. I call upon the pedantic theoreticians of cmerna to chase after such things. Go for it, losers.

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The producers sent the script to my agent, but when it comes to negotiating contracts I prefer doing things myself, and chose to face them and their henchmen man to man. At our first meeting I sat with five people from the production company. My first question was, "Are any of you legal counsel for the production?" one of them identified himself. I asked him to stay in the room but not participate in the discussion, then said, "What I have to say here isn't the invention of some industry agent who is trying to sound important. I represent myself here. If you want to be in business with me, I need certain indisputable prerequisites. I decide who the cameraman, editor and composer of this film will be." They quickly accepted this, then asked me for my rate. "What do you mean by 'rate'?" I said. "How much do you get for directing a film?" they said. "What's your price?" My response to such a ridiculous question was the most coherent I could muster: "I'm priceless." How can I answer a question like that in any other way? With a film like The Wild Blue Yonder I paid myself virtually nothing and used mostly my own money, but with Bad Lieutenant I quoted them an exorbitant figure, immediately adding, "I guarantee you I'll finish this film under budget, so in effect you'll be saving money." The main producer wanted to shake on it immediately, but I resisted. I prefer the overnight rule. "If I have a contract in my hands at eight o'clock tomorrow morning," I told them, "we have a deal." I have a general understanding of Hollywood: if you don't have a deal in two days, you won't have it in two years either. The next morning a messenger was at my house with a signed contract, which I looked at carefully for a few minutes, signed without telephoning a lawyer, then handed back for delivery to the producers.

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I appreciate the value of money and know how to keep costs down because I've been my own producer for so many years. If it's your own money, you had better learn to look after it. I demanded a say on the size of the crew and asked for daily access to the cash flow, which the producers acceded to. I needed to know if I could afford another half a dozen police cars in this shot or twenty more extras in that sequence. People often throw money at problems, but I have always preferred to use vigilance and flexibility in advance, diffusing situations that have a tendency to become problems. I put an end to things like having duplicate costumes for actors with only a few lines and waived my right to a trailer, a personal assistant and - that awful status symbol - a director's chair. "I just saved you $65," I told the producers. The completion-bond guarantor visited the set during production to see how things were going. "You charge hundreds of thousands of dollars to guarantee that this film will be completed, which makes you a complete waste of money," I said to him. "I am the guarantee that this film will be delivered on time and on budget."

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I met with Eva Mendes in a New York hotel and won her over by joking about her not bringing her dog's psychiatrist to the set. Eva eventually showed up with only two people: a make-up woman and a chauffeur, who doubled as her bodyguard. Nicolas Cage's entourage was similarly small. I had very little time for pre-production and in three weeks scouted forty locations, cast thirty-five speaking roles, put together a crew and production office, and did the required set design. Every penny of the budget showed up on the screen. I know what I want and shoot only that, and on most days we were finished at three or four o'clock in the afternoon. I would do a couple of takes, then move on. The crew weren't used to my method of working and at the start of the shoot suggested I get more shots so I would have more editing options, but I told them we didn't need any of that. "Finally," said Nicolas, "someone who knows what he's doing." We finished two days ahead schedule and $2.6 million under budget. That's unheard of in Hollywood, and it meant I earned a bonus. I delivered the finished film two weeks after principal photography was completed. The producer wanted to marry me, and immediately offered me half a dozen other projects.

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WHAT CONTRIBUTION DID YOU MAKE TO THE SCREENPLAY?

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The script is Finkelstein's, but as usual it kept shifting, demanding its own life, and I invented several new scenes full of what we might call "Herzogian" moments. The opening sequence was originally a man jumping in front of a New York subway train and the lieutenant saving him, but New Orleans has no subway. I wanted the story to start in the most debased way possible, and came up with the new beginning of the two detectives placing bets on how long it will take for the prisoner to drown. In that scene - for which Finkelstein wrote the dialogue - we initially used fresh water, but it looked too clean, so the set designer added dye, but that turned the water toxic. Someone had the idea of using instant coffee, but that would have been dangerous for the actors because caffeine seeps through skin and would probably have induced cardiac arrest. In the end we dumped two and a half thousand pounds of decaffeinated coffee powder into the water.

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I added other moments, like the dancing soul and the alligator lying, run over, in the middle of the road with a nylon fish line attached to its leg, which I tugged on from off screen, so it looks as if the creature is still twitching. The iguanas, which the bad lieutenant sees thanks to the drug haze he is under, were my idea. There is nothing more wondrous than seeing Nicolas Cage and a lizard together in one shot. I was walking through the city and saw one of these creatures sitting up in a tree. "I need two of them," I told one of the producers. I filmed them myself in a thoroughly demented way, using a dirty lens at the end of a fibre-optic cable. Everyone on set asked me what the meaning of the shot was. "I have no idea," I said, "but It's going to be big." One of these little monsters bit into my thumb; its jaws were a steel vice. I struggled to shake it off as the entire crew laughed hysterically.

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Werner Herzog? "Werner Herzog A Guide For The Perplexed" (2015)

Music and Math Thinkers

Patterns instead of pictures dominate the thinking processes of these children. Both music and math are a world of patterns, and children who think this way can have strong associative abilities. They like finding relationships between numbers or musical notes; some children may have savant-type calculation skills or be able to play a piece of music after hearing it just once. Musical talent often emerges without formal instruction. Many of these children can teach themselves if keyboards and other instruments are available. When they grow up, pattern thinkers are often very good at computer programming, engineering, or music. Some of these children should be advanced several grades ahead in math, depending on their abilities, but they may need special education in reading, which may lag behind.

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Verbal Thinkers

These children love lists and numbers. Often they will memorize bus timetables and events in history. Interest areas often include history, geography, weather, and sports statistics. They are not visual thinkers. Parents and teachers can use these interests and talents as motivation for learning less-interesting parts of academics. Some verbal thinkers are whizzes at learning many different foreign languages. I know individuals with verbal thinking skills who have been successfully employed in sales, stage acting, accounting, factual/technical writing, and pharmacology.

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The thinking patterns of individuals with ASD are markedly different from the way "normal" people think. Because of this, too much emphasis is placed on what they "can't do" and opportunities to capitalize on their different, but often creative and novel, ways of thinking fall by the wayside. While impairments and challenges do exist, greater progress can be made teaching these individuals when parents and teachers work on building the child's strengths and teach in a manner aligned with their basic pattern of thinking.

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Temple Grandin "The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism & Asperger's" (2011)

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Another souvenir Hitchcock brought back from Germany was the playful tyranny in his persona; a tyranny that was very German, mingled with playfulness that was very much his own.

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At Elstree in the late 1920s emerge the first eyewitness accounts of a director who sometimes ruled the set like a fuhrer, manipulating the people and the atmosphere the way he manipulated pieces of film - achieving darkness or light according to his mood.

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To get what he wanted on film, he was capable of behaving like a dictator, or a circus clown. Like other tales of Hitchcock hubris, these stories have grown and been exaggerated over the years. The penchant for elaborate, sometimes borderline-ugly practical jokes was widespread during this era. Hitchcock was not the only practical joker at B.I.P (or, later, Gaumont); the trend was industrywide. People say, for example, that whenever Monta Bell - an American who was "literary editor" of Chaplin's Woman in Paris before turning director - was on the lot, the madness was rife.

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Sometimes Hitchcock's "odd behavior" was simply good publicity.

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Teatime, for example, was a treasured afternoon break, and so it was fodder for the columnists when Hitchcock took to hurling crockery over his shoulder, signaling "Back to work!" after drinking his cuppa. "I always do it when I'm feeling good," Hitchcock explained one time. "I like to get up onto a high rostrum with a camera, and tip the tray over. Or push cups over the edge of a platform. Or just open my hand and let the whole thing drop. Wouldn't you?"

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The first time he did it, Hitchcock told the press, one of his favorite crew members split his sides with laughter - a sure invitation to repeat performances. Soon he was expected to smash all his teacups. Such eccentricity woke people up, and made for an exclamation mark in an otherwise humdrum day. The crew relished it, which was sensible policy.

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Hitchcock also hated uninvited visitors to the set, especially members of the general public on courtesy tours (ironic considering his later association with Universal Studios, packager of the most lucrative studio tour in film history). So, when such tours materialized, Hitchcock would switch to German, shouting curses and obscenities - all the more amusing when the visitors were priests accompanied by ecclesiastical students.

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Most of his practical jokes were innocent: hosting formal dinners with all the food tinged with blue coloring, placing whoopee cushions under the hinds of stuffy guests, plying uptight people with strong drink and watching as they came unglued. Some were elaborate and expensive: tying quantities of kippers onto the bumpers of a victim's fancy car, ordering a load of coal to be dumped on someone's front doorsill.

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But practical joking was also a matter of one-upmanship - a game Hitchcock was driven to win at all costs. Assistant cameraman Alfred Roome recalled how the director used to poke fun at his posh, beetle-size Austin-Healey, and one day requisitioned the car for a conference with floor manager Richard "Dickie" Beville. Both hefty men, Hitchcock and Beville squeezed inside the vehicle, pointedly annoying Roome, who felt his private vehicle ought to be off-limits. Roome went in search of a smoke pot, found one in storage, placed it underneath the Austin-Healey, and then lit the fuse. "You never saw two fat men get out of a car quicker," recalled Roome. "Hitch never tried anything again on me. He respected you if you hit back. If you didn't, he'd have another go."

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No question, some of his jokes had a bullying quality that disturbed people. Actors he didn't like or considered "phony" were special targets for sarcasm or pranks. Hitchcock said defensively in a 1972 televised interview that he never meant to harm or denigrate anyone. But everyone knew his jokes were at their worst when a film wasn't going right.

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Oh, my son couldn't be a murderer, Bruno's mother (Marion Lorne) exclaims in Strangers on a Train; it must be one of his practical jokes. "Sometimes he goes a little too far," she sighs.

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People reflexively cite the case of Dickie Beville. Beville always seemed to suffer the worst, most humiliating Hitchcock persecution. One notorious time, Hitchcock bet Beville he couldn't last a night in handcuffs. Before Hitchcock locked the cuffs, however, he tricked Beville into drinking coffee laced with a strong laxative. Even though there are wildly conflicting versions of this anecdote - the only consistent touch is the handcuffs - the story is widely accepted as gospel in English film annals. Poor Beville, it is said, spent a long diarrheic night, thanks to cruel Hitchcock.? (Typical of the wild, disparate versions, cinematographer Jack Cardiff wrote in his autobiography that man's name was Harry, the laxative was in his beer, and after Harry was sodden and soiled he was pushed out of his car by Hitchcock "in the middle of nowhere," leading to Harry's arrest "on suspicion of being an escaped convict.")

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Patrick McGilligan "Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light" (2003)

A Carpenter's known by his chips

(Swift)

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My story starts in a lonely, rather deserted street in a town not a thousand miles from Piccadilly Circus.? Wandsworth actually.? It's a borough isn't it, not a town, but never mind.

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There were two fried fish shops in this street.? Follow me very carefully here.?? One was run by a chap called Charlie Holmes.? And these fish shops were in deadly rivalry

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And Charlie Holmes suddenly got all the trade because he'd put a big neon sign outside his fish shop saying, "There's no place like Holmes's"

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And he got all the trade.? And this other chap, old Alf Carpenter, he was absolutely furious at this, so he said to his staff.? He only had one staff because they were very small shops, and his staff was the batter man, a chap called Gunga Din.

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He said to Gunga Din, "Now if you can think of a slogan for my shop that will get all the trade back and I'll make you the chipper."

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Now although Holmes's place was undoubtedly very good, Old Alf was a very good buyer of spuds.

And he really did you a very crisp chip

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And actually that was the idea that gave Gunga Din the slogan that now Carpenter, of course, sought out, now has all the trade, because there's now a big neon sign outside his shop that says, "A Carpenter is known by his chips."

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Frank Muir 580625a

download at http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?wuibf89ixw5wk3f

I love my partner, but the rumbling snores keep me awake. Any solutions for people like us?

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Sharing a bed with someone who snores can be a challenge. It's also a common one — up to half of adults in the United States snore regularly, some data suggests, and their partners can suffer. Experts say the first step to getting some rest is understanding what's causing the noise.

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When the muscles that keep your airway open become relaxed while you sleep, your airway can narrow, causing the soft tissues in your throat to vibrate with each breath, said Daniel Vena, an assistant professor of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School.

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"Those muscles go to sleep when you go to sleep," Dr. Vena said. Also, people who are overweight tend to snore because extra tissues in the tongue and throat can hinder airflow, he said.

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Congestion can also constrict an airway; some people snore because of a cold or allergies, said Dr. Kuljeet K. Gill, a clinical assistant professor of sleep medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

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For partners who snore regularly, the first step is to rule out obstructive sleep apnea. This is a potentially serious condition that occurs when the airway collapses enough during sleep that it blocks airflow, temporarily pausing breathing and causing people to wake up gasping for air. Untreated, sleep apnea can increase the risk for heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and certain cancers.

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Most people with sleep apnea snore, Dr. Vena said. But not all people who snore have sleep apnea, so get a proper diagnosis. A sleep specialist or an ear, nose and throat doctor should be able to help, said Dr. Omar G. Ahmed, an E.N.T. sleep surgeon at Houston Methodist Hospital. Lifestyle changes like losing weight or quitting smoking — or the use of continuous positive airway pressure machines — may also curtail snoring.

in addition, consider these tips:

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DISCOURAGE MOUTH BREATHING

If your partner has a blocked nose, he or she is probably breathing through the mouth instead, Dr. Gill said. That can lead to snoring, she added. To promote nose breathing while sleeping, your partner can apply nasal strips or clear the sinuses with a nasal rinse before bed. If there's a more permanent blockage, like a deviated septum or nasal polyps, surgery might be an option, Dr. Ahmed said.

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PROMOTE SIDE SLEEPING When sleeping on your back, gravity can cause your airway to narrow, which results in snoring, Dr. Vena said. To help your partner, try placing firm pillows behind his or her back, said Heather E. Gunn, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Alabama. Or you can make rolling over uncomfortable by sewing or taping tennis balls or other objects onto the back of a shirt, said Wendy Troxel, a senior behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation, a think tank whose research includes public health.

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TUNE OUT THE SOUND Covering your ear with a pillow is one way to stifle the noise, but you'd most likely need to adjust it during the night, Dr. Gunn said. Instead, try wearing earplugs, running a fan or playing white noise, she said.

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TRY A SLEEP DIVORCE If all else fails, try sleeping separately from your partner, perhaps in a spare bedroom (if you have one) or on the couch. A "sleep divorce" might seem bad for your relationship at first, Dr. Gunn said. But inadequate rest can also sink a relationship, Dr. Troxel said. Offset the time apart with quality time together during the day.

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Caroline Hopkins Legaspi

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Much of what one needs to know about the history and beauty of a font may be found in its ampersand. Done well, an & is not so much a character as a creature, an animal from the deep. Or it is a character in the other sense of the word, usually a tirelessly entertaining one, perhaps an uncle with too many magic tricks.

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Although long treated as a single character or glyph, the ampersand is actually two letters combined - the e and the t of the Latin 'et' (the word ampersand is a conflation of 'et, per se and'). It is the result of scribes working fast: its first use is usually credited to a shorthand writing method proposed by Marcus Tiro in 63 BC.

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The biggest and most noble demonstration of its unifying potential came in early 2010, when the Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA) released 'Coming Together', a font consisting of 483 different ampersands. This cost $20, with all proceeds going to Doctors Without Borders to assist with the Haiti earthquake appeal. Almost four hundred designers from thirty-seven countries contributed one or more glyphs, ranging from the Caslon-esque to the almost unrecognizable. It was the fourth FontAid event, the first three benefiting Unicef (26 letter pairs), the families of victims of September 11 (a collection of question marks) and those affected by the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami (400 floral ornaments known as fleurons).

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Coming Together swiftly became a bestseller at the digital font agencies that offered it. This is the best thing about the ampersand - its energy, its refusal to sit still. It is almost impossible to look at one and not think about its shape, or to draw one and not think about liberation.

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Simon Garfield "Just My Type" (2010)

He hated waste, and he felt that America had become a wasteful country, not only of its abundant natural resources but also of its human talents. It was a nation, he believed, about to squander its exceptional blessings. He mocked American management, finding it responsible for most of the nation's woes, and he liked to tell audiences that the one thing this country must never do is export its managerial class - at least to friendly nations. He had little tolerance for fools (and he thought most American managers fools), especially those who pretended to care about his principles but had no intention of changing their ways. He was for most of his career virtually unknown in America, a prophet without honor in his own land, but he was one of the most important figures of the second industrial revolution, that is, the challenge of East Asia to the West. As much as any man he gave the Japanese the system that allowed them to maximize their greatest natural strength, their manpower. His system for quality control provided them with a series of industrial disciplines mathematically defined, and with a manner of group participation that fitted well with the traditions of their culture. It was in essence a mathematical means of controlling the level of quality on an industrial line by seeking ever finer manufacturing tolerances.

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What Deming and the other leading American authority on quality control, Joseph Juran, were telling the Japanese was that quality was not some minor function that could be accomplished by having some of the workers at the lowest levels attend a class or two, or by appointing a certain number of inspectors to keep an eye on things. True quality demanded a totality of commitment that began at the very top; if top management was committed to the idea of quality and if executive promotions were tied to quality, then the priority would seep down into the middle and lower levels of management, and thus inevitably to me workers. It could not, as so many American companies seemed to expect, be imposed at the bottom. American companies could not appoint some medium-level executive, usually one whom no division of the company particularly wanted, and, for lack of something better to do with him, put him in charge of something called quality. The first thing that an executive like that would do, Deming said, and quite possibly the only thing, was to come up with slogans and display them on banners. If the company treated quality as a gimmick or an afterthought, then true quality would never result. Above all, he was saying, quality had to be central to the purpose of a company.

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The America of the fifties and sixties had scorned Deming and his teaching and in effect driven him abroad to find his students. America in those years was rich and unchallenged, the customers seemed satisfied, and in most important fields there were few competing foreign products against which a buyer might judge the quality of an American product and find it wanting. The theory of management then asserting itself in American business was a new one: managers should no longer be OF the plant. They should come from the managerial class, as it arrived from the best colleges and business schools, and they should view management as a modern science. Their experience should not be practical, as it had been in previous generations, but abstract. Practical experience was, if anything, a handicap. They were not men who knew the factory floor, nor did the people on their boards of directors know it either. ?Later, after Japan became immensely successful, too much was made, Deming thought, of the fact that an ordinary Japanese worker had a lifetime contract with his company; too little was made of the fact that the Japanese manager had a comparable contract – he would stay the course, remain absolutely loyal to the company and thus to the product, and his restraint on his ambition might be its own reward. Too little was also made, Deming believed, of that fact that the Japanese manager's roots were typically in science and engineering, as were those of the men on the board of directors that judged him, while the American manager came from a business or law school, as did the board that judged HIM.

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Nothing appalled Deming more than the idea of the interchangeable manager. "What is the motivation and purpose of men like this?" he would say with contempt. "Do they even know what they do anymore? What do they produce?" All about was numbers, not product. All they thought about was maximum profit, not excellence of product. The numbers, of course, he added, always lied. "They know all the visible numbers, but the visible numbers tell them so little. They know nothing of the invisible numbers. Who can put a price on a satisfied customer, and who can figure out the cost of a dissatisfied customer?" One of Deming's American disciples, Ron Moen, said it was as if Deming saw work as a kind of zen experience. "What he is really asking," Moen pointed out, "is 'What is the purpose of life, and what is the purpose of work? Why are you doing this? Who truly benefits from what you do other than yourself?' Those are not questions that many people in American business want to answer anymore."

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David Halberstam "The Reckoning" (1987)

WHAT PREPARATION DID YOU DO FOR FILMING IN THE JUNGLE?

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The calibre of some films is decided by pre-production, and preproduction on Aguirre was meticulous. Before I took the crew into the jungle I bought the most primitive and cheapest of cameras - some tiny Super 8" plastic thing with a wide-angle lens which I couldn't even focus - and went to Peru, where I scouted locations. It was the first time I had ever been in the jungle. I did reconnaissance on a small steamboat, then had a nimble balsa raft constructed. For several weeks an oarsman and I drifted down the Urubamba, Nanay and Huallaga tributaries, sleeping on hammocks and rarely leaving the raft. From the first to the last tributary was a distance of nearly fifteen hundred miles. I was trying to develop a feeling for the river's currents, searching for those that looked spectacular but weren't too dangerous. Several stretches were clearly too hazardous for a film crew. At one point the raft struck some rocks and was split in two. The half we were on became caught in a whirlpool; what saved us was getting stuck in a strong current and being swept several miles away. It would have been a disaster to have made the film without having gone down there beforehand to test things out. It was crucial to be in physical contact with the rapids before I started filming, not unlike a few years before, when I took the actors and crew around the fortress before we shot Signs of Life. I had to create some tactile connection to the place, and wanted everyone to be familiar with the environment before we started filming. "We aren't going to pull out the equipment for at least two days," I said, and asked them to walk around, touching the walls and feeling the smooth surfaces, which is how I had experienced the fortress myself when I first encountered it as a teenager.

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Peru was governed by a military dictatorship it the time we made Aguirre, but a left-wing one that had nationalised various industries and instituted a vast land-reform programme. President Juan Velasco Alvarado was of Native Indian descent and controlled a regime very different to those of people like Stroessner in Paraguay and Pinochet in Chile. We weren't offered much assistance by the Peruvian government, though the army supplied us with an amphibian aircraft and established a radio station, which meant we could be in contact with the nearest big city, providing the electricity didn't fail. Shooting permits were needed, otherwise showing up at conspicuous places like Machu Picchu would have been problematic. The government representatives we worked with appreciated that the strongest force in Aguirre is the Native Indians with their ancient heritage, fighting the imperialist invaders. They are the ones who ultimately survive, not the plundering Spanish conquistadors.

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Once production started, we built an encampment for 450 people on Rio Urubamba, including the 270 Indians from the mountains who acted as extras. It was so big I decided it needed a name, so I called it Pelicula a Muerte [Film or Death], which is a joke version of the Cubans' cry of "Patria a muerte" at the Bay of Pigs. For a time I slept in a nearby hut owned by a hunchback dwarf, her nine children and more than a hundred guinea pigs, which crawled all over me. We eventually moved to Rio Huallaga, but with a much smaller group of extras because throughout the story so many characters drop away like flies. Filming took about six weeks, including a whole week lost when we took the cast and crew from one tributary to another, a distance of more than a thousand miles.

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Once we arrived at Rio Nanay we lived on rafts that had been especially built. There were less than ten in total, and on each was a small hut with a thatched roof and hammocks inside. We weren't able to set foot on dry land because in the flat lowlands the jungle was flooded for miles around, so at night we tied the rafts to overhanging branches. They floated in a convoy about a mile behind the one we were shooting on, which meant we could film the river without having any other rafts in shot. Once filming was done for the day, we would tie up and wait for this floating village to arrive, including the raft that was used exclusively as a kitchen.

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IN ONE SCENE THE RAFTS PASS THROUGH THE RAPIDS.

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It took only two minutes, or even less, and we absolutely had get to those shots the first time around. The wooden rafts were extremely solid, constructed by the Indians, who were expert builders, and also had several excellent rowers. Having said that, sometimes they were drunk and wse had no control over where they were going. With Aguirre the audience can feel the authenticity of the situations the actors are in, but there was never any danger because everyone - including the Indian rowers - was attached by cords, which you can see if you look carefully. Cameraman Thomas Mauch and I were the only people moving freely.

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The scene where the soldiers get caught in the whirlpool and are found dead the following morning was especially difficult to shoot because the flow of the river was so fast and violent. At the end of the day we lowered ropes down to the actors from the cliff above, which they attached to themselves, and we pulled them up. The next morning the raft was still there, wrestling with the fierce counter-current. The extras - who were paid more than everyone else - were proud of themselves once they reached safety, though they were vomiting because of the raft's incessant spinning. At one point I was standing on the cliff looking down at the water; the rocks were slippery, so I grabbed a branch to stop myself from sliding. I could see it was covered in fire ants, but stupid as I am I swung my machete to chop the thing off. All that did was shake it violently, and hundreds of these ants rained down on me. I was bitten all over and ended up in bed for two days with a serious fever.

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Later, at a much calmer bend on Rio Urubamba, we found a cable strung across the river, with a primitive platform attached to it. The rope needed to pull the platform to either side was missing, so my production co-ordinator Walter Saxer and I decided to swim across, carrying a rope with us. We also wanted to explore the other side of the river, which looked like an especially beautiful spot. I jumped in and almost immediately saw a whirlpool coming at me. It was moving quickly in a semi-circle and gave off a loud, strange slurping sound. I managed to swim to the other side of the river and then, with the rope in my mouth, swung my arms and legs over the cable and pulled myself towards the platform in the middle of the river. I had a beautiful gold watch in my pocket, one of my most prized possessions at the time, a gift from my first great love. As I was clambering across I felt it slipping, and watched helplessly as it dropped into the water. I was very upset, but at the same time I knew that all these rivers carry gold deposits. "Oh well," I remember thinking to myself. "Gold back to gold."

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HOW MUCH TROUBLE WERE THE MONKEYS IN THE FINAL SEQUENCE?

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That scene was different from the one written in the screenplay, but during my initial scouting of the rivers I befriended a little monkey who would sit on my shoulder. He became a good comrade and I named him after one of my two favourite football players, Di Stefano the brilliant Argentinian. Unfortunately Di Stefano perished because of a stupid mistake I made. I tied him to a metal post because I had to go on land and take care of some things. When I returned three hours later, he was dying because he had wrapped his leash around the post and was dangerously exposed to the sun. He died later that day because of my negligence, so I thought I should honour my little friend with the scene at the end of the film. My other favourite football player of all time, by the way, is Garrincha, a brilliant dribbler.

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I hired local Indians who captured hundreds of savage little monkeys - ?the ones who overrun the raft - but gave them only half the money up front because I knew if I paid full price, the guy organising everything would run off with the cash. Even so, the animals never arrived on set, so we drove out to the airport as quickly as possible. It turned out they had all been resold to an American businessman and were already on an aeroplane waiting to be shipped out to a dealership in Miami. "I'm the veterinarian I yelled to the cargo handlers, making use of the kind of subterfuge that has always been an indispensible element to my filmmaking, "Stop immediately! Where are the vaccination documents for monkeys?" They were caught completely off guard and admitted they had no papers, so we unloaded the animals from the aeroplnae, put them into our truck and sped off. When it actually came to shooting the sequence, the monkeys had some kind of panic attack and bit me all over. I couldn't cry out because we were shooting live sound at that point. Another jumped onto the shoulder of the cameraman Thomas Mauch and started viciously biting his ear. His mouth was wide open but no scream came out. He just kept on filming, endearing himself to me beyond description.

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WHERE DID THE INDIAN EXTRAS COME FROM?

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From a single village high up in the mountains. I travelled there to explain what the film was and what I needed from them, and we ended up hiring almost the entire population, a conscientious group unafraid to carry out the sometimes difficult work. They were well paid compared to what they usually earned. One time, after filming in the mud and swamps, I noticed the Europeans were exhausted and wanted to call a halt for the day, but the Indians asked me why we were stopping. They said it would be even more difficult to continue later on, so why not carryon now and finish the job? I can't say I ever truly understood the Indians, but we were all aware of something we had in common: a mutual respect for work. They were part of a socialist co-operative at Lauramarca, with a real knowledge both of their own history and the current political situation, and understood that their time on the film wasn't useful only for themselves, but for the Indians' cause as a whole.

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One of the extras was a man I encountered at the main square in Cusco, where he would drum on tin cans and play a pan flute, and occasionally make money by selling pairs of scissors. I never knew his real name and I'm not sure he even knew it himself, so everyone called him Hombrecito, which means "Little Man." I liked him so much I asked him to come with us for the shoot. I explained I would pay him well, more than what he would earn in ten years sitting there playing for people. At first he refused, saying that if he were to stop playing in the square, everyone in Cusco would die. He wore three alpaca sweaters at the same time, even when it was unbearably hot and humid; and refused to take them off because he thought they would be stolen. He said they protected him against "the bad breath of the gringos." Hombrecito seemed to carry all the humiliation, oppression and despair of his people on his shoulders. I persuaded him to join us, and he became the crew's mascot; you can see him in the film playing his pan flute. He would take his sweaters and place them carefully in a plastic bag which he hid in the jungle so no one would steal it. Every evening the crew had to hunt around for the bag because Hombrecito could never remember where he put it. Once filming was over, he went back to Cusco's main square, this time wearing three jackets, one on top of the other, which he had bought with his wages.

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We shipped in costumes and props from a rental company in Spam. Jungle transportation wasn't easy to organise because we had to squeeze everything - including all the camera equipment and even the horse - into one big amphibian aeroplane. In the sequence where the soldiers go on shore and raid a village is a single shot of a mummy. My brother Lucki found a real one and flew it in from Lima. It was so fragile he had to buy a separate seat for it, so for the entire journey had this ferocious-looking thing sitting next to him wearing a seat belt.

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DID YOU WRITE THE SCRIPT FOR KLAUS KINSKI?

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I don't need to hole myself up in a monastery or retire to a quiet spot for months on end to write. Most of the screenplay was written on a bus going to Italy with the football team from Munich I played for. By the time we reached Salzburg, only a few hours into the trip, everyone was drunk and singing obscene songs because the team had drunk most of the beer we were bringing as a gift for our opponents. I was sitting with my typewriter on my lap. In fact, I typed the whole thing almost entirely with my left hand because with my right I was trying to fend off our goalie sprawled on the seat next to me. Eventually he vomited over the typewriter. Some of the pages were beyond repair and I had to throw them out of the window. There were some fine scenes lost because I couldn't recall what I had just written. They're long gone. That's life on the road for you.

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Later on, in between football games, I wrote furiously for three days and finished the script. It was written so fast and so spontaneously that I didn't think about who might play the part, but the moment I finished it I knew it was for Kinski and sent it to him immediately. A couple of days later, at three in the morning, I was awoken by the telephone. At first I couldn't figure out what was going on; all I heard were inarticulate screams at the other end of the line. It was Kinski. After about half an hour I managed to filter out from his ranting that he was ecstatic about the screenplay and wanted to play Aguirre.

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My first choice for the role was actually Algerian president Boumediene. Take a look at photos of him from when Algeria won its independence and you'll see why he intrigued me; his physical presence was powerful indeed. Ahmed Ben Bella became president in 1963, but Boumediene was the man behind everything, including running the military. Later he ousted Ben Bella in a coup d'etat and became president. I never pushed the script on him as I figured he had other things to take care of, but if he had been removed from office himself before we started filming I would have offered him the role.

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HOW WAS KINSKI IN THE JUNGLE?

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He arrived with a load of alpine equipment - tents, sleeping bags, crampons, ice axes - because he wanted to expose himself to the wilds of nature. But his ideas about the jungle were rather insipid; mosquitoes and rain weren't allowed in his world. The first night after setting up his tent it started to pour and he got soaked, which set off one of his raving fits. The next day we built a roof of palm fronds above his tent, and eventually moved him and his wife into the only hotel in Machu Picchu. We all drank river water, but Kinski had a constant supply of bottled mineral water.

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He had just cut short his infamous Jesus Christus Erloser tour, scenes of which you can see at the start of My Best Fiend. His plan was to take the show around the world, but the first performance, in Berlin, ended in mayhem after about ten minutes. Kinski was playing the kind of ferocious, revolutionary Jesus who chased the merchants from the temple with a whip, not the kind, tolerant and benevolent Son of God. He lived by styling himself to excess and would adopt the personae of various people. For a time he was Francois Villon, whose poetry he recorded; later Dostoyevsky's idiot; and in the years' before his death he portrayed himself as Paganini. When he arrived in Peru to start filming Aguirre he identified so strongly with his role as a derided, misunderstood Jesus that he would sometimes answer questions in character and scream at me in biblical verse. Every day Kinski could see the problems I was having, yet he continued to create scandals or explode if so much as a mosquito appeared.

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I knew of his reputation, that he was probably the most difficult actor in the world to deal, with; working with Marlon Brando must have been like kindergarten in comparison. While filming a scene he nearly killed an actor when he struck him on the head with his sword. Thankfully the man was wearing a helmet, though he carries a scar to this very day. One evening a group of extras were in their hut; they had been drinking and were making too much noise for Kinski. He screamed and yelled at them to stop laughing, then grabbed his Winchester and fired three bullets through the thin bamboo walls. There were forty-five of them crammed together in this small room, and one had the top of his finger shot off. It was a miracle Kinski didn't kill any of them. I immediately confiscated his rifle, which is one of my big souvenirs. During filming he would insult me every day, sometimes for hours. Kinski had seen Even Dwarfs Started Small, so to him I was the "dwarf director." He screamed in a high-pitched voice in front of everyone, saying it was an insult I would even think about talking to him, the great actor. He insisted he could do everything himself, that being directed by me was like working with a housewife, and shrieked that David Lean and Brecht had left him alone to do his job, so why shouldn't I? "Brecht and Lean?" I said. "Never heard of them." That upset him even more. I was forced to put up with his behaviour, but Kinski never reckoned with my determination to see the Job through. No one tamed him as well as I did.

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Kinski and I agreed on nothing without a struggle. Temperamentally he was forever on the verge of hysteria, but I managed to harness this and turn it to productive ends. Sometimes other methods were necessary. On one occasion, towards the end of the shoot, he was looking for a victim to jump on; it was probably because he didn't know his lines. Suddenly Kinski started shouting like crazy at the sound assistant. "You swine! You were grinning!"

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He insisted I fire the guy on the spot. "I'm not going to do that," I said. "The whole crew would quit out of solidarity." Kinski immediately left the set and started packing his bags, saying he was going to find a speedboat and leave. I went up to him and said, very politely, "Mr Kinski, you will not do this. You will not leave before we are finished here in the jungle. Our work here is more important than either our personal feelings or private lives." Quitting like that would have been a gross violation of his duty to the film, so I told him - quietly and calmly - that I would shoot him if he left. "I have had time to ponder the unthinkable," I said, "and have already made up my mind about this. After months of deliberation I know precisely what line I will not permit you to transgress. I don't need a single second longer to know what must be done. Leaving now is something you will not survive." I told him I had a rifle - it was actually his Winchester - and that he would only make it as far as the next bend in the river before he had eight bullets in his head. The ninth would be for me. Although I didn't have a gun in my hand at that particular moment, he knew it was no joke and screamed for the police like a madman, though the nearest police station was at least three hundred miles away. The police would never have done anything anyway. Over there the laws of the jungle are what count; a few bottles of whisky and a couple of hundred dollars would have been sufficient to dissuade the locals from investigating or have them put the incident down to an unfortunate hunting accident. For the remaining ten days of the shoot Kinski was extremely well behaved. The press later wrote that I directed him from behind the camera with a loaded gun. A beautiful image, but complete fiction.

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Kinski was known for breaking contracts and walking away from a film if he felt like it. During a performance of Goethe's Torquato Tasso he stopped in the middle of a speech, hurled insults at the audience, threw a lit candelabra into the auditorium and wrapped himself in the carpet that was lying on stage. He remained coiled inside until the audience was cleared from the theatre. Before Aguirre he had to have a check-up for insurance reasons. I took him to see a doctor, who asked routine questions about allergies and hereditary diseases, and then: "Mr Kinski, have you ever suffered from fits of any kind?" "YES, EVERY DAY!" screamed

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Kinski at the highest pitch possible, before laying waste to the doctor's office. At one point during filming I reached up to move a strand of hair that was hanging down over his face. "Pardon Mr Kinski," I said, gently brushing it aside. He immediately exploded. "HAVE YOU GONE CRAZY? NOT EVEN MY BARBER IS ALLOWED TO TOUCH MY HAIR. YOU'RE AMATEUR!" The tabloid press adored him, and whenever he appeared on a talk show everyone in the audience would sit on the edge of their seats waiting for him to deliver the scandal. It never took more than a few minutes.

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YOU ADMIRE HIS PERFORMANCE IN THE FILM.

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Absolutely. He was an excellent actor and truly knew how to move on screen. I wanted to give Aguirre a vicious little hump, like a tumour on his shoulder, the size of a fist. I felt there should be differentiation between Aguirre's physicality and everyone the character had to have some kind of inner distortion that would be apparent on the surface. It was Kinski's Idea that Aguirre have a kind of pigeon chest with a slight protrusion, and he decided to make one of his arms appear longer than the other so he would walk lopsidedly. His left arm became so short that his sword wasn't around his waist; it was higher up, almost up into his armpit. He introduced these physical aberrations into the film gradually and precisely, and by the final scene the character is even more deformed. Kinski did it all perfectly, moving almost like crab a walking on sand. As an actor he knew all about costumes, and I learnt a great deal as I watched him oversee every buttonhole and stitch. He wanted a dagger as a prop, as long and thin as a knitting needle. "When I stab someone," he told me, "it has to be malicious. No blood should be shed. My victims bleed to death internally." In the screenplay, to spare her the shame of his defeat, the original idea was that Aguirre kills his daughter with this dagger.

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Having said that, he was a complete scourge and didn't care if Aguirre was ever finished or released. He was interested only in his salary, and once shooting was over he refused to come to Munich and re-record some of his dialogue. About 20 per cent of what we recorded in the jungle was unusable because of the noise from the roaring rapids. What he actually said was: "I'll be there, but it will cost you a million dollars." He was absolutely serious about this, so I had no choice but to hire an actor - who had a lengthy career dubbing Humphrey Bogart into German - to dub Kinski's entire part. He did it with great skill, and years later I heard Kinski raving about how good he was in the German version of Aguirre. For the next film we did together I put into the contract that he was obliged to do a few days of re-recording, though Kinski insisted I could kidnap him, drag him to the studio, sit him in front of a microphone and handcuff him, and he would only sing his lines. Although for a couple of years afterwards he said he hated the film, I know he eventually liked it very much. At times it was clear he recognized and respected the work we did together, and understood that he and I were out to capture things beyond our individual existence, even beyond our collective existence. The man was a complete pestilence and a nightmare, and working with him became about maintaining my dignity under the worst conditions. It's also true that I call every grey hair on my head Kinski. But who cares about such things now? What's important is that the work was done the films were made.

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WHAT WAS THE FILM'S BUDGET?

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Three hundred and seventy thousand dollars, a third of which went to Kinski, so I couldn't afford to take many people with me into the jungle; the entire crew numbered less than ten and we shot only a very small amount of footage in total. Although Kinski later insisted that I dined on caviar every night, sometimes I had to sell my boots just to get breakfast. I was the one who would take a boat out at four in the morning and go downriver to buy some chicken, eggs and yucca, or ate nothing if there wasn't enough food to go around. Like Fitzcarraldo a few years later - where I traded unopened bottles of shampoo and aftershave I had bought in Miami for sacks of rice - Aguirre was a barefoot film, so to speak, a child of poverty. Some of the actors and extras sensed this might be one of the film's virtues, so they never took their costumes off, even though they were full of mould because of the humidity. There is something authentic about the jungle that can never fabricated, and if we had filmed in a studio I would have through burnt the entire budget in three day.

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Werner Herzog? "Werner Herzog A Guide For The Perplexed" (2015)

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About halfway through" shooting Aguirre, it looked as though everything we filmed had been lost in transit to the laboratory in Mexico, where the exposed negative was to be processed. The plan was for everything to be transported to Lima, and from there to Mexico City. Our only form of communication with the lab was a telex machine, but they insisted no negative had been received. Only my brother Lucki and I knew that everything might be irretrievably lost; we told none of the actors or crew because they would have instantly freaked out. We knew it was an absurdity to continue shooting because we had no insurance, so there was no choice but to muster our nerve and carryon with our work. I thought perhaps the lab had accidentally destroyed everything, but had a hunch there was a problem with the shipping company in Lima. They insisted the material had been sent to Mexico, so I asked Lucki to head down there and told him to enter their offices if necessary by force. He eventually scaled a high fence and found all the footage thrown away, scattered inside the sealed-off customs area at Lima airport, baking in the scorching sun. The shipping agency had bribed various airport employees to stamp the documents, which "proved" our negative had left the country. Apparently it was too much trouble to actually send the material. Lucki grabbed everything and took it to Mexico City himself. So I you all now: whenever you have to, Jump the Fence. And if you can't do that, barbed wire is easy enough to get through; just set about it with wire cutters. Razor wire is something else. Find a mattress to cover it before making the leap.

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Werner Herzog? "Werner Herzog A Guide For The Perplexed" (2015)

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Wanger endorsed putting Hitchcock on radio mainly for the promotional value - at that point he and Hitchcock were talking about a long-term association - whereas the Selznick Agency was motivated by the financial considerations. Myron's brother David, as usual, was the chief skeptic. Wasn't radio declasse? Wouldn't a radio series take too much of Hitchcock's time - time better spent on prestigious Selznick films or better-paying loan-outs? And if Hitchcock did apply himself to radio, wouldn't DOS be entitled to his usual cut?

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Throughout the spring of 1940, the director squeezed in meetings and phone calls and memos, dreaming up an Alfred Hitchcock radio series. Radio producer Joe Graham saw Hitchcock as emcee of a weekly anthology program presenting the favorite detective stories of famous people; the first episode, hypothetically, might be based on a story of President Roosevelt's choice. But Hitchcock told Graham he wasn't a fan of detectives per se - he was generally more interested in the victims and criminals – and the concept evolved, after a few meetings, into a series of mystery melodramas of Hitchcock's choosing, with him introducing and producing. The series would be called Suspense.

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But the meetings and preparatory work were suspended after DOS decided he didn't want his director wasting valuable energy on a radio profram over which Selznick International exerted no control, and for which it was unclear who would receive the payment. Myron tried to budge his brother - this is one instance where the agency aggressively pursued Hitchcock's wishes - but, as was becoming typical, without effect. DOS was was adamant: No radio series. Because the contract with DOS was ambiguous when came to nonfilm activity, Hitchcock wasn't convinced it was the producer's prerogative. But lawyers for the director and the agency warned him repeatedly against skirting the contract.

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Shrewdly, then, Hitchcock floated an idea: What if he exercised his acquired rights to The Lodger for radio? Not only would that help him establish a foothold in the broadcast medium, but a well-done radio show would enhance his prospects of remaking the film.

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DOS reluctantly okayed a radio production of The Lodger as a onetime experiment.? Hitchcock borrowed two of the main actors from Foreign Correspondent: Herbert Marshall as Mr. Sleuth (the Lodger) and Edmund Gwenn (whose English currency had helped secure the rights) as the landlord. (This was an in-joke: his brother Arthur Chesney had played the part in Hitchcock's silent film. The Lodger was broadcast as an audition in the Forecast series on July 22, 1940.

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Patrick McGilligan "Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light" (2003)

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Ask NYT Climate

How can I lower my climate risk when buying a house?

?When thinking through your home-buying decision, it's useful to think in terms of two categories of risk, according to Jesse Keenan, a professor at Tulane University who studies the effects of climate change on real estate.

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The first is what could be called climate shocks. As humans burn more fossil fuels, causing global temperatures to increase, extreme weather events like hurricanes, floods and wildfires are becoming more frequent and intense. That means the risk of your house being damaged or destroyed by a disaster is growing over time.

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The second category is climate stresses, Dr. Keenan said. More frequent and severe disasters are forcing local governments to spend more on infrastructure services that are funded largely through property taxes. "Taxes are only going up with climate change," he said.

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Climate stress also affects the cost of home insurance. The amount of money that households paid for insurance rose faster than inflation between 2014 and 2023, according to data compiled by Benjamin Keys, a professor of real estate at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, and Philip Mulder, a professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Business.

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And don't forget the potential effect of climate change on your home's long-term value. Properties in areas at greater risk from climate change "are also at risk of seeing a thinner pool of buyers," said Sam Chandan, founding director of the Chen Institute for Global Real Estate at New York University's Stern School of Business.

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There was a period not long ago when people talked about "climate havens," places where some mix of geography, topography and weather patterns meant the risk of climate shocks would be, if not zero, then close to it. People in Miami would say that if the seas rose, they would move someplace safe, like Asheville, N.C.

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Then Hurricane Helene came for Asheville, emphasizing in the most painful way that no place is immune.

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But that doesn't mean all properties are equally exposed. Rather than think in binary terms like risky or safe, prospective home buyers should get comfortable with idea of degrees, Dr. Keys said.

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All that said, does this mean a house is a bad idea now?

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Not necessarily. Experts stress that homeownership remains, in general, a good way to build wealth.

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The point is, you should ask questions. Start by assessing the amount of risk facing the property you're considering, according to Sheila Foster, a professor at Columbia University's Climate School. One important thing to do is check whether the property is in a federally designated flood zone.

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But being outside a flood zone doesn't mean your risk is zero. You should also consider your home's exposure to heat. Neighborhoods with plenty of trees and green space will give you more options during a heat wave, keeping your home cooler in general, and especially if your power fails.

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If you're looking at buying a condo, ask about the building, Ms. Foster added. Does it use efficient forms of heating? Does it meet recognized standards, like LEED certification?

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Buying a home was never a financial slam dunk, even before climate change became a growing concern.

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Any number of things could cause the value of your home to fall. Climate change just adds to the uncertainty.

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But in some cases, that additional risk may be too much.

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Dr. Keenan said that in high-risk areas like coastal Florida, he would rent rather than buy. Take the money you would have spent on insurance, maintenance and other costs, and put it into the stock market, he said. "Your rate of return is going to be greater."

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If you're looking at a place facing an existential risk from sea-level rise, like the Florida Keys or the Outer Banks of North Carolina, "you need to go in really clear-eyed," Dr. Keys said. "These assets are not there for the long haul."

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As for other places, Dr. Keys said to find out how much insurance costs now. Then, consider whether you could still afford your monthly costs if those insurance premiums doubled or tripled.

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If the answer is no, then maybe don't buy the house.

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Christopher Flavelle

My bladder's always full at break time, so I make my way to the men's room at the end of the hall. There's no plumbing, just a waist-high tiled sink filled with water and a small bucket on the side. After pissing, I go to the sink, fill the bucket with water, pour it in the urinal. If you shit in one of the two squat toilet stalls, several trips from the sink to the toilet are required to clean up after yourself.

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Travis Jeppesen "See You Again in Pyongyang: A Journey into Kim Jong Un's North Korea" (2018)

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Katayama and Kawazoe had direct personal knowledge of the car's problems, for in the beginning theirs was truly a shoestring operation; if a Datsun broke down - and one often did - and everyone else was busy, the sales manager himself might have to drive the repair truck to pull it off the road. Katayama and Kawazoe, in fact, sometimes ended up doing the repair themselves. If worse came to worse and the car could not be fixed, they might even lend the enraged owner their own cars. Nor was it just the Datsun that was terrible; the first Toyota to enter the American market, at about the same time, was such a bomb that Toyota took it off the market, went back to work on it, and did not come back into the U.S. market until 1964. There were those who worked for Nissan in America who believed that Tokyo, realizing how bad its car was, had declined to put the company's name on it, calling it not the Nissan but the Datsun, so that if the car failed, there would be less loss of face. Only twenty years later, when their cars were demonstrated successes, did the company go through the clumsy and expensive process of changing its American name.

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The worst thing about the Datsun was that its engine was simply too small. Its displacement was only 1000cc. Even the VW's was 1300, and the smaller American cars in those heady pre-oil-crunch days were coming in with engines of 5OOO and 6000cc displacement. With the Datsun's little engine, its acceleration was poor, a real problem on the entrance ramps of the California freeways. Also, the brakes were weak. That was not all. The Datsun was designed for Japanese winters, which by and large were milder than American ones, and the car was very difficult to start in the winter, in part because the battery was too small. For the Datsuns in the northern sections on each coast, this morning sluggishness was a major problem. In the East, the Datsuns were selling mainly to blue-collar people who could not afford better cars. Generally, were people who got up early, when the engines were coldest the batteries weakest. Masataka Usami, one of the Nissan executives, who lived in Greenwood Lake, New Jersey, and whose own car would not start in cold weather, reported back to his port team in Tokyo that Nissan could not have a car that started only two out of ten times. Tokyo was not very helpful. The alleged starting problems were impossible, they insisted, since they had checked and Hokkaido - the northernmost of the Japanese home islands, where Datsuns started without difficulty - was just as cold as New Jersey.

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David Halberstam "The Reckoning" (1987)

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