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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