The story behind the making of Werner Herzog’s 1982 film Fitzcarraldo is arguably more interesting than the actual movie. One of the questions to guide this behind the scenes look is “Did anything go wrong?” which when it comes Fitzcarraldo it would be harder to list things that didn’t go wrong.

For a quick summary, the movie is based on the true story of a rich guy who wants to build an opera house in the jungle.

 

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To start on the “making of” for this movie there is a part of the real life story where the protagonist moved a steam ship across the jungle, for perfectly obvious reasons. When it comes to the film the producers asked Werner Herzog if he planned to use a miniature or some forced perspective. Doing one of these things would have been reasonable. Herzog is not a reasonable director. Herzog’s plan was to actually move a real steamboat up to a jungle flat. This is where I mention that the film took five years to make, and roughly twenty people died during the production. The steamship sequence really does need to be seen to be believed and really teaches a valuable lesson that trying to make everything in a movie “real” is insane. However they did manage it not once, but twice for “safety”. A mass of steel cables were attached to the front of the ship and it was pulled over a muddy hillside by two bulldozers.

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Another lesson we can learn from is when filming in the middle of a jungle, prepare and bring medical equipment so a decent amount of crew and extras don’t die of malaria. This would be fairly common sense to most filmmakers but I guess it slipped their mind, whoops. More tragedy was brought to the production by a plane, bringing more crew members and equipment, crashed.

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In probably the most hellish production of any movie ever, its phenomenal that not only did this movie get finished but it's legitimately good. The fact that a movie with such an awful production managed to be great makes me lose all sympathy for the legendary productions of Heaven’s Gate and Waterworld.