About

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'."

With a production that has become even more legendary than the film itself, it is easy to forget that Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo is such a mighty piece of cinema. When Brian Sweeney 'Fitzcarraldo' Fitzgerald (a prodigious Klaus Kinski) decides to build an opera house in the middle of the Amazon jungle, he must first transport a 320-ton ship over a Peruvian mountain to access the lucrative rubber trees needed to fund it.

Herzog famously refused to fake this endeavour with props and replicas; instead he and his crew actually hauled a full steamship over a mountain in the heart of the South American jungle. This was no mere gimmick but instead a means of conjuring a truly potent sense of adversity and triumph that emanates from every frame of the film. Fitzcarraldo is an audacious epic of a scale that few filmmakers could hope to achieve. In matching his lead character's obsessive quest on screen with his own behind the camera, Herzog has produced a titanic piece of cinema both startling and rousing in equal measure.