Remember The Time Werner Herzog Ranted About Miserable Birds In The Amazon?
"The trees are in misery. The birds are in misery. I don't think the birds sing. They just screech in pain."
On the press circuit for Disney+ original The Mandalorian, German auteur Werner Herzog’s comments have made headlines in the past week. First, he admitted he’d never seen a single Star Wars film despite acting in a Star Wars spin-off. Even so, the sight of Baby Yoda made him cry, calling it “heartbreakingly beautiful”.
With this in mind, we want to cast light onto Herzog’s most Herzog moment: a monologue meltdown in the middle of the Peruvian Amazon while filming Fitzcarraldo, an absolute production nightmare. Yes, it’s even more Herzog than saying “the universe is monstrously indifferent to the presence of man”.
In case you’re not across 1980s German cinema, here’s a bit of context. Based off true events, Fitzcarraldo details a 19th century rubber baron’s should-be Sisyphean task of transporting a steamship across the Amazon forest in order to reach some precious rubber.
In order to film it, Herzog’s crew had to push around a 320-ton steamship up one very steep hill, as scenes were filmed without special effects. This, as you can imagine, was hellish.
Multiple labourers — largely Indigenous peoples hired for cheap — were severely injured during production, with at least one death recorded. There were also two plane crashes during production, and one Peruvian logger working on the film chainsawed off his own foot after a snake bit him, to avoid the spread of venom.
Meanwhile, his lead actor departed due to severe dysentery, forcing him to bring in Klaus Kinski, an actor he’d previously had violent clashes with on-set. Herzog later said that an extra offered to kill Kinski for Herzog — but he declined because he needed the actor in order to finish the film.
The film’s making, in short, echoed the film itself. Fitzcarraldo‘s the story of a megalomaniac endangering lives and battling nature for profit, made by a megalomaniac endangering lives and battling nature for artistic merit.
It’s all very Apocalypse Now — and just as that tumultuous production was captured by a BTS documentary Hearts Of Darkness, so too was Fitzcarraldo with Burden of Dreams, directed by Les Blank. Which brings us to Herzog’s most Herzog moment: a two-minute scene where he meditates on his battle against nature.
“Of course we are challenging nature itself, and it hits back,” he says in his thick German drawl. “It just hits back, that’s all. That’s grandiose about it and we have to accept that it is much stronger than us.”
He continues to describe the “obscenity” of nature, “violent at its base”. The Amazon, for Herzog, is filled with the same misery that is all around us.
“The trees are in misery,” he says. “The birds are in misery. I don’t think the birds sing. They just screech in pain.”
Reading these comments does not do them justice — watch the snippet below.
May we never feel as much as this man feels, though if you’d like to try to reach Herzog’s heights (or lows, rather), Burden of Dreams is available to rent and buy on Vimeo.