"If I abandon this project I would be a man without dreams, and I don't want to live like that."Someone really missed out on a great opportunity to call this Herzcarraldo. It's amazing how closely the making of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo parallels the actual story within the film itself. The film hit every possible snag in its production, from sets falling apart to cast and crew being attacked by natives. And while this is due in large part to Herzog's insane dedication to verisimilitude, it also needs to be said that the director never asks anyone to do anything he doesn't do himself. The problem is that there's almost nothing Herzog won't do himself. There's a shot in the documentary where's he's standing up to his knees in loose mud, and it looks like the ground is trying to suck him down into an early grave. That's about the point where I would have said, "Nope! We're doing this in a studio." The effort put into it really shows on screen, and Burden of Dreams shows us that it wasn't just some lucky accident that Fitzcarraldo looks as good as it does. People literally lost their lives making this movie, and here you can see how that fact weighs on Herzog's conscience.Also, the documentary has a great sense of visual storytelling. It's shot almost like a Terrence Malick film, with a lot of cutaways to natural scenery which evokes the mood of the people on set (e.g. lots of animals fighting each other). It opens with a small propeller plane (maybe a 4-seater) landing on location, and the landing gear spits up all kinds of muck and dirt and looks like it might just fall apart at any second, and it feels like a metaphor for the film's entire production. Aside from the narration (which sounds like it's being read by a robot), this is the gold standard against which all other behind-the-scenes documentaries ought to measure themselves."I shouldn't make movies anymore. I should go to a lunatic asylum right away."Behind the ScenesAlso, Werner Herzog says some amazing things:"Kinski always says [the jungle]'s full of erotic elements. I don't see it so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It's just, Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and, just, rotting away. Of course, there's a lot of misery, but it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing, they just screech in pain. It's an unfinished country. It's still prehistorical. The only thing that is lacking is the dinosaurs here. It's like a curse weighing on an entire landscape. And whoever goes too deep into this has his share of this curse. So we are cursed with what we are doing here. It's a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger. It's the only land where creation is unfinished yet. Taking a close look at what's around us there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel. We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment."
