Walter Saxer on Fitzcarraldo
Q&A
Walter Saxer on Fitzcarraldo
Micaela and Walter Saxer at Metrograph, October 2022.
Q&A
BY
Metrograph
Werner Herzog’s regular producer Walter Saxer joined Metrograph to discuss the notorious, against-all-odds production of Fitzcarraldo.
Whole Lotta Herzog plays Metrograph from October 14, along with Walter Saxer’s re-discovered film Sepa.
METROGRAPH: Would you welcome me in joining Walter Saxer and Micaela Saxer.
WALTER SAXER: Thank you for inviting me. And thanks for the public for coming to see this film.
METROGRAPH: It really is a privilege, I can’t believe that it was made. This is 10 years after Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972). I’m curious if you could say a couple of things about what you learned on the production of Aguirre that you were able to apply to this, to make it even in your mind possible to do this film.
WS: Well, this was exactly 10 years later. And of course, when we first started with the production, everybody believed this was not going to be possible. Even I thought, “Well, maybe it’s not possible.” And then, this looked like the most complicated production of movie-making history. And it probably was. [Laughs]
We started on the wrong foot with the film. Firstly, we wanted to shoot in a completely different location, close to the port to Ecuador, where we ran into problems with local tribes up there. There were a few anthropologists who interfered in our project, because they thought we would film the real history of the rubber baron Fitzcarraldo, which was never our intention. Our protagonist’s intention was to build an opera house in Iquitos, like the one that existed in in Manaus. We then tried to settle the things somehow, but in the end this anthropologist interfered and showed the local tribes photographs from WWII camps and but what happened in WWII, and they said, “That’s how Germans work.” The next night, they assaulted our camp and set it on fire, so we lost a whole year, and had to change location to the south of Peru.
Then we started with a different cast of the film. We first wanted to have Jack Nicholson for the for the leading role, and Jack wanted to shoot the film, but he asked for $5 million. There was no way that we could put that money up. And then Warren Oates agreed to do the film, but he got sick by cancer and died half a year before we started to shoot.
And then Werner, by Errol Morris’s recommendation, casted Jason Robards. Jason Robards who worked with Claudia Cardinale in an Italian Western [Once Upon a Time in the West, 1968] by Sergio Leone. But for me he was completely wrong because he was too old. It looked like, how do I say, a grandfather who has scaped from an old age home. And just imagine this guy pulling a ship or a mountain…. But we shot like six weeks with him, and the six weeks were a catastrophe. The whole thing. Then we also had a very dangerous financial situation because of the time we’d lost, changing from one location to another. And then finally Jason Robards got sick, and left the production. Luckily enough, he was covered by an insurance company. They had to come up with the money, and that’s why we were able to restart the film completely with Klaus Kinski.
Fitzcarraldo (1982)
"The next night, they assaulted our camp and set it on fire, so we lost a whole year, and had to change location to the south of Peru."
METROGRAPH: It’s a completely plagued production, it is still amazing that it was made. There was another bit from yesterday that I’d like you to talk about. Huerequeque [Enrique Bohorquez], who plays the chef on the boat—you met on the production of Aguirre, correct?
WS: He’s the one who put that ship on top of a tree in two days with his compadres, his friends, and this was something almost as impossible as this film was. Werner didn’t want to cast him as the cook because he didn’t speak English, and he wanted to shoot in English. So Werner went to Mexico and cast an actor from Mexico, a comic, and brought him down to play the part. The first day of shooting, he found out that we wanted to shoot in English, and nobody asked him whether he spoke English, which of course he didn’t. On the first day of shooting, I came to the set and I saw that Werner Herzog was trying to teach him English. I said, “Are you crazy? One doesn’t learn English on a movie set!” We let him do the part in Spanish, but he was so finished with his nerves, he could hardly speak. That was the end of the part for him.
When we started the film again with Klaus Kinski, we changed his part. And for me now, Huerequeque is one of the best actors in this whole film. He had never stood in front of a camera. It’s the first time.
METROGRAPH: And you have even more of a personal connection to this film with your daughter Micaela here.
WS: Yeah, my daughter was born on my birthday in 1980. And here she is.
METROGRAPH: I’d like to open it up to the audience.
AUDIENCE: Hi, I would love to know how you went about, from a production standpoint as opposed to directing, paying and housing and feeding a cast of Indigenous people? And what would you do differently now, and what was done then—I’m not judging 1982.
WS: The Indian tribe came from the central part of Peru, about three days travelling to the location. There were 650 people who came. We had to talk to them and try to explain to them that we were shooting a film, but nobody had ever seen a film, and they didn’t know what filmmaking was—so we tried to explain as well as we could. They decided either everybody comes or nobody comes, so they came with their wives and their children and also with their parents, it was the whole tribe who came. We had to build camps for them, and feed them three times a day, which was logistically, practically, an impossible thing to do. But somehow it worked, and they stayed seven months with us. It was one of my best experiences that I had in filmmaking, to be with these wonderful people.
AUDIENCE: Hello, it’s an honour. Kinski’s adversarial relationship with you and Herzog and the whole world is well known. Ultimately, he did submit to an incredibly arduous shoot—one of five—and he gave a brilliant performance that is not only intense, but nuanced and often quiet and sensitive. Can you share any instances over the course of the production in which it seemed as if he did, of course, respect and trust Herzog, and believed in the project, if that was your impression?
WS: Klaus was like day and night compared to Jason Robards. He was also very active in putting this film together. Like I said yesterday with Aguirre, he didn’t allow that somebody directed him. This was again a film that is as much as Kinski’s films as Herzog’s film. I think even more Kinski’s, because compared to what happened in the first part with Jason Robards, this was day and night, this was 100 times better that what we before thanks to Klaus Kinski.
Walter Saxer at Metrograph, October 2022.