i’ve been kind of obsessed with the movie fitzcarraldo, it’s one of those rare projects where the process of its creation is almost more fascinating than the finished product. reality and fiction blend together - herzog is a real-life fitzcarraldo, a man who for the sake of art toils to accomplish the impossible feat of pulling a 300 ton steamship over a hill in the middle of the jungle. struggles within the film mirror struggles with the film production - getting financing, treacherous waters, dealing with the natives. it’s fitting that herzog was almost forced to play fitzcarraldo himself after the original actor playing the role was forced to drop out, and probably would have had his last-ditch attempt of contacting kinski not panned out.

i’m not a habitual harvester of quotes, but herzog’s turns of the phrase are so incredible (he sounds like a character in his movies) that in this case it yielded a rare bumper crop.

This brings to mind the image, the great metaphor, of the pig in Palermo, which I heard had fallen into a sewer shaft: it lived down there for two years, and continued to grow, surviving on the garbage that people threw down the shaft. and when they hauled the pig out, after it had completely blocked the drain, it was almost white, enormously fat, and had taken on the form of the shaft. It had turned into a kind of monumental, whitish grub, rectangular, cubic, and wobbly, an immense hunk of fat, which could move only its mouth to eat, while its legs had shrunk and retracted into the body fat.

To fail to embrace my dreams now would be a disgrace so great that sin itself would not be able to find a name for it.

I am thirty-eight now, and I have been through it all. My work has given me everything and taken everything from me. No one and nothing can throw me off course.

…and in the foreword I came upon the breathtakingly idiotic comment that the most blatantly unbelievable passages had been deleted- when in fact it is precisely the incredible elements that account for the beauty of the story, or rather opera as a genre, because those elements that cannot be accounted for even by the most exotic probability calculations appear in opera as the most natural, thanks to the powerful transformation of an entire world into music.

I recall experiencing a similar shiver of awe as a child in Sachrang, when I found a frayed piece of bright blue plastic that had floated down the brook and got caught on an overhanging branch. At the time I had never seen anything like it, and I kept it hidden for weeks, licked it, found it slightly stretchy, full of miraculous properties. Not until weeks later, when I had my fill of owning it, did I show it to anyone. Till and I discovered that when you held a burning match to it, it melted: it gave off black smoke and a nasty smell, but it was something we had never seen before, an emissary from a distant world high in the mountains along the upper reaches of the brook, where it vanished into gorges and there were no people. So where did it come from? Had it been blown into the mountains by the wind? I did not know, but I gave the plastic a name-what I do not recall. I do know it had a nice sound and was very secret, and since then I have often racked my brains, trying to remember that name, that word. I would give a lot to know it, but I do not, and I also do not have that delicate piece of weather-beaten plastic anymore. Having neither the secret word nor the plastic makes me poorer today than I was as a child.

Kinski gave me his screenplay to read, all six hundred pages of it; he wants me to direct the film. One glance at the script makes it clear that Kinski’s project is beyond repair. There is half a page of fucking, then half a page of fiddling-and so on, for six hundred pages. The whole thing adds up to one enormous Kinski ego trip. He will have to do this one himself.

Laplace is talking about leveling the slope to a mere 12 percent grade, but that would look like the narrow strip of land that forms an isthmus. I told him I would not allow that, because we would lose the central metaphor of the film. Metaphor for what, he asked. I said I did not know, just that it was a grand metaphor. Maybe, I said, it was just an image that is slumbering in all of us, and I happened to be the one to introduce him to a brother he had never met.