It’s amazing how there are times when reality is better than fiction, such is the case of Fitzcarraldo. The story goes that Fitzcarraldo faced hostile Indians, snakes, disease, and unspeakable hardship while using indigenous labor to pull, drag, and hoist a boat over a mountain in the Amazon jungle. The baron, Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, an Irishman known as Fitzcarraldo, had become aware of an untapped plot of land that was rich in rubber but unattainable due to the Pongo das Mortes (Rapids of Death).
Fitzcarraldo’s dream was to build an opera house in the jungle city of Iquitos, but he needed the funds to achieve his dream. He had tried various ways to find the financing, but to no avail.
He finally convinced his girlfriend, who ran a brothel in Iquitos, to finance his expedition for the rubber. He figured he could get to the untapped 400-square-mile parcel by going upriver on a parallel tributary and moving his 30-ton boat across an isthmus upstream of the rapids, filling the boat with rubber (rubber), floating the boat through the rapids to Iquitos and take advantage of the reward and make your dream of bringing opera to Iquitos come true.
The story continues as Fitzcarraldo ventures into hostile Indian territory. His crew gets scared and abandons the expedition, leaving Fitzcarraldo surrounded by hostile Indians who block his return route. He realizes that the Indians believe in a river god and decides to see if his boat will meet the theological requirements. He uses the music of his hero, the opera singer Enrico Caruso, to suffocate the tribe and gain support from him.
After months of pushing and pulling the task was completed, the ship moved through a mountain to the Ucayali River. A big party has taken place to celebrate the task. Late at night, while the crew sleeps in a drunken stupor, the chief of the Indians cuts the mooring to appease the river god and the empty boat floats down the river through the rapids and back to Iquitos.
It seems that Fitzcarraldo’s dream has faded, but once back in Iquitos, he sells his boat and uses the proceeds to bring the opera from Manaus Colombia to Iquitos to play a command performance on the deck of the boat as it floats into port. from Iquitos.
In reality, Fitzcarraldo was really Carlos Fermin Fitzcarrald, the son of an American father and a Peruvian mother. Not the benevolent figure portrayed in the film, but a ruthless conqueror who killed and defeated the indigenous people and forced them to work as slaves or die for his own exploitation.
He did indeed move a boat across an isthmus, but first he had slave labor dismantle it and completed his task of filling it with rubber and his own pockets. Despite his brutality, he was a pioneer and explorer who chartered the Madre de Dios region of Peru, founded the city of Puerto Maldonaldo, and explored what is now the Manu Reserve. He later died when his boat got caught in a whirlpool, the boat sank and he died, but the story doesn’t end there.
Intrigued by Fitzcarraldo’s story, famed director Werner Herzog set out on a quest to make an epic film about the rubber tycoon. He cast Jason Robards as Fitzcarraldo and Mick Jagger as Wilber (Fitzcarraldo’s partner).
The first hurdle came five weeks into filming and 40% of shooting had been completed and Robards came down with dysentery and his doctors would not allow him to return to complete the film. Then Mick Jagger’s concert and album commitments force him to drop out of the project, leaving Herzog with a half-finished film and his two stars jumping ship.
Most directors would have licked their wounds and gone home, not Herzog. He went back to the drawing board to refinance and recast the film, this time with Klaus Kinski in the title role, but this was only the beginning of his troubles.
Herzog had negotiated with the Aguaruna Indians to support his project, but he did not realize that he had entered a political nightmare. A border skirmish between Peru and Ecuador had everyone on edge. The Indians had become disenchanted with the film and began to be hostile towards the whole project. Rumors that Herzog planned to turn the filming field into a tourist mecca angered the Indians.
As in the Amazon, rumors turned into wild tales and wild tales turned into strange action as the film project catalyzed and unified Aguarunenses. The Indians found it threatening that a group of men camped together without women. Men without women met them before the battle.
Rumors then spread that Herzog had exterminated two Indian villages and had participated in the German holocaust. The Aguarunenses, dressed in war paint, surrounded the camp and ordered everyone to leave. They burned the camp and celebrated the act of driving the white man from his land.
Once again, most would have given up and gone home. No Herzog, the problems continued when the Amazon experienced a severe drought that grounded the ship, crew members died in a plane crash, people were injured, many contracted malaria and there is a story that one was bitten by the deadly snake Bushmaster. They gave him an ultimatum, die in the jungle or cut off his leg with a chainsaw, he chose the latter. The crew went crazy, the constant rain, the mishaps, and the continual problems with the Indians, including people being shot with arrows.
Kinski was on a constant rampage, in fact at one point the Indian chief offered to kill him if Herzog would give him permission, an action that Herzog himself had contemplated. Hookers, cold beer, and masato, a fermented drink made by chewing yucca root and spitting into a canoe, kept the lid on the powder keg, and eventually the film was finished after four years of agonizing effort, along with a “realization of the Fitzcarraldo called Cargo of Dreams.
Filming and moving a 340-ton ship through a mountain without special effects was no easy task, but Herzog completed what the real Fitzcarrald would never have attempted.
El Fitzcarraldo won Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival in 1982. Today there are still remnants of Fiscarraldo scattered around Iquitos. Fitzcarrald’s real home is now the Micobank which is on the corner of Prospero St. Original producer Walter Saxer runs a hotel and relaxing spot for a cold beer called Casa Fiscarraldo and one of the original actors Huerequeque, who played to the ship’s cook. , runs a bar on the Nanay River.
Carlos Fitzcarrald’s original house still stands on the corner of Calle Próspero in Iquitos, now a bank but still the same building built with clay.