Aguirre, the Wrath of God

Herzog wrote the screenplay "in a frenzy", and completed it in two-and-a-half days. Much of the script was written during a 200-mile (320 km) bus trip with Herzog's football team. His teammates got drunk after winning a game and one vomited on several pages of Herzog's manuscript, which he immediately threw out the window. Herzog claims he cannot remember all of what he wrote on these pages.[7]

The screenplay was mostly shot as written, with only minor differences. In an early scene in which Pizarro instructs Ursúa to lead the scouting team down the river, in the script, Pizarro mentions that in the course of the expedition Ursúa could possibly discover what happened to Francisco de Orellana's expedition, which had vanished without a trace years before (see "Historical Accuracy" section). Later in the screenplay, Aguirre and his men find a boat and the long-dead remains of Orellana's soldiers.[8]

Further down the river, they discover another ship lodged in some tree tops. In the screenplay, Aguirre and others explore the boat but find no sign of Orellana or his men. Herzog ultimately eliminated any such references to Orellana's expedition from the film. The sequence with the boat caught in the upper branches of a tree remains, but as filmed it seems to be simply a hallucinatory vision.[8]

The finale is significantly different from Herzog's original script. The director recalled, "I only remember that the end of the film was totally different. The end was actually the raft going out into the open ocean and being swept back inland, because for many miles you have a counter-current, the Amazon actually goes backwards. And it was tossed to and fro. And a parrot would scream: 'El Dorado, El Dorado'".[9] This ending was eventually used for Cobra Verde.

Herzog's first choice for the role of Aguirre was actor Klaus Kinski. The two had met many years earlier when the then-struggling young actor rented a room in Herzog's family apartment, and Kinski's often terrifying and deranged antics during the three months he lived there left a lasting impression on the director. Years later, Herzog remembered the volatile actor and knew that he was the only possible man who could play the mad Aguirre, and he sent Kinski a copy of the screenplay. "Between three and four in the morning, the phone rang", Herzog recalled. "It took me at least a couple of minutes before I realized that it was Kinski who was the source of this inarticulate screaming. And after an hour of this, it dawned on me that he found it the most fascinating screenplay and wanted to be Aguirre."[10]

From the beginning of the production, Herzog and Kinski argued about the proper manner to portray Aguirre. Kinski wanted to play a "wild, ranting madman", but Herzog wanted something "quieter, more menacing". In order to get the performance he desired, before each shot Herzog would deliberately infuriate Kinski. After waiting for the hot-tempered actor's anger to "burn itself out", Herzog would then roll the camera.[11]

On one occasion, irritated by the noise from a hut where cast and crew were playing cards, the explosive Kinski fired three gunshots at it, blowing the tip off one extra's finger.[7] Subsequently, Kinski decided to leave the jungle location (over Herzog's refusal to fire a sound assistant), only changing his mind after Herzog threatened to shoot first Kinski and then himself. The latter incident has given rise to the legend that Herzog made Kinski act for him at gunpoint. However, Herzog has repeatedly denied the claim during interviews, saying he only verbally threatened Kinski in the heat of the moment, in a desperate attempt to keep him from leaving the set.[12] The incident is parodied in Incident at Loch Ness, which Herzog co-wrote.[13]

The film was made for US$370,000, with one-third of the budget paying for Kinski's salary.[14] It was filmed on location in the Peruvian rainforest, Machu Picchu (the stone steps of Huayna Picchu),[14] and on the Amazon River tributaries of the Ucayali region. Aguirre was shot in five weeks, following nine months of pre-production planning.[7] The film was shot in chronological order, because Herzog believed the film crew's progress on the river directly mirrored that of the explorers' journey in the story. The director and his cast and crew floated in rafts down the Huallaga and Nanay rivers through the Urubamba Valley in Peru.[14]

All of the actors spoke their dialogue in English. The members of the cast and crew came from sixteen countries, and English was the only common language among them. In addition, Herzog felt that shooting Aguirre in English would improve the film's chances for international distribution. However, the small amount of money that had been set aside for post-synchronization "left Peru with the man in charge of the process; both absconded en route". The English-language track was ultimately replaced by a higher-quality German language version, which was post-synched after production was completed.[5] Herzog claims that Kinski requested too much money for the dubbing session, and so his lines were performed by another actor.[15]

The low budget precluded the use of stunt men or elaborate special effects. Cinematography in many scenes was done in order to accommodate the inclement weather and terrain of the region, with the camera lens often being obscured by rainwater and mud when the cast moved through thicker regions of the jungle. The cast and crew climbed up mountains, experienced the adverse conditions of the jungle, and rode Amazonian river rapids on rafts built by locals. At one point, a storm caused a river to flood, covering the film sets in several feet of water and destroying all the rafts built for the film. This flooding was immediately incorporated into the story, as a sequence including a flood and subsequent rebuilding of rafts was shot.[7]

The camera used to shoot the film was stolen by Herzog from the Munich Film School.[16] Years later, Herzog recalled:

It was a very simple 35mm camera, one I used on many other films, so I do not consider it a theft. For me, it was truly a necessity. I wanted to make films and needed a camera. I had some sort of natural right to this tool. If you need air to breathe, and you are locked in a room, you have to take a chisel and hammer and break down a wall. It is your absolute right.[14]

To obtain the monkeys used in the climactic sequence, Herzog paid several locals to trap 400 monkeys. He paid them half in advance and was to pay the other half upon receipt. The trappers sold the monkeys to someone in Los Angeles or Miami, and Herzog came to the airport just as the monkeys were being loaded to be shipped out of the country. He pretended to be a veterinarian and claimed that the monkeys needed vaccinations before leaving the country. Abashed, the handlers handed the monkeys over to Herzog, who used them in the shot they were required for, then released them afterwards into the jungle.[7]

Aguirre's musical score was performed by Popol Vuh, a West German progressive/Krautrock band. The band was formed in 1970 by keyboardist Florian Fricke, who had known Herzog for several years prior to the formation of the band.[17] He had appeared as an actor in the director's first full-length film, Signs of Life (1968), playing a pianist. Aguirre was only the first of many collaborations between the band and the director.

Popol Vuh's "hypnotic music"[18] for Aguirre met with considerable acclaim. Roger Ebert wrote, "The music sets the tone. It is haunting, ecclesiastical, human and yet something else ... [T]he music is crucial to Aguirre, the Wrath of God".[19] AllMusic noted, "The film's central motif blends pulsing Moog and spectral voices conjured from Florian Fricke's Mellotron-related 'choir organ' to achieve something sublime, in the truest sense of the word: it's hard not to find the music's awe-inspiring, overwhelming beauty simultaneously unsettling. The power of the legendary opening sequence of Herzog's film ... owes as much to Popol Vuh's music as it does to the director's mise-en-scène."[20]

Herzog explained how the choir-like sound was created: "We used a strange instrument, which we called a 'choir-organ.' It has inside it three dozen different tapes running parallel to each other in loops. ... All these tapes are running at the same time, and there is a keyboard on which you can play them like an organ so that [it will] sound just like a human choir but yet, at the same time, very artificial and really quite eerie."[19]

In 1975 Popol Vuh released an album entitled Aguirre. Although ostensibly a soundtrack album to Herzog's film, the six-track LP included only two songs ("Aguirre I (L'Acrime Di Rei)" and "Aguirre II") taken from Aguirre, the Wrath of God. The four remaining tracks were derived from various recordings made by the group between about 1972 and 1974. At the time of Aguirre the band members were Fricke (piano, Mellotron), Fichelscher (electric guitar, acoustic guitar, drums), Djong Yun (vocals), and Robert Eliscu (oboe, pan pipe).

While Herzog was location scouting for Aguirre, the Wrath of God in Peru, his reservation on LANSA Flight 508 had been canceled due to a last minute change in itinerary. During this flight, the airplane disintegrated in mid-air after a lightning strike and crashed in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest in 1971, killing 91 people, except the sole survivor, 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke. Herzog was inspired to make the 1998 documentary film Wings of Hope about Koepcke's survival of the aviation disaster and in the jungle, since he had narrowly avoided taking the same flight.[21]

The film was produced in part by West German television station Hessischer Rundfunk, which televised the film on the same day it opened in theatres. Herzog has blamed this for the relatively poor commercial reception of the film in Germany.[14] However, outside Germany the film became an "enormous cult favorite" in "such places as Mexico, Venezuela, and Algiers".[22] The film had a theatrical run of fifteen months in Paris.[23] Aguirre received a theatrical release in the United States in 1977 by New Yorker Films. It immediately became a cult film, and New Yorker Films reported four years after its initial release that it was the only film in its catalog that never went out of circulation.[22]

In Germany, the Süddeutsche Zeitung described the film as "a colour-drenched, violently physical moving painting".[24] The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described Kinski's acting as "too theatrical" to embody God's wrath.[24]

In the US and the UK the film received mostly positive critical notices upon release. Vincent Canby, writing in The New York Times, called it "[A]bsolutely stunning ... Mr. Herzog views all the proceedings with fixed detachment. He remains cool. He takes no sides. He may even be slightly amused. Mainly he is a poet who constantly surprises us with unexpected juxtapositions ... This is a splendid and haunting work."[25]

In Time, Richard Schickel opined that "[Herzog] does the audience the honor of allowing it to discover the blindnesses and obsessions, the sober lunacies he quietly lays out on the screen. Well acted, most notably by Klaus Kinski in the title role, gloriously photographed by Thomas Mauch, Aguirre is, not to put too fine a point on it, a movie that makes a convincing claim to greatness."[26] Time Out's Tony Rayns noted, "each scene and each detail is honed down to its salient features. On this level, the film effectively pre-empts analysis by analysing itself as it proceeds, admitting no ambiguity. Yet at the same time, Herzog's flair for charged explosive imagery has never had freer rein, and the film is rich in oneiric moments."[27]

The film's reputation through the years has continued to grow. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 96% of 50 critics gave the film a positive review, with an average rating of 9/10. The site's critics consensus reads, "A haunting journey of natural wonder and tangible danger, Aguirre transcends epic genre trappings and becomes mythological by its own right."[28]

J. Hoberman has written that Aguirre "is not just a great movie but an essential one ... Herzog's third feature ... is both a landmark film and a magnificent social metaphor".[29] Danny Peary wrote, "To see Aguirre for the first time is to discover a genuine masterpiece. It is overwhelming, spellbinding; at first dreamlike, and then hallucinatory."[22] Roger Ebert has added it to his list of The Great Movies,[30] and in a 2002 Sight & Sound poll of critics and filmmakers on the best films ever made, Ebert listed it in his top ten.[31] In the same poll, critic Nigel Andrews and director Santosh Sivan also placed it in their top ten list.[32] Martin Scorsese included it on a list of "39 Essential Foreign Films for a Young Filmmaker".[33]

In 1999, Rolling Stone included the film on the magazine's "100 Maverick Movies of the Last 100 Years" list.[34] Aguirre was included in Time magazine's "All Time 100 Best Films", compiled by Richard Schickel and Richard Corliss.[35] Entertainment Weekly named it the 46th greatest cult film ever made.[36] The film was ranked #19 in Empire magazine's "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" in 2010.[37]

Aguirre has won several prestigious film awards. In 1973 it won the Deutscher Filmpreis (German Film Award) for "Outstanding Individual Achievement: Cinematography".[38] In 1976 it was voted the "Best Foreign Film" by the French Syndicate of Film Critics.[39][40] In 1977 the National Society of Film Critics US gave it their "Best Cinematography" Award.[41] It won the prestigious Grand Prix of the Belgian Film Critics Association in 1976 and was nominated for a "Best Film" César Award.[42]

Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now, a film based on Joseph Conrad's 1902 novella Heart of Darkness, was influenced also by Aguirre, as it contains seemingly deliberate visual "quotations" of Herzog's film.[43][44][45] Coppola himself has noted, "Aguirre, with its incredible imagery, was a very strong influence. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention it."[46]

Several critics have noted that Aguirre appears to have had a direct influence on several other films. Martin Rubin has written that "[a]mong the films strongly influenced by Aguirre are Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Terrence Malick's The New World (2005)".[43] J. Hoberman agreed, noting that Herzog's "sui generis Amazon fever dream" was "the influence Malick's over-inflated New World can't shake."[29] Channel 4 opined "This is an astonishing, deceptively simple, pocket-sized epic whose influence, in terms of both style and narrative, is seen in films as diverse as Apocalypse Now, The Mission, Predator, and The Blair Witch Project (1999)."[47]