Passion is an emotion found in every farce of the soul if occurring. It includes enthusiasm in every way as well as love and hate. Two Icons of German movie history and the shooting of a movie more thrilling than many other movies itself are caught in exact these feelings.
To suffer for a calling and to have a calling for something at all was always something I admired. The calling of a few were often the impulse for many. From this point of view there is a good reason to look for the work behind the objects we admire.
To make a long story short, I am talking about the movie “Fitzcarraldo” its director Werner Herzog and an actor nobody knows if to hate or to love him: Klaus Kinski.
After the initially leading actor had to resign due to health problems and Mick Jagger had to leave for a planned world tour, Herzog was searching again for a new leading actor. And so it was that the (from my point of view) dream team of Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog came together once more.

One of the most conspicuous scenes in the movie shows the act of transporting a real ship over a real mountain. Every Investor said no but Herzog didn’t want to give up and do the shot in the studio. So he invested his own money and wanted to show the real transport without movie tricks. The ship had to move with nothing more than manpower up and over the hill. But next to Herzog nobody believed this would actually be possible. For the morale in the crew this was not helping at all.

Herzog once was asked while the shooting what he wants to do after the movie was finished. His answer: “I should not do any more movies. I should go straight to the madhouse.”
Unfortunately it would be too much to list up every single happening but here are anecdotes from the potentially most extreme movie shoot ever

All these catastrophic happenings slowed down the production for the movie for years and led to a financial fiasco. The project “Fitzcarraldo” is in every matter “Larger than Life”. It’s a kind of magic how Herzog had the perseverance to keep on going while the problems went worse and still there is nothing to be seen in the final cut.