Aguirre the Wrath of God

That's one of the best films ever made. It was a huge influence, on all of us. I showed it [Aguirre, the Wrath of God] to the cast and crew to give them a sense of the kind of intensity I wanted.

goland feels akin to movies like Martin gesi silence or or herx are gei the wrath of God stories about the clash between man's huus

I also wanted to make something that could be compared to what I consider the epic masterpieces, like Andrei Rublev or Aguirre, the Wrath of God, or Valhalla Rising, films that feel ancient and that feel like they have a certain kind of gravitas and weight.

As Francis Ford Coppola descended into the logistical madness of filming his Vietnam epic, he looked to Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God as his absolute spiritual and aesthetic lodestar. Coppola was mesmerized by Herzog's hallucinatory depiction of a megalomaniac drifting down a jungle river into absolute madness, consciously mirroring its hypnotic, fever-dream pacing for Captain Willard's journey. Furthermore, the chaotic, documentary-style immediacy of the film's early combat sequences was directly inspired by Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, from which Coppola sought to replicate the terrifying, unvarnished chaos of asymmetrical warfare. The resulting epic completely transcends the traditional war film, operating instead as a surrealist descent into the darkest corners of the human psyche.

Paul Thomas Anderson has described Werner Herzog as a defining influence, specifically Aguirre, the Wrath of God, which is also about a monomaniacal man consumed by an impossible vision in an unforgiving landscape. Daniel Plainview is Klaus Kinski's Aguirre transplanted to California oil fields. Herzog showed Anderson that you could build an entire film around the terrifying spectacle of a man losing his humanity to obsession. Aguirre is on Criterion Channel and is one of the great performances in cinema history.

He mentioned that the film [Life of Pi] had made him think about the silent films of Jacques Tati, “about how you use space, how you frame things, how you move your camera. It’s really just the visual.”