Fitzcarraldo

Herzog's movies, like Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, I always loved their vision of madness.

He's very strong, Herzog. I especially like Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo because he blends this documentary style with dreams, and this is what I am always interested in.

I watched tons of documentaries. I watched all the documentaries about real tsunami survivors. I watched documentaries about survival stories like those from Werner Herzog like Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Herzog is an amazing guy, an incredible filmmaker who really understands how to put the audience in the heart of the experience.

I had seen Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo as a teenager and had this fascination for Herzog. I love him, and I think he’s one of the greatest directors of all time, and those films are part of the landscape of the jungle in cinema. Apocalypse Now also. So I think for me, it was more like, I had a great respect for what he had done. But at the same time, I knew it wasn’t the way I wanted to approach the jungle. I wanted to approach it from the perspective of the indigenous, not from the perspective of the white man arriving in the jungle. So it was an important reference for me, but maybe more as something that I wanted to depart from than something I wanted to follow.

I wanted to take this seriously, I wanted to make a visceral and authentic Viking film, and films like Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo were inspirations for the feeling of being in a landscape where nature is overwhelming and men are small.

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.

Pete Docter and Bob Peterson cited Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, a man dragging a massive steamship over a jungle mountain through sheer obsession, as the thematic blueprint for Up's second act. Carl dragging his house through the South American wilderness is Fitzcarraldo made animated, made family-film emotional. Docter documents this in commentary and interviews. Fitzcarraldo is available on Criterion Channel.

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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.”