Filming the Making of the Film of the Making of Fitzcarraldo
Garry Kilworth
He told me his name was Cartier and we arranged a meeting at once, in a cafe on the Boulevard St Augustin. He was a small, thick-set man with dark features and an Eskimo's eyes. He claimed to be a Canadian and spoke a form of French that I had to translate mentally into the purity of my own tongue. His story essentially involved three people – himself, a man called McArthur, and McArthur's niece, a twenty-year-old called Denise. Somehow – this was never fully explained – Cartier got wind of the film-maker Werner Herzog's decision to make the movie Fitzcarraldo and the three of them followed Herzog and his crew to the South American jungles, determined, clandestinely, to film the German at work.
I ordered cognacs, before Cartier got too involved with his story, and we waited for a few moments, watching the Parisian passersby, until the drinks were on the table. I then signalled for Cartier to continue.
'We pooled our money – all we had – and set off in pursuit of Herzog's crew. It might seem, now, that taking Denise with us was a bad decision, but she absolutely worshipped McArthur and unfortunately most of the money came from her. Anyway, McArthur had always been strong on family, you know. He wasn't married and his parents were dead. His sister, to whom he had always been close, was working somewhere in Asia. So he felt it was his duty to include his niece, her daughter, in the expedition, if that's what she wanted.'
It was with intense annoyance (a mild word, I should have thought) that Cartier and McArthur realised an official movie of the making of the film was already in progress. In fact it was this second crew that he and McArthur had to shoot, since this party remained a barrier between Herzog's main crew and Cartier's secret camera.
'Denise stayed well behind at this stage, in a second canoe, but McArthur and I disguised ourselves as Indians and followed at a distance as they went up-river. McArthur had the camera in the nose of our canoe, camouflaged with reeds. In any case, we were quite a way behind and we had our Indians, who waved to those in front. We hoped they would just think us curious natives.'
The Cartier-McArthur camp was established a little down-river from the other two crews, and on the opposite bank, their movements hidden by the thick foliage of the rainforest.
'The Indians helped us to make some huts out of the broad-leafed plants. They weren't much, but they provided shelter from the tropical rain. McArthur was like a schoolboy at first. Everything excited him; the jungle life, especially. He had a new single-reflex stills camera – with a close-up lens – and he photographed anything that buzzed, croaked or hissed. The place was teeming with life. It got into all the equipment and our clothes. The only things McArthur wasn't too fond of were the snakes and spiders. His phobias were very suburban.
'Denise, on the other hand, was contemptuous of everything in the rainforest. She showed neither interest in any creature, nor fear. I personally believe she was utterly incapable of being fascinated. That is, she saw no magic in this quite extraordinary world, only squalor. To her there were only two kinds of creature, in myriad shapes – "slimes" and "crawlers". Oh, she knew the names for them all right, but she just wasn't going to waste her time finding the right word. That would have meant giving them a specific identity, acknowledging that they were even of minor importance to her, personally.
'All Denise was interested in was getting the job done. She didn't like me very much either. I think I was a "crawler". And she was forever pestering me. One morning I had the camera in pieces – the spare wasn't working either.
'"Can I help?" she asked, but wearing one of those wooden expressions which I hated. She had several facial masks which were designed to keep me at a distance and in my place.
'"Yeah – you can scratch my insect bites," I told her. "They're killing me." I lifted my shirt to show her three or four large red lumps on my stomach.
'She didn't even say, "You're disgusting," or anything like that. She merely looked at me blankly and remarked, "I mean with the camera."
'"No, I'll have it fixed soon."
'"What about the spare?"
'"I'll work on that next. You're in my light."
'McArthur was busy cooking something and he said, "Get out of his way, Denise. Let him see the light."
'She laughed at that. I didn't think it was very funny, but they did. She went over to one of the Indians then, who was painting his body. He had a cut, which was infected, over the part of his face on which he was applying the ochre. She started remonstrating with him, quietly, though he couldn't understand a word she was saying.
'"Don't mother him," I told her. "He knows what he's doing."
'Sure enough, when she tried to interfere, he slapped her hand away. She went very red, glanced at me as if it were my fault, and looked as though she were going to cry.
'McArthur had seen the incident – a small one you might think, but when all expectations are met with frustrations, and the rainforest is sending its squadrons of insects to harass you day and night, no incident is minor or too trivial – everything that happens is of a magnitude which threatens sanity.
'He put his arm around her and she nestled in his shoulder for a moment. I watched them out of the corner of my eye. "All right?" he asked her, and she nodded, still flushed, before getting up and going into her hut.
'The trouble with Denise was she wanted to be doing things, all the time, to help – and there really wasn't that much to do. I didn't see it then, though I do in retrospect. God, she was so eager to help it was stretching her nerves to tight wires. I think if a maniac had run into the camp, waving a gun, she would have looked around eagerly for someone to throw herself in front of, in order to take the bullet. She wanted to make her mark on the project – sacrifice herself – to give it every chance of success, so that afterwards she couldn't be accused of being just a passenger. If I had given her the onions to peel, and said, "You know, Denise, we couldn't have made it without you," she'd have been my friend for life.
'The funny thing was, it was her presence that kept us going, only she didn't realise it. She thought she had to give something physically, or intellectually, or it wasn't worth anything. Her strength of will – the spiritual pressure she applied – was powerful enough to keep us there, working away with almost no material.
'Nothing was stated, you understand. McArthur and I didn't say to each other, "Let's go home," and then, "No, we can't, because Denise will be disappointed in us." The fact that she was there prevented even this much admittance of failure. I just know, in myself, that had she not been with us, we would have gone home after just a few days.
'However, because it was one of those buried truths, she didn't know it, and she still sought some way, any way, of proving that her presence was necessary to the project.
'If only I had given her some acknowledgement of the very real part she was playing ... but I didn't. All I could do was grumble that she was in my way. So we carried on as we were, stumbling around in the dark, and with Denise fluttering around us like some giant moth, ready to throw herself into the candle flame if it would provide us with more light.'
Cartier paused here. There was a tenseness to him which the brandy seemed to exacerbate, rather than relieve. He was gripping the glass as if to crush it.
'It was McArthur who thought of the idea,' he said, placing the glass carefully on the table, 'because nothing, absolutely nothing of interest was happening – not for us. All we could do was shoot that damn boat from a distance and watch the crews working and eating – not the stuff of exciting cinema.
'McArthur had noticed a certain antagonism evident between our own Indians and those in Herzog's camp. Something to do with territorial areas I expect. He said it wouldn't be a bad thing – for us – if something developed.
'"Like what?" I asked him.
'"Well, if one of our Indians should meet, face to face, with one of theirs, we wouldn't be responsible, would we?"
'Denise understood him instantly – they had a strange kind of mental rapport which needed few spoken words. It was only when he said, "I suppose it should be me," did I get the idea. I'm not saying I didn't approve the scheme, because I did. I was as anxious as the other two to go home with something of worth on film. But I was scared. Not only was it unethical, even criminal, it carried a very dangerous undercurrent. We might start something we wouldn't be able to stop.
'So I did endorse the plan, and we made certain preparations. McArthur had volunteered himself because he believed himself to be an archer. He was the obvious choice. I was as dark as he, and my disguise was convincing, but the man behind the bow had to be good. We didn't want a death on our hands: just a little action for the film. You understand. I could blame the heat, the insects, the rainforest – you know we had to wipe everything, each day, to get rid of the mould that grew on our possessions overnight – the humidity was unbelievable. We had begun to bicker continually amongst ourselves, fighting over silly things that meant nothing – nothing at all – even McArthur, whose initial wonder in the place had since dissipated. There was an indefinable sickness amongst us, that we battled with medication and had a hard time holding down.
'It was another world – a kind of heavy, drug-dream place. A place in which we felt we had a right to make our own rules. We had come a long way from civilisation – used all our resources to get there – and we had to go back with something. Oh, I could blame a thousand things – the excuses proliferate, even as I talk to you now.
'So – we did it. The next time we saw a fisherman leave Herzog's camp in his canoe, we followed on foot, keeping pace with it along the bank. McArthur had borrowed bow and arrows from one of our Indians and when the man stepped ashore, he shot him, aiming for his leg.
'Now, I'm not saying that McArthur's expertise with the weapon he normally used was wanting – he was probably very good with a precision-made longbow – but the Indians use much longer arrows and smaller bows. McArthur fired two arrows, I think, or maybe it was three – I can't remember exactly. The idea was to wound the fisherman, have him running back to his people, and provoke some sort of reaction from them. We had a naive vision of flights of arrows whizzing across the river and nobody actually getting hurt – badly, that is – so that some attention would be focused on our side of the water. We wanted a skirmish to film.
'Anyway, it was a disaster. The last of McArthur's arrows caught the fisherman in the throat. There was a kind of gagging sound and the man went down, disappearing into the foliage. I've got it all here, on the film. You'll be able to see exactly what happened when I show it to you. Even now I have difficulty in remembering the details. You know, when you're working, you're too involved with the business of filming to register a conscious blow-by-blow description of the scene in your own mind – the director's supposed to do that, and my director was one of the actors in this particular scene.
'I know I cried, "My God, you've killed him!" when the next thing I realised was that McArthur was on the ground himself. He was staring stupidly at an arrow protruding from his thigh, as if it had just grown there – you know, like a bamboo branch had sprung from his flesh. I'm still not sure where that shaft came from, but I guess the fisherman must have fired back, from a prone position. The angle seemed to indicate something of that nature.'
Cartier must have seen a look of enquiry on my face because he added, 'They fish with bow and arrows, there.
'Anyway, I dragged McArthur away with me and we headed back to camp, he using me as a prop while he limped along. He was as white as fish belly, I can tell you, and he was vomiting the whole way.'
I interrupted the story here. 'I remember seeing a wounded Indian in the film of the making of Fitzcarraldo – was that the same man?'
'I think so. He lived, thank God. Or thanks to the doctor that their crews had taken with them.
'I got McArthur back to our camp and we put him in one of the huts. Denise was absolutely distraught – McArthur was babbling by this time, delirious, and Denise kept shouting about poison on the tip of the arrow. How she got that idea I don't know. I thought it was just shock – there was no obvious discoloration around the wound. No dark red lines going up into his groin.
'She wanted to get the doctor from the other camp, but after what we'd done I thought we'd be in for a nasty reception from the wounded fisherman's tribe. I was absolutely against it. I convinced her that the arrow, which we had left behind, was a fishing arrow and would not be poisoned. Finally, she agreed, and decided to nurse him herself. She went into that hut and ... well, I have my own ideas about the events which followed, bizarre as they might seem to you now, in the light of a Parisian day. Things were different there. It was all a little surreal. Our light, filtered by the roof of the rainforest, was of a sickly, greenish hue, and shadows moved back and forth through it, like phantoms. There were the constant murmur of insects and sudden confrontations with amphibians and reptiles, which seemed to appear on trees, in the grass, as if by magic. The whole place had a sense of the fantastic about it.
'Perhaps the arrowhead had been tipped with some kind of substance? Anyway, McArthur went into a state of fever. I heard him yelling occasionally, between bouts of absolute silence. Most of his complaints were concerned with being too hot, or too cold, but I also heard him shouting about the "snake" and the "river" – and following these cries, the low, soft voice of Denise, telling him it was all right, she would protect him. I didn't go into the hut. They had no need of me.
'Of course, fever can bring on hallucinations during bouts of delirium, but I believe it was more than that – something quite extraordinary was happening to McArthur. The mind is a delicate mechanism – if that's the right analogy – and once you tamper with its intricacy, its balance, it can respond in strange ways, playing havoc with reality. As I said before, I have my own ideas – ideas about memories and self-protection.
'The mind is like a camera, recording memories, which are never projected. Short films, locked away and only replayed internally, so there is never any doubt of their unreality. I say never, but I think in McArthur's case, there was.
'When McArthur was yelling about the snake, I think he was talking about the anaconda we had seen basking on the river bank a few days earlier. From the canoe we had watched it uncoil its enormous length, as thick as a man's thigh in places, and slip into the river. McArthur had been petrified. He thought the creature might come towards the canoe and he was shaking so much there was a danger of the canoe overturning.
'It didn't. It swam away, up-river – slow, sinuous movements through the brown water, its blunt head showing just above the surface.
'I think that McArthur's mind was replaying this encounter, projecting it and superimposing it on the actual scene – the interior of the hut. A sort of double-exposure effect, which had him believing that the snake was inthere with him and as real as everything else around him.'
Cartier paused as a waiter passed our table, as if he did not want any eavesdroppers to hear what he had to say next. Once the man was out of earshot, he continued.
'He was projecting, not just memories of the snake, though, but longer, deeper memories, which he had buried to keep from the light. These too began to emerge, to superimpose themselves on the dim scene within the hut. Memories evoke not only recognition of their familiarity, but emotions. Just as the snake stirred some primal fear within him, those older memories aroused a forbidden desire, a passion . indulged during earlier years. McArthur's past was with him in that hut, and he could not separate real from unreal. Combined with this was his need to be protected from that terrible serpent, and Denise was there to provide that protection. She wanted to help him, you
understand? She saw it as essential to herself to do what she could for him, at the same time, making her contribution to the expedition.'
Cartier took a swallow of his cognac. I sensed that the revelation was about to emerge and tried not to make any movement which might distract him. He seemed on the verge of abandoning the tale altogether. So I sat, quietly, waiting for him to continue.
'They were in that hut three days,' he said. 'I sent in food and drink, of course, but I didn't enter the place myself, not until I heard McArthur talking in more rational tones. I couldn't hear exactly what was being said, there was an intense quality to the speech, but the long periods of silence, punctuated by irregular sessions of screaming, had ceased.
'I went in, then. I'm afraid I interrupted them. I was expecting to see – well, I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't two naked bodies locked together. I left immediately, but though Denise hadn't seen me, McArthur had ...'
I groaned, inwardly, expecting now that I would get a sob story about how much he, Cartier, had been in love with Denise, and that he had never suspected that her uncle would take advantage of her hero-worship.
'So – it was incest,' I said, hoping to ward off his outpourings. 'A fairly mild form though. Both adults – and the relationship not as close as it could have been.'
He stared at me, his dark eyes holding mine, something troubling their depths.
'Yes. That's what I thought – and no doubt Denise. She didn't know either, you see.'
'Know what?'
It was the first time since we had met that I saw anything like real discomfort registering in Cartier's features.
He said, 'She didn't know McArthur was her father.'
My thoughts did a few acrobatics and I said, instinctively, 'But Denise was his sister's daughter ...' Then I stopped. I had the whole picture. He had fathered his sister's child and had now taken that daughter to bed. What a mess! The whole thing was revolting: incest in layers.
'He told you this?' I asked.
'Shortly afterwards. We pieced together the theory of memory projection from it. You can see how it relates to the film .. .'
'And you want me to distribute this movie?'
I stared out of the cafe window, waiting for his reply, watching people hurrying along the boulevard. My distaste for this project almost made me jump to my feet and join them, but I decided to see the thing out.
'Yes – we all do. We thought you should have some background to the movie – it might help to create a little publicity, don't you think?'
Cartier's face was devoid of expression. I tried to imagine what was going on in his mind. It wasn't easy.
'Let me take the £lm away with me. I'll contact you tomorrow.'
He agreed and we went outside and transferred the movie from his car to mine. I did not shake hands with him. I just climbed into my car and said, 'Tomorrow then.'
I had noticed, when we left the cafe, that he was limping.
~
As I drove home I thought about my own predicament. The bills were mounting up and I still had not found the successful movie which would get me out of the rut. My recent decisions might have been sound ones, based on my experience in the business, except that no one can predict certain success in the movie world.
That evening I watched the film in my private studio. It was a boring collage of river and forest scenes. The Herzog boat was there, the area around busy with people, but it could have been an amateur movie, taken by a camp follower, or, more likely, it had been put together from stolen discarded cuttings of Fitzcarraldo itself, and the film of the film, to form a bastardised child of both. The whole effort folded in on itself, until nothing made sense because it was too internalised. It exposed too much of its inner self, which in the revelation showed nothing but a confusion of scenes and snatches of close-ups. It revealed everything, yet it revealed nothing, because at any core, whether it is human emotion or something more substantial, there is no truth which can be grasped and understood. Everything becomes a cluttered wash of incomprehensible colour tones, weakened further by the continual rinsing of the thing in itself, until all you have is a faded copy of a copy, recurring.
When the film reached the scene where the arrows were exchanged, I paid particular attention, but even here I was disappointed. The light was all wrong, either too weak or too strong. There were figures in the gloom of the forest, and action certainly took place, but, bright and dark, what came out of it was a flurry of furtive movements, glimpsed through curtains of leaves and fences of treetrunks. There was a close-up of the wound in McArthur's leg, which looked genuine enough, as did the agony on his face, but it had been done better, by Charlton Heston in El Cid. McArthur, on film, was of course the spitting image of the man I met in the restaurant, calling himself Cartier.
There was also a single scene of the niece, or daughter, or both, half hidden behind smoke from a campfire. Either the shot was over-exposed or she was thin and pale, almost translucent, with red-rimmed eyelids. The sort of will-o'-the-wisp female that gets cast as a fairy extra in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
What it amounted to was an unholy tangle. Of course, if the story were true, there were enough vultures in the world to make the film a success in terms of sales at the box office. Artistically, it stank, but some cinema-goers would be curious about this trio and their incestuous goings-on in the South American jungle. If it was released to the media, the gutter press would provide all the publicity needed.
However, I doubted very much that the story was true and I had my integrity to consider.
I met Cartier, or McArthur, at the same cafe the next day.
I gave him the standard rejection.
'It's not good cinema,' I said.
He seemed very disappointed, leaving me his card and saying I was to call him if I changed my mind. I replied that there was little chance of that. Once I had made a decision, I told him, I usually stuck with it.
His eyes went to a corner of the cafe, where there was a door with a small window set in it. I thought I caught a flash of something behind the glass of that window and turned back to him. He had a dejected expression on his face.
'Who's behind the door?' I said.
He seemed about to argue, then must have changed his mind. I suppose that, since I had rejected his offer, he saw nothing to gain by denial.
A friend of mine – cameraman. He's filming us. I thought it would make a good postscript to the movie – you and I meeting, discussing the project ...'
I looked him straight in the eyes.
'You're McArthur, aren't you? Who's that behind the door? Cartier?'
Before he could reply, I saw his eyes widen as he looked up, over my left shoulder. Then a tremendous explosion filled my head. I felt the heat of a blast on my cheek, and smelt the acrid odour of cordite. My head rang with the noise and for a few seconds I could not see. let alone hear anything. If any sensible thought at all crossed my mind, it was that the cafe had been bombed by some terrorist organisation.
When I was able to register a conscious understanding of what was happening, I realised that McArthur was sprawled on the floor, where he had gone flying backwards. There was blood in his hair, on his collar. What I had heard was the sound of a revolver being fired close to my ear.
As I turned around, still groggy and shocked, she was just putting the barrel of the gun beneath her chin. There was another explosion, not so loud as the first, since it was muffled by soft flesh. The body struck my shoulder as it fell and I think I screamed.
The next thing I knew I was being helped to my feet and led away towards the bar. My legs were shaking violently and someone forced a brandy down my throat. I couldn't even hold the glass, my hands were trembling so much. There was a lot of shouting, which I could hear above the ringing in my ears. I remember glancing back at the woman's corpse. once. But it was impossible to tell whether the face – now covered in gore – belonged to the girl I had seen in the movie the previous evening. It crossed my mind that it might even be McArthur's sister; the mother of their daughter.
An unholy tangle. The police came and took me into another room at the back. I can't recall what I told them, but I must have just recounted what had passed over the last two days, between the man on the floor and myself. I found out later that they had secretly videoed my statement. Finally, I remembered about the cameraman, behind the window in the door, and started to tell them when one of them pointed towards the corner of the room. There was another man there. talking to more policemen. He glanced across at me and I recognised him.
There was a movie camera, on the table, between him and his interviewers. He gave me a look, as he nodded at his recording device. It was difficult not to interpret that gesture into a language I knew well, that said:
'I've got it all here. on film. if you want to use it.'
That was just before the TV crews arrived, and I believe you saw what followed, for yourselves, on the six o'clock news.
Alain d'Ivry, the talk-show compère, offers me a glass of water, and with the cameras still working, I take a long drink.
'Are we still on?' I say.
He nods. 'But don't worry – we'll edit this out later. Let's get back to the cafe scene. You say you didn't recognise the woman's face after she turned the gun on herself, but now of course...'