Name: Werner Herzog on Letterman, October 11, 1982
Uploaded: 2016-09-21T16:54:09.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Werner Herzog on Letterman, October 11, 1982' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-09-21. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Werner Herzog on Letterman, October 11, 1982' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-09-21. Transcript available.

thank you uh francois truffaut called my next guest the greatest filmmaker
alive today his
most recent film fitz carraldo has just won the best director award at the can
film festival we're
delighted that he could be with us tonight for his first talk show appearance
ever welcome please
werner herzog um yeah quite an enthusiastic following represented here tell me
uh
i hate to do this to you since this is your first talk show but let's talk
about your brand new film
just like they do on all talk shows tell me about fitz carraldo first of all
who is
fitz carraldo well uh the name is derived from the british or irish name fitzgerald
the leading
character's name is brian sweeney fitzgerald but as people down in the amazon
can't pronounce his
name properly he calls himself fitz carraldo it's a story based in the amazonian
jungle during the turn
of the century during the rubber boom which was like a gold fever and he wants
to bring great opera
into the jungle and he's kind of a dreamer and settles out for an expedition to
move a huge steamboat
over a mountain into another river system which is inaccessible because further
down you would find
the most violent rapids in all latin america and he just moves them moves the
boat over the mountain and
it ends quite happily at the end very strange which is unusual for my films to
say the least to hear
you describe this it all sounds so simple i have seen the burden of dreams the
film about this film
and it was uh anything but simple anyway let me we'll get to that in a second
how did
did fitz carraldo the irishman you said yeah how does he get to the middle of
the amazon jungle and want
to bring in uh an opera what the film doesn't show it but apparently he's an
opera fan and he goes down
to the city the brazilian city of manaos where people actually around the turn
of the century built
a huge opera house a pompous uh incredible opera house in the middle of nowhere
just in the middle of
the jungle there was just ramshackle huts around it and um just incredible and
they they brought caruso
and big names from europe into this place just to perform for one night for let's
say two hundred
thousand gold dollars or so just fortunes to to get those guys in so he was
originally attracted by the
opera or the the rubber boom or both no i would say both well you see him in
the film as as a man who
has had a lot of failures before he tries to link the amazon basin across the
andes with a railway system
which gets stuck and he he goes bankrupt and the railway the train the locomotive
is still sitting
on 200 yards of rails which ends in the jungle after 200 yards only and he he
has had another big
failure trying to make a fortune as a ice producer but nobody wants that in the
jungle either so you're
going to try something a little easier bringing the opera to the amazon right
um we have a bit of uh
film from fitzcarraldo and do you know what we're going to look at here uh werner
yeah i was told so
okay give us give us a description of what we're going to see it's a scene
where fitzcarraldo finally
arrives at the place where he actually knows that the two river systems come
very close to each other less
than a mile distance in between and only a small mountain in between and he's
planning to drag this monstrous
steamboat over the mountain which we actually did in one solid piece and that's
what the film is about
later on you know it sounds very simple by description take a look at it here a
scene from uh fitzcarraldo
now this this movie was in in the filming for beginning the end of what about
five years four and a half yeah almost five years but most of it is of course
is pre-production we had to build two identical
two huge steamboats huge steamboats they were not there around so we had to be
afraid we would
lose one of the boats in a rapid scene the boat actually went four times
through the most violent
rapids in all latin america so we thought if if it sank we would need another
two years to build a new
boat and you don't get your crew and the actors back on on location after such
a time we actually didn't lose it but we almost lost it yeah the uh the film
that i saw
burden of dreams about the making of this one it just is a litany of one thing
after another that goes
wrong starting with the cast who was the original cast for this film jason
robots and we also had
mick jagger in the film but unfortunately uh jason robots got ill and mick jagger
had some other
commitments for later on for his concert tour so that was a big loss how far
into the film were you when
these people left almost 40 percent so it's awful to to start a film all over
again yeah it's quite a drag
but it turned out that this was one of you this was one of your smaller
problems by comparison
once you got started again we we were caught in the border war that was
building up border wars peru
and ecuador there was also some feuding native uh fractions that and we got
caught in the middle
of that and they attacked our camp at the end and burned it down we had two
plane crashes we had all
kinds of of things that can happen and of course we we moved this boat over the
mountain and it has not
been done before i mean nobody there was no necessity for such a thing so there's
no there's literally
no precedent in in technical history for such a thing well that that brings up
another point i'll
ask you about when we uh come back here we have to pause for commercial also i
want to find out
about mick jagger as an actor was that pretty good pretty good all right uh werner
herzog we'll be back
werner herzog is here uh in in the film that i saw the burden of dreams there
was some speculation
that during the filming of uh fitz carraldo you went out of your way to make
things more difficult
for the crew and the actors and the natives you hired my feeling is that this
is a misinterpretation
of my intentions les blank is a good friend of mine who did the film and it's
an excellent film i can say
that easily because i haven't done the film yet he's not free of mistakes i
wouldn't look out for trouble
but i i would be the last one to chicken out if it was necessary to to climb
down to
into hell and and wrestle a film out of the claws of the devil i would do so
so i wouldn't be scared of anything you say that again i'm not sure i
understood that you wouldn't
well it's i have done a film on on a volcano that was just about to explode
like mount st helens it was actually a volcano in the caribbeans so uh once you
climb on that mountain
uh the that bastard might might blow up any second you don't know yeah so you
you got to decide what
are you gonna do so we did it anyway yeah this would be a good place for me to
ask you about this
particular quote uh something to the effect that film is is uh uh is worth more
than human life
no i wouldn't say human life than my life i would only i would only speak in
that term in such a term
so you i would never risk the life of any of anyone else of course when we went
on the volcano and of
course when you did fitz carraldo everyone was with me and they decided to be
with me and they even
pushed me in into doing things like when we went through the rapids we had seen
the boat which almost
sank and then finally we said it would be marvelous to have a couple of cameras
on board the ship
and they even pushed me on board at the end almost everyone was injured
but that that was fine i mean it's it's quite it's quite some spectacular shots
that we got out of that
that's worthwhile i mean nobody complained and the film is what counts but i
mean looking at this film
the the circumstances and you would know better than anybody were just
impossible you you were knee deep
in mud a couple of times you had other natives attacking the natives you had
hired yeah there
was not enough medicine your the soccer ball had a hole in it uh which was a
disaster yeah
uh and and at one point when the to see the film they're moving this a 90 ton
steamship whatever
across 320 320 that's a little more than 90 90 90 90 tons i would move with let's
say uh 200 disciplined
people from the bronx give me 300 000 give me 300 000 people from new york and
i'm gonna move uh empire
state building over to new jersey but i need about 30 years for that but they
they said in in the film
that the people who were doing the pulling of the ship and there was some
danger involved at one point
the engineer said you may lose this guy you may lose that guy you may lose this
guy and you
elected to go ahead with it but the the the guys doing precautions i'm sorry
you did take precautions
of course yeah there was no one really in danger okay and i would have been the
first one to be behind
the boat well now that's what i was going to say the people pulling the boat
said we would feel better
if the owner of this boat yeah was back there while we were pulling yeah
exactly but nobody was behind
the boat when we pulled yeah and if we needed anyone behind the boat to push it
i would have been the first
one and probably the only one yeah let me uh uh ask you about working with klaus
kinski he he doesn't
look like an easy going guy well let me put it this way uh marlon brando has a
reputation as being a
difficult actor but i think uh his in comparison to kinski is probably like
only like a docile extra
on the set no but there's so much talk about the difficulties with kinski of
course he is difficult
but all his madness is is his real quality you only have to make it productive
for the screen and so
what what do all the battles count that we had we we do have a very deep
understanding that probably
actors and directors normally do not have okay i want to ask you one more
question about klaus and
i'll go back to mick uh not on this film but on another film uh did you uh pull
a gun on klaus well
there are some some crazy reports about that i must i must say that was in a on
an earlier film
that a gary the wrath of god he he he had an argument with a sound assistant he
demanded from
me ultimately that i should dismiss the man and it was all klaus's fault i said
no i won't dismiss him
and he said i'm gonna fire him and i said no you don't do that so he said i'm
gonna leave and it was
10 days before the end of shooting and he packed everything and went into the
speedboat and i came
unarmed of course and i spoke quite with a soft voice and i told him i i would
shoot him he would reach
the next river bend and he would have eight bullets in his head and and the
last would be for me
so the man has instincts and he knew it was no joke anymore
he was kind of scared and he screamed for the police but for about 600 miles
around there was
no of course no police post yeah it was to no avail uh anyway now back to mc
jagger what yeah
uh here's a guy you had never worked with before no of course i had never met
him before a good actor
you do you think no not a good actor that would be wrong to say he's he's a
sensation and nobody has
realized that what what a performer is that man it's just incredible he's uh he
played a part of a
feeble-minded of a retarded englishman who ends up as a crazed actor somewhere
in the jungle and he's
a sidekick of of the leading character just a very very big and sad loss i
tried to to take the momentum of
those catastrophes for the advantage of the film i i concentrated the story
better i made the conflict
between the the white intruders and the and the native indians more important
so it at the end i
think it was the advantage of the film and maybe we shouldn't speak so much
about the losses and all the
all the difficulties that we have gone through what we see on the screen is the
only thing that counts
and klaus kinski's fitz carraldo and we've got that film and i'm quite happy
with it uh and again you
already said you don't want to talk about this but what is there anything to be
done with this all
of this footage with jagger in it i mean or is that just uh you should have
folks over to your house and
look at it no no as a matter of fact i threw it all away i only before i did
that i made a small collection
for mick jagger i put it on video and they sent it to him as a gift yeah that
was very nice um oh i'm
sorry geez i had one more question we're out of time we do it okay um no i
forgot the question well
auditions for this job will open up soon um oh i was going to say at one point
in one of these monologues
in this film you say i don't think i should be making films anymore you said if
i complete this maybe
i should look for another line of work obviously that was not really how you
felt you have to see it
out of the situation how it came uh of course i'll be around and i'm gonna
struggle and i'll try to
do my best you're gonna stay out of the jungle for a while i would guess i
guess maybe i'll go to the
sahara next time with about 10 000 people terrific uh werner herzog we have to
pause for our commercial
thank you very much we're out of time i want to thank you my guest tonight mr jay
leno and of course
mr werner herzog a fascinating film called pitts corolla thank you very much
werner nice of you to be here

Werner Herzog on Letterman, October 11, 1982

thank you uh francois truffaut called my next guest the greatest filmmaker
alive today his
most recent film fitz carraldo has just won the best director award at the can
film festival we're
delighted that he could be with us tonight for his first talk show appearance
ever welcome please
werner herzog um yeah quite an enthusiastic following represented here tell me
uh
i hate to do this to you since this is your first talk show but let's talk
about your brand new film
just like they do on all talk shows tell me about fitz carraldo first of all
who is
fitz carraldo well uh the name is derived from the british or irish name fitzgerald
the leading
character's name is brian sweeney fitzgerald but as people down in the amazon
can't pronounce his
name properly he calls himself fitz carraldo it's a story based in the amazonian
jungle during the turn
of the century during the rubber boom which was like a gold fever and he wants
to bring great opera
into the jungle and he's kind of a dreamer and settles out for an expedition to
move a huge steamboat
over a mountain into another river system which is inaccessible because further
down you would find
the most violent rapids in all latin america and he just moves them moves the
boat over the mountain and
it ends quite happily at the end very strange which is unusual for my films to
say the least to hear
you describe this it all sounds so simple i have seen the burden of dreams the
film about this film
and it was uh anything but simple anyway let me we'll get to that in a second
how did
did fitz carraldo the irishman you said yeah how does he get to the middle of
the amazon jungle and want
to bring in uh an opera what the film doesn't show it but apparently he's an
opera fan and he goes down
to the city the brazilian city of manaos where people actually around the turn
of the century built
a huge opera house a pompous uh incredible opera house in the middle of nowhere
just in the middle of
the jungle there was just ramshackle huts around it and um just incredible and
they they brought caruso
and big names from europe into this place just to perform for one night for let's
say two hundred
thousand gold dollars or so just fortunes to to get those guys in so he was
originally attracted by the
opera or the the rubber boom or both no i would say both well you see him in
the film as as a man who
has had a lot of failures before he tries to link the amazon basin across the
andes with a railway system
which gets stuck and he he goes bankrupt and the railway the train the locomotive
is still sitting
on 200 yards of rails which ends in the jungle after 200 yards only and he he
has had another big
failure trying to make a fortune as a ice producer but nobody wants that in the
jungle either so you're
going to try something a little easier bringing the opera to the amazon right
um we have a bit of uh
film from fitzcarraldo and do you know what we're going to look at here uh werner
yeah i was told so
okay give us give us a description of what we're going to see it's a scene
where fitzcarraldo finally
arrives at the place where he actually knows that the two river systems come
very close to each other less
than a mile distance in between and only a small mountain in between and he's
planning to drag this monstrous
steamboat over the mountain which we actually did in one solid piece and that's
what the film is about
later on you know it sounds very simple by description take a look at it here a
scene from uh fitzcarraldo
now this this movie was in in the filming for beginning the end of what about
five years four and a half yeah almost five years but most of it is of course
is pre-production we had to build two identical
two huge steamboats huge steamboats they were not there around so we had to be
afraid we would
lose one of the boats in a rapid scene the boat actually went four times
through the most violent
rapids in all latin america so we thought if if it sank we would need another
two years to build a new
boat and you don't get your crew and the actors back on on location after such
a time we actually didn't lose it but we almost lost it yeah the uh the film
that i saw
burden of dreams about the making of this one it just is a litany of one thing
after another that goes
wrong starting with the cast who was the original cast for this film jason
robots and we also had
mick jagger in the film but unfortunately uh jason robots got ill and mick jagger
had some other
commitments for later on for his concert tour so that was a big loss how far
into the film were you when
these people left almost 40 percent so it's awful to to start a film all over
again yeah it's quite a drag
but it turned out that this was one of you this was one of your smaller
problems by comparison
once you got started again we we were caught in the border war that was
building up border wars peru
and ecuador there was also some feuding native uh fractions that and we got
caught in the middle
of that and they attacked our camp at the end and burned it down we had two
plane crashes we had all
kinds of of things that can happen and of course we we moved this boat over the
mountain and it has not
been done before i mean nobody there was no necessity for such a thing so there's
no there's literally
no precedent in in technical history for such a thing well that that brings up
another point i'll
ask you about when we uh come back here we have to pause for commercial also i
want to find out
about mick jagger as an actor was that pretty good pretty good all right uh werner
herzog we'll be back
werner herzog is here uh in in the film that i saw the burden of dreams there
was some speculation
that during the filming of uh fitz carraldo you went out of your way to make
things more difficult
for the crew and the actors and the natives you hired my feeling is that this
is a misinterpretation
of my intentions les blank is a good friend of mine who did the film and it's
an excellent film i can say
that easily because i haven't done the film yet he's not free of mistakes i
wouldn't look out for trouble
but i i would be the last one to chicken out if it was necessary to to climb
down to
into hell and and wrestle a film out of the claws of the devil i would do so
so i wouldn't be scared of anything you say that again i'm not sure i
understood that you wouldn't
well it's i have done a film on on a volcano that was just about to explode
like mount st helens it was actually a volcano in the caribbeans so uh once you
climb on that mountain
uh the that bastard might might blow up any second you don't know yeah so you
you got to decide what
are you gonna do so we did it anyway yeah this would be a good place for me to
ask you about this
particular quote uh something to the effect that film is is uh uh is worth more
than human life
no i wouldn't say human life than my life i would only i would only speak in
that term in such a term
so you i would never risk the life of any of anyone else of course when we went
on the volcano and of
course when you did fitz carraldo everyone was with me and they decided to be
with me and they even
pushed me in into doing things like when we went through the rapids we had seen
the boat which almost
sank and then finally we said it would be marvelous to have a couple of cameras
on board the ship
and they even pushed me on board at the end almost everyone was injured
but that that was fine i mean it's it's quite it's quite some spectacular shots
that we got out of that
that's worthwhile i mean nobody complained and the film is what counts but i
mean looking at this film
the the circumstances and you would know better than anybody were just
impossible you you were knee deep
in mud a couple of times you had other natives attacking the natives you had
hired yeah there
was not enough medicine your the soccer ball had a hole in it uh which was a
disaster yeah
uh and and at one point when the to see the film they're moving this a 90 ton
steamship whatever
across 320 320 that's a little more than 90 90 90 90 tons i would move with let's
say uh 200 disciplined
people from the bronx give me 300 000 give me 300 000 people from new york and
i'm gonna move uh empire
state building over to new jersey but i need about 30 years for that but they
they said in in the film
that the people who were doing the pulling of the ship and there was some
danger involved at one point
the engineer said you may lose this guy you may lose that guy you may lose this
guy and you
elected to go ahead with it but the the the guys doing precautions i'm sorry
you did take precautions
of course yeah there was no one really in danger okay and i would have been the
first one to be behind
the boat well now that's what i was going to say the people pulling the boat
said we would feel better
if the owner of this boat yeah was back there while we were pulling yeah
exactly but nobody was behind
the boat when we pulled yeah and if we needed anyone behind the boat to push it
i would have been the first
one and probably the only one yeah let me uh uh ask you about working with klaus
kinski he he doesn't
look like an easy going guy well let me put it this way uh marlon brando has a
reputation as being a
difficult actor but i think uh his in comparison to kinski is probably like
only like a docile extra
on the set no but there's so much talk about the difficulties with kinski of
course he is difficult
but all his madness is is his real quality you only have to make it productive
for the screen and so
what what do all the battles count that we had we we do have a very deep
understanding that probably
actors and directors normally do not have okay i want to ask you one more
question about klaus and
i'll go back to mick uh not on this film but on another film uh did you uh pull
a gun on klaus well
there are some some crazy reports about that i must i must say that was in a on
an earlier film
that a gary the wrath of god he he he had an argument with a sound assistant he
demanded from
me ultimately that i should dismiss the man and it was all klaus's fault i said
no i won't dismiss him
and he said i'm gonna fire him and i said no you don't do that so he said i'm
gonna leave and it was
10 days before the end of shooting and he packed everything and went into the
speedboat and i came
unarmed of course and i spoke quite with a soft voice and i told him i i would
shoot him he would reach
the next river bend and he would have eight bullets in his head and and the
last would be for me
so the man has instincts and he knew it was no joke anymore
he was kind of scared and he screamed for the police but for about 600 miles
around there was
no of course no police post yeah it was to no avail uh anyway now back to mc
jagger what yeah
uh here's a guy you had never worked with before no of course i had never met
him before a good actor
you do you think no not a good actor that would be wrong to say he's he's a
sensation and nobody has
realized that what what a performer is that man it's just incredible he's uh he
played a part of a
feeble-minded of a retarded englishman who ends up as a crazed actor somewhere
in the jungle and he's
a sidekick of of the leading character just a very very big and sad loss i
tried to to take the momentum of
those catastrophes for the advantage of the film i i concentrated the story
better i made the conflict
between the the white intruders and the and the native indians more important
so it at the end i
think it was the advantage of the film and maybe we shouldn't speak so much
about the losses and all the
all the difficulties that we have gone through what we see on the screen is the
only thing that counts
and klaus kinski's fitz carraldo and we've got that film and i'm quite happy
with it uh and again you
already said you don't want to talk about this but what is there anything to be
done with this all
of this footage with jagger in it i mean or is that just uh you should have
folks over to your house and
look 