Fitzcarraldo

Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo won Best Director at Cannes 1982, the biggest prize the festival ever gave him, after the earlier Aguirre, the Wrath of God had been turned away from competition as a German submission and not an international one. It made Herzog one of the most internationally famous European auteurs of the 1980s, and the stories from the shoot, recorded at length in Les Blank's extraordinary documentary Burden of Dreams, set the standard for the making-of films that followed.

Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (Klaus Kinski), an Irish-Peruvian rubber trader in early-twentieth-century Iquitos, is obsessed with bringing Enrico Caruso's opera to the Amazon. To pay for an opera house in Iquitos, he plans to claim a remote concession of rubber trees by hauling a 320-ton steamship over a forested mountain between two parallel rivers, and then to run the rubber business on the capital it would generate. Claudia Cardinale plays Molly, the Iquitos brothel madam who bankrolls his early ventures.

Herzog insisted on doing the central engineering feat for real, pulling a real 320-ton steamer over a real Peruvian mountain with no special effects, and the shoot became legendary: the original lead, Jason Robards, was replaced by Kinski partway through, several of the cast were injured, and production stretched across three years. Thomas Mauch's photography of the Amazon and Popol Vuh's electronic score are among the most distinctive collaborations in 1980s European cinema. With Aguirre and Cobra Verde, it forms the core of the Herzog-Kinski rainforest trilogy.