Trivia / Aguirre, the Wrath of God

• Breakthrough Hit: For Werner Herzog.
• Completely Different Title:
  • Norway: The Hunt for El Dorado
  • Taiwan: Scourge
• Enforced Method Acting: Werner Herzog wanted Aguirre to be the epitome of Tranquil Fury, but Klaus Kinski wanted to produce a raving madman (more akin to Kinski's own real personality). To get his wish, Herzog would intentionally provoke Kinski into unleashing all his fury off-camera, so by the time shooting began, Kinski was exhausted, creating the performance that Herzog desired.
• Fake Nationality:
  • A number of German actors played Spanish roles, starting with Klaus Kinski as Aguirre.
  • The Mexican Helena Rojo as the Spanish Inés de Atienza.
  • Ruy Guerra, from Mozambique, as the Spanish don Pedro de Ursúa.
• Inspiration for the Work: The idea for the film began when Herzog borrowed a book on historical adventurers from a friend. After reading a half-page devoted to Lope de Aguirre, the filmmaker became inspired and immediately devised the story. He fabricated most of the plot details and characters, although he did use some historical figures in purely fictitious ways.
• Never Work with Children or Animals:
  • Werner Herzog says on the DVD Commentary that he was bitten over and over again "about 50 times" by the monkeys that appear at the end of the film. Klaus Kinski claimed at one time that while filming the final scene, he was also bitten by some of the monkeys.
  • Herzog was attacked by fire ants when he was chopping a tree branch with his machete. He didn't cut it down completely before ants poured down on him and bit him "about 150 times". As a result, he got a bad fever.
• On-Set Injury:
  • Klaus Kinski noticed an extra eating bananas that were meant for the cast (such as himself). His response was to hit him in the head with a sword. The extra was left with a huge gash and would have died if it wasn't for the helmet he was wearing.
  • Kinski later became irritated by the amount of noise coming from a hut where crew members were playing cards. He grabbed a rifle and fired multiple shots into the hut, blasting off the tip of someone's finger. By this point, it was said that it was a miracle that he didn't kill anyone.
• Orphaned Reference: In the DVD Commentary, Werner Herzog reveals that the ship in the trees originally was part of a subplot related to Orellana that was dropped in the course of filming. It was intended to be a real ship, not a hallucination. He has not explained how the ship came up there, though.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: At one point, a storm caused a river to flood, covering the film sets in several feet of water and destroying all the rafts built for the film. This flooding was immediately incorporated into the story, as a sequence including a flood and subsequent rebuilding of rafts was shot.
• Throw It In!: A lot of scenes were improvised on the spot or were complete accidents. For example, the scene where the raft is destroyed was an accident captured on film.
• Troubled Production: When Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski make a movie, it's a given. This one was fairly mild compared to other instances, as Herzog threatened to shoot Kinski and then himself when Kinski tried saying Screw This, I'm Outta Here.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Werner Herzog was travelling with a soccer team while writing the script, and one of them got drunk and vomited on the first several pages he'd done, rendering them illegible and forcing him to redo it all. To this day, he has no memory of what was on the lost pages.
  • The screenplay was shot as written, with some minor differences. In an early scene in which Pizarro instructs Ursúa to lead the scouting team down the river, in the script Pizarro also mentions that in the course of the expedition Ursúa could possibly discover what happened to Francisco de Orellana's expedition, which had vanished without a trace years before. Later in the screenplay, Aguirre and his men find a boat and the long-dead remains of Spanish soldiers, and further down the river they discover another ship lodged in some tree tops, which Aguirre and company explore, but they find no sign of Orellana or his men on it. Herzog ultimately eliminated any such references to Orellana's expedition from the film. The sequence with the boat caught in the upper branches of a tree remains, but as filmed it seems to be simply a hallucinatory vision.
  • The finale is significantly different from Herzog's original script. The director recalled,
    "I only remember that the end of the film was totally different. The end was actually the raft going out into the open ocean and being swept back inland, because for many miles you have a counter-current, the Amazon actually goes backwards. And it was tossed to and fro. And a parrot would scream: "El Dorado, El Dorado"..."

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