If you were to name two films in which the trials and tribulations of the production were evident in the final cut, the first which would spring to mind to most people would be Apocalypse Now. Another jungle-set film which shares both visual and thematic concerns with Francis Ford Coppola's classic war movie and was fraught with production difficulties is Werner Herzog's masterpiece, Aguirre, The Wrath of God. After conquering the Incan empire, a group of Spanish conquistadors led by Lope de Aguirre set off through the dense jungle in search of the legendary city of gold, El Dorado. With little beyond this in the way of narrative, Aguirre, The Wrath of God plunges into the depths of insanity, with Herzog regular Klaus Kinski seeming to channel his off-screen tantrum-prone personality. Indeed, this is Kinski's film as much as it is Herzog's - a screen presence rarely rivaled in cinema, and a man who quite possibly was completely mad himself. Herzog chose to shoot Aguirre, The Wrath of God in chronological order, and the payoff for this approach means that the film is lent an incredible realism, with the cast (and presumably the unfortunate crew) increasingly beaten down by the encroaching, ever-present jungle. Herzog even adapted the film during the shoot in accordance with the weather, at one point integrating a flood into the plot. Unperturbed by the harrowing and stressful shoot, Kinski and Herzog returned to the Amazon rainforests ten years later to film Firzcarraldo, a production which turned out to be even more problematic than Aguirre, The Wrath of God.
