Werner Herzog has published his diaries that he wrote during the filming of Fitzcarraldo, Conquest of the Useless. For those of you who have seen Burden of Dreams, you understand that this is probably some freaky shit definitely worth reading. If you haven’t seen Burden of Dreams but you have seen Fitzcarraldo, you’ll find this history of the filmmaking process nothing short of astonishing. And if you are unfamiliar with all of it, well, I’d start with the movies.

I haven’t read the book yet, but from a new interview with Herzog over at Art Beat by Jeffrey Brown, Herzog admits that even he couldn’t go back to those diaries for many years. An excerpt from the prologue:

“A vision had seized hold of me, like the demented fury of a hound that has sunk its teeth into the leg of a deer carcass and is shaking and tugging at the downed game so frantically that the hunter gives up trying to calm him. It was the vision of a large steamship scaling a hill under its own steam, working its way up a steep slope in the jungle, while above this natural landscape, which shatters the weak and the strong with equal ferocity, soars the voice of Caruso, silencing all the pain and all the voices of the primeval forest and drowning out all birdsong. To be more precise: bird cries, for in this setting, left unfinished and abandoned by God in wrath, the birds do not sing; they shriek in pain, and confused trees tangle with one another like battling Titans, from horizon to horizon, in a steaming creation still being formed. Fog-panting and exhausted they stand in this unreal world, in unreal misery– and I, like a stanza in a poem written in an unknown foreign tongue, am shaken to the core.” Listen/read the interview >>

The interview doesn’t focus on the book specifically, but that’s ok since we all just want more Herzog!