Burden of Dreams
For nearly five years, acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog desperately tried to complete one of the most ambitious and difficult films of his career, Fitzcarraldo, the story of one man’s attempt to build an opera house deep in the Amazon jungle. Documentary filmmaker Les Blank captured the unfolding of this production, made more perilous by Herzog’s determination to shoot the most daunting scenes without models or special effects, including a sequence requiring hundreds of indigenous Peruvians to pull a full-size, 320-ton steamship over a small mountain. The result is an extraordinary document of the filmmaking process and a unique look into the single-minded mission of one of cinema’s most fearless directors.
Special Features
- New, restored high-definition digital transfer
- Audio commentary by director Les Blank, editor and sound recordist Maureen Gosling, and Fitzcarraldo director Werner Herzog
- Dreams and Burdens, a new thirty-eight-minute interview with Herzog
- Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980), a twenty-minute film by Blank featuring Herzog fulfilling a bet
- Deleted scenes
- Photo gallery of images taken by Gosling
- Trailer
- New English subtitle translation
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- Plus: An essay by film scholar Paul Arthur
Cover illustration by Richard May, design by Martin Ogolter
Special Features
- New, restored high-definition digital transfer
- Audio commentary by director Les Blank, editor and sound recordist Maureen Gosling, and Fitzcarraldo director Werner Herzog
- Dreams and Burdens, a new thirty-eight-minute interview with Herzog
- Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980), a twenty-minute film by Blank featuring Herzog fulfilling a bet
- Deleted scenes
- Photo gallery of images taken by Gosling
- Trailer
- New English subtitle translation
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- Plus: An essay by film scholar Paul Arthur
Cover illustration by Richard May, design by Martin Ogolter
Cast
- Werner Herzog
- Klaus Kinski
- Claudia Cardinale
- Jason Robards
- Mick Jagger
Credits
- Director
- Les Blank
- Sound
- Maureen Gosling
- Editing
- Maureen Gosling
- Producer
- Les Blank
- Cinematography
- Les Blank
- Interpreting, interviewing, and camera assisstance
- Bruce "Pacho" Lane
- Interviewing and camera and sound assistance
- Michael Goodwin
- Narration written by
- Michael Goodwin
- Narration spoken by
- Candace Laughlin
- Editing assistance and office management
- Chris Simon
- Research
- Chris Simon
- Translations
- Francisca Wentworth
- Research
- John Lumsdaine
- Translations
- Inez Reider
- Translations
- Richard Becker
