Then, with nearly half the movie shot, Robards got sick and had to be evacuated ... His greatest performance, though, is a love story: his own. Werner Herzog is a hopeless romantic.

Once, at the height of COVID, I dropped off a book at the home of Werner Herzog ... of the shot, which is playing a looping video of fish swimming in schools. “I got intrigued by the images ...

Shooting Fitzcarraldo was incredibly dangerous, but Herzog says he didn’t put anyone through anything he hadn’t first tested on himself, “So I got injured sometimes and that’s OK”.