Book Review: "Conquest of the Useless"--Hertzog Makes "Fitzcarraldo"

This is what “a beautiful, fresh, sunny morning” was like for Werner Herzog during the Sisyphean miseries that plagued the shooting of his Amazonian epic “Fitzcarraldo” (1982): one of two newly hatched chicks drowned in a saucer containing only a few millimeters of water. The other lost a leg and a piece of its stomach to a murderous rabbit. And Mr. Herzog realized, for the umpteenth time, that “a sense of desolation was tearing me up inside, like termites in a fallen tree trunk.”

link: Books of The Times - Werner Herzog’s ‘Conquest of the Useless’ - The Jungle, the Director and the Madness - Review - NYTimes.com