The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (29 page)

EXT. ESTABLISHING SHOT. BBC TV CENTRE.

Long shot across tube line of huge satellite dishes at BBC TV Centre. Train sweeps into foreground.

PAN—

to follow train and take up position on the line showing the cab at the end of the last carriage as train heads into Shepherd’s Bush station, where it stops, no one alighting, then resumes its journey.

NEW ANGLE. EXTREME CLOSE UP. MICHAEL (whispering).

Celluloid miners. That’s what you are. Celluloid miners. You quarry these films from beneath London. Deprived of light you have become blind. Blind celluloid miners enslaved to the monster you created.

EXT. LONG SHOT OF MOVING TRAIN FROM INSIDE HOUSE.

To the accompaniment of a childlike tune from a musical box. From behind the bars of MICHAEL’s cot in his
old
house, his
father’s
house, we see the train trundle by. Yellow light pours out of the train windows, oblong like individual frames on celluloid. The tinkle from the musical box grows louder. The intensity and brightness of the light increase.

(MICHAEL—WHISPERED VOICEOVER)

You seek emancipation. I will give it to you. I am your saviour.

EXT. MOVING SHOT OF TRAIN FROM INSIDE HOUSE.

Camera moves out from between bars of cot toward window. As the last carriage passes the house, more and more light pours out of the train. We are allowed a quick glimpse of the interior of the last carriage—a blurry confusion of flashing knife blade and bright red gouts of blood splashing against train windows. Musical box crescendo. The light increases further in intensity, diluting the red then obliterating it completely.

WHITE OUT

MUSIC FADES

ROLL CREDITS

HE TOLD ME his name was Cartier and we arranged a meeting at once, in a café on the Boulevard St. Augustin. He was a small, thickset man with dark features and an Eskimo’s eyes. He claimed to be a Canadian and spoke a form of French that I had to translate mentally into the purity of my own tongue. His story essentially involved three people—himself, a man called McArthur, and McArthur’s niece, a twenty-year-old called Denise. Somehow—this was never fully explained—Cartier got wind of the filmmaker Werner Herzog’s decision to make the movie
Fitzcarraldo
and the three of them followed Herzog and his crew to the South American jungles, determined, clandestinely, to film the German at work.

I ordered cognacs, before Cartier got too involved with his story, and we waited for a few moments, watching the Parisian passersby, until the drinks were on the table. I then signalled for Cartier to continue.

“We pooled our money—all we had—and set off in pursuit of Herzog’s crew. It might seem, now, that taking Denise with us was a bad decision, but she absolutely worshipped McArthur and unfortunately most of the money came from her. Anyway, McArthur had always been strong on family, you know. He wasn’t married and his parents were dead. His sister, to whom he had always been close, was working somewhere in Asia. So he felt it was his duty to include his niece, her daughter, in the expedition, if that’s what she wanted.”

It was with intense annoyance (a mild word, I should have thought) that Cartier and McArthur realised an official movie of the making of the film was already in progress. In fact it was this second crew that he and McArthur had to shoot, since this party remained a barrier between Herzog’s main crew and Cartier’s secret camera.

“Denise stayed well behind at this stage, in a second canoe, but McArthur and I disguised ourselves as Indians and followed at a distance as they went upriver. McArthur had the camera in the nose of our canoe, camouflaged with reeds. In any case, we were quite a way behind and
we
had our Indians, who waved to those in front. We hoped they
would
just think us curious natives.”

The Cartier-McArthur camp was established a little downriver from the other two crews, and on the opposite bank, their movements hidden by the thick foliage of the rainforest.

“The Indians helped us to make some huts out of the broad-leafed plants. They weren’t much, but they provided shelter from the tropical rain. McArthur was like a schoolboy at first. Everything excited him— the jungle life, especially. He had a new single-reflex stills camera—with a close-up lens—and he photographed anything that buzzed, croaked, or hissed. The place was teeming with life. It got into all the equipment and our clothes. The only things McArthur wasn’t too fond of were the snakes and spiders. His phobias were very suburban.

“Denise, on the other hand, was contemptuous of everything in the rain forest. She showed neither interest in any creature, nor fear. I personally believe she was utterly incapable of being fascinated. That is, she saw no magic in this quite extraordinary world, only squalor. To her there were only two kinds of creature, in myriad shapes—‘slimes’ and ‘crawlers.’ Oh, she knew the names for them all right, but she just wasn’t going to waste her time finding the right word. That would have meant giving
them
a specific identity, acknowledging that they were even of minor importance to her, personally.

“All Denise was interested in was getting the job done. She didn’t like
me
very much either. I think I was a ‘crawler.’ And she was forever pestering me. One morning I had the camera in pieces—the spare wasn’t working either.

“‘Can I help?’ she asked, but wearing one of those wooden expressions that I hated. She had several facial masks which were designed to keep me at a distance and in my place.

“‘Yeah—you can scratch my insect bites,’ I told her. ‘They’re killing me.’ I lifted my shirt to show her three or four large red lumps on my stomach.

“She didn’t even say, ‘You’re disgusting,’ or anything like that. She merely looked at me blankly and remarked, ‘I mean with the camera.’

“‘No, I’ll have it fixed soon.’

“‘What about the spare?’

“‘I’ll work on that next. You’re in my light.’

“McArthur was busy cooking something and he said, ‘Get out of his way, Denise. Let him see the light.’

“She laughed at that. I didn’t think it was very funny, but they did. She went over to one of the Indians then, who was painting his body. He had a cut, which was infected, over the part of his face on which he was applying the ochre. She started remonstrating with him, quietly, though he couldn’t understand a word she was saying.

“‘Don’t mother him,’ I told her. ‘He knows what he’s doing.’

“Sure enough, when she tried to interfere, he slapped her hand away. She went very red, glanced at me as if it were my fault, and looked as though she were going to cry.

“McArthur had seen the incident—a small one you might think, but when all expectations are met with frustrations, and the rain forest is sending its squadrons of insects to harass you day and night,
no
incident is minor or too trivial—everything that happens is of a magnitude that threatens sanity.

“He put his arm around her and she nestled in his shoulder for a moment. I watched them out of the corner of my eye. ‘All right?’ he asked her, and she nodded, still flushed, before getting up and going into her hut.

“The trouble with Denise was she wanted to be doing things, all the time, to help—and there really wasn’t that much to do. I didn’t see it then, though I do in retrospect. God, she was so eager to help it was stretching her nerves to tight wires. I think if a maniac had run into the camp, waving a gun, she would have looked around eagerly for someone to throw herself in front of, in order to take the bullet. She wanted to make her mark on the project—sacrifice herself—to give it every chance of success, so that afterwards she couldn’t be accused of being just a passenger. If I had given her the onions to peel, and said, ‘You know, Denise, we couldn’t have made it without you,’ she’d have been my friend for life.

“The funny thing was, it was her presence that kept us going, only she didn’t realise it. She thought she had to give something physically, or intellectually, or it wasn’t worth anything. Her strength of will—the spiritual pressure she applied—was powerful enough to keep us there, working away with almost no material.

“Nothing was stated, you understand. McArthur and I didn’t say to each other, ‘Let’s go home,’ and then, ‘No, we can’t, because Denise will be disappointed in us.’ The fact that she was there prevented even this much admittance of failure. I just know, in myself, that had she not been with us, we would have gone home after just a few days.

“However, because it was one of those buried truths,
she
didn’t know it, and she still sought some way, any way, of proving that her presence was necessary to the project.

“If only I had given her some acknowledgement of the very real part she was playing . . . but I didn’t. All I could do was grumble that she was in my way. So we carried on as we were, stumbling around in the dark, and with Denise fluttering around us like some giant moth, ready to throw herself into the candle flame if it would provide us with more light.”

Cartier paused here. There was a tenseness to him which the brandy seemed to exacerbate, rather than relieve. He was gripping the glass as if to crush it.

“It was McArthur who thought of the idea,” he said, placing the glass carefully on the table, “because nothing, absolutely nothing of interest was happening—not for us. All we could do was shoot that damn boat from a distance and watch the crews working and eating—not the stuff of exciting cinema.

“McArthur had noticed a certain antagonism evident between our own Indians and those in Herzog’s camp. Something to do with territorial areas I expect. He said it wouldn’t be a bad thing—for us—if something developed.

“‘Like what?’ I asked him.

“‘Well, if one of our Indians should meet, face to face, with one of theirs, we wouldn’t be responsible, would we?’

“Denise understood him instantly—they had a strange kind of mental rapport that needed few spoken words. It was only when he said, ‘I suppose it should be me,’ did I get the idea. I’m not saying I didn’t approve the scheme, because I did. I was as anxious as the other two to go home with something of worth on film. But I was scared. Not only was it unethical, even criminal, it carried a very dangerous undercurrent. We might start something we wouldn’t be able to stop.

“So I did endorse the plan, and we made certain preparations. McArthur had volunteered himself because he believed himself to be an archer. He was the obvious choice. I was as dark as he, and my disguise was convincing, but the man behind the bow had to be good. We didn’t want a death on our hands: just a little action for the film. You understand. I could blame the heat, the insects, the rain forest— you know we had to wipe everything, each day, to get rid of the mould that grew on our possessions overnight—the humidity was unbelievable. We had begun to bicker continually amongst ourselves, fighting over silly things that meant nothing—nothing at all—even McArthur, whose initial wonder in the place had since dissipated. There was an indefinable sickness amongst us, that we battled with medication and had a hard time holding down.

“It was another world—a kind of heavy, drug-dream place. A place in which we felt we had a right to make our own rules. We had come a long way from civilisation—used all our resources to get there—and we had to go back with
something
. Oh, I could blame a thousand things—the excuses proliferate, even as I talk to you now.

“So—we did it. The next time we saw a fisherman leave Herzog’s camp in his canoe, we followed on foot, keeping pace with it along the bank. McArthur had borrowed bow and arrows from one of our Indians and when the man stepped ashore, he shot him, aiming for his leg.

“Now, I’m not saying that McArthur’s expertise with the weapon he normally used was wanting—he was probably very good with a precision-made longbow—but the Indians use much longer arrows and smaller bows. McArthur fired two arrows, I think, or maybe it was three—I can’t remember exactly. The idea was to wound the fisherman, have him running back to his people, and provoke some sort of reaction from them. We had a naive vision of flights of arrows whizzing across the river and nobody actually getting hurt—badly, that is—so that some attention would be focused on our side of the water. We wanted a skirmish to film.

“Anyway, it was a disaster. The last of McArthur’s arrows caught the fisherman in the throat. There was a kind of gagging sound and the man went down, disappearing into the foliage. I’ve got it all here, on the film. You’ll be able to see exactly what happened when I show it to you. Even now I have difficulty in remembering the details. You know, when you’re working, you’re too involved with the business of filming to register a conscious blow-by-blow description of the scene in your own mind—the director’s supposed to do that, and my director was one of the actors in this particular scene.

“I know I cried, ‘My God, you’ve killed him!’ when the next thing I realised was that McArthur was on the ground himself. He was staring stupidly at an arrow protruding from his thigh, as if it had just grown there—you know, like a bamboo branch had sprung from his flesh. I’m still not sure where that shaft came from, but I guess the fisherman must have fired back, from a prone position. The angle seemed to indicate something of that nature.”

Cartier must have seen a look of enquiry on my face because he added, “They fish with bow and arrows, there.

“Anyway, I dragged McArthur away with me and we headed back to camp, he using me as a prop while he limped along. He was as white as fish belly, I can tell you, and he was vomiting the whole way.”

I interrupted the story here. “I remember seeing a wounded Indian in the film of the making of
Fitzcarraldo
—was that the same man?”

“I think so. He lived, thank God. Or thanks to the doctor that their crews had taken with them.

“I got McArthur back to our camp and we put him in one of the huts. Denise was absolutely distraught—McArthur was babbling by this time, delirious, and Denise kept shouting about poison on the tip of the arrow. How she got that idea I don’t know. I thought it was just shock—there was no obvious discoloration around the wound. No dark red lines going up into his groin.