Werner Herzog’s 1982 film Fitzcarraldo tells the tale of a crazed opera-loving Irishman, played by Klaus Kinski, who wants to bring opera to the Amazonian jungle. He becomes obsessed with getting a steamship from one river to another to further his plan. And the steamship must be dragged uphill to do this. Most film directors would have shot that sequence with a model ship getting dragged up a model mountain and called it good enough.

But Herzog said “forget models.” He wanted to do the real thing. You could say he was like the title character of his film and he was obsessed with the idea. That is, drag a 320-ton steamship up a muddy 40% incline. But to do that he needed plenty of rope.

Herzog filmed a scene that showed crews of native Amazonian people turning huge, crudely-built capstans that took up the rope and using the mechanical advantage of multiple pulleys seemed to drag the ship uphill. Herzog wrote in his 2002 book Herzog on Herzog, “We had about 700 Indians who provided much of the pulling force by moving the winches.”

The real weight of the ship was not resting on fiber rope as depicted in the film, however, but rather on steel wire rope. And according to Herzog the mechanical advantage designed into the system was so pronounced that only a small number of people were required to actually provide the pulling force. Again, from Herzog on Herzog, “Theoretically speaking, I could have pulled the boat over the mountain with my little finger given the fact that we had a pulley system with a 10,000-fold transmission. It would have taken very little strength, though I would have had to pull the rope about five miles to move the boat five inches.”

Herzog was later criticized for endangering the people working on the ship dragging scene in Fitzcarraldo, but he insisted in his 2002 book that this was not the case. “No one was ever at risk while the ship was pulled over the mountain. No one means no actor, no technician, no extra. The simple reason for this was that the space at the rear of the ship was sealed off from the rest of the set. If the cables holding the ship had snapped, it would have slid down the mountain without harming anyone.”

Even with this precaution, some critics later claimed that some of the Amazonian people had been killed during the shooting of the scene, even though that didn’t happen, according to Herzog on Herzog. “There is a shot in Fitzcarraldo where the boat finally starts to edge up the side of the mountain a few feet before slipping back again, crushing a couple of Indians. I am proud that the scene is so well directed it was claimed these Indians really had died and I had the audacity to actually film their bodies, deep in the mud underneath the boat. Thankfully Les Blank got that shot he used in  Burden of Dreams — the [documentary] film he made on the set of Fitzcarraldo — where we see the Indians emerging from underneath the boat, laughing, and then washing themselves in the river. I suppose that many of these wild accusations were triggered by shots that looked so convincing.”

So, the main things to remember when dragging a ship uphill is have plenty of rope and to have a documentary filmmaker on hand to record the whole thing just in case!