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.

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