In 1982, Werner Herzog released Fitzcarraldo, a film whose central image, a 320-ton steamship dragged over a muddy 40-degree jungle slope, was achieved not with miniatures or effects but by actually doing it in the Peruvian Amazon. Drawing on production diaries, retrospectives and Les Blank's documentary Burden of Dreams, this episode explains why Herzog rejected the sensible shortcuts, how the real rubber baron Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald had dismantled a far smaller 30-ton boat, and why the director who called himself the conquistador of the useless insisted that the physical struggle itself become the art.

The conversation walks through the cascade of disasters: original stars Jason Robards and Mick Jagger lost after 40 percent of the film was shot, two plane crashes, a logger who amputated his own foot with a chainsaw after a snakebite, t ...