Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) on Netflix
NR19721h 33mAdventureDramaHistory
A Spanish expedition crosses into the Amazon rainforest in 1560, hunting the fabled city of gold, El Dorado. Don Lope de Aguirre, hungry for riches, is second-in-command of the scouting party.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.8/1069,058 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes96%
Trailer
Plot summary
Christmas Day, 1560. Gonzalo Pizarro's conquistadors leave the newly conquered Inca Empire and descend into the jungle, chasing El Dorado, the legendary city of gold. Pizarro picks forty men to raft downriver and scout the way; they have one week to come back with news, or they will be given up for lost. Don Pedro de Ursúa takes command of the group, with Don Lope de Aguirre beneath him, Don Fernando de Guzmán speaking for the Spanish crown and Brother Gaspar de Carvajal attending to God's word. Two women come along: Doña Inés, Ursúa's mistress, and Flores, Aguirre's teenage daughter. When the current carries the rafts miles off course and the week expires, Ursúa wants to return to camp, while Aguirre holds out the promise of riches ahead.
Cast
- Cecilia Riveraas Flores
- Alexandra Chevesas (as Alejandro Chavez)
- Armando Polanahas Armando
- Daniel Farfán
- Julio E. Martínezas (as Julio Martinez)
Show all 20 cast
- Alejandro Repullésas Gonzalo Pizarro
- Lothar Blumhagenas Don Pedro de Ursúa (voice) (uncredited)
- Heinz Theo Brandingas Don Fernando de Guzmán (voice) (uncredited)
- Michael Chevalieras Conqueror Being Beheaded (voice) (uncredited)
- Norbert Gescheras Conqueror (voice) (uncredited)
- Justo Gonzálezas González (uncredited)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- On location, Klaus Kinski fired three gunshots at a hut where cast and crew were playing cards, blowing the tip off an extra's finger. When Kinski then tried to leave the jungle because Herzog would not fire a sound assistant, Herzog threatened to shoot him and then himself.
- While scouting locations for Aguirre in Peru in December 1971, Werner Herzog lost his reservation on LANSA Flight 508; the plane broke up after a lightning strike and crashed, killing 91 people, with 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke the only survivor. Herzog later made the documentary Wings of Hope about her.
- To get monkeys for the climactic scene, Herzog paid locals to trap 400 of them, half the money in advance; the trappers sold them to a buyer in Los Angeles or Miami instead, so Herzog rushed to the airport and posed as a veterinarian, saying the animals needed vaccinations before being shipped out.
- Herzog wrote the screenplay "in a frenzy" in two-and-a-half days, much of it during a 200 mi bus trip with his football team. After a drunken victory celebration, one teammate vomited on several pages of the manuscript, which Herzog threw out the window.
- Herzog sent Klaus Kinski the screenplay, knowing he was the only actor who could possibly play Aguirre. Kinski phoned between three and four in the morning, screaming inarticulately for an hour before Herzog realized he found the screenplay fascinating and wanted the part.
- A storm flooded a river during the shoot, covering the sets in several feet of water and destroying every raft built for the film. Herzog immediately wrote the flooding into the story and shot a sequence with a flood and the rafts being rebuilt.
- Herzog explained that the film's choir-like sound came from a "choir-organ" with three dozen tapes running parallel to each other in loops inside it; played from a keyboard, it could sound like a human choir yet "very artificial and really quite eerie".
- Francis Ford Coppola said Aguirre was "a very strong influence" on his 1979 film Apocalypse Now, which contains seemingly deliberate visual "quotations" of Herzog's film; Coppola said he would be "remiss" not to mention it.
