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, the recasting of Klaus Kinski and his screaming tantrums, and the offer from the Machiguenga chief to kill Kinski on Herzog’s behalf. It also covers anthropologist Michael F. Brown’s accusations, the burning of the film set by the Aguaruna in 1979, Herzog’s invitation to Amnesty International to investigate his own production, and the film’s eventual triumph with the Best Director award at Cannes and four stars from Roger Ebert.

• Why Herzog looked to ancient standing stones and pyramids rather than Hollywood effects for inspiration
• How hundreds of workers with hand-cranked capstans and steel cables replaced a failed bulldozer
• How Herzog used the extras’ genuine hostility toward Kinski to fuel the tension of a dinner scene
• What Amnesty International found when it examined working conditions on the set
• The film’s afterlife in The Simpsons, Metalocalypse and a Glen Hansard song, and what CGI may have cost us