A legendary Director is recorded while filming an ambitious feature in Director Les Blank’s 1982 documentary, Burden of Dreams.

Burden of Dreams follows Director Werner Herzog and his cast and crew as they shoot Fitzcarraldo, the story of one man’s attempt to build an opera house deep in the Amazon jungle. Documentarian Les Blank captured the unfolding of the production, made more perilous by Herzog’s determination to shoot the most daunting scenes without models or special effects, including a sequence requiring hundreds of indigenous Peruvians to pull a full-size, 320-ton steamship over a small mountain. The result is an extraordinary look at the filmmaking process and the single-minded mission of one of cinema’s most fearless Directors.

On September 24, following the DGA Special Projects Committee’s Documentary Series screening in the Guild’s Los Angeles Theater, the subject of the film, Director Werner Herzog, discussed his participation in the behind-the-scenes look at the making of Fitzcarraldo, as well as his own body of work during a conversation moderated by DGA Special Projects Documentary Series Subcommittee Chair Ondi Timoner (Last Flight Home).

During the conversation, Herzog mentioned how Blank’s documentary sensationalized some of the dangers of the undertaking of Fitzcarraldo but acknowledges Blank’s powerful storytelling. “I think Les made an extraordinary film with great depth, with great insight, with great beauty. Unprecedented.”

Asked if he had any advice for fellow filmmakers, Herzog said, “Start shooting tomorrow. Anything that comes to you, you have to do instantly. Don’t wait for inspiration. The world is full of stories. They come at you. It’s like the burglars in your kitchen at 4:00 in the morning. You wake up because something is stirring and one of them comes swinging at you so that’s the one with whom you have to deal first. This is how I’m dealing with my work.”

In addition to Burden of Dreams, which received the British Academy Film Award for Best Documentary in 1983, Blank’s directorial credits include the feature documentaries A Poem Is a Naked Person, Always for Pleasure, Innocents Abroad, The Maestro: King of the Cowboy Artists, Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers and In Heaven There Is No Beer? Blank passed away in 2013.

In addition to Fitzcarraldo, Herzog’s nearly 70 credits include the feature films Aguirre: The Wrath of God, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Nosferatu the Vampyre, Invincible, Rescue Dawn and Queen of the Desert; the documentaries Salt and Fire, Into the Abyss, Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Little Dieter Needs to Fly; and episodes of the television documentary series On Death Row. Herzog was nominated for the Academy Award for his 2009 documentary Encounters at the End of the World. He won the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary for his 2005 feature Grizzly Man. Herzog has been a DGA member since 2006.