Criterion Collection: Burden of Dreams

For nearly five years, acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog desperately tried to complete one of the most ambitious and difficult films of his career, Fitzcarraldo, the story of one man s attempt to build an opera house deep in the Amazon jungle. Documentary filmmaker Les Blank captured the unfolding of this 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 native Indians to pull a full-size, 320-ton steamship over a small mountain. The result is an extraordinary document of the filmmaking process and a unique look into the single-minded mission of one of cinema s most fearless directors.

DVD SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
– Restored high-definition digital transfer
– Audio commentary by director Les Blank, editor and sound recordist Maureen Gosling, and Fitzcarraldo director Werner Herzog
– Dreams and Burdens, a new 38-minute video interview with Herzog
– Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980), a 20-minute film by Blank featuring Herzog fulfilling a bet
– Deleted scenes
– Photo gallery of images taken by Gosling
– Theatrical trailer
Plus: An essay by film scholar Paul Arthur