Production
The film was shot in Africa, Brazil and Colombia. Herzog showed Kinski photographs of the places where he would like to work. Kinski was interested in some landscapes in Colombia, but Herzog did not agree. However, Kinski made the trip with a group of friends to some remote places that fascinated him: the foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Cape of The Sailing, on the peninsula of La Guajira, Colombia. Herzog finally decided on Villa de Leyva and Valle del Cauca, in the South American country. Kinski said then: "Herzog does not know that I give life to the dead scenery. "
The film was based upon Bruce Chatwin's 1980 novel, The Viceroy of Ouidah, which was itself based on the Brazilian slave trader Francisco Felix de Sousa and his role in helping King Ghezo overthrow his brother Adandozan as King of Dahomey with the help of Ghezo's Dahomey Amazons.
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Famous quotes containing the word production:
“The problem of culture is seldom grasped correctly. The goal of a culture is not the greatest possible happiness of a people, nor is it the unhindered development of all their talents; instead, culture shows itself in the correct proportion of these developments. Its aim points beyond earthly happiness: the production of great works is the aim of culture.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“The heart of man ever finds a constant succession of passions, so that the destroying and pulling down of one proves generally to be nothing else but the production and the setting up of another.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)