Don't plan too far in advance

Last night I finally watched Fitzcarraldo, directed by Werner Herzog, after having it sit around my apartment since April (it's hard to find time to watch a 2 hour and 40 minute movie).

Klaus Kinski plays Fitzcarraldo, an Irishman obsessed with the idea of bringing an Italian opera house to the natives of the Peruvian jungle. After a few false starts trying to raise money for his project by selling ice in the Amazon and trying to obtain sponsorship from local rubber barons, Fitzcarraldo comes up with a far-fetched plan to raise the money by starting his own rubber empire.

First he purchases a remote parcel of land in the Amazon, rehabs an old steamboat, and hires a crew. He maps out a route up the river which involves clearing the jungle and hauling the steamboat across a narrow strip of land in order to relaunch the vessel in the parallel river. Now here's the part that I thought was particularly crazy, but perhaps also the most believable: I don't think he ever really knew exactly how he would get the boat into the other river. I think he had some vague idea, but I think he planned on figuring it out once he got there. Despite the fact that this step was absolutely crucial to his plan, he basically winged it.

The interesting thing to me is that I'm starting to think that perhaps this is how extraordinarily big things get down. You can't possibly plan for every unknown when undertaking a large project. Certain aspects will simply have to be dealt with in the present as the obstacles arrive. If you try to solve every problem from the very beginning, everything would either go wrong at the first unforseen problem or it would be too discouraging to even start.

Perhaps a slight spoiler, but I'm leaving out all of the details which make the ending interesting: Fitzcarraldo eventually gets the opera to the Amazon, even if it's not exactly how he planned it in the beginning.

images: stills from Fitzcarraldo, found on the Internet