INTO THE MYTHIC JUNGLE:
THE THAI PRODUCTION

Werner Herzog has long had a uniquely ambivalent relationship with the natural world in his films – exploring both its allure and its indifferent ferocity – and with jungles, in particular. His first foray into the jungle came with the internationally acclaimed AGUIRRE: THE WRATH OF GOD, the story of a mad 16th century adventurer in search of El Dorado. Herzog returned to the Peruvian jungle with FITZARRALDO, the tale of a rubber baron with an intent dream of bringing an Opera House to a remote area off a tributary of the Amazon.

Though Herzog has a clear fascination with the abject terrors and chaos of the jungle, he also has unveiled its mythic dimensions. Herzog once said: “The jungle is all about our dreams, our deepest emotions, our nightmares. It’s not just a location. The jungle is a form of our soul – fears and dreams, a fabulous, luxurious wealth of growth, forms and shapes. It’s a state of our mind.”

Naturally, the ordeal of filming in such remote and perilous locales has also resulted in Herzog’s reputation for productions that flirt with disaster. In this respect, and in spite of its Hollywood pedigree, RESCUE DAWN fits right into the legendary pantheon of Herzog’s films.

RESCUE DAWN was shot on location in the remote Northwestern Hill Country of Thailand, near the border with Burma, and an area known for its fecund beauty -- its landscape a thick, jewelgreen jungle dotted with rocky hills and simple tribal villages, similar to that in which Dieter found himself after escaping from the POW camp. Luxuries in this location were notoriously few for the cast and crew – yet the primal conditions were also in keeping with the intensity of the tale being told. There weren’t even chairs, let alone trailers, for the actors. Instead, between takes, Bale, Zahn and Davies could often be found resting on the ground, sheltered from the penetrating sun only by the shade of a tree.

Each and every day brought new physical and mental challenges, as the cast ate slithery maggots, snatched real snakes with their bare hands, moved through the jungle in a deeply vulnerable state of bare feet and raggedy clothing and, during the rafting sequences, spent hours submerged in water. Cast and crew each gathered a growing patchwork of lacerations, bruises and mysterious rashes.

But, for Herzog, for whom filmmaking has always been a tactile, physical art, the more enveloping and true the locations, the better. Yet for all the natural challenges of filming in Thailand – which Herzog sees not so much as challenges as simply an organic part of the process of creating powerful imagery – real disasters were few in number. Herzog especially praises the Thai support for the film. “The crew was very professional,” he says, “and I can only advise Thailand as a location for filmmaking because it has such a wide variety of locations, a great infrastructure and very experienced crews. It was really a pleasure to work with the people there.”

Shooting in the Hill Country also enabled Herzog to film authentic tribal villages, largely unchanged from those that Dieter saw as a prisoner forty years ago. “The villagers liked that I wanted to show them as they really are,” notes Herzog. “No one is dressed up, they are wearing what they normally wear.”

The story of RESCUE DAWN was filmed entirely in reverse, so that the actors could arrive on set having lost, over a period of months, the necessary weight to convey their emaciated, indeed desperate, state in the POW camp -- then gain it back more quickly for the beginning of the film, when Dieter Dengler appears, just as the real Dengler does in vintage photographs, as impressively handsome and fit. Always true to his cast, Herzog dieted in solidarity with his actors, although he committed to only losing half the pounds that Bale, Zahn and Davies did.

When it came to the film’s powerfully imagery, Herzog collaborated closely with cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger, with whom he has made a number of films, including the acclaimed GRIZZLY MAN and his forthcoming film set in Antarctica. “What I like about Peter is his physicality and how he plows after the actors through the jungle. He has a great eye for storytelling and a great sense of space and physical intensity,” comments Herzog of Zeitlinger. “He’s also a very powerful man of great physique and a former hockey player!”

Zeitlinger further brought to the film his extraordinarily rare skill with hand-held camerawork. “When Dieter is walking through the jungle to the Hill Tribe villages, there is no Steadicam – it’s all hand-held camera,” notes Herzog.

Adding to Zeitlinger’s cinematography are the film’s opening images – stunning footage of bombs dropping on jungle villages, turning the lush green instantly to shocking phosphorescence. At once beautiful and harrowing, the images seem to establish, if only momentarily, a wider sense of scale before the film drops into the searing intensity of Dieter’s experience. The footage, which was also used in LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY, is public material from the National Archives, shot by the military for the purpose of bomb damage assessment.

“It is a frightening shot because it is so persistent,” Herzog says. “And we set it to very lyrical music – a wonderful, wonderful idea by composer Klaus Badelt to not make it into a dramatic kind of war movie scene but to give it a more poetic feeling, that makes it even more frightening.”

In its entirety, the gripping realism of RESCUE DAWN that draws the viewer into the core of Dieter Dengler’s confrontation with death was achieved without special effects or camera tricks. The only digital shot in the entire film comes early on: when Dieter is seen flying the skies over Laos with several other Skyraider planes, digital assistance was required because there remain too few Skyraiders in existence to use real planes. But Dieter’s horrific plane crash I was filmed authentically -- following three weeks of intensive preparation in Thailand. “What you see is a real fuselage exploding in the jungle and a real man flying through the air – there is nothing added and nothing taken away,” says Herzog.

With imagery so stark and palpable, the score by Klaus Badelt, one of Hollywood’s most sought-after composers, adds an elegiac contrast. “Klaus immediately understood that it shouldn’t be that kind of orchestrated, wild, battle music of war and action films,” explains Herzog. “He proposed that there should be a poetic, lyric quality to the music, which actually makes it more frightening -- you frighten yourself by how beautiful you find it.”

As with every other element of the film, the music only adds to the audience’s feeling of being immersed in Dengler’s journey – from its shocking terrors to its sudden outbursts of beauty to its inspirational outcome. Herzog summarizes, “This is very, very difficult in filmmaking, but I think the film maintains a very high level throughout. From the very first moments it lifts the audience into a different perspective, with an elevated heart -- and neither I as a director nor the actors nor the photography nor the music ever allows the audience to step down.”

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RESCUE DAWN Synopsis
In the annals of history’s great escapes there is no other story like that of Dieter Dengler, the only American to ever break out of a POW camp in the impenetrable Laotian jungle.