It was a grind Gray woke up daily at 4:30 in the morning, put on his already-fogged up glasses, and headed down to the makeshift set. Instead of the typical 100 crew members, he had about 35, and hardly any set decoration or visual aids. The locals’ disinterest in the physical production of filmmaking may have something to do with the relatively small scale of Gray’s operation. It wound up being four different tribes playing the indigenous, and they were in some weird way the best actors you could hope for because they didn’t know anything about the camera they didn’t care.” “It had some measure of infrastructure, it had the terrain I wanted, and it had access to the Motilone Bari, which is the tribe that I needed to play some of the indigenous people in the film. “I got very excited because Colombia had imagery that was exactly like the stuff I saw in the photographs from the Royal Geographical Society ,” Gray explains. In the process of elimination, Colombia was up next. The next option was Manaus, a city just south of a major waterway in northern Brazil, but it didn’t have the infrastructure required for filmmaking, namely the ability to reach it by car. But Gray found Iquitas had changed in the 35 years since Herzog made his classic. With Brazil out as an option, Gray next looked to Peru, in Iquitos, where Werner Herzog shot 1982’s Fitzcarraldo. “And the irony is, it’s probably a lot of the reason we now know Fawcett was correct in his theories is because when they would clear-cut the forest, they found all this pottery and evidence of moats and bridges and causeways.”Ī soybean field is seen on deforested land in 2012 in Para, Brazil. And going through Brazil, I decided I had to go where Fawcett was - but much of where Fawcett was is now soy bean fields for farming, and the jungle has been razed,” Gray tells Inverse. “I went down to Brazil and I went to Argentina, to Iguazu Falls. And in trying to find the right locations in which to make the movie, Gray wound up acting as a bit of an explorer himself. The measure of Fawcett’s accomplishments has been disputed by some - with whom Gray vigorously disagrees - but there is no doubt that the land he explored had little in the way of creature comforts.
The story goes like this: In the early 1900s, Fawcett (played here by Charlie Hunnam) navigated uncharted terrain in the Amazon rainforest, mapping out land for South American governments that had little conception of what lay within their borders. Critics seem to love it as well: It has an 88 percent “Fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
The movie, which opened Friday, is an adaptation of David Grann’s best-selling book, which tells the exploits of the British explorer Percy Fawcett. It took the director James Gray an agonizing six years and three leading men to get The Lost City of Z out of so-called “development hell.” And that, it would turn out, would be the easiest part about making the movie.
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