Nature is rotting away

German film director Werner Herzog on the hardships he encountered in making his 1982 film Fitzcarraldo in the Amazon:

Kinski always says [nature] is full of erotic elements. I don’t see it so much as erotic. I see it more as full of obscenity.... Nature here is violent, base. I wouldn’t see anything erotical here. I would see fornication, and asphyxiation, and choking, and fighting for survival,... just rotting away. Of course there is lots of misery but it is to say misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, the birds here are in misery. They don’t sing, they just screech in pain.

They are geniuses, both.