Famous explorer movies movie#

Almost as important as reaching their destinations is behaving with decorum and selflessness. That’s one of the fascinations of the films about them. They’re also well-bred Englishmen with very good manners. Think of the movies and the first images likely to spring to mind are of Klaus Kinski (who played the leads in both) with that look of demented, demonic determination in his eyes.īritish explorers like Mills’ Scott or Hunnam’s Fawcett share that determination. Both films had a touch of madness about them – and both were awe-inspiring and spectacular in a way that puts the most expensive studio-made epic to shame.

We had starvation – and no money,” his production manager George Sluizer later recalled of his experiences on the troubled production. I still think it was the toughest film in film history, tougher than Apocalypse Now. He returned a decade later for Fitzcarraldo (1982), which wasn’t about an explorer but told the story of a mad opera-loving businessman who dragged a steamship over a mountain. Herzog was in the Amazonian jungle for his 1972 film Aguirre, The Wrath of God, about a Spanish conquistador in search of El Dorado. They also both hit back at idiots like me who challenge them by wanting to make films there,” Werner Herzog commented in recent book A Guide For The Perplexed. “Jungles and deserts are at the extreme ends of the landscapes this planet has to offer, and both have enormous visual force. When they venture far afield on location, disaster is never far away. Their movies are the equivalent of expeditions. It goes without saying that filmmakers share some of the same mix of restlessness and hubris as the explorers whose stories they tell. He receives one of its highest medals for his work charting and exploring unknown territory in South America – but his fervent belief in a lost civilisation somewhere in the Amazonian jungle is regarded with extreme scepticism by many RGS members. In the film, based on David Grann’s book, Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) is both lionised and ridiculed by members of the RGS. The RGS also features prominently in James Gray’s remarkable new feature, The Lost City Of Z, which dramatises the life of Percy Fawcett, another British explorer in the Scott and Fiennes mould. After all, this is where many celebrated explorers came for funding and support, Scott among them. The Kensington venue is a fitting place at which to screen Scott Of The Antarctic.

Scott was simply very “unlucky with the weather.” He spent a year researching his own study of Scott and concluded that the expedition was not poorly planned at all. Fiennes was “astounded” by the lies and inaccuracies in the Huntford book.

Famous explorer movies movie#

Fiennes isn’t a movie expert but he knows everything there is to know about Captain Robert Falcon Scott, whom he describes as “by far the greatest polar traveller of all time.” He remembers hearing from Mrs Gorbachev in the 1980s that a new book had been published on Scott by Roland Huntford that described him as a “bad man” and suggested that Scott’s expedition was incompetently planned. The British explorer extraordinaire Sir Ranulph Fiennes will be at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) on Monday to introduce a screening of Scott of the Antarctic starring John Mills.