GOOD TALK WITH WALTER SAXER

Walter Saxer is a Swiss Film Producer who began his film career in the late 60’s when, in Lanzarote, he met the young German director Werner Herzog who had chosen the spanish island to shoot his second feature “Even Dwarfs Started Small”. Walter, 20 at the time, helped the production without having ever worked in a film before and became captured by the challenge of making the “impossible” happen. Walter then moved to Germany where he quickly became acquainted with writers, poets, filmmakers who were part of the German New Cinema wave like Herbert Achternbusch, Reiner Fassbinder and of course Werner Herzog, with whom he collaborated for most of his career. Walter eventually took a leading role in the production of iconic films like “Aguirre The Wrath Of God” and “Fitzcarraldo”. It is during the making of Fitzcarraldo that Walter gets to know the penal colony “Sepa Nuestro Señor de los Milagros”. The colony was a mandatory checkpoint before traveling to the Camisea location in Central Peru, where the steamboat was moved over the mountain. After the completion of the almost insurmountable feature film, Walter decides to return to the Amazon to document the surreal open air penal colony that had captured his heart and imagination. The documentary Sepa was put aside when other projects came to the forefront. After spending his life between Germany and Italy, Walter, in the mid 90’s decided to make the Peruvian Amazon his home. Today he lives in the city of Iquitos where he manages a small hotel “La Casa Fitzcarraldo” hidden in a luscious garden product of his relentless fight against the deforestation that is destroying the jungles he once feel in love with.