Ned Beauman salutes the bold directors who’ve gone to wild extremes to film an epic – and been humbled by the jungle

​The opening credits of The New Adventures of Tarzan (1935) included the following message: “The production of this film was carried out under conditions of extreme difficulty and hardship, involving personal danger to the actors and technicians, to whom the producers owe a debt of appreciation. The sound recording was occasionally interfered with by the extremely variable atmosphere condition[s], and your kind indulgence is craved in this direction.​”

It must be a bit humiliating to start your film with an apology to the audience, but the director Edward A Kull and his team had indeed faced more than their share of trials. Ashton Dearholt, an independent producer who’d struck a deal with Edgar Rice Burroughs, didn’t have any studio space in Hollywood, so he decided to shoot on location in Guatemala. This turned out to be a rash idea. The crew survived storms, diseases and crocodiles; their equipment was imperilled by customs officials, mountain roads, and jungle humidity; and they ran out of money before they finished filming.

If all that sounds rather familiar, it’s because The New Adventures of Tarzan is an obscure forerunner to two films with far more notorious production histories: Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982). Coppola, as is well known, had to deal with the worst typhoon to strike the Philippines in 40 years, Martin Sheen’s dicky heart, Marlon Brando’s obstinacy, and financiers who understandably balked at a six-week shoot stretching to 16 months of chaos. Herzog, however, has described Apocalypse Now as “only a kindergarten compared to what we went through”. He was filming deeper in the jungle; instead of sending a patrol boat down a river, he had to haul a steamship over a mountain; and he had a star, Klaus Kinski, who made Brando look like a model of dignified professionalism.