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Last night we were filming in the early hours for The Night of Tears. Having got inside the city without fighting, the Spanish lost their nerve and massacred hundreds of Aztec warriors. Now surrounded and terrified, their supplies cut off, they decided to pull out in the dead of night: hooves and harness muffled. The canal bridges on their line of retreat had been broken, and their portable bridge got stuck: They were trapped. Terrible scenes of panic as they and their baggage fell into the water. Two thirds of them- maybe eight hundred men- were killed. Many were captured alive to be sacrificed to the Aztec god of war. The stuff of Hollywood. But history is here and now. It is what we make of it: Landscape, people, traditions, texts. You have to hang your film narrative on those pegs. History as a kind of travel-adventure.
This first shoot has gone well. As always there are things we wish we had got, things we wish to do in the Lost City of the Incas. In Peru we will be going up to 18,000 feet on the greatest Inca pilgrimage. The fitness I had on our forced march over the Hindu Kush in Alexander's footsteps has evaporated in a year or two of the soft life in London. Unless we are fit and acclimatized, we haven't a hope of doing that with all the camera gear. So is filming a young person's game? Ask me after we've been up the Andes!!
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