Editing Aguirre, the Wrath of God (section)

===Screenplay===
Herzog wrote the screenplay "in a frenzy" in two-and-a-half days. Much of the script was written during a {{convert|200|mi|km|adj=on}} bus trip with Herzog's football team. His teammates got drunk after winning a game and one vomited on several pages of Herzog's manuscript, which he immediately threw out the window. Herzog claims that he cannot remember what he wrote on these pages.<ref name="Herzog" />

The screenplay was mostly shot as written, with only minor differences. In an early scene in which Pizarro instructs Ursúa to lead the scouting team down the river, in the script, Pizarro mentions that in the course of the expedition Ursúa could possibly discover what happened to [[Francisco de Orellana]]'s expedition, which had vanished without a trace years before (see "Historical Accuracy" section). Later in the screenplay, Aguirre and his men find a boat and the long-dead remains of Orellana's soldiers.<ref name="Fritze"/>

Further down the river, they discover another ship lodged in the treetops. In the screenplay, Aguirre and others explore the boat but find no sign of Orellana or his men. Herzog ultimately eliminated any such references to Orellana's expedition from the film. The sequence with the boat caught in the upper branches of a tree remains, but as filmed it seems to be simply a hallucinatory vision.<ref name="Fritze">{{cite journal |id={{Project MUSE|402266}} {{ProQuest|1308280267}} |last1=Fritze |first1=Ronald |title=Werner Herzog's Adaptation of History in Aguirre, The Wrath of God |journal=Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies |date=1985 |volume=15 |issue=4 |pages=74–86 |doi=10.1353/flm.1985.a402266 |s2cid=191781266 }}</ref>

The finale is significantly different from Herzog's original script. The director recalled, "I only remember that the end of the film was totally different. The end was actually the raft going out into the open ocean and being swept back inland, because for many miles you have a counter-current, the Amazon actually goes backwards. And it was tossed to and fro. And a parrot would scream: 'El Dorado, El Dorado{{'"}}.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/werner_herzog.html|title=The Trail of Werner Herzog: An Interview|access-date=2007-05-08|first=Werner|last=Herzog|publisher=Off Screen}}</ref> This ending was eventually adapted for ''[[Cobra Verde]]'', Herzog's final film with Kinski.