By the 25th of July, Flaherty and Murnau were barely speaking. At times David acted as an intermediary, and Flaherty occasionally came round to the veranda and they sat together in morose silence like an old married couple. Flaherty was miserable and angry about the final version of the film’s story, but it was Murnau’s money, and Murnau’s picture.

By that point it had become a simple tale of love in the face of the curse of the tabu. As a concession to Flaherty, the story had been set against the contrast between the lovers’ paradisical atoll and the “civilized” island of the merchants and missionaries. Murnau, too, saw the latter as a sad place steeped in alcohol and jazz. Flaherty kept insisting that the death of a people was their real subject; that they couldn’t turn back the clock. They had to film what was there.

Murnau’s reply was that Flaherty hadn’t worried so much about that in his earlier films. Hadn’t he invented activities for his noble primitives in both Nanook and Moana? Hadn’t he in both films taught the natives fishing techniques they’d long ago abandoned?

Murnau’s questions, David had later remarked, had been one of the low points in their negotiations.

In the afternoon heat they had the veranda to themselves. The Scots uniformly napped, and the Frenchmen lounged about inside, one to a table. They looked for the most part even more miserable than Flaherty. They weren’t interested in sociability; it wasn’t what their kind of tropical drinking was all about. Those who couldn’t find separate tables dragged chairs up to the wainscoting.

Pal had been overcome with a particularly vicious type of flea and some version of mange. Crosby had cut his thumb and was trying to work with a cartoon bandage. Flaherty was known to prefer more than one drink, and had been drinking heavily. He spent his afternoons sitting around making fun of Murnau’s hat. David continually capped his bottle or offered to put it away, which inevitably would initiate a short spat.

With the change of seasons, most days began poorly, with spoiled fruit for breakfast. On final location-checks, the surf often ran high when they returned from their anchorages. Confusion around the tiller would periodically cause their away-boat to broach to. Some production notes would be lost. After one capsizing, Flaherty’s pocket watch became a tiny aquarium; for the next few days he showed off a minuscule shrimp traversing the water beneath its face.

The long-awaited first day of shooting was delayed when one of the camera cases was dropped off the dock. Cleaning the camera took the next three days of Crosby’s time. The more intimate portions of the mechanism were coated with salt.