An interview with Werner Herzog
by A.G. Basoli
By the time Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski teamed up for the filming of Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Kinski had appeared in scores of films and Herzog, with five features behind him at the age of twenty-eight, was one of the most promising directors of New German Cinema. The role of Aguirre, the mad sixteenth-century Conquistador leading a splinter group of rebels to self-destruction while searching the Amazon for the fabled El Dorado, had appealed to Kinski enough to brave the prospect of two grueling months of filming on location in the Peruvian jungle.
After weeks of drifting down the Amazon on a raft, wearing heavy period costumes in the sweltering heat, with the little food or drinking water on account of Herzog's alleged hell-bent quest for authenticity, Kinski's already feisty disposition turned lethal and he threatened to quit the production. "You can't do it," replied Herzog, who was filming on a tight budget that allowed little room for mistakes, let alone starting over with a new leading man. "I told him I had a rifle," Herzog explained, "and he would only make it as far as the next bend in the river before he had eight bullets in his head-the ninth would be for me." "Whoever heard of a pistol or rifle with nine bullets," Kinski commented about the incident in his autobiography-but the pact was sealed. Kinski completed the film and Aguirre went on to become Herzog's first international hit.
The unlikely allegiance forged by the two men on the location of their first film together spawned a creative relationship which lasted over fifteen years and produced four more extraordinary films, regarded by many as Herzog's masterpieces, including Nosferatu the Vampyre (a remake of Murnau's classic), Woyzeck, and Fitzcarraldo. But the storm never abated: over the years their fights became legendary and in his outrageous autobiography, Kinski Uncut (Viking Penguin, 1996), Kinski repeatedly lambasted Herzog with interminable, blistering tirades: "Herzog is a miserable, hateful, malevolent, avaricious, money-hungry, nasty, sadistic, treacherous, cowardly creep," he wrote. "He doesn't care about anyone or anything except his wretched career as a so-called filmmaker Herzog doesn't have the foggiest inkling on how to make movies!"
Of course, Herzog's own version of the relationship (including an intriguing explanation for Kinski's vituperative comments) was bound to follow at some point, and My Best Fiend, his feature-length documentary on the late Klaus Kinski, who died in 1991, premiered at Cannes Film Festival this spring.
Echoing the beginning of Kinski's Autobiography, My Best Fiend opens with an incident that occurred, during Kinski's tour of Germany with a one-man show in which he played Jesus. The location is the Deutschlandhalle in Berlin, capacity twenty thousand, in the early Seventies. A tight close-up of a wild-eyed Kinski widens to reveal him alone on a stage, glaring into the dark auditorium. Someone in the audience just heckled him and he's trying to locate the voice. Suddenly a man is next to him and reaches for the microphone. Kinski pushes him away and a fight ensues. Kinski thunders on: "I am not the Jesus of the official church tolerated by those in power. I am not your superstar." The heckler finally gains the microphone: "I doubt that Jesus was like Kinski. Jesus was a patient man, he didn't say 'shut up' to those who contradicted him!" Kinski wrangles the mike away from him and declares that he will not continue until this "miserable jerk" leaves; then he walks away in great, angry strides, throwing the microphone and tripod off the stage.
Using this footage out of context, unexplained, My Best Fiend succeeds in creepily establishing the tone of Kinski's madness, and then proceeds to expose Herzog's peculiar brand of lunacy. Through a tightly woven tapestry of remarkable archival footage, excerpts from the feature films, interviews and personal recollections, Herzog chronicles the pivotal points of their collaboration-from a thirteen-year-old Herzog's first encounter with Kinski, to their early fights on the set of Aguirre, his plans to burn down Kinski's house with him in it, their reconciliation at the Telluride Film Festival, and the incidents during the making of Fitzcarraldo.
"Kinski seriously thought that I was crazy. Of course I am not-not 'clinically,' at least-but he was right in that I was perhaps too choleric," concedes Herzog, although some might argue that hauling a ship over a mountain from one tributary to another-the central metaphor of Fitzcarraldo and an enterprise that delayed the completion of the film by four years-is dead giveaway in matters of insanity. When everyone else deserted him, however, Kinski stood by Herzog. The film was eventually completed and won the Director's prize at Cannes in 1982.
As if Herzog himself were addressing the jeers and accusations of an unseen spectator, My Best Fiend seems to waver between a harangue and a plea, often portraying Kinski as the culprit rather than the subject of the documentary. But when Herzog resists the urge to play the impoverished but visionsary filmmaker victimized by a megalomaniac prima donna, an ineffable sense of loss seeps through. Kinski becomes the recipient of a rueful and formidable homage made all the more poignant by Herzog's reluctant appreciation of his belligerant muse and by his truggle to defer to a powerful bond that shaped both his filmmaking career and, as he puts it, his destiny.
My Best Fiend will be released this fall by New Yorker Films and is set for a U.S. premiere at the Telluride Film Festival and a New York theactrical opening at the Film Forum on November 3rd. - A.G. Basoli