Cineaste: Would you both have been lesser human beings had your encounter not taken place?
Herzog: I cannot answer because he was part of my life and I was part of Kinski's life. Of course there was life before Kinski and in between Kinski - in between the films I made with him. I made Kaspar Hauser, Stroszek with Bruno S., and later Land of Silence and Darkens and, of course, there was life after Kinski. I met him for the first time when I was thirteen. The film explains the chain of events.
We lived in the same pensione. The owner of this place had picked him up from the street, literally, and given him a room and food for free and did his laundry. He entered this place like a tornado, a force of nature, and it didn't take him one minute to destroy and lay waste to all the furniture. It was strange because I remember that everybody was immediately scared of Kinski. I was the only one who was not scared. I was astonished. I looked at him as if an extraterrestial had just landed, or a tornado had just struck. The way you watch a natural disaster, sometimes with strange amazement. That is the feeling I remember.
Of course, he didn't remember me, I was a child at the time, and the next time we met it was for Aguirre. As a private persona and a filmmaker, I think it was a necessary collaboration, that the two us found each other. There was a certain inevitabiltity about it - it was destiny. Thought the ancient Greeks would use this term with necessary caution.
Cineaste: Were there any similarities between Kinski and Bruno S.?
Herzog: Both of them had an enormous presence on screen, a presence and intensity that is almost unprecedented in cinema. Kinski was not an actor - I wouldn't call him an artist either, nor am I. Of course, he mastered the techniques of being an actor, the technique of speech, of understanding the presence of light and of the camera, the choreography of camera and of bodily movements. Bruno S. didn't have that and so had to be taught. But as the core of Klaus Kinski was not his existence as an actor - he was something beyond that and apart from it.
Cineaste: Would you say, then, that your fiction films with him were documentaries about Kinski, as well?
Herzog: If you use the term 'documentary' with very wide margins, yes. And, of course, Fitzcarraldo -moving a ship of that size over a mountain is a deed that bears a certain affinity with him, but only would take place in a documentary. The line between documentary and fiction film is obviously blurred for me. They bear such an affinity to each other that I can't really distinguish that easily.
Cineaste: What role does the German tradition play in your esthetics?
Herzog: I grew up in Bavaria. My first language was Bavarian and my own father could not understand what I was saying when I spoke in Bavarian to him and he needed my mother to translate. I had to painfully learn to speak Hoch Deutsch [High German] in high school later on, because I was ridiculed for my dialect. I have to say, with a rather primitive metaphor, that the only other person capable of making Fitzcarraldo would have been King Ludwig II. He was quintessentially Bavarian. It's not easy to define it but when I name him an you look at the castles, there's a kind of dreaminess and exuberance of fantasies that is specifically Bavarian and Austrian. There's an affinity, and it is certainly distinct from the Teutonic German culture and imagination.