| KINSKI ON FITZCARRALDO
[...] Herzog suddenly pops up in Lalaland and goes all over, begging for money to shoot Fitzcarraldo. But nobody in [...] Months ago I told Herzog that he could go fuck himself, and I hung up on him. So he began Fitzcarraldo without me, using someone from After some four weeks of shooting with the guy from [...] The five months in the Peruvian jungle are just like the months we spent filming Aguirre ten years ago. Once again our lives are constantly put at risk because of Herzog's total ingnorance, narrowmindedness, arrogance, and inconsideration, which threaten to bring about the collapse of the shooting and the financing. Once again the crew feeds on inedible chow cooked in lard. Once again we lack the barest necessities to keep up our strength and ward of dangerous diseases. Once again we lack fruit, vegetables, and especially drinking water. Mine is the only contract to stipulate a daily ration of lemons, papayas, and mineral water. The instant Herzog smells the roast, he sticks to me like a fly to dung and tries to eat up my food. No matter how much I curse, insult, and even threaten him, the moment he wants something from me, he's here, like malaria, like the stench billowing out from a pile of shit. He's the same decaying garbage heap that he was ten years ago - only more moronic, more mindless, more murderous. Day and night he keeps a notebook in the leather kit on his belt and he jots down his distortions about the shooting. He's also hired Les Blank, a so-called documentary filmmaker, who thinks of nothing but food. He's supposed to shoot a flick about Herzog, but this chow hound is so lazy that he sleeps through everything. If ever, by some chance, he happens to be at the right place at the right time, he dawdles and dawdles until his camera is finally attached to its tripod - and by then it's too late. He never uses a hand held camera. He's probably too shaky, but the main reason is no doubt the camera itself: It's too heavy and uncomfortable. Once again Herzog and his cameraman fo for weeks without washing. Once again their clothes are stiff with filth. Not soil, not mud, not clay. No. Filth! Their own filth. For hygenic reasons the thin leather over the rubber edge of the viewfinder normally ought to be changed daily. But it's not changed for weeks - no, months - so it's covered with a kind of blackish-gray slime. And it stinks so unbearably that I can't get near the camera. Furthermore, they're all disgusting lazy and voracious - they're still asleep at eight or nine A.M., whereas the jungle day dawns at three, and its wonderous and enchanting light reveals creation in all its mysterious power and purity. Before my very eyes the jungle arises from the colourful morning fog, just as a body is born from a mother's womb. Everything is new, young, and untouched. No human beings have ever seen this on a movie screen. Today the morning fog is rosey, almost violet. Using a machete I hack a path through the plant walls until I can look across the river. On the steeply sloping opposite bank, the 350-ton ship is hanging from a single steel hawser - as if it were sailing straight up to the rosy and violet clouds in the heavens. It's four A.M. I plunge through the jungle, return to the camp, and kick Herzog out of his sleep. When he sees with his own eyes what I've been yelling into his ears, he finally hauls ass and runs along the river. Five A.M. The fog will be shreaded in twenty minutes, and nothing is repeated in nature, nothing resembles the past. There's barely time to shoot the image I want. That's how it goes, day in, day out, several times a day. Over and over again I refuse to stick to Herzog's hair-raisingly crappy script or to take his amateurish "direction." I have to force him to accept every camera angle I want. I have to show that dimwit of a cameraman where the camera belongs, and I have to get the lens and the distance. I never "rehearse" a single scene. I say, "Roll 'em!" and I shoot only once. The movie is practically finished. A few more weeks, and I'll be rid of the vermin. The final scene, which is moved up, is shot on the boat sailing along the Amazon. I have to smoke a gigantic cigar. I stand on deck, right in the wind, which hurls the black billows from the smokestack right into my face and lungs. It's the smoke of rubber tires burning in the engine room - for the vessel, which is supposed to look like a steamship, is actually driven by a diesel engine. I feel like puking my guts out by the time the scene's been shot with different lenses. I'm so ill that I nearly blank out - then Herzog comes over and says he wants to do another take. This creep must be totally crazy! He wants me to go through the same hell again? What for? The take was fine, I know it! That'll do! I knock Herzog to the ground with a kung fu lunge and kick him in the face. Then I go below deck to avoid having to see him. In Please watch out for snakes - I love you, Nanhoï I can't help crying. I can't help laughing. Ihave to cry as I laugh. I have to laugh as I cry. Oh, my dearest darling! You're the only person I can't forget in the wilderness. Youre words are the sweetest. The shooting has to be interrupted. The blowhard has refused to listen to the Indians. The level of the river has sunk so low that the ship is stuck in the mud bottom. We won't come back until two and a half months from now to complete the filming. Herzog gives one of those pukey "going-away parties" that producers throw after beating the crew bloody. Then they all get drunk on cheap rotgut and stuff their bellies at the self service buffet. I don't attend. This afternoon, shortly before my plane is to take off, Herzog shows up at the airport. He hugs me and thanks me. I'm gonna toss my cookies. [...] Herzog and his cohorts keep bombarding me with phone calls, yammering and begging me to attend the Cannes Film Festival. I say, "Fuck off!" But they're like vermin, they keep coming back. Eventually, I think, Okay. I have to visit my dentist in In Tonight is the so-called gala premiere of Fitzcarraldo. I'm already wearing a repulsive tux, which feels like a straightjacket in a nuthouse. This is the last time. Tomorrow morning I'm gonna dump it in the trash. |
HERZOG ON KINSKI - From 'Herzog on Herzog' edited by Paul Cronin
[...] Kinski and I complemented each other in a strange way. It is certainly true that I owe him a lot, but also that he owed me a great deal too, only he could never admit it. It was very fortunate for both of us, fortunate for me that he did a film like Aguirre and fortunate for him that I took him seriously as an actor. You look at his filmography, something like 200 films, and you know exactly what I am talking about. He was totally reckless with his own possibilities. He respected and truly liked me, but he would never admit that in public. On the contrary, he would heap the wildest expletives over me, which has a very funny side to it.
[...] Though we worked together five times, I never saw him as some kind of doppelgänger. we were similar in many ways, and I think the reason he returned again and again to work with me was because we shared a real passion for our work. I suppose you might argue he was my screen alter ego, but only because all the characters in my films are also close to my heart. Maybe he was as much a doppelgänger for me as I was for him. it is hard to explain, but Kinski had always wished he could direct, and he really envied me for certain qualities that I had. He wanted to articulate certain things that were brooding inside of him but was not able to do. [...] I could see through him like no one else could. I knew what was there and what could be mobilized and articulated. Whenever he really got going, I would get the shooting underway as quickly as possible, and often we managed to capture on film something unique. Sometimes I would even provoke him so he ended up shouting and screaming for a couple of hours, after which he would be so exhausted and in the right mood, very silent, quiet and dangerous. I did this for the speech in Aguirre when he calls himself 'the Wrath of God'. He wanted to play the scene screaming with real anger while I wanted him almost whispering, so I provoked him and after a particularly vicious tantrum he was literally foaming at the mouth and utterly exhausted. Then I insisted we start shooting, and he did the speech in one single take. So sometimes I had to trick him into a performance, though he always believed he was doing it all himself. I knew how to nudge him, even trick and cheat him, just to get the best possible performance out of him.
The way I communicated with Kinski was rather strange. A lot of the time we did not even use words, almost like a set of identical twins. During the making of Fitzcarraldo we did a take where everything was just perfect, the camera and sound were flawless, the actors did not make a single mistake and Kinski was great. But I would say to him, 'Klaus, I think there is more to this. Turn the pig loose.' and somehow he knew what I was talking about, and I would roll it again and he would go straight into something new, something totally exceptional. Whenever I saw him go into one of those wild things. [...] And sometimes, even though the scene was coming to a close, I would not call 'cut', but let the camera continue rolling to see what might happen because I would see that Kinski was up to something. Kinski would kind of look at me out of the corner of his eye, instantly sense I was not going to stop the camera and of course the whole thing would just explode and get even wilder and better than anything that had come before it. This synchronicity was quite incredible sometimes, and there were many times when we would communicate almost through these kinds of currents. I knew his hysterical energy and his so-called insanity, bring them to life before the camera. He felt safe working with me, and the closeness between us became such that we almost changed roles; I felt that if necessary I could have played the role of Fitzcarraldo, though not nearly as well as he did.
[...] (Do you miss him?) Maybe very rarely, I have to admit, but my relationship with him had ended some years before he died. There were moments in Cobra Verde that I will never forget. The final scene where he tries to push the boat out into the ocean is full of such despair, and Kinski is magnificent as he collapses into the water. But I knew at the time we could go no further after the film, and I told him so. There was nothing I would like to have discovered with him beyond that which I had already discovered in these five films. He had certain qualities I sensed and that we explored together, but anything beyond Cobra Verde would have been repetition.
The final scene of Cobra Verde was the last day of shooting that we ever did together. He had put so much intensity into this final scene that he just fell apart afterwards. Even at the time we both sensed it, and he even said to me, 'We can go no further. I am no more.' He died in 1991 at his home north of
Edited by Paul Cronin
Faber and Faber, 2002.
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