The actor Werner Herzog called a kindred spirit: “There was an urge in both of us to join forces”
The most famous creative collaborator of Werner Herzog will always be Klaus Kinski, but when his best friend and worst enemy passed away in 1991, there was a major creative void that proved difficult to fill.
Of course, Herzog has always been a complete and total individual, but there was always something about Kinski that caused the filmmaker to raise his game. Maybe it was the one-upmanship, or perhaps it was the regular threats they levelled towards each other, but that deep-seated admiration and mutual appreciation they always had for each other was a blessing for cinema.
Teaming a famous eccentric with an even more notorious iconoclast was always going to generate sparks, with Herzog and Kinski a formidable duo on either side of the camera. When they knuckled down, history beckoned, and greatness awaited. When they were at each other’s throats, industry folklore gained many of its most infamous tales.
If there was going to be another actor who came along and enamoured Herzog in the post-Kinski years, it had to be somebody suitably weird. After all, this is a director obsessed with chickens who brushed off being shot on live television and once ate a shoe on camera because he lost a bet, so whoever his next muse ended up being, they needed to bring endless amounts of oddball energy to the table.
Funnily enough, that person turned out to be Nicolas Cage, one of Hollywood’s pre-eminent outsiders who’d decided that as much as he wanted to be an actor, he didn’t want to be an actor like anybody else had ever been. Put them together, and the sparks were sure to fly, as they did when the dynamic duo made a movie exactly as weird as everyone was expecting in 2009’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.
“This relentless, high level of professionalism he has is really joyous,” Herzog explained to Filmmaker Magazine of the film’s leading man. “The work itself was actually very quiet, very focused, almost like open-heart surgery. You don’t rush it, but you focus on the essentials. This is how I like to work, and Nicolas Cage followed me in this regard with blind faith.”
They’d only met once before prior to agreeing to make Bad Lieutenant together, which had come decades previously on Francis Ford Coppola’s winery “when Nicolas was an adolescent, and I was about to set out for the Peruvian jungle in order to move a ship over a mountain” as the auteur recalled in classic Herzogian style.
Once they’d reconnected, it was together or not at all. “It became instantly clear that we would do this film together, or neither one of us would do it,” Herzog admitted. “There was an urge in both of us to join forces.” Join forces they did, and thanks to Cage giving another one of his no-holds-barred showcases that somehow even managed to freak out his director, fans of both got exactly what they wanted out of the deal.
