Klaus Kinski: The actor Werner Herzog called “something beyond”
Every bit as outspoken as he is eccentric, Werner Herzog has made friends, enemies, and creative collaborators alike during his career, but he somehow still managed to find all three at once in the same person.
Their relationship was tumultuous at the best of times, but the results of his movies with Klaus Kinski can’t be argued with. From 1972’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God to Cobra Verde 15 years later, their five feature-length partnerships proved that while they were a match made in heaven on a professional level, those waters became significantly choppier when the cameras weren’t rolling.
At various points, Herzog confessed to plotting Kinski’s murder during the production of Fitzcarraldo, which was only thwarted when the actor’s dog intervened and attacked the filmmaker before he could set fire to his home. Their first movie together saw him threaten his star with death, too, with Herzog confirming on the DVD commentary for Aguirre that he’d pulled a gun and “would have shot him, there was no doubt” after Kinski threatened to quit.
In his autobiography, Kinski reflected on his partnership with Herzog by stating how he thought “big red ants should piss in his eyes”, which isn’t the sort of terminology you’d expect to hear from two creative mavericks who spent years in each other’s company. And yet, having first met when the latter was only a teenager, both of them were convinced there was an inescapable air of fate surrounding their intertwined existence.
Despite all the death threats, nightmarish productions, verbal and physical sparring, tirades being aimed at each other with regular abandon, and simmering tension anytime they were in the same room, Herzog couldn’t speak highly enough of Kinski as either a performer or a person. He even wrote and directed the 1999 documentary My Best Fiend as a means of working through the long-standing grief brought on by Kinski’s death from a heart attack eight years previously, as he told The Guardian: “Do I miss him? It’s hard to admit, but I have to say yes. Sure I do.”
Herzog held Kinski in such high esteem that he viewed him as much more than a simple actor reciting lines and embodying the characters on the printed page, elevating him to a pantheon above that in his own estimation. In an interview with Cineaste fittingly titled ‘The Wrath of Klaus Kinski’, the director shared how he saw the constant thorn in his side as it related to the profession.
Although he started off by clarifying that “Kinski was not an actor”, he acknowledged that he’d “mastered the techniques of being an actor”, which extended to “understanding the presence of light and of the camera, the choreography of the camera, and of bodily movements”. Instead, he believed that “at the core of Klaus Kinski was not his existence as an actor, he was something beyond that and apart from it”.
