by Paul Cronin
In one scene the rafts pass through the rapids.
It took only two minutes, or even less, and we absolutely had to get those shots the first time around. The wooden rafts were extremely solid, constructed by the Indians, who were expert builders, and we also had several excellent rowers. Having said that, sometimes they were drunk and had no control over where they were going. With Aguirre the audience can feel the authenticity of the situations the actors are in, but there was never any danger because everyone – including the Indian rowers – was attached by cords, which you can see if you look carefully. Cameraman Thomas Mauch and I were the only people moving freely.
The scene where the soldiers get caught in the whirlpool and are found dead the following morning was especially difficult to shoot because the flow of the river was so fast and violent. At the end of the day we lowered ropes down to the actors from the cliff above, which they attached to themselves, and we pulled them up. The next morning the raft was still there, wrestling with the fierce counter-current. The extras – who were paid more than everyone else – were proud of themselves once they reached safety, though they were vomiting because of the raft’s incessant spinning. At one point I was standing on the cliff looking down at the water; the rocks were slippery, so I grabbed a branch to stop myself from sliding. I could see it was covered in fire ants, but stupid as I am I swung my machete to chop the thing off. All that did was shake it violently, and hundreds of these ants rained down on me. I was bitten all over and ended up in bed for two days with a serious fever.
Later, at a much calmer bend on Río Urubamba, we found a cable strung across the river, with a primitive platform attached to it. The rope needed to pull the platform to either side was missing, so my production co-ordinator Walter Saxer and I decided to swim across, carrying a rope with us. We also wanted to explore the other side of the river, which looked like an especially beautiful spot. I jumped in and almost immediately saw a whirlpool coming at me. It was moving quickly in a semi-circle and gave off a loud, strange slurping sound. I managed to swim to the other side of the river and then, with the rope in my mouth, swung my arms and legs over the cable and pulled myself towards the platform in the middle of the river. I had a beautiful gold watch in my pocket, one of my most prized possessions at the time, a gift from my first great love. As I was clambering across I felt it slipping, and watched helplessly as it dropped into the water. I was very upset, but at the same time I knew that all these rivers carry gold deposits. “Oh well,” I remember thinking to myself. “Gold back to gold.”
How much trouble were the monkeys in the final sequence?
That scene was different from the one written in the screenplay, but during my initial scouting of the rivers I befriended a little monkey who would sit on my shoulder. He became a good comrade and I named him after one of my two favourite football players, Di Stéfano, the brilliant Argentinian. Unfortunately Di Stéfano perished because of a stupid mistake I made. I tied him to a metal post because I had to go on land and take care of some things. When I returned three hours later, he was dying because he had wrapped his leash around the post and was dangerously exposed to the sun. He died later that day because of my negligence, so I thought I should honour my little friend with the scene at the end of the film. My other favourite football player of all time, by the way, is Garrincha, a brilliant dribbler.
I hired local Indians who captured hundreds of savage little monkeys – the ones who overrun the raft – but gave them only half the money up front because I knew if I paid full price, the guy organising everything would run off with the cash. Even so, the animals never arrived on set, so we drove out to the airport as quickly as possible. It turned out they had all been resold to an American businessman and were already on an aeroplane waiting to be shipped out to a dealership in Miami. “I’m the veterinarian!” I yelled to the cargo handlers, making use of the kind of subterfuge that has always been an indispensible element to my filmmaking. “Stop immediately! Where are the vaccination documents for the monkeys?” They were caught completely off guard and admitted they had no papers, so we unloaded the animals from the aeroplane, put them into our truck and sped off. When it actually came to shooting the sequence, the monkeys had some kind of panic attack and bit me all over. I couldn’t cry out because we were shooting live sound at that point. Another jumped onto the shoulder of the cameraman Thomas Mauch and started viciously biting his ear. His mouth was wide open but no scream came out. He just kept on filming, endearing himself to me beyond description.
Where did the Indian extras come from?
From a single village high up in the mountains. I travelled there to explain what the film was and what I needed from them, and we ended up hiring almost the entire population, a conscientious group unafraid to carry out the sometimes difficult work. They were well paid compared to what they usually earned. One time, after filming in the mud and swamps, I noticed the Europeans were exhausted and wanted to call a halt for the day, but the Indians asked me why we were stopping. They said it would be even more difficult to continue later on, so why not carry on now and finish the job? I can’t say I ever truly understood the Indians, but we were all aware of something we had in common: a mutual respect for work. They were part of a socialist co-operative at Lauramarca, with a real knowledge both of their own history and the current political situation, and understood that their time on the film wasn’t useful only for themselves, but for the Indians’ cause as a whole.
One of the extras was a man I encountered at the main square in Cusco, where he would drum on tin cans and play a pan flute, and occasionally make money by selling pairs of scissors. I never knew his real name and I’m not sure he even knew it himself, so everyone called him Hombrecito, which means “Little Man.” I liked him so much I asked him to come with us for the shoot. I explained I would pay him well, more than what he would earn in ten years sitting there playing for people. At first he refused, saying that if he were to stop playing in the square, everyone in Cusco would die. He wore three alpaca sweaters at the same time, even when it was unbearably hot and humid, and refused to take them off because he thought they would be stolen. He said they protected him against “the bad breath of the gringos.” Hombrecito seemed to carry all the humiliation, oppression and despair of his people on his shoulders. I persuaded him to join us, and he became the crew’s mascot; you can see him in the film playing his pan flute. He would take his sweaters and place them carefully in a plastic bag which he hid in the jungle so no one would steal it. Every evening the crew had to hunt around for the bag because Hombrecito could never remember where he put it. Once filming was over, he went back to Cusco’s main square, this time wearing three jackets, one on top of the other, which he had bought with his wages.
We shipped in costumes and props from a rental company in Spain. Jungle transportation wasn’t easy to organise because we had to squeeze everything – including all the camera equipment and even the horse – into one big amphibian aeroplane. In the sequence where the soldiers go on shore and raid a village is a single shot of a mummy. My brother Lucki found a real one and flew it in from Lima. It was so fragile he had to buy a separate seat for it, so for the entire journey had this ferocious-looking thing sitting next to him wearing a seatbelt.
Did you write the script for Klaus Kinski?
I don’t need to hole myself up in a monastery or retire to a quiet spot for months on end to write. Most of the screenplay was written on a bus going to Italy with the football team from Munich I played for. By the time we reached Salzburg, only a few hours into the trip, everyone was drunk and singing obscene songs because the team had drunk most of the beer we were bringing as a gift for our opponents. I was sitting with my typewriter on my lap. In fact, I typed the whole thing almost entirely with my left hand because with my right I was trying to fend off our goalie sprawled on the seat next to me. Eventually he vomited over the typewriter. Some of the pages were beyond repair and I had to throw them out of the win
dow. There were some fine scenes lost because I couldn’t recall what I had just written. They’re long gone. That’s life on the road for you. Later on, in between football games, I wrote furiously for three days and finished the script. It was written so fast and so spontaneously that I didn’t think about who might play the part, but the moment I finished it I knew it was for Kinski and sent it to him immediately. A couple of days later, at three in the morning, I was awoken by the telephone. At first I couldn’t figure out what was going on; all I heard were inarticulate screams at the other end of the line. It was Kinski. After about half an hour I managed to filter out from his ranting that he was ecstatic about the screenplay and wanted to play Aguirre.
My first choice for the role was actually Algerian president Houari Boumediene. Take a look at photos of him from when Algeria won its independence and you’ll see why he intrigued me; his physical presence was powerful indeed. Ahmed Ben Bella became president in 1963, but Boumediene was the man behind everything, including running the military. Later he ousted Ben Bella in a coup d’état and became president. I never pushed the script on him as I figured he had other things to take care of, but if he had been removed from office himself before we started filming I would have offered him the role.
How was Kinski in the jungle?
He arrived with a load of alpine equipment – tents, sleeping bags, crampons, ice axes – because he wanted to expose himself to the wilds of nature. But his ideas about the jungle were rather insipid; mosquitoes and rain weren’t allowed in his world. The first night after setting up his tent it started to pour and he got soaked, which set off one of his raving fits. The next day we built a roof of palm fronds above his tent, and eventually moved him and his wife into the only hotel in Machu Picchu. We all drank river water, but Kinski had a constant supply of bottled mineral water.
He had just cut short his infamous Jesus Christus Erlöser tour, scenes of which you can see at the start of My Best Fiend. His plan was to take the show around the world, but the first performance, in Berlin, ended in mayhem after about ten minutes. Kinski was playing the kind of ferocious, revolutionary Jesus who chased the merchants from the temple with a whip, not the kind, tolerant and benevolent Son of God. He lived by styling himself to excess and would adopt the personae of various people. For a time he was François Villon, whose poetry he recorded; later Dostoyevsky’s idiot; and in the years before his death he portrayed himself as Paganini. When he arrived in Peru to start filming Aguirre he identified so strongly with his role as a derided, misunderstood Jesus that he would sometimes answer questions in character and scream at me in biblical verse. Every day Kinski could see the problems I was having, yet he continued to create scandals or explode if so much as a mosquito appeared.
I knew of his reputation, that he was probably the most difficult actor in the world to deal with; working with Marlon Brando must have been like kindergarten in comparison. While filming a scene he nearly killed an actor when he struck him on the head with his sword. Thankfully the man was wearing a helmet, though he carries a scar to this very day. One evening a group of extras were in their hut; they had been drinking and were making too much noise for Kinski. He screamed and yelled at them to stop laughing, then grabbed his Winchester and fired three bullets through the thin bamboo walls. There were forty-five of them crammed together in this small room, and one had the top of his finger shot off. It was a miracle Kinski didn’t kill any of them. I immediately confiscated his rifle, which is one of my big souvenirs. During filming he would insult me every day, sometimes for hours. Kinski had seen Even Dwarfs Started Small, so to him I was the “dwarf director.” He screamed in a high-pitched voice in front of everyone, saying it was an insult I would even think about talking to him, the great actor. He insisted he could do everything himself, that being directed by me was like working with a housewife, and shrieked that David Lean and Brecht had left him alone to do his job, so why shouldn’t I? “Brecht and Lean?” I said. “Never heard of them.” That upset him even more. I was forced to put up with his behaviour, but Kinski never reckoned with my determination to see the job through. No one tamed him as well as I did.
Kinski and I agreed on nothing without a struggle. Temperamentally he was forever on the verge of hysteria, but I managed to harness this and turn it to productive ends. Sometimes other methods were necessary. On one occasion, towards the end of the shoot, he was looking for a victim to jump on; it was probably because he didn’t know his lines. Suddenly Kinski started shouting like crazy at the sound assistant. “You swine! You were grinning!” He insisted I fire the guy on the spot. “I’m not going to do that,” I said. “The whole crew would quit out of solidarity.” Kinski immediately left the set and started packing his bags, saying he was going to find a speedboat and leave. I went up to him and said, very politely, “Mr Kinski, you will not do this. You will not leave before we are finished here in the jungle. Our work here is more important than either our personal feelings or private lives.” Quitting like that would have been a gross violation of his duty to the film, so I told him – quietly and calmly – that I would shoot him if he left. “I have had time to ponder the unthinkable,” I said, “and have already made up my mind about this. After months of deliberation I know precisely what line I will not permit you to transgress. I don’t need a single second longer to know what must be done. Leaving now is something you will not survive.” I told him I had a rifle – it was actually his Winchester – and that 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. Although I didn’t have a gun in my hand at that particular moment, he knew it was no joke and screamed for the police like a madman, though the nearest police station was at least three hundred miles away. The police would never have done anything anyway. Over there the laws of the jungle are what count; a few bottles of whisky and a couple of hundred dollars would have been sufficient to dissuade the locals from investigating or have them put the incident down to an unfortunate hunting accident. For the remaining ten days of the shoot Kinski was extremely well behaved. The press later wrote that I directed him from behind the camera with a loaded gun. A beautiful image, but complete fiction.
Kinski was known for breaking contracts and walking away from a film if he felt like it. During a performance of Goethe’s Torquato Tasso he stopped in the middle of a speech, hurled insults at the audience, threw a lit candelabra into the auditorium and wrapped himself in the carpet that was lying on stage. He remained coiled inside until the audience was cleared from the theatre. Before Aguirre he had to have a check-up for insurance reasons. I took him to see a doctor, who asked routine questions about allergies and hereditary diseases, and then: “Mr Kinski, have you ever suffered from fits of any kind?” “YES, EVERY DAY!” screamed Kinski at the highest pitch possible, before laying waste to the doctor’s office. At one point during filming I reached up to move a strand of hair that was hanging down over his face. “Pardon me, Mr Kinski,” I said, gently brushing it aside. He immediately exploded. “HAVE YOU GONE CRAZY? NOT EVEN MY BARBER IS ALLOWED TO TOUCH MY HAIR. YOU’RE AN AMATEUR!” The tabloid press adored him, and whenever he appeared on a talk show everyone in the audience would sit on the edge of their seats waiting for him to deliver the scandal. It never took more than a few minutes.
You admire his performance in the film.
Absolutely. He was an excellent actor and truly knew how to move on screen. I wanted to give Aguirre a vicious little hump, like a tumour on his shoulder, the size of a fist. I felt there should be some differentiation between Aguirre’s physicality and everyone else’s; the character had to have some kind of inner distortion that would be apparent on the surface. It was Kinski’s idea that Aguirre should have a kind of pigeon chest with a slight protrusion, and he decided to make one of his arms appear longer than the other so he would walk lopsidedly. His left arm became so short that his sword wasn’t around his waist; it was higher up, almost up into his armpit. He
introduced these physical aberrations into the film gradually and precisely, and by the final scene the character is even more deformed. Kinski did it all perfectly, moving almost like a crab walking on sand. As an actor he knew all about costumes, and I learnt a great deal as I watched him oversee every buttonhole and stitch. He wanted a dagger as a prop, as long and thin as a knitting needle. “When I stab someone,” he told me, “it has to be malicious. No blood should be shed. My victims bleed to death internally.” In the screenplay, to spare her the shame of his defeat, the original idea was that Aguirre kills his daughter with this dagger.
Having said that, he was a complete scourge and didn’t care if Aguirre was ever finished or released. He was interested only in his salary, and once shooting was over he refused to come to Munich and re-record some of his dialogue. About 20 per cent of what we recorded in the jungle was unusable because of the noise from the roaring rapids. What he actually said was: “I’ll be there, but it will cost you a million dollars.” He was absolutely serious about this, so I had no choice but to hire an actor – who had a lengthy career dubbing Humphrey Bogart into German – to dub Kinski’s entire part. He did it with great skill, and years later I heard Kinski raving about how good he was in the German version of Aguirre. For the next film we did together I put into the contract that he was obliged to do a few days of re-recording, though Kinski insisted I could kidnap him, drag him to the studio, sit him in front of a microphone and handcuff him, and he would only sing his lines. Although for a couple of years afterwards he said he hated the film, I know he eventually liked it very much. At times it was clear he recognised and respected the work we did together, and understood that he and I were out to capture things beyond our individual existence, even beyond our collective existence. The man was a complete pestilence and a nightmare, and working with him became about maintaining my dignity under the worst conditions. It’s also true that I call every grey hair on my head Kinski. But who cares about such things now? What’s important is that the work was done and the films were made.