by Paul Cronin
You lent your voice to an episode of The Simpsons.
When they invited me to voice a character, I said, “What do you mean, my voice? Isn’t it a newspaper cartoon strip?” They thought I was pulling their leg, but I had no idea the animated series existed. I played a German pharmaceutical industrialist called Walter Hottenhoffer who creates an LSD-style pill that makes everyone happy, in particular grumpy grandpa. It’s my apotheosis within American popular culture.
Do you still play football?
Not too often since moving to California, though for years I was with a club in Munich called Black and Yellow [Schwarz/Gelb München]. It was a hopeless team but a great joy to play with those people. I pay tribute here to the late Sepp Mosemeier, the founder and president, a chubby pastry baker by profession. In a different life he would have been an opera singer or poet. He had a wonderful outlook on everything and managed to keep the team together – men from all strata of society – for years.
During the early years I was a goalkeeper, about which I have a strange story. I’m interested in how sometimes we do things completely contrary to our intentions, yet they turn to be the right thing after all. We were playing against a far superior team – a group of apprentice butchers from Munich – and were having a good day, keeping the game tied at 1–1. One striker on the other team was a bully, strong as an ox and with a ferocious shot. Seconds before the game was over there was a penalty against us, and though I prayed, “Please, not the bully,” I saw him trotting to the penalty spot with absolute confidence. When your opponent is someone with such a relentlessly strong kick, a monster who can turn a football into a projectile, a goalkeeper has no choice but to pick a corner and hope it’s the one the ball is going to fly into. But even if I picked the correct corner there was still little chance of stopping the ball. I saw him placing the ball on the spot and had the feeling he glanced for a split second into the right-hand corner of the goal. I said to myself, “Go for the right, go for the right.” He took the run-up, and the second before he kicked I inwardly screamed to myself, “THE RIGHT! THE RIGHT!” For some reason I flew to the left, which turned out to be where he was aiming for. The ball hit my fist, pounded into the ground, soared high into the air and bounced away from the goal. It was a strange experience, not unlike what Peter Handke describes in his novel The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, though in his story the goalkeeper is so terrified that he ends up frozen dead centre between the posts.
My time in goal ended a few years later during a football game at the Cannes Film Festival, where there was a tradition that directors played against actors. Although some of the directors were near obese and totally inept, it was a hard-fought match one year. The actors would draw our team into their half, then kick the ball at the goal and sprint – three or four at once – towards me. Up until half-time I had managed to save all their attempts at goal, but at the beginning of the second half the ball flew wide into empty space near me. As I ran out of the penalty area to connect with it, I saw Maximilian Schell galloping towards me like a furious bison. I was certain I could get there first to kick the ball away, which I did, but a split second later Schell crashed into me and dislocated my elbow; it still bothered me a year later. After that I stopped playing in goal and moved to centre forward, where I got the reputation of being a kamikaze player. I was never the fastest person on the pitch, but I was the most dangerous, though you have to see all this in perspective. It was football at a very low level.
During pre-production on Aguirre in Peru, I met the legendary Rudi Gutendorf, who over the decades coached six first-division teams in Germany and countless others in nearly forty countries. At the time he was the coach of Lima’s top club, and one day he invited me to participate in the team’s fitness training. After that there would be a test game, team A versus team B. One of the B-team players had hurt his ankle, so Rudi told me to step in as a substitute. Before we started he asked me, “Who do you want as your opponent?” I said, “I want to play against the best in the world. I want Gallardo.” Alberto Gallardo – famous after his performance in the 1970 World Cup – was extremely unpredictable, so fast that no one in the world could follow him. I was confident I could at least shake him up on the pitch. This was ridiculous, wishful thinking on my part; the whole thing was hopeless from the start. I had no idea how tough it was going to be, how fiercely the players fought for the ball. Even with my thirty-foot start, Gallardo would outrun me by twenty feet, and after only ten minutes I was so bamboozled that I couldn’t tell in which direction my team was playing. I couldn’t even have told you the colour of my team’s shirt. After fifteen minutes I had terrible stomach cramps and crawled pathetically off the field on all fours. I ended up behind some bushes, vomiting. Rudi was good enough to pretend he hadn’t seen anything.
Did you go to football matches as a child?
Until the age of about fifteen my brother and I would go see Die Löwen [The Lions] play. It was more of a working-class club than Bayern Munich and quickly disappeared from the first division. My father always objected to us playing football; it was much too primitive and proletarian a game for him. He didn’t like us coming home with dirty knees and shorts, and preferred we do something classier instead, like fencing.
Albert Camus apparently said that much of what he knew about morality he learnt from the football pitch. Can the same be said of you?
No. Football is just football.
My Best Fiend is about your relationship with Klaus Kinski.
Kinski was one of the great screen actors, perhaps the last expressionistic performer in cinema. As an adolescent I watched him in the anti-war film Kinder, Mütter und ein General, in which he plays a lieutenant who leads schoolboys to the front. The mothers of the boys and the soldiers go to sleep for a few hours. Kinski is awakened at daybreak, and the way he stirs, raising his head from the table, will forever stay in my memory; I replay it several times in My Best Fiend. I’m sure it looks like nothing special to most people, but this one moment impressed me so profoundly that later it was a decisive factor in my professional life. Strange how memory can magnify things. Today I find the scene where he orders Maximilian Schell to be shot much more impressive.
Kinski was undoubtedly the ultimate pestilence to work with, but he also gave truly amazing – and in subtle ways very different – performances in each of the films we made together. He and I were like two critical masses that would explode when they came into contact with each other, though thankfully I was able to transform this highly flammable mixture into a productive screen collaboration. He constantly threw tantrums, created scandals, broke contracts and terrorised actors, crews and directors. Every day it was my task to domesticate the beast and make these crazed energies productive for the screen. One of my achievements was to do this without clipping his wings, which would have made him harmless and uninteresting on screen. I was able to see through him like looking through water in the sink; I could always gauge his hysterical energy, and knew how to mobilise and articulate it in front of the camera. People think we had a love–hate relationship, but I neither loved nor hated him. At one point I did seriously plan to firebomb him in his home, though I confess with some embarrassment that my infallible plan, with its airtight alibi, was sabotaged by the vigilance of his Alsatian. It was all a farce, like those Italian comedies of the fifties where bank robbers drill through the wrong wall and accidentally find themselves in the local police station. Kinski later told me he had planned to murder me around the same time. We had a few drinks and a good laugh about it.
Kinski and I complemented each other in a strange way, and though it’s true I owe him a lot, it’s also fair to say he owed me something, even if he could never admit it. It was a fortunate situation for both of us: fortunate for me that he decided to be in Aguirre; fortunate for him I took him seriously as an actor. He was so reckless with his own possibilities. Look at all the films he made and you see what I’m talking about; in many of them he appears for onl
y two minutes, which meant he was needed for only one or two days of shooting. No one could endure him for longer than that. When he and his Vietnamese wife – who I had never met before – arrived on the set of Aguirre, Klaus and I embraced one another, after which I went to shake his wife’s hand. He immediately pushed me aside and with a menacing look stood two inches from my face for at least a minute, staring directly into my eyes, snorting and fuming and shivering, without saying a word. This book isn’t the place for me to talk about the monstrous way Kinski treated the women in his life and abused his daughter Pola, who sought me out before she published her memoir.* Let me say that there were debates in Germany about whether her allegations could be proved, but there isn’t a shred of doubt in my heart that she is telling the truth. If I am on anyone’s side, it’s hers. All this may change the way people see Kinski in my films, but this shift of perspective won’t last for ever. Long into the future audiences will see Kinski again as Aguirre. All these centuries later, the fact that Caravaggio was a murderer doesn’t change the way we look at his paintings.
Did you learn anything from Kinski?
What was impressive about him was his knowledge of cinema, of lighting, stagecraft and the choreography of the human body in front of the camera. I shot a sequence for Aguirre, but two days later had the feeling I hadn’t filmed it correctly and decided a wider angle was needed. On set and in costume, Kinski made precise inch-by-inch movements and turns with the exact same rhythms as he had two days before. There was no video footage to study. He had instant recall of the physical nature of that particular moment and his contribution to the scene. Then there’s the “Kinski Spiral,” something I demonstrate in My Best Fiend with photographer Beat Presser. When an actor enters the frame from the side, there is often no dramatic tension, so whenever there was a reason for it Kinski would make his appearance from directly behind the camera. If he wanted to spin into frame from the left, he would position himself next to the camera, with his left foot next to the tripod. Then he would step over the tripod with his right leg, twisting his foot inward. The whole body would unwind before the camera, allowing him to spin smoothly into frame, which created a mysterious nervousness. There is also a move called “Kinski’s Double Spiral,” where the initial movement is followed by a counter-spin, but that’s complex stuff and I could never explain it to you in words. I adapted the single spiral for a shot in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, when Kaspar is at the party with Lord Stanhope. Look closely and you see me doing it myself in Incident at Loch Ness.
Was there a particular reason you made My Best Fiend when you did?
When I first heard Kinski had died I understood it only acoustically. I registered the fact but it didn’t really enter my heart until months later, when I stood alongside his ex-wife and son, his ashes in my hands, which I emptied out into the Pacific Ocean. I always felt that the five films we made together needed something to bind them together, and planned to make a film about the two of us – our struggles, our work together – but for years after his death it was all too heavy to deal with. Time lightened the burden, made everything milder, and when I felt able to talk about Kinski with warmth and humour I realised I was ready. If I had made the film immediately after his death, I’m sure it would have been much darker. Today I can laugh about what happened between us; I see the bizarre side of everything and look back with some serenity. As it is, My Best Fiend has a feeling of utter weightlessness for me.
The film was easy to make, almost effortless. It appeared before my eyes, complete, in the same room as me. I had no script; I knew only that I wanted to go back to this or that place, where we had shot our films, and talk to the camera. I always felt the film is more than just a personal look at my working relationship with an actor; it’s about the process of creation itself, and could just as easily have been about two other people. The themes it deals with go far deeper than Kinski and me. I was very selective when it came to the conversations I included in My Best Fiend; I’m speaking here primarily of Eva Mattes and Claudia Cardinale. I could have found untold numbers of people who had only terrible things to say about Kinski, that he was the ultimate scum, but I wanted to show another side, one that doesn’t necessarily shine through in his autobiography. He truly could be full of humour and generosity. On one occasion I complimented him on his beautiful couture jacket, at which point he took it off and insisted I keep it. If something didn’t go as I hoped when we were working together on Woyzeck, he would take my arm and say, “Werner, what we’re doing here is important. Just striving for it will give it its appropriate size. Don’t worry, it will fall into place.” He worked hard on Büchner’s text, and unlike so many other times generally knew his lines. It was truly a joy to work with him during those days, and I think back on that time with genuine fondness. I’m glad the sequence of the two of us embracing at the Telluride Film Festival is in My Best Fiend. In fact, I’m glad that footage exists at all, otherwise no one would believe we could be so good with each other.
Kinski always complained about the money he was offered to be in certain films. He refused roles in films by Kurosawa, Visconti, Fellini and Pasolini, and spoke of those directors as psychopathic assholes who never paid enough. But I always had relatively small budgets and paid him less than what he would have earned working with these other filmmakers, so it’s something of a paradox. We had a rapport that meant money wasn’t important. In public Kinski claimed to hate my films and me, but when I spoke to him privately it was obvious the opposite was true, that he was proud of the work we did together.
In his autobiography Kinski describes his ambivalent feelings towards you.
The book is a series of highly fictitious and entertaining rants, in which he uses the wildest possible expletives to describe me; at one point he writes about pushing me into piranha-infested water, then watching them shred me to death. On page after page he keeps on coming back to me, like an obsessive compulsion.† I had a hand in helping to invent particularly vile expletives and insults. “Nobody will read this book if I don’t write terrible things about you,” he told me. “If I say we get along well together, nobody will buy it. The scum only want to read about the dirt. Don’t let the vermin know we collaborated on this.” I came with a dictionary from which we pulled out the foulest invectives we could find. He needed money at the time and knew that by writing a semi-pornographic rant against everyone and everything it would get some attention. Kinski actually grew up in a relatively well-to-do middle-class pharmacist’s household, but in the book he describes his childhood as one of such poverty that he fought with rats over the last breadcrumbs and worked in a morgue washing corpses. He even wrote about an incestuous relationship with his mother, something that apparently infuriated his brothers. What’s fascinating about his book is that to a certain extent it tells the story of the life Kinski wished he had. Although I helped him find new and interesting insults, I can’t deny that he wrote about me with some degree of disturbing sincerity.
You lived with Kinski for a time when you were young.
It was a chain of coincidences. My mother – struggling to raise three sons on her own – found a room in a boarding house for the four of us in the Schwabing neighbourhood of Munich. It was cramped, with a dozen people clambering for the same bathroom every morning. The owner was Klara Rieth, an elderly lady of sixty-five with wildly dyed orange hair who had a soft spot for starving artists, as she had come from a similar background herself. Kinski had been living in a nearby attic. Instead of furniture he had filled it knee high with dry leaves and would sometimes come to the door stark naked to sign for a letter. Klara invited Kinski to stay at her boarding house, and as a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old boy I distinctly remember the first time I saw him. It was in the long corridor of the apartment as he fled from a young housemaid who was chasing him, furiously beating him with a large wooden tray. Apparently Kinski had tried to grab under her skirt. When we ate at the same table, he would throw his knife, fork and spoon on th
e floor and eat with his fingers, insisting that “Fressen ist ein viehischer Akt. Wir müssen mit den Händen essen” [“Eating is a beastly act. We should eat with our hands”].
From the first moment he arrived at the boarding house, Kinski terrorised everyone. He once locked himself into the bathroom and, in his maniacal fury, smashed everything to smithereens for forty-eight hours. The bathtub, the toilet bowl, everything; you could sift it through a tennis racket. I never thought it possible that anyone could rave for so long. One day he took a running jump down the long corridor in the apartment and smashed through into Klara’s room; the door flew off its hinges. He stood there flailing hysterically and foaming at the mouth. Something came floating down like leaves – it was his shirts – and three octaves too high he screamed, “KLARA! YOU PIG!” His voice was incredibly shrill; he could break wine glasses with it. What happened was this poor woman who let him live there for free, feeding and cleaning for him, had failed to iron his shirt collars neatly enough. He pretended to be a genius who had descended from heaven with God-given gifts, though in reality he worked very hard to train himself. I would hear him doing voice exercises for ten hours non-stop in his tiny room.
One day a theatre reviewer was invited for dinner. He hinted that having watched a play in which Kinski had a small role, he would mention this performance as being outstanding and extraordinary. Kinski immediately threw two steaming potatoes in the man’s face, before jumping up and screaming, “I was not outstanding! I was not extraordinary! I WAS MONUMENTAL! I WAS EPOCHAL!” I appeared to be the only person at the table who wasn’t afraid, merely astonished. He entered my life, when I was thirteen, like a tornado, and three months later left like a tornado. Years later, when I decided Kinski was the only person who could play Aguirre, I knew what was in store for me.