by Paul Cronin
Was he some kind of alter ego for you?
We were similar in many ways, and I suppose you might say he was my screen alter ego, but only because all the characters in my films are close to my heart. The reality is Kinski always wished he could direct, and envied me. He wanted to articulate certain things that were brooding inside of him, but was never fully able to.
Although we often kept our distance, we would seek one another out at the right time, and could often make ourselves understood without words, non-verbally, almost like animals or a set of identical twins. Whenever he got going, I would turn on the camera as quickly as possible, and often managed to capture something unique. Sometimes I would even provoke him so that he would scream and shout for an hour, after which he would be exhausted and in the right mood: silent, quiet and dangerous. I did this for the speech in Aguirre in which he calls himself “the Wrath of God.” He insisted on playing the scene screaming with anger, but I wanted him almost whispering, so I purposely irritated him, and after a particularly vicious tantrum he was utterly exhausted and literally foaming at the mouth. I turned the camera on, and he did the speech in a single take. I knew how to trick him into giving the best possible performance, though he always believed he was doing everything himself. During production on Fitzcarraldo we did takes where everything was perfect; the camera and sound were flawless, the acting was excellent. “Klaus,” I would say, “I think there is more to this,” and somehow he knew what I was talking about. I would roll the camera again, and he would move things in a fresh direction. At other times, as the scene was coming to a close, I wouldn’t cut because I could see he was up to something exceptional, that an idea had popped into his head. I knew when there was more to be wrung from Kinski. This was usually all done without a word spoken; he would look at me out of the corner of his eye, instantly sensing I wasn’t going to stop the camera, and launch into something new and original.
How did the Indians react to Kinski’s behaviour during production on Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo?
His ravings strained our relations with the locals. He was quite frightening to them, and because the Indians would solve their conflicts in a totally different way, he became a real problem. During Kinski’s frequent tantrums they would huddle together and whisper to themselves. In their culture everything is softly spoken; there is never a loud word. One of the chiefs came to me towards the end of production on Fitzcarraldo. “You probably realised we were afraid,” he said, “but not for one moment were we scared of that screaming madman, shouting his head off.” It turned out they were actually afraid of me because I was so quiet.
Kinski’s behaviour can be explained partly by his egocentric character. Egocentric perhaps isn’t the right word; he was an outright egomaniac. Whenever there was a serious accident, it became a big problem because all of a sudden he was no longer the centre of attention. The locals usually clear a swathe of trees in the jungle without wearing boots, because more likely than not they will be sucked into the mud. But even with dozens of woodcutters in the jungle working barefoot, it’s rare for one of these men to be bitten by a snake because the animals naturally flee from the noise of the chainsaw and smell of gasoline; it happens maybe once every three years. Unfortunately a lumberman working on Fitzcarraldo was bitten twice by a shushupe, one of the most poisonous snakes on the planet. It would have taken a few minutes for cardiac arrest to take place, so this man thought for five seconds, grabbed his chainsaw and cut off his foot. His colleagues immediately applied a crude tourniquet using lianas. It saved his life because the camp – where the serum was stored – was twenty minutes away. I knew that when news of all this reached Kinski, he would throw a tantrum and rave about something trivial because he was now a marginal figure. After the plane crash I described earlier, there were garbled reports on the radio; we were desperately trying to work out whether we could send out a rescue party into the jungle. Kinski saw he was no longer in demand and threw a fit, claiming his coffee was only lukewarm that morning and his mineral water wasn’t cold enough. For hours he screamed at me, three inches from my face, as I explained the severity of the situation to him. As usual in such situations, I stood like a silent rock wall and let him crash against it. I finally walked to my hut, where for months I had successfully hidden one last piece of Swiss chocolate from the ants. We would all have killed one another for a taste of something like that. I went right up to his face, unwrapped this tiny piece of chocolate and ate it in front of him. All of a sudden he was quiet; it was beyond him. Towards the end of shooting the Indians offered to kill Kinski for me. “No, for God’s sake!” I told them. “I still need him for shooting. Leave him to me.” They were dead serious, and there’s no doubt they would have done the deed. Occasionally I regretted not having given them the nod.
Kinski was a peculiar mixture of physical cowardice and courage. A wasp would cause him to scream for his mosquito net and a doctor, though on Fitzcarraldo, when it was proposed we get onto the boat as it went through the rapids, Kinski was encouraging. “If you sink,” he said, “I shall sink too.” Although he styled himself as a man of nature, he never actually liked the jungle, and everything he said about nature was a careful pose. He declared everything there erotic, but never set foot outside of our encampment and brought with him antidotes for every kind of poisonous snake imaginable. If Kinski wandered a few feet into the jungle to where a fallen tree lay, a photographer had to follow and take hundreds of photos of him tenderly embracing and copulating with this thing. The shots of him with the butterfly in My Best Fiend are out-takes from Burden of Dreams; the only reason it was sticking so close to him was because it was licking his sweat. There was no mystical, animal-like connection between the two of them. There is a moment in Burden of Dreams when Kinski, Thomas Mauch and I pull up to shore in a small boat, and Kinski is the one who leaps out and pulls us onto dry land. He was playing to the camera, plain and simple; he took pride in being physical when he knew such things were being documented. It was the same thing with that photo of him at my throat with a machete, which became the poster image for My Best Fiend. He saw Beat Presser standing with a camera and lunged at me. You don’t need to look carefully to see that I’m grinning. I distinctly remember Kinski embracing a young homeless child on the set of Cobra Verde and giving him a $100 bill, but only because two journalists were watching; he would never have done something like that otherwise. Poses and paraphernalia were what mattered to Kinski. His alpine gear was more important than the mountains, and his camouflage combat fatigues – tailored by Yves Saint Laurent – were much more important than any jungle. Kinski, in this regard, was endowed with his fair share of natural stupidity.
Do you miss him?
Perhaps sometimes, though my relationship with him had ended some years before he died. There were moments in Cobra Verde I’ll never forget. The final scene where he tries to pull the fishing boat out into the ocean – something that would normally take a dozen men – was the last day of shooting we ever did together. It was unrehearsed and was supposed to last less than a minute. I sensed something else was coming, so I let the camera run. Kinski knew I wasn’t going to cut the scene, and it soon became a sequence of extraordinary despair as he collapsed with exhaustion into the water. I thought he was really drowning and my first reflex was to run over and help him; the crew had to hold me back so I wouldn’t jump into the surf and get him out. I knew at the time we could go no further together, and told him so. There was nothing I wanted to explore with him beyond the five films we made together; anything else would have been repetition. He sensed it too. He died in 1991 at his home north of San Francisco. He had burnt himself out, like a comet. I regret not a single moment, and today judge Klaus only for his work done in front of the camera. The butterfly shot is the image I like to keep in my head, even if it goes against many of my memories. Maybe sometimes I do miss him, the swine.
The Lord and the Laden and Pilgrimage are both about faith and religious worship.
Both films were made for television. The network asked me to contribute to a series about two thousand years of Christianity; I told them I wanted to do something about the church in Latin America, but they shouldn’t expect anything encyclopaedic because I wanted to go to a couple of specific places. The opening shots of The Lord and the Laden were taken in Antigua, Guatemala, and the main sequence was shot at a shrine in San Andrés Itzapa, also in Guatemala. There is nothing organised about this religious ceremony; it’s in a private yard and is run by regular people who pay nothing to attend. The mixture of paganism and Catholicism is evident. The figure being worshipped – Maximón, an ancient Mayan god dressed up like a rich Spanish ranchero to demonstrate his power – is a mannequin in a glass case. Part of the veneration of this pagan god involves fumigating him with cigar smoke and putting cigarettes in his mouth, so lots of people are smoking. Worshippers also spit and spray alcohol over him and each other, part of a ritual of cleansing and purification in the presence of God. The Catholic Church, not knowing what to do with this phenomenon, has more or less adopted Maximón. They wanted a foot in the door to places like this, so squeezed in a Catholic saint – St Simon – though everyone ignores him. You would never see a Catholic priest there. The whole place is completely chaotic, with no hierarchy or dogma.
I went to the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, where I filmed the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, one of the few pieces of Aztec history that survives in its original form, and was also allowed to film the Codex Florentino in the Laurentian Library in Florence. For me the Codex is one of the greatest and most honourable deeds of humankind, unquestionably a monumental achievement. Even as Aztec culture was being destroyed by the Spanish invaders, there was one man, Bernardino de Sahagún, who, with other monks, spent decades methodically collecting accounts from Aztecs who had knowledge of their history, language, culture and economic system. The result was a book that describes Aztec life, from religious rituals to botanical knowledge and educational systems. Amidst the carnage of the Spanish invasion, this far-sighted monk attempted to preserve as much of the Aztec world as possible, and even purposely mistranslated certain Classical Nahuatl accounts about religion and human sacrifices because otherwise the texts would have been burnt by the Inquisition. A translation was done into English, which in its magnitude is comparable to the King James Bible. Two scholars at the University of Utah spent a quarter of a century on the project. It has such power of language that I made a pilgrimage to see the surviving translator, Charles Dibble, in Salt Lake City. He was an unobtrusive man in his eighties, a professor emeritus, moved and surprised that a filmmaker was so interested in his work.
You worked with John Tavener on Pilgrimage.
At the time we made the film I considered Tavener one of the greatest living composers, and was initially uncertain whether a collaboration would work because he always refused to write music for films. But in this case it was neither about him writing music for a film, nor me making a film to accompany his music. The idea was to ensure that both elements found common ground; this was a project where music and images had equal value. I contacted Tavener and was surprised when he told me he liked my films and would be happy to meet. We had a good working relationship. People who have a certain greatness to them are easy to get along with. The mediocre are the troublesome ones.
The context Tavener and I worked within was a religious one. His conversion to the Greek Orthodox Church as a young man strongly influenced his music, while I feel I understand religious impulses because of the short and dramatic religious phase I experienced in my adolescence. It meant we approached the film from the same point of view, one that seemed obvious for both of us. I proposed our collaboration be about the prayers and hopes of pilgrims. “We shouldn’t talk about making a film together,” I said. “We should make a pilgrimage together.” When we first met we had such an instant concordance of hearts that we didn’t even discuss the music or the film. He immediately knew what I wanted, and after he played maybe twenty seconds on the piano I interrupted him and said, “John, stop. Just compose it.”
The finished film is only eighteen minutes long, with no dialogue or voiceover. We see only landscapes, bodies and faces – all material originally shot for other projects – but for me it’s an important work about basic human emotions and practices. Some of the footage features pilgrims I filmed in Russia for Bells from the Deep, and the images of the crashing waves are from Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, where I shot the crabs for Invincible. The quote at the beginning is from Thomas à Kempis, the mediaeval mystic: “It is only the pilgrims who in the travails of their earthly voyage do not lose their way, whether our planet be frozen or scorched: they are guided by the same prayers, and suffering, and fervour, and woe.” If readers have had their eyes on the previous chapters of this book, they will smell something the moment this text appears. Yes, the quote is my invention. I had something else in mind, but Tavener wrote a fine letter to me, full of passion. I immediately knew he was the melior pars and had the right to overrule me. It’s a question of fairness. I always try to respect the wishes of collaborators in these kinds of situations, when they come at me with such intensity and conviction. Unless what Tavener had proposed contradicted my deepest knowledge of cinema, I was willing to accede.
Most of Pilgrimage was shot at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Tepeyac, on the outskirts of Mexico City. There was very little available light, so we made the film entirely on video. People were arriving from all over the country, some literally on their knees, exhausted, weeping, tormented, at the end of their physical strength. Whether en route to Santiago de Compostela or at the shrine of the Virgen de Guadalupe, pilgrims on the move are a metaphor for human life. We had very little room to manoeuvre because thousands of people were arriving every hour, drifting through the basilica on a mechanical conveyor belt that moves slowly, never stopping. This is the only way to maintain any level of safety because otherwise there would be serious pile-ups. In the film it appears as if everyone is floating past the camera, looking up in wonder. My original idea was to include a variety of sounds I had recorded in the basilica, but the moment I heard John’s music it was obvious this would bring the film down to some pseudorealistic level. It isn’t important to show exactly who these pilgrims are, or who and what they are venerating. A man talks to the image of the Virgin while holding a photo of a woman. We know nothing about him, yet through this simple, stirring image we seem to have complete knowledge of his story.
Would you have shot films like Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo digitally if the technology had been available?
Under no circumstances, though I’m not one of those caught in the nostalgia of celluloid. Nothing can compare with the depth and force of film, and though digital imagery has improved over the years and will continue to do so, I plan to stick with film for as long as possible. One problem is that some high-tech cameras are designed and produced by computer engineers who don’t fully understand cinema’s century-old history of high-precision mechanics. We shot My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done using what at the time was an innovative camera that looked like a gigantic computer. It took me more than four minutes just to turn it on. That’s an eternity for me when I’m on a film set. The more technologically advanced your equipment is, the more potential problems there are.
Although the relatively low cost of video means filmmakers can be more self-reliant, it provides an unhealthy and misleading pseudo-security, because you can instantly replay the images you have just captured. What I like about film is that you never immediately know what has been shot. When I feel in my guts we have the best we can possibly get, I stop. I don’t want to be able to push a button and check there and then what we’ve been working on. This is why you won’t find video-assist monitors on my set. I feel the same way about dailies, which I always found dangerously misleading and discouraging. Material fresh from the laboratory can be useful to look at if you want to check certain technical things, but w
hen you take a shot out of context – not only from the scene but also the story as a whole – there is no way of knowing just how good it really is. Filming on celluloid naturally forces you into a much more intense relationship to whatever you’re shooting. Careful deliberation is required; you have only a few minutes on a single reel to get what you need. On video, by comparison, you can pick up hours of material very easily, though most of it will likely be of mediocre quality, and you can never make a single extraordinary minute of cinema with mediocre material.
How much of Invincible is based on historical fact?
It was inspired by the true story of Siegmund “Zishe” Breitbart, a young Jewish blacksmith who became a famous strongman in the variety world of Vienna, Berlin and even Broadway in the early twenties. The Nazis, who were rising to power at the time, were dismayed that a Jew, not an Aryan Siegfried, was being hailed as the strongest man in the world. Zishe was fiercely proud of his Jewish heritage, called himself the “New Samson” and died after an absurd accident when a rusty nail scratched his knee.
One of Zishe’s descendants, Gary Bart, had in his possession thousands of related photos, letters, newspaper reports and other documents. I also saw thirty seconds of a newsreel about him. There was a screenplay in existence that Gary had commissioned, but it was about Zishe’s fairground exploits, and after reading it I called Gary and said I thought there was something big in the story, something everyone had overlooked. There was a fire on my roof almost instantly and I had to scramble up with a bucket. I asked Gary if he had the nerve to throw away his investment, telling him I would write a screenplay myself. As I already mentioned, I shifted the entire story ten years into the future, closer to the Nazi era. Invincible is a story that shows the Jewish people as strong and confident, and ends on 28 January 1933, two days before Hitler takes power. I also added things like the character of Zishe’s nine-year-old brother Benjamin. Their relationship is an important one because it serves to show the power of family life in condensed form. I see Zishe and Benjamin as Moses and Aaron: the prophetic strongman heavy of tongue and his little brother having to speak for him. What really touched a nerve with me was the idea of someone so strong also being so vulnerable.