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WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Werner Herzog week continues with Cobra Verde (1987)

Herzog’s working relationship with Klaus Kinski dissolved for good during the filming of their fifth and craziest collaboration (Kinski was “completely out of control” says Herzog on the DVD commentary), and Herzog’s last fiction feature until Invincible (2001). Based on Bruce Chatwin’s novel The Viceroy of Ouidah, Kinski stars as Francisco Manoel “Cobra Verde” de Silva, a sinister bandit in 19th Century Bahai, who manages to impregnate every one of his wealthy plantation-owner boss’ daughters. As punishment, Cobra Verde is sent to West Africa to work in the slave trade, but winds up leading the slaves as a rebel army. And, of course, he goes insane - but not before fathering dozens of children with his rebel army.

This is the least-seen and least-loved of the Herzog/Kinski films, but it’s a lot of fun. As usual, there are many wild and memorable images, particularly the sight of the raving Kinski leading an army of topless natives (“A spectacularly Freudian nightmare conjured after wanking to one too many National Geographic magazines,” said Ed Halter in The Village Voice), but the biggest pleasure is the unhinged Kinski. In a career full of over-the-top performances, this may be the craziest.

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Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Roger Ebert from 2005:

RE: I don’t want to prompt you with another story that I probably have wrong, but when you mention being 11, I’m trying to remember the details of something you told me once of having seen Klaus Kinski. When you were young.

WH: I was 13 then.

RE: Thirteen. And knowing, somehow. You saw him and you knew something.

WH: We had moved to Munich, and we lived in some sort of a boarding house, the four of us, my mother and my two brothers, so it was four persons in one room. One day, the owner of the place, an elderly lady who had a heart for starving artists, picked up Kinski literally from the street, well, actually from an attic that he had occupied, he had squatted in an attic and filled it up with autumn leaves, and made huge scandals, and would climb up to the roof and defy policemen who would try to arrest him. And she picked him up and fed him and gave him a very small room in our boarding house. She did his laundry, fed him, everything, for free. And from the very first moment I was terrorized. Everyone was in sheer terror. It took him only 48 hours and the entire bathroom was in smithereens.

He would yell and scream, and the only one that was not afraid — who
was just in amazement and wonderment — was a young peasant women,
something like 17 or 18 years old. She was not afraid at all and she had a tray and Kinski flung the tray against the wall and all the dishes left a mess and I still see her, she bends down, slowly picks up the empty tray, and smacks him in the face with it. And he would calm down for a moment, but it was only fleeting, because he would be like, how should I say, like a hurricane. Laying waste two apartments, movies, he would wreck cars, he would wreck Ferraris, no it was not Ferraris, it was Rolls-Royces, at a rate of a Rolls Royce  a week.

Later when he was in Italy and earned a lot of money, there was always a trail of devastation behind him, and some of it was not funny because part of him was really, really, really bad. So he may rest in peace and make his peace with the creator if ever he encounters him. So then I was 13. And of course one day I asked him to do “Aguirre.” When I sent him the screenplay, 12 years later, I knew if he would accept it, what I had to expect, but I was never afraid.

RE: Many directors do not hire someone that they believe is going to be trouble.

WH: No, it was much more.

RE: It was much more than trouble. You were going take him into the middle of the rain forest hundreds of miles from anything and live with him there for months. And it was a film that you could not possibly start again if anything went wrong. And you bet everything on that. When we think of “Aguirre” we think of Kinsey, so yours was the right decision, but what a chance you took.

WH: When you know that there is only one option that you have, there is no alternative. There is absolutely no alternative. But Kinski doing Aguirre must not be afraid of actually doing it, and no matter what comes along you will prevail as long as it’s a secure vision.

RE: The legend is that Kinski accepted movies entirely on the basis of convenience and location.

WH: Money.

RE: Money.

WH: He would even do hard-core pornos for money. Money,
money, money! And if for any reason he would start to scream, he
would scream until he had frost on his mouth. He would scream about
this pig who didn’t offer him decent money, who was this psychopathic
asshole. Obviously he made some distinctions, because I obviously
paid him much less than others would offer him. I mean a fraction of
that. I didn’t have the budget. Kinski the bastard won a third of the
entire budget.

And then, there’s an interesting thing, the real good version is the German version, it’s the authentic version, but since we filmed a lot in rapids there was such a huge noise that — of course we did have some direct sound — but you could hardly understand a word. We had to post-synch it, so I said to Klaus, “We need you for looping, for one and a half days.” He said, “Yes, I’m coming, but it will cost a million dollars.” And there was absolutely no way. He knew, of course, I didn’t have a thousand dollars, everything was gone, my wrist watch was gone, everything, and he asked for a million dollars, he hated the film so badly you could not believe it. And he didn’t show up for looping so I looped it with a different voice, and the voice is as good as Kinski. I took a lot of effort; nobody, nobody would ever know. But you know it now. Can you please not… do not leak to the press.

RE: But you have just told 1,600 people. (Laughter) What is astonishing, you returned to the jungle for “Fitzcarraldo,” and it seemed like you both wanted to do this.

WH: We were not mad I think. He understood that there was a higher duty that both of us had to accept. That was actually the most dangerous of all, because of course I could tolerate all sorts of  things, and it was not only Kinski that was hard to take. Moving the  ship over the hill was something you could not imagine, and we had  all sorts of catastrophes. We had two plane crashes. We had people  shot with huge arrows at the throat that almost killed them and we  operated on them on kitchen tables. Everything in the book happened,  with now Kinski on this location. Everyone in the crew after two  days would turn against me: “How can you have the guts to bring in  this pestilence again? We are refusing!” The actors on a daily basis would threaten to terminate with a strike. For me there was one borderline, it was duty, a high duty. High duty on which he stood and I stood.

In “Aguirre,” at the end, ten days before the end of shooting, Kinski, I believe as usual, didn’t learn his lines. They were very short lines anyway, and he all of a sudden interrupts everything and throws everything around and he screams in a tantrum and destroys half the set and screams that the still photographer had smiled and had to be dismissed on the spot. Of course I wouldn’t dismiss him because everyone else would have walked out in solidarity.

I said “No, I’m not doing it, let’s calm down and we’ll continue.” And he left the set. And I knew why he had done it because he had done it 35 times just within the last five years. And because of that, movies were canceled and destroyed. It was too well documented. He packed his things into a speedboat and screamed and screamed. And it was somehow not correctly reported in the press, but I have witnesses that I was unarmed, and did not point a gun at him, but I walked up and I said to him, “Klaus, I don’t have to make up my mind. I’ve had months of deliberating where is the borderline that we will not transgress. This would be the transgression, the borderline. This is something that you will not survive.”

I said to him, “I do have a rifle,” very calmly. He could try to take the boat and he might reach the next bend of the river but he would have eight bullets through his head. But of course there were nine bullets, and I said, “Guess who gets the last one?” And he looked at me and he understood it was not a joke anymore. I would have done it. He understood he better behave, and it was kind of hostile for the next couple of days. But what I’m trying to say is, the incident may sound funny now, and it seems funny and bizarre to me; if I sat out there I would laugh with you. But what I’m trying to say is that there’s always been a very clear borderline, a line that must not be stepped over. So once you accept the duty you have to understand the duty that is upon you. I’ve always understood it myself.

From the set of Cobra Verde.