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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.

***

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.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Werner Herzog week continues with My Best Fiend (1999)

To my eyes, My Best Fiend, Herzog’s documentary self-portrait about his personal and professional relationship with Klaus Kinski, is both one of the most irresistible and most flawed of Herzog’s films. It suffers the practical flaw that little footage exists of Kinski and Herzog together, so for much of the runtime, Herzog simply sits in the locations where their films were shot and tells anecdotes to the camera. However, what footage Herzog digs up is uniformly memorable: Kinski raging at the audience during his “Jesus Tour”; Kinski berating a crew member on the set of Fitzcarraldo (a deleted scene from Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams); a touching moment of Herzog and Kinski hugging each other/chatting affectionately at the Telluride Film Festival; a side-by-side comparison between Jason Robards’ aborted performance as Fitzcarraldo, and Kinski’s.

The other flaw is more conceptual. Ostensibly a tribute to his late collaborator Klaus Kinski, My Best Fiend strikes me as more than a little self-serving. No doubt plagued for years by the myths that arose from the productions of Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo (like the old story that he forced Kinski to act at gunpoint - or at least threatened it), My Best Fiend feels like an attempt by Herzog to position himself as the only sane man who could harness the volatile madman. There are many stories of Kinski’s ranting and raving, and comparatively few about his talent or warmth (Claudia Cardinale and Eva Mattes are on-hand to provide some kind words), and it’s hard not to wince when Herzog says things like, “Together we were like two critical masses which made for a dangerous combination when coming into conflict.” More than anything, My Best Fiend makes me wish Kinski was alive to provide a rebuttal.

But while this is hardly a great movie, it is, as I said, irresistible. All these flaws could be excused away by the sheer fact that a film like this is a valuable document. You may quibble with his presentation, but this is inarguably Herzog’s perspective of Kinski, and how wonderful it would be if every prolific actor/director team produced an autobiographical document of this nature (Scorsese/DeNiro, Kurosawa/Mifune, Von Sternberg/Dietrich, Greydon Clark/Joe Don Baker… the possibilities are endless). And, if you like hilarious stories about Kinski throwing tempter tantrums, My Best Fiend has ‘em in spades.

Recommended after - and only after - viewings of all five Kinski/Herzog films.

***

There are very few English-language interviews with Klaus Kinski, but this invaluable collection of Kinski resources includes an interview he did with Fangoria, issue #24:

Fangoria: One of your latest films, Fitzcarraldo, is already something of a legend…

Kinski: Yeah, they made a legend out of it. It’s strange to see how a legend grows.

Fangoria: How did this one grow?

Kinski: Werner Herzog invents his own legends to make himself look interesting. He was writing down notes the entire time he was shooting the film. He had a notebook with him, always. It took him longer to write his ledger than it did to film the movie. Every three minutes he’d be off scribbling. He was printing tinier than the print you find in the Bible. Brave! You can print smaller than the Bible. [NOTE: Herzog’s diaries were published in 2009 as “Conquest of the Useless”]

He would send these letters back to newspapers in Germany, like some explorer describing the conquest of the North Pole. “This morning, Kinski tempts me…but I resist! I cannot give up!” That sort of shit. “I have the feeling that Kinski is terrified of being filmed!” Of course I was terrified of being filmed! The cameraman didn’t know anything about lighting and half the crew didn’t understand the movie.

Fangoria: Was filming in the Amazon jungle as rough as Herzog states?

Kinski: We made it rough. The jungle is life itself. A thousand times more alive than anything you’ve ever seen. We didn’t go there to be a part of it. We invaded it. We shaved the jungle and made a stinking camp in the middle of it. Radios blaring. It was disgusting.

Herzog was most interested in showing the world that he could pull a 250 ton ship over a mountain. That’s the plot of the movie. I would say things like, “You are stupid! This task is stupid! What are you trying to prove? American movie makers would use a small model ship that would duplicate the full scale ship. You’d save time. You’d save money!”

He said, “No, I want to show the world that I can do what nobody has ever done.” I say to that, “Fuck that, asshole.”

The real Fitzcarraldo’s ship was only 35 tons. He had it dismantled and carried across the jungle. Herzog wanted to outdo the real Fitzcarraldo. That’s crazy.

Fangoria: Did Herzog’s behavior strike you as being particularly odd?

Kinski: No. Herzog’s always been like that. He did strange things when we were filming Aguirre 12 years ago. He wanted us to do suicidal things. But he didn’t count on me. I wouldn’t get trapped like the others.

We were supposed to go down the jungle rapids in a raft. The local natives were saying “You’ll die! You can’t do that!” Herzog dismissed them. He was in a motorboat. I was on the damned raft with over 40 pounds of armor on. If I had fallen into the water, I wouldn’t have been able to swim. The raft ran into a tree. We were in the water up to our waists. I started cutting my armor off. Herzog told me to stop. To keep it on. I yelled back “Fuck you!” He didn’t care about me. He filmed the entire scene, with me cursing at him and cutting off my armor. Later, he played that one scene in Germany before the movie opened. He was already creating legends years ago. Me? I think a movie, if it’s good, will create its own legend once it opens.

Fangoria: Do you dislike Herzog?

Kinski: No. He’s a highly talented guy. He does very good movies and he’s not the sort of person who always talks in bullshit. He does man,y many things right. But he’s also sick. Obsessed. He wants to make history, not movies. Anyone who wants to make history is stupid.

Klaus Kinski, the star of such New German Cinema masterpieces as Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, was not only a great and memorable actor: he also got angry a lot. In another exciting instalment of KLAUS KINSKI GETS ANGRY, we celebrate this famed thespian’s struggles to keep a leash on his temper.

Today’s episode comes from a French talk show appearance, in which Klaus gets upset by the interviewer’s line of questioning. No subtitles, alas, but you don’t really need ‘em.

From this useful Klaus Kinski blog.

Klaus Kinski, the star of such New German Cinema masterpieces as Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, was not only a great and memorable actor: he also got angry a lot. In another exciting instalment of KLAUS KINSKI GETS ANGRY, we celebrate this famed thespian’s struggles to keep a leash on his temper.

In today’s episode, Klaus has an altercation with a crew member on the set of Fitzcarraldo.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Klaus Kinski’s Kinski Paganini (1989)

Klaus Kinski’s Kinski Uncut (aka All I Need Is Love) is quite possibly the most brutal celebrity autobiography ever written. Written entirely in the present tense, with no chapters or index, the book is a feverish affront to civilized society. After describing a poverty-stricken childhood involving incestuous canoodling with his sister and mother, Kinski spends most of the rest of the book describing dozens and dozens of sexual encounters in painful, mind-numbingly clinical detail. When he discusses his 100+ films, he usually dismisses them in one line - “It’s an insult to have to do the movie Madame Claude”; “There’s also some American crap directed by James Toback, but at least Jimmy gets me girls.” No delightful Hollywood anecdotes here: Maria Schneider is “That sleazy bitch”; Susan Sarandon is “Some New York slut actress”; “No outsider can imagine the stupidity, blustering hysteria, authoritarianism, and paralyzing boredom of shooting a flick for Billy Wilder”; and, in one particularly hilarious passage, Werner Herzog “should be thrown alive to the crocodiles! An anaconda should strangle him slowly! A poisonous spider should sting him and paralyze his lungs!… The huge red ants should piss into his lying eyes and gobble up his balls and hsi guts! He should catch the plague! Syphilis! Malaria! Yellow fever! Leprosy!”

In the rare passages when Kinski Uncut isn’t angry and/or pornographic, it’s suffocatingly earnest. Whenever Kinski writes about his ex-wife, Biggi, or his son, Nanhoi, he expresses his unconditional love through hyperbolic prose (“I can’t wait to see Nanhoi again! Bend down to his little bed, take him in my arms, kiss him, lick him, gobble him up. Kiss his gigantic, heavenly little eyes, which are dark stars”). How strange it is to see a passage like that immediately followed by some passage about all the degrading sex he had with [insert woman here] in [insert town here] while filming [insert “piece of shit movie” here].

I’ve often thought how great it would be to see a feature film version of Kinski Uncut - perversely faithful, NC-17-rated one, directed by someone along the lines of Lars von Trier or Gasper Noe. (Only possible star: Willem Dafoe). Imagine my delight, then, when I saw Klaus Kinski’s cinematic swan song, Kinski Paganini (1989), and discovered that it pretty much is the cinematic Kinski Uncut I’d always dreamed of.

Assembled from a rough cut rumoured to have run 16 hours, the 80 minute film is a dizzying, plotless blur of random, outrageous scenes. Less a biography than a thinly-veiled autobiography, Kinski clearly projects all of his neuroses, fetishes, talents, and character flaws on Paganini. Kinski stars as the titular violinist, depicted here as a vile, ugly man redeemed only by his exceptional artistry and his overwhelming love for his son (played by - you guessed it - Nanhoi Kinski, by now rechristened Nikolai). Like the Kinski of Kinski Uncut, Paganini is a monstrous sex addict with a special fondness for underage girls. The sex scene, like the ones in the book, are explicit, brutal, and anti-erotic, but induce suspiciously over-the-top pleasure from the women. And, as in the book, women become overwhelmed with lust whenever they hear Kinski/Paganini act/play his violin (there’s an unforgettable scene where a woman writhes in erotic ecstasy listening to Paganini’s music while watching two horses have sex. Unsimulated, I’m sorry to report).  It’s a pretty awful film, but like the book, it’s a riveting train-wreck, and Kinski is as odd and magnetic a presence as ever.

This was Kinski’s first and last directorial effort; the producers sued him for a multitude of contract violations, and the completed film was a critical disaster. After the film’s disappointing reception, Kinski never acted again, and died in 1991. For more Kinski fun, why not check out the entertaining short film Please Kill Mr. Kinski, about David Schmoeller’s experiences filming Crawlspace.

Klaus Kinski, the star of such New German Cinema masterpieces as Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, was not only a great and memorable actor: he also got angry a lot. KLAUS KINSKI GETS ANGRY is a new series here at Will Sloan’s Wonder Emporium devoted to celebrating this famed thespian’s struggles to keep a leash on his temper.

In today’s episode, Klaus feels disrespected at the Cannes press conference for his only self-directed film, Paganini (1989), and lets his discomfort be felt.

WILL’S ART HOUSE

Please Kill Mr. Kinski (1999)

Have you ever read Kinski Uncut, the autobiography of Klaus Kinski (the famously insane star of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, and Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht)? Damn, it is really something. It’s about 300 pages, and at least half of those are nauseatingly graphic descriptions of Kinski having rough, horrible sex with anyone and everyone. In between, he finds time to write some harsh words about Herzog:

“Herzog is a miserable, hateful, malevolent, avaricious, money-hungry, nasty, sadistic, treacherous, blackmailing, cowardly, thoroughly dishonest creep. His so-called ‘talent’ consists of nothing but tormenting helpless creatures and, if necessary, torturing them to death or simply murdering them. […] He should be thrown alive to the crocodiles! An anaconda should strangle him slowly! A poisonous spider should sting him and paralyze his lungs! The most venemous serpent should bite him and make his brain explode! No panther claws should rip open his throat - that would be much too good for him! No! The huge red ants should piss into his lying eyes and gobble up his balls and his guts! He should catch the plague! Syphilis! Malaris! Yellow fever! Leprosy!

Herzog, of course, has claimed that the book was mostly fiction, and indeed, he would work with Kinski one more time on Cobra Verde. But still, it really is one of the nastiest and most awful books you’ll ever read. It’s also just about impossible to put down (yes, even during the parts when Kinski starts talking about how big his johnson is). I keep hoping Lars Von Trier will make it into a movie.

Anyway. The same year that Werner Herzog made the documentary My Best Fiend about his relationship with Kinski (which, entertaining as it is, is probably my least-favourite Herzog movie - it plays a bit more like Herzog trying to spin the famous Herzog/Kinski feud to his advantage than a tribute), David Schmoeller, the decidedly less-visionary filmmaker behind Crawlspace, made this very entertaining short about his disastrous working relationship with the madman. Fun stuff.

newcult:

Kinski Fridays

Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski. I love this picture more than anything in the world, up to and including my life.

(via dirty-robot)