The most cherished pairings of a director and an actor who never threatened to kill one another include Ford and Wayne, Hitchcock and Stewart, Truffaut and Léaud, and Scorsese and De Niro. But if we take away that ‘killing’ parameter, the list grows to include the films of Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski.
Herzog directed Kinski in Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Nosferatu the Vampyre, Woyzeck, Fitzcarraldo, and Cobra Verde between the early 1970s and the late 1980s – that is, to the extent that the unpredictable Kinski was directable.
Herzog is known for only letting his cast and crew attempt certain dangerous stunts after he has personally tried them. He dislikes working in studios because he believes it kills spontaneity. While filming in a studio is unquestionably safer (there is no risk of contracting malaria, as Herzog has done numerous times), there is always an air of artificiality present because the space is posing as something it is not, and it is likely that the actors would follow suit and deliver less genuine performances. Herzog likes to film in a world that is both outside of the studio and outside of himself; a world he is unable to control with precise lighting setups or a well-prepared production, but one that will constantly throw challenges at him and catch him off guard. This opens the door for some very bizarre situations on site.
According to Herzog, “Film does not have so much to do with reality as it does with our collective dreams.” In the end, his movies are extraordinary, eerie stories about poetry, nature, and man. Herzog’s goal as a filmmaker is to alter reality rather than just record it, giving us the chance to view an “ecstatic truth” (as he calls it). Some bizarre things happened on Herzog’s many film sets, all in the name of the search for the ‘truth.’
Herzog threatened to shoot Kinski eight times, then himself, during the 1972 production of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, if Kinski left the set.
Herzog insisted that a real ship be towed over a real mountain in the jungle and refused to film the scene using special effects in a studio. Fitzcarraldo, the main character in this movie (played by Klaus Kinski), is motivated by his love of music and devises a huge scheme that seemed destined to fail: constructing an opera theater in the jungle and exposing the uneducated indigenous to the brilliance of Caruso, Verdi, and Wagner. Fitzcarraldo takes a ship up a tributary and, with the aid of a thousand natives, pulls this boat over a mountain and into a parallel river in order to raise money and build his opera house. Huge sea vessels are typically not designed to be dragged over mountains. Initially, Twentieth Century Fox was interested in making the movie, but Herzog refused to use a model boat and a model mountain, which were the conditions set by the studio.
Due to the construction of a boat and a camp large enough to house the crew and a thousand extras, the pre-production for the movie took three years. Many people suffered harm for the sake of art: Herzog’s cinematographer cut his hand open while filming on the steamboat (and it had to be stitched up without anesthesia). Another crew member who had been bitten by a poisonous snake had to use a chainsaw to amputate his own foot in order to prevent cardiac arrest. However, the boat eventually managed to cross the mountain successfully, and Herzog captured the entire event on camera—challenging the fundamental laws of nature and succeeding.
But the film could have been abandoned so easily. If Herzog weren’t insane, that is. Kinski had a habit of losing his cool, frequently in response to the smallest issues. One time, Kinski became upset because some extras and crew members were making a lot of noise while playing cards in a hut. The only way he knew how to respond was to go groin-piercingly doolally. He took out a gun and fired three times at them. Fortunately, no one was killed in the incident; however, a stuntman’s finger was severed. This didn’t stop Herzog from finishing his movie. Herzog would only ever stop making films if both he and Kinski were killed. Seriously. Herzog claimed that Kinski tried to legitimately abandon the project when the assistant cameraman grinned during filming, as documented in the excellent movie My Best Fiend. However, Herzog put a stop to that. Here is how he describes what happened:
“I went up to him, very composed… and said ‘You can’t do this. The movie is more important than our personal emotions… even more important than our persons and this can’t be permitted. This simply will not be!’ He said: ‘No, I’m leaving now.’ I told him I had a rifle … there’d be eight bullets in his head and the ninth one would be mine. He instinctively knew that this wasn’t a joke anymore… he was very disciplined during the last days of shooting.”
The details of their infamous love-hate conflict are only now becoming clear. My Good Fiend, a documentary by Herzog, exposes friendship.
After the Cannes film festival premiere, he said, ‘We had a great love, a great bond, but both of us planned to murder each other. Klaus was one of the greatest actors of the century, but he was also a monster and a great pestilence. Every single day I had to think of new ways of domesticating the beast.’
Herzog, who worked on five of his films with him, recalled that Kinski used to yell insults at him and threaten to trample him into the mud.
Kinski made over 200 film appearances, including in Dr. Zhivago and numerous spaghetti westerns, frequently appearing as a psychopath cameo who was a self-portrait of the actor.
The tragedy, said Herzog, is that he was ‘a genius. A terrifying genius. His intensity scared other directors.’
When Hollywood called, Kinski spat in its face. Steven Spielberg tried to cast him as the lead in Indiana Jones, but was told: ‘This script is a yawn-making, boring, pile of shit.’
