Difficult Actors: Klaus Kinski

When I call a director “difficult”, it is because his or her movies are inscrutable and difficult to figure out.  A difficult actor is just that.  Impossible to deal with.  A potential destroy of harmony on the movie set, if not potentially destructive of the entire film itself.  Perhaps you cannot figure out why he or she is like that.  For all we know, it might be part of the actor’s method.

No one fits this category better than Klaus Kinski.  You may not know him but he’s appeared enough in mainstream films that you might remember him.  My first experience of him is in For A Few Dollars More (1965), Sergio Leone’s second film of the ‘Man with No Name Trilogy’ starring Clint Eastwood.  Kinski is in the gang that has stolen a safe from an El Paso bank.  The gang is led by Gian Maria Volante, who is also Eastwood’s main antagonist in A Fistful of Dollars (1964). Kinski has blonde hair and is constantly challenging Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef.  Van Cleef kills Kinski in a barroom shootout, which Kinski has provoked.

Unlike Volante, Kinski never worked again for Leone.  In fact, Klaus Kinski NEVER worked twice with a director, save one.  Since he made nearly 200 films, this is not an easy thing to accomplish.  Can anyone be so off putting?  Yet, we might ask how he got so many roles.  This is what separates Kinski from other difficult actors.  He has an undeniable presence when in good roles.  And there’s the other thing.  He could get roles, many roles, but in inferior films.

For a Few Dollars More was his first decent film, followed by Dr. Zhivago (1965), then two notable Spaghetti Westerns, A Bullet for the General (1966) and The Great Silence (1968).  It isn’t until 1972, when he played in Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: Wrath of God, that he found some kind of fame.  But only in the foreign “art film” circuit.  He continued to make six or seven movies a year with little discernible script quality or aesthetics.

Then, Herzog chose Kinski to play the lead in Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), which I saw in a Large ornate theater in Florence, Italy.  It is one of his most restrained performances, perhaps in part because the massive makeup he had to endure.  And I mean “endure” because this was the first movie Kinski wore any makeup (his first film, 1948).  In the next ten years, Herzog cast him in Woyzeck (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1983), and Cobra Verde (1988).

This may be the most extreme case in which the actor’s best work arises from a specific collaboration.  Other examples come to mind of great combinations: DeNiro and Scorsese, Mifune and Kurosawa, Erich Von Stroheim and Gloria Swanson, Woody Allen and Woody Allen, Bergman and Von Sydow.  Some ended with complete breaks and hard feelings, like Mifune and Kurosawa, who made 14 films together.  The story of their collaboration is commemorated in a book The Emperor and The Wolf by Stuart Galbraith.

Herzog and Kinski became a team in spite of themselves.  One story has Herzog pulling a gun on Kinski and threatening to shoot him when Kinski wanted to quit the filming of Aguirre.  Kinski himself has written that the episode is a set up, something he and Herzog worked out together.  Perhaps, but it isn't hard to believe Kinski wanted to quit a production, especially in the difficult conditions presented by an Amazon rain forest.

In 1999, Herzog made a documentary, My Best Fiend: Klaus Kinski, memorializing their mutual careers.  Indeed, Herzog first encountered Kinski at age 12, sharing an apartment with the actor who was in this twenties.  It gives their relationship a strong sense of fate.  But what they truly shared is manic devotion to their respective professions.  Kinski's temper matches Herzog's obsessive artistic motives and goals.  In Kinski's screen performances of Aguirre, Nosferatu, and Fitzcarraldo, perfectly match Herzog's drive and temperament.