Marcelle Clements: KLAUS KINSKI & THE THING Is this man of strange and explosive power really the world's greatest actor?" Seite 3/10 Not surprisingly, he loathes all critics and refers to them as "the masturbators." He loathes most directors, too. "Do you think other people - directors, for example - understand this thing we have been talking about?" I asked him. "Directors in general understand shit," he answered. It is now part of his legend that he has turned down offers of roles from Fellini, Pasolini, Ken Russell, Steven Spielberg and others, the given reason usually being that he wasn't offered enough money. I make movies for money," Kinski asserts, "exclusively for money." And so, most of the several hundred films in which he has appeared would be described, by any standards, as trash; others as some of the greatest of any time. Kinski says it is his terrible destiny to be an "actor" and, therefore, to appear in movies and that there is not much difference between the trash and the so-called art films. Almost always, he says, the latter are merely pretentious and, what's worse, pay less. "So I sell myself for the highest price. Exactly like a prostitute. There is no difference." Kinski hates pretentious trash much more than the many so-called spaghetti Westerns he has made, which have brought him a large audience and, as he puts it bluntly, the most money. Of course he turned down Russell and all the others. Why, he asks, should he work with someone like Fellini, who will pay him less and who treats actors like marionettes? He is somewhat less harsh when he speaks of the German film maker Werner Herzog. Although Kinski was already widely known in Europe for his stage and film work, it is his roles in the Herzog films that are now, in Europe and in this country, invariably joined with his name: Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Nosferatu the Vampyre, Woyzeck and Fitzcarraldo. Both men have been quoted as saying that they work together by a kind of telepathy. Herzog, says Kinski, gives him no instructions. "In all of my scenes," says Kinski, "I am the one who does it." But their fights are notorious, and they are said to have come to blows on the set. There is an anecdote about an altercation Kinski and Herzog had during the filming of Aguirre, when they had already spent several months in the Peruvian jungle. In the course of an argument, Kinski is said to have announced that he was leaving. Herzog has been quoted many times in the ensuing 15 years as claiming to have then pulled out a gun and said, "Before you reach the bend in the river, there will be eight bullets in your head, and the last bullet will be for me." Kinski comments, "This story is so shitty, because he didn't even have a gun to pull! Besides, there is no gun with nine bullets! And I was the only one with a rifle." © 1985 by Marcelle Clements and Playboy Enterprises Inc.

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