Marcelle Clements:
KLAUS KINSKI & THE THING
Is this man of strange and explosive power really the world's greatest actor?"


Seite 9/10

I floored the accelerator and drove off in a flurry of gravel. If this made me even more nervous, it seemed to affect Kinski not a bit. In fact, he simply sat back, though it did seem to me that he maintained a high degree of; shall we say, alertness throughout our ride. I suddenly remembered a passage from his book in which he describes driving his Ferrari on the Italian highway at more than 100 miles an hour, dosing his eyes and counting to ten. If he could take that, I figured he could take this, too.
At the first red light, I got out my tape recorder, set it against the windshield and turned it on. But I soon abandoned any hope of getting him to repeat anything he had said the day before. He began right where he'd left off.
"What I was telling you yesterday," he said, "this is why the ultimate acting is to destroy yourself." "I wanted to ask you - " I said.
"The more I think about it," he told me, "the more it makes sense to me. You are too far on the left. Look how much space you have on my side. An article including everything that we said, so it's not just talking about somebody that is what you call an actor. You cannot separate it."
"I wanted to ask you a question," I said.
"What?" he said, for once.
"About anger," I said. "I wanted to ask you
"Why are you cluttering up your article?" he said. "This has nothing to do with what we have been talking about."
"You know," I said, casting a quick glance toward my tape recorder to see if the meter needle was moving and, of course, drifting into the next lane. "You know," I said, "I have been thinking about this, and you are taking over my article, exactly the way you take over your scenes in Werner Herzog's movies." "Where are you going?" said Kinski.
"Sorry," I said and careened back into my own lane.
"Of course," he said, "it's obvious that you should write about this. You cannot write in a story everything about me." "Well," I said, because I know very well that I have a tendency to clutter up my articles, "you may be right."
"Of course," he said.
We headed toward the mountains. The road became sinuous as we climbed.
"Why are you so worried?" he asked.
"I'm not worried," I said.
"You looked worried," he said. "Why? This is what you need. This is what is important to know. This is the essence this thing. This is what journalists were trying to get out of me for 20 years. And I never thought of it in this way before, but last night, because of our conversation, I thought, this is what is essential; this is the fundament. It is obvious that this is what you must write. Don't keep mixing in these other things." "But - " I started to say.
"It only confuses," he said. "What are you doing? You are too far on the left again."
"But you need a framework," I said.
"You need a framework? What is this, a framework? You don't need a framework. They told you you need this. You don't need this. You need a painting, not a frame. You are going too slow. Just go."
"Well" I started to say; but then I gasped as I was suddenly jolted backward, because Kinski, having decided the car was too sluggish on the steep road, had without warning shifted down.
"That's better," he said as we picked up speed. By the time I recovered, I had lost my train of thought. "At first, I felt this thing coming up in myself," he continued, "just really physically growing in myself and happening, but it was a jungle, so I couldn't distinguish things so much. I knew there were, in myself, the souls of millions of people who lived centuries ago - not just people but animals, plants, the elements, things, even, matter - that all of these exist in me, and I felt this. OK, this pushed and pushed and pushed. OK, that was the beginning... And through the years it became clearer and clearer, this thing; it started to separate itself. I could make it come when I had to concentrate on, let's say, a person I had to become - this thing became stronger. And took more of me. In this moment, I let it do it, because I wanted, I had to be this person. And as I was led to doing it, there was then no way back. And the more I tried to do it, the more I hated it. But there was no way back anymore; it was always going farther and farther and farther. Until one day, when I was walking through the streets of Paris, I started crying, because I could look at a man, a woman, a dog, anything, and receive it, anything, everything; there was no difference between physical and psychological. I felt like I was breaking out, breaking up, receiving everything, every moment, even things I did not see. There is no turning back from this. But this danger is the power you have. It is this same power that lets you hold an audience when you are on a stage. Then it is a concentration, the same concentration that in kung fu is used for the kick that kills or to break a table with your hand. It means that you are sure of the power and that you relinquish yourself to it."
Kinski hesitated for a moment.

© 1985 by Marcelle Clements and Playboy Enterprises Inc.

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