Marcelle Clements: KLAUS KINSKI & THE THING Is this man of strange and explosive power really the world's greatest actor?" Seite 10/10 "It should not be necessary to explain things," he said. "I don't know... maybe it comes from this fucking occupation that they call ,art.' I don't know what the meaning of that is. And they call me ,actor,' and 1 know this is shit, OK, because it just means that some idiot, absolutely imbecilic, cretin, illiterate director can say what he wants to me, can even harm me. So I say to him, ,FUCK OFF!' Or I go home or whatever. And then they say, ,He is mad; he just happens to be an artist.' These people who do not see the terrible things and therefore do not see the beautiful things, either. But I cannot dump, dump this thing. They think you can dump all this and be an actor. Then they say, ,Good job.' Do you say ,Good job' to an earthquake?" Kinski paused. "I am dying of hunger," he said. We stopped at a little fast-food place at the beach, an absurd gray structure that had been weathered to look quaint against the background of the ocean. I watched him stand at a counter and eat a chili dog, using a plastic knife and fork. "These beans are disgusting," he said. "They are hard. Look at this sign, HOMEMADE. What does this mean, ,home'? Does it mean that the beans are even more disgusting than others? I don't understand their signs. I don't WANT to understand their signs. This HOMEMADE, it's supposed to tell you these disgusting beans are good. These fucking signs! Signs everywhere that lie." Kinski paced back and forth along the beach while I traipsed along behind him with my useless tape recorder: There was a howling wind that whipped our hair and our clothes and that I knew would make this tape inaudible, too. It was cold this day, already autumn. We couldn't see the horizon; the gray of the ocean merged into the sky. Even the sand seemed gray in that light. Behind us were more grays, those of the cliffs, and then the brown of the mountains. It was the only time I saw Kinski not dressed in white; he had on a bright-red windbreaker, the only splash of passionate color in the mist. Kinski talked and I listened until I started shivering in the relentless wind. "Let's go back," he said. We sat for a while in the parked car. It seemed almost silent now, away from the beach. "Why do I continue making movies?" he said in reply to a question I'd asked hours earlier. "Making movies is better than cleaning toilets." "Do some roles leave you cold?" "In a way, everything concerning a movie leaves me cold, and everything involves me. For a smaller one, you just give a smaller kick." I remained silent. "I don't know. Why have I had this life? If I knew, I wouldn't have done it. Do you know what I mean? You cannot even say, I cannot even tell myself, ,Why did I do it? I shouldn't have done it.' It's ridiculous." "It wasn't a choice?" "It wasn't my choice." He sighed. "So it means," he continued, "the only thing I can say is ,OK, shit!' Just like saying ,Shit!' to yourself. You say ,SHIT' ten times when you hurt yourself. You say ,SHIT.' Nobody is there. You just say ,SHIT.' So I could tell myself, ,Oh, shit, why, WHY, why did all that happen to me? Why was I not a bird on the ocean? You know? Instead of this, you know?' This I could say, but just to myself. SHIT! It doesn't even make sense after a while when you say ,Shit' from morning to evening, but there was a time when I could not stop. It was like a tic. I said ,Shit' all the time. SHIT!" For the first time in his presence, I felt afraid. Not of him but of the furor of that younger self he was reincarnating in the small, cramped space where we sat, yet another cage to be filled with that power and rage that I finally understood to be his furor at his own fate. And I saw that same vein stand out on his forehead that I had seen on Aguirre's, and the same intensity in the set of his jaw: It was not the rage of helplessness, it was the rage of defiance. Kinski opened his eyes, which had been clamped shut, and then looked away at the ocean. In the car, the silence seemed new. Well, it wasn't a silence. There was still the wind, the sound of a sea gull's wings flapping. It only seemed like a new silence to me, because I had watched a man say "Fuck you" to his own pain. Kinski stared steadfastly at the ocean. "I don't know," he said. "Why do you live alone?" I asked. "I didn't choose solitude," he answered. It was unusually brief for him. "Because in your book," I said, "you seemed capable of such love." "Yes," he said. "Love is the salvation." He sighed again. "I didn't choose to be alone. But I cannot explain this. I could be with a woman in a bed, for weeks even and it would seem to me like three seconds. Or 300 years. There is no time sense because of things that are going on in you. I don't know, there is no explanation of this. But every time, even with someone I.... But whenever I was with a woman, I always sort of want another one. So there was always another one. I can't explain this, but it means that these women, they were not sharing my solitude. I wanted to stay with somebody, but I couldn't, it wasn't possible, because of this thing moving in myself. I had to learn this. I didn't want to be alone, but I had to learn that the dimensions of my feelings are too violent. I had to learn this. It is what I was just telling you before. Why? Why am I like this? It is the same as ,Why wasn't I born a fisherman?' This is not a choice. There is not a why. Look at this bird there. Why does he fly to the left? Why?" We watched as the gull flew out of our sight, toward the mountains. A few hundred feet away, on the road leading to the beach, a truck pulled up and some men got out, carrying pneumatic drills and jackhammers. They set to work, and it was the sounds of the drills and the hammers that now reached the car. "Look at them!" exclaimed Kinski. "They are not happy if they don't hammer. They hammer, they hammer; it is unbearable. That is why you have to go away. It is not a solution, but you have to go away, to protect your feeling of life, where people won't shock you and hurt you. They hammer everywhere! Everywhere they can possibly hammer! They hammer in your brain! Hell, these idiots, they come with their hammer, where people are sitting, to hammer, to hammer, to hammer! Let's go." I started the car without stalling it, mercifully, and drove away. We headed back toward town and I got more driving tips from Kinski and we talked some more about the thing. We've had other conversations since, but it is at the ocean that I remember him best. Even though many of his words were torn from his mouth by the sea breezes and were hurled toward the ocean or the mountains or buried in the sand, Klaus Kinski led me to grasp, with what I felt was perfect clarity, the definition of an ineffable force of nature, because he seemed to be both a part and an expression of it, even though now, when I listen to my tape, there are only fragments of speech, meaningless by themselves, and what I can hear, mostly, is only the screaming of the wind and the detonation of the waves. This is the most important lesson I learned about what it is, ultimately, the "actor" does. © 1985 by Marcelle Clements and Playboy Enterprises Inc.

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