Marcelle Clements: KLAUS KINSKI & THE THING Is this man of strange and explosive power really the world's greatest actor?" Seite 4/10 In the decade and a half since they first worked together, the two men have sometimes gone years without speaking. But then Herzog will telephone Kinski in the middle of the night and ask to meet him in yet another strange part of the world, for yet another strange cinematic enterprise, and Kinski will agree. "He is a less big asshole than the others," says Kinski. And Herzog, though he once diagnosed Kinski as a paranoid schizophrenic, has more recently suggested that it is all the others who are crazy: "He has an exacerbated sensibility inconceivable for the rest of us." There, Herzog is also talking about the "thing." And, in fact, Herzog has a name for it. He calls it an "instinctive formulation," and he says that what Kinski has is genius. It is in Herzog's films that Kinski is most tormented by his thing that, in devouring him, allows him to convey an extraordinarily complete identification with his character. The torment is not conjured on the set, as in Method acting ("Completely worthless shit," Kinski says), but is lived through as soon as he reads the script and lasts long after the film is completed. Kinski appropriates another's feelings as dons his costume. When he first read the script of Aguirre, he said "I didn't think anything. I just was Aguirre. It was as if you say, 'Oh, yeah.' Like you remember, you remember the l6th Century, you remember yourself in the l6th Century." His film roles imprison him. "Sometimes," he says, "my heart hurts so much, I beat it with my fists. I try to run. But you cannot run away from this. You cannot run from it. Wherever you run, it waits for you. Even when you think you have escaped it, it is there, where you have run to. it waits for you, to ambush you. it is like those vines called lianas, those tropical creepers that grow around you and strangle you. You cut off one branch, but there is another that grows. You leap over the wall of one ghetto and find yourself in another ghetto." That's why, he says, the good films imprison him as much as the bad ones. "It is only a different kind of cage." In articles about him, there is a much-repeated quote: "I am like a wild animal born in captivity, in a zoo. But where a beast would have claws, I was born with talent." In recent years, such articles have seldom omitted the word legend. Kinski's legend is that of the masterful but embattled anarchist artist who does not seek prestige and shuns respectability. He rejects awards "if they're not changeable into cash money. It is the Nobel Prize I want," he says, laughing. "It's worth $400,000. "You can call it my consciousness of using my talent like a whore uses her body: to pay the price." © 1985 by Marcelle Clements and Playboy Enterprises Inc.

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