My Best Fiend – Klaus Kinski (1999)

If you look up Klaus Kinski on IMDB you see that he has acted in an impressive 135 movies and TV shows. Yet I have only seen him in one movie, the brilliant Fitzcarraldo. With a constant ferocious look in his eyes I always got the feeling from watching that movie that he was someone who was hard to predict and who had a flicker of madness in his eyes, just like the character he played. Werner Herzog (whose work I almost always enjoy watching) has worked with him on five films and had a special relationship with him. He already knew him from a time when he was a lot younger, living in the same house. With this documentary, made after Klauski’s passing Herzog looks back at the life of this man he had worked with but with whom he had also fought several times, which almost resulted in Herzog firebombing his house at one time.

The documentary opens with Kinski up on stage, yelling loudly into a mic and refusing to hand over the microphone when someone steps on to stage to take it from him. Herzog tells a couple how he got to know Kinski, who at a young age already was eccentric and would act out wildly and violently, who would sometimes walk around without any clothes on. He was a man who wasn’t always easy to work with, which Herzog himself found out several times. If something was not done to the liking of Kinski he would threaten to leave the movie (something he had done to other directors in the past). Herzog tells that when they were working on Fitzcarraldo he threatened to shoot Kinski if he would leave and Kinski stayed. During the shooting of the movie the local people did not feel comfortable with him, with his regular outbursts (one of them is shown in this film) and even offered Herzog to kill him if he wanted to.

Besides the unpredictable side Herzog also shows that you had to know how to work with him and also interviews a couple of fellow actors who had no issue sharing a scene with him. Kinski would put everything into his roles and that would show up on the screen. Even though I did not know a lot about Kinski I thought this documentary managed to capture and show the brilliance (and something which can only be described as something close to insanity) of this actor. The personal stories, the behind the scenes footage makes it a compelling Herzog documentary about someone he considered his best friend.