Actors From Germany

"Why do I continue making movies? Making movies is better than cleaning toilets."

"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."

"Your face is that of a child, but your expression is hard at the same time. It changes from one to the other in an instant. I have never seen such a face."

"He was a classy actor. He was a little odd. He did not like people to touch him. He did not like people to get too close to him, like wardrobe people, people like that. He thought that they were getting into his aura, so to speak."

"Kinski's fits can be partly explained by his egocentric character. Egocentric is perhaps not the right word; he was an outright egomaniac. Whenever there was a serious accident, it became a big problem because, all of a sudden, he was no longer the centre of attention. He was no longer important."

"Here is this man, Kinski, and you have to put him on the screen. You have to take all his rage, all his intensity, all his demonic qualities, and make them productive for the screen. That was the task and there was no time for learning. I had to master the situation from day one, from the first day of shooting Aguirre. On set you have no choice. I had to be strong enough to shape him and force him to the utmost, beyond the limits of what is normally required for the shooting of a film. But he would push me equally-to the limit. It was not permissible to take even a little step back from his level of intensity and professionalism. And, of course, he literally would have been ready to die with me, if I had died on the ship in the rapids. He would have sunk in the ship with me, and vice versa. But I cannot deny that there were moments, which were dangerous, when we could have killed each other."

"Kinski was not an actor - I wouldn't call him an artist either, nor am I. Of course, he mastered the techniques of being an actor, the technique of speech, of understanding the presence of light and of the camera, the choreography of camera and of bodily movements... But at the core of Klaus Kinski was not his existence as an actor - he was something beyond that and apart from it."

"People like Brando are just kindergarten compared to Kinski. He is totally mad and unpredictable. You can see something raging in this man. We liked each other, we hated each other and we respected each other, even though we hatched serious plots to murder each other."

"The funny thing about Klaus Kinski is that for all the bravado he’s just a scared little man. All you have to do is stand up to him. Herzog knew and I knew that, too. He wasn’t a bad person, he’s just so self-centered. Everything was his way or the highway."

"He was one of the few German actors I really admired because he did his own thing - he didn't adapt, he didn't conform in any way, and he had this strong way of playing his roles."

"I have never met a man like my father. He is so mad, terrible and vehement at the same time. Because of him, I never knew anything other than passion. When I began to meet other people I saw that it wasn’t normal."

"My father loved us so much, but he's the kind of person that chokes you. He doesn't leave you your own pleasures. If you think or feel one way and he feels the other way, he won't accept it. My mother wanted to work. People wanted her to do movies, but he just wanted her to be at home, be a mother, be a wife, be this Venus, this planet he could land on anytime."

"My father is so expressive that things he feels even before they are thoughts are visible on his skin. He heats up. What other people work on, he was born with. He's got eyes like the sky and like hell at the same time. They're so clear and blue and alert and serious, and then they're like hell. That's how he is. He is total light and pureness and then hell. He gives totally or he gives nothing. He is like the sun, then an iceberg, then nonexistent, and then the sun again. Which is fine. It's a lot better than most people are."

"When he died I had a moment of grief that lasted about five minutes. It was very intense, then never again. Not because I forced myself, but I think it was because he caused us too much pain."

"I would do anything to put him behind bars for life. I am glad he is no longer alive."

"I can't hear it anymore: 'Your father! Great! A genius! I always liked him.' The idolization has only gotten worse since his death."

"The terrible thing is that he once told me that it was completely natural, that fathers all over the world did that with their daughters. He was paying for me to be his little sex object, placed on silk cushions."

"As a child I always had to keep my mouth shut because he was always threatening me. And I was dependent on him, on his affection."

"I've written a book about [Kinski's abuse] because I can no longer bear the fact that a person whose halo gets bigger from year to year is being glorified in this way."

"When he died my mother [the singer Gislinde Kühlbeck], told me on the telephone and I felt nothing, neither a sense of sadness nor hate."

"He’s putting his hand up my skirt. The night before he kept coming to my room, he came to my door, he came to my window, he tried to get in. One time he saw me, he stood up and said he was Nosferatu...anything to get me to open the window."

"The film was appropriately called Venom and Klaus seemed determined to live up to its name... From what I was able to glean, the only excuse for his domestic outbursts sprang from his daughter, Nastassja Kinski, being on a roll. After Polanski's Tess, she became the new darling of Hollywood, courted, caressed and cast wherever she went. I believe Klaus was actually envious of his own offsping."

"Because I'm no bloody fool."

"Klaus and I lived actually in a place from Kafka. Every night and every day I was on stage in our home. He created a play and I had to react. It was sometimes terrible. It was a hell and heaven. I was convinced one hundred percent he was the devil. It was Richard III ten times or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He was extremely jealous. No one ever had the right to put the name of me or Nastassia in their mouths. He wanted me to have a child every year. It was impossible. He was so possessive, he was jealous when I gave Nastassia milk from my breast. It was as if he had built a religion around us, the Madonna and child."

"He’d fuck you on a pile of corpses but he’d never shake your hand, because of the germs. If ego is what makes men miserable, then he was surely one of the most miserable men of all time."

"[Kinski and Herzog] were both ridiculous, flaming egomaniacs of only slightly different stripes — Kinski’s ugliness was flailing, external; a flash fire that burned itself, and himself, out. Herzog’s rage was of the passive-aggressive, festering sort, and therefore more dangerous... Herzog was an inverted sociopath; Kinski threw loud vocal fits, repressing nothing. Who was more sick? Werner Herzog was the visual version of Kinski’s extremity. Kinski exploited hearts; Herzog exploited landscapes and native peoples."

"I don't try to justify myself or defend myself. I've always done what I had to. She should know for herself that I love her, that I've loved her always, always. Those years you can't replace by words, though. After years and years, words get weaker and weaker."

"I saw Stay as You Are and Tess only. I didn't ask her if she saw every movie I did. I could never think about that. Why do I have to see every movie she did? Why? Sometimes she did movies with people I was bored by. I don't care about this or that director. So if she is so beautiful in a movie, it is because of her, not a director. So why should I see the movie then? As long as I am not blind, I don't need a dog to see. If I am blind, maybe I would like the dog to lead me. I am not blind. I don't have to see her movies. I know my child."

"I have made many things wrong in my life. I should have made many things better in my life, not only to Nastassja but many things. If someone said to me, 'You did everything wrong in your life,' I would say, 'Okay, maybe you're right.' But my way is the only way I can exist. I can feel and express things to understand how true somethings is. People in my life have tried to change me, and I have blown up even more violently and I said, 'What, do you really want to distort me?' What's left, you have to do it your way. I don't need a Bible to tell me I'm doing wrong a hundred million times in my life. Everything I did wrong in my life I am suffering a long time. It's coming back and back and back and back to me for years. I am not ashamed to tell myself what I am doing wrong, but there must always be a way to understand that's all I can do. What I want to say is I tried, okay, I tried, and I'm not breaking my head that it's not happened. It's like a growing plant. This tiny things is coming out, you can feel it coming out, it's breaking through, so it may be one day that she will understand many more things than she understands today. Nobody can come to me and say, 'Why haven't you seen this and why and why.' I know what I have to do."

"I don't shake the hand of a Jewish pig. I'm German and Jews sicken me."

"Werner, nobody will read this book if I don't write bad stuff about you. If I wrote that we get along well together, nobody would buy it. The scum only wants to hear about the dirt, all the time."

"I don't care about that scum! Why should I receive a prize? I know that I'm a genius!"

"I've come here to tell the most exciting story in the history of mankind: the life of Jesus Christ. I'm not talking about the Jesus in those horribly gaudy pictures. Not the Jesus with the jaundice-yellow skin - whom crazy human society has turned into the biggest whore of all time. Whose corpse they perversely drag around on disgraceful crosses. I don't mean the jabbering about God or the blubbering hymns. I don't mean the Jesus whose moldy kiss frightens little girls out of horny dreams before their First Communion and then make them die of shame and disgust when they foam in the latrines. I'm talking about the man: the restless man who says we have to turn over a new leaf all the time, now! I'm talking about the adventurer, the freest, most fearless, most modern of all men, the one who preferred being massacred to rotting with others. I'm talking about the man who is like what all of us want to be. You and I."

"I am not the official Church Jesus who is accepted by policemen, bankers, judges, executioners, officers, church bosses, politicians and similar representatives of power. I am not your Superstar who keeps playing his part for you on the cross, and whom you hit in the face when he steps out of his role, and who therefore cannot call out to you, "I am fed up with all your pomp and all your rituals! Your incense is disgusting. It stinks of burnt human flesh. I can't bear your holy celebrations and holidays any longer. You can pray as much as you like, I'm not listening. Keep all your idiotic honours and laudations. I won't have anything to do with them. I do not want them. I am no pillar of peace and security. Security that you achieve with tear gas and with billy clubs. I am no guarantee for obedience and order either. Order and obedience at reform schools, prisons, penal institutions, insane asylums. I am the disobedient one, the restless one who does not live in any house. Nor am I a guarantee for success, savings accounts and possessions. I am the homeless one without a permanent home who stirs up trouble wherever he goes. I am the agitator, the invoker, I am the scream. I am the hippie, bum, Black Power, Jesus people. I want to free the prisoners. I want to make the blind see. I want to redeem the tortured. I want to cast love into your hearts, the love that reaches out beyond everything that exists. I want to turn you into living human beings, immortals."

"Yeah, I've got violence in me, but no negative violence. My violence is the violence of the free man who refuses to knuckle under. Creation is violent. Life is violent. Birth is a violent process. Tempests and earthquakes are violent movements of nature. My violence is the violence of life. It is not violence against nature, like the violence of the state, which sends your kids to the slaughterhouse, deadens your minds, and drives out your souls!"

"The Communist Manifesto was our Bible... It's in our souls, our friendship, our music… This is music for the people. We were kamikaze. For your land you would kill everyone that came from the capitalist foreign land."

"We're all living in Amerika Amerika ist wunderbar"

"I don't sing my mother tongue No, this is not a love song"

"Ich werde euch die Richtung zeigen Nach Afrika kommt Santa Claus und vor Paris steht Micky Maus"

"We comprehend... that nuclear power is a real danger for mankind, that over-crowding of the planet is the greatest danger of all. We have understood that the destruction of the environment is another enormous danger. But I truly believe that the lack of adequate imagery is a danger of the same magnitude. It is as serious a defect as being without memory. What have we done to our images? What have we done to our embarrassed landscapes? I have said this before and will repeat it again as long as I am able to talk: if we do not develop adequate images we will die out like dinosaurs."

"You can fight a rumour only with an even wilder rumour."

"I am not an artist and never have been. Rather I am like a craftsman and feel very close to the mediaeval artisans who produced their work anonymously and who, along with their apprentices, had a true feeling for the physical materials they were working with."

"I have never been one of those who cares about happiness. Happiness is a strange notion. I am just not made for it. It has never been a goal of mine; I do not think in those terms."

"I am someone who takes everything very literally. I simply do not understand irony, a defect I have had ever since I was able to think independently."

"May I propose a Herzog dictum? Those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it."

"It is my firm belief, and I say this as a dictum, that all these tools now at our disposal, these things part of this explosive evolution of means of communication, mean we are now heading for an era of solitude. Along with this rapid growth of forms of communication at our disposal— be it fax, phone, email, internet or whatever— human solitude will increase in direct proportion."

"To me, adventure is a concept that applies only to those men and women of earlier historical times, like the mediaeval knights who travelled into the unknown. The concept has degenerated constantly since then... I absolutely loathe adventurers, and I particularly hate this old pseudo-adventurism where the mountain climb becomes about confronting the extremes of humanity."

"If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big colour photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe."

"Actually, for some time now I have given some thought to opening a film school. But if I did start one up you would only be allowed to fill out an application form after you have walked alone on foot, let's say from Madrid to Kiev, a distance of about five thousand kilometres. While walking, write. Write about your experiences and give me your notebooks. I would be able to tell who had really walked the distance and who had not. While you are walking you would learn much more about filmmaking and what it truly involves than you ever would sitting in a classroom. During your voyage you will learn more about what your future holds than in five years at film school. Your experiences would be the very opposite of academic knowledge, for academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion."

"Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates."