And later, when reporting on Herzog's infamously cavalier attitude toward the physical safety of his cast and crew:

"Herzog is a miserable, hateful, malevolent, avaricious, money-hungry, nasty, sadistic, treacherous, cowardly creep. His so-called 'talent' consists of nothing but tormenting helpless creatures and, if necessary, torturing them to death or simply murdering them. He doesn't care about anyone or anything except his wretched career as a so-called filmmaker ... For his movies, he hires retards and amateurs who he can push around (and allegedly hypnotize!), and he pays them starvation wages or zilch. He also uses freaks and cripples of every conceivable size and shape, merely to look interesting. He doesn't have the foggiest inkling of how to make movies."

Herzog, according to Kinski, bullied and abused the natives, extras and other actors, not to mention animals and the landscape. Kinski describes Herzog sending a llama down the Pongo rapids on a raft and the crew watching in anguish as the terrified animal got sucked into a whirlpool and died.

"I shriek into his face that I want to see him croak like that llama he executed ... The most venomous serpent should bite him and make his brain explode! ... No! The huge red ants should piss into his lying eyes and gobble up his balls, penetrate his asshole and eat his guts!"

If Kinski's demands weren't met during his tantrums, he was famous for breaking contracts. At one point, before the end of shooting "Aguirre," he threatened to walk off the set. Herzog seriously threatened Kinski's life, saying that if he took off, he'd get his rifle and put "eight bullets in his head ... the ninth one would be mine."

For some reason, Kinski returned to the set, and, for the rest of the shoot, behaved professionally. I believe that he understood the desperate point to which he had driven Herzog, and it moved him to compassion: He "recognized" this extreme distress.

It is remarkable, given the absurdly incendiary relationship of these two men, that one of them didn't end up floating facedown in the Urubamba river.

The only woman for whom Kinski ever seems to have developed a profound attachment was Minhoï, a moody Vietnamese orphan he married in 1972.

"It takes Minhoï's Asian soul a long time to adjust to the dreadful extremes in my character. On the one hand, I'm irritable, I fly off the handle too easily, I react too quickly. My French is bad, but I'm impatient if Minhoï doesn't understand me right away, and these misunderstandings, behind which I suspect the most subtle schemes, poison my mind and my soul. I'm desperate. I have a low frustration tolerance, and my outbursts are unlimited. On the other hand, I'm considerate to the point of self-sacrifice, and my love is so immense that it terrifies Minhoï."

Kinski describes having been so insanely jealous that Minhoï was forced to give up all her friends -- she burned her phone book in front of him, to soothe him. At one point, he made her go to the bathroom with the door open so she would never leave his sight.

Minhoï and Klaus both became obsessed by the idea of their unborn son, and how he might transform their frayed inner lives and tumultuous relationship. Kinski, the man whom no woman or director could tame, imbued the baby with visions of whacked-out Germano-nature-culto-mystical eugenic über-powers:

"I count the hours, the days, the minutes, until the birth of my son, like a convict carving the days, the hours, the minutes, and seconds into the walls of his cell. My son will be my redeemer. His love will liberate me from the chains of torment ... Just as a fettered but growing tree smashes the iron rings that threaten to grow into its bark and flesh, as they do into my soul, my son is my strength, pushing to the outside from my innermost depths."

Suffice it to say, Kinski wasn't exactly cut out for a healthy parental narcissistic cathexis -- "The Drama of the Gifted Child" has no better poster boy than poor Nanhoï Kinski, who had the extra misfortune of being a startlingly beautiful child, which must have seemed a physical confirmation for Klaus that his unsupportable sentiments were warranted. After Minhoï inevitably left him and Kinski was unable to see Nanhoï every day, he stalked them, refusing to believe his wife had finally escaped the gravitational vortex of his love.

Then, after a laundry list of schlocky Italian films that nobody has ever heard of, Kinski returned to Herzog in 1979, when they did a back-to-back shooting of "Nosferatu" and "Woyzeck."

"Nosferatu" is essentially Herzog's love letter to the silent film images of the great F.W. Murnau. Isabelle Adjani is made up to look like a silent horror film star, shock-wide blue eyes surrounded by black powder, on a paper-white face, her long, kinky black hair falling about her shoulders, crucifix pulsing against her white neck. Kinski shaved his head for the role of the ultimate Goth ghoul, which had a morbid effect on his already fragile state of mind:

"I feel exposed, vulnerable, defenseless. Not just physically (my bare head becomes as hypersensitive as an open wound) but chiefly in my emotions and my nerves. I feel as if I have no scalp, as if my protective envelope has been removed and my soul can't live without it. As if my soul had been flayed."

At this time, 1979, Minhoï was insisting on a divorce. She and 3-year old Nanhoï accompanied Kinski to Holland for the filming of "Nosferatu" so that he could see his son in the evenings. Kinski transformed into the loveless, shriveled bat incapable of dying, who sucks the life force out of the humans in his sphere, infecting them with his miserable disease.

"The absence of love is the most abject pain," Nosferatu whimpers, with tears in his sunken eyes.

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