Movie Type: Film & Television History, Interpersonal Relationships
Themes: Filmmaking, Actor's Life
Main Cast: Werner Herzog
Release Year: 1999
Country: DE/UK/US/FI
Run Time: 98 minutes
Plot
To say the working relationship between director Werner Herzog and actor Klaus Kinski was often stormy strains the boundaries of understatement. Kinski's tirades against Herzog are the stuff of legend -- Kinski's scabrous autobiography All I Need is Love features a number of venomous rants against the director far too foul to recount here, while Herzog had to threaten Kinski with murder to get him to complete his work on Aguirre, The Wrath Of God. However, the collaboration between these two men, no matter how combative, resulted in the finest, most memorable work of either's career, including Aguirre, Nosferatu, Woyzeck and Fitzcarraldo, before Kinski's death in 1991 ended the partnership. Mein Leibster Feind/My Best Fiend is a documentary by Herzog about his work with Kinski, and portrays the actor with a large degree of affection while making no secret of his volatile nature (an actor displays a scar on his head from a wound Kinski inflicted with a sword, while an outtake from Fitzcarraldo shows him terrorizing a member of the crew). Despite their remarkable differences, Herzog sums up their working relationship with admirable conclusion: "We complemented one another. I needed him and he needed me." Mein Leibster Feind/My Best Fiend was produced for European television, though it did receive a screening (out of competition) at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Review
Werner Herzog's documentary is a thoughtful and clever examination by the director of his longstanding friendship and creative partnership with the late Klaus Kinski. It's not a biography, and there's little information about Kinski's life outside of Herzog's purview. There's a brief, but fascinating clip of Kinski on stage during his "Jesus Tour," wherein the actor traveled through Germany, ranting at his audiences, claiming to be the "new Jesus." Herzog claims that Kinski was a madman, and there's ample evidence of the actor's mental imbalance in outtakes as he throws lengthy tantrums and is seen smashing another actor over the head with a sword. But Herzog also shows Kinski's power as an actor, contrasting a clip of Jason Robards playing Fitzcarraldo with a clip of the raving Kinski playing the same scene after he replaced Robards. Herzog also interviews Claudia Cardinale and Eva Mattes, who worked with Kinski on Herzog's films and remember him as a gentle and sensitive man. Herzog is a skilled documentarian, and is himself a fascinating subject, as had already been proven in Les Blank's excellent account of the making of Fitzcarraldo, Burden of Dreams. He's softened a bit since those days, but his fierce intellect shines through. Some may wish that the film included more clips of Kinski, as the footage there is of him -- raving, performing, and playing with a butterfly -- is incredible, while Herzog's stories are even more astounding. The director takes credit for a lot of the actor's work, describing how he essentially tricked Kinski into giving him just the performance he wanted, and at one point even claiming he helped Kinski come up with the horrible insults he throws at Herzog in his autobiography. One wishes Kinski were still around to let Herzog have it one more time. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide
Herbert Golder - First Assistant Director, Werner Herzog - Director, Joe Bini - Editor, Christine Ruppert - Executive Producer, Andre Singer - Executive Producer, Peter Zeitlinger - Cinematographer, Lucki Stipetic - Producer, Eric Spitzer - Sound/Sound Designer
My Best Fiend (German: Mein liebster Feind - Klaus Kinski, literally My Dearest Enemy - Klaus Kinski) is a 1999documentary film by Werner Herzog about his tumultuous yet productive relationship with German actor Klaus Kinski. It was released on DVD in 2000 by Anchor Bay.
The film opens with shots from one of Klaus Kinski's Jesus tours, in which he performed – after his own interpretation – the role of Jesus. Kinski harangues the audience for not paying attention to him, curses wildly, has the microphone taken away from him, and, screaming, steals it back. Kinski had to leave one of these tours in order to star in his first Herzog film, Aguirre, the Wrath of God. This was the first of five films that the two would make together, including Nosferatu the Vampyre (1978); Woyzeck (1978); Fitzcarraldo (1982); and Cobra Verde (1987).
Herzog presents selected pieces of Kinski's biography. He tours a substantially renovated apartment in which Kinski lived, looks at a film clip of the first time he ever saw Kinski, and presents a large amount of footage from the sets of their various movies. Herzog recounts the heated arguments and sometimes violent altercations between them, including the oft-repeated story of Herzog threatening to shoot Kinski should he leave the production of Aguirre. He draws heavily on footage from Burden of Dreams, a documentary of the making of Fitzcarraldo, a particularly difficult film for their relationship.
The Kinski that Herzog presents, however, is not solely the raving madman he is sometimes remembered as. Herzog has a deep respect for Kinski's acting talent. He also displays a tender side of Kinski. From interviews with two of the women who starred opposite him, Eva Mattes (from Woyzeck) and Claudia Cardinale (from Fitzcarraldo), one would get the impression that Kinski was a loving and gentle, indeed a calm man. The final sequence in the film is a series of shots of Kinski playing with a butterfly in the Peruvian jungle.
Herzog describes Kinski's death as the result of living so strenuously and fully ("like a comet" as he describes it). As he talks, the documentary shows the final scene from Cobra Verde, in which Kinski collapses in the surf as he tries to pull a large boat out to sea. The film, then, is something of an elegy to Kinski, Herzog's dear friend and sometimes foe.
Janet Maslin of the New York Times admiringly called the film "[a] captivating documentary, a film that serves as an eloquent coda to their unforgettable creative partnership."[3]. Roger Ebert gave the film three stars out of a possible four, saying:
“
As a meditation by a director on an actor, it is unique; most show-biz docs involve the ritual exchange of compliments. My Best Fiend is about two men who both wanted to be dominant, who both had all the answers, who were inseparably bound together in love and hate, and who created extraordinary work – while all the time each resented the other's contribution.[4]
Edwards and Peter Sellers reportedly were at each other’s throats throughout their many collaborations on Pink Panther comedies—largely, it appears, because of Sellers’s hyperbolically neurotic behavior. Herzog and Kinski had a similarly volatile relationship, which ended only after Kinski died, in 1991. Herzog got his revenge by releasing outtakes of his difficult star, much as Edwards continued to fiddle around with unreleased footage of Sellers as Inspector Clouseau in Trail of the Pink Panther. Herzog offers a personal documentary about Kinski and himself—recollecting particular tantrums and outrages while speculating on their significance, revisiting the Peruvian locations of some of their joint efforts, interviewing former crew members, showing Kinski behaving vilely to everyone around him.[5]
