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Kinski was a movie himself.
He was a rather peculiar individual, a very curious person.
Klaus Kinski was the worst work experience of my life.
I would never do it again, even under torture.
I worked on NOSFERATU IN VENICE, and it's a long story.
I was involved in every step of the production,
from development to the very end.
The story starts around 1984 when I was directing second unit
and doing the special effects for Dario Argento's PHENOMENA.
NOSFERATU with Klaus Kinski had been released not too long before and it was a big success.
Carlo Alberto Alfieri wanted to do a sort of ripoff, an unauthorized sequel.
He was optimistic because he'd known Kinski for years.
And one day, when Kinski was visiting Rome, he managed to have him sign a contract
to make NOSFERATU IN VENICE, a sequel to the famous NOSFERATU.
Alfieri asked me to work on this movie because he wanted me to do the special effects,
since he knew I had experience in that field.
So I was involved in the development of the project from his office.
At first it was quite an ambitious movie which was supposed to be directed by Maurizio Lucidi,
who was a gialli and western director.
Lucidi was going to direct, initially.
The movie was supposed to be shot in 1984/85, I think.
There was already a script and the whole story was set during the carnival in Venice,
which happens in February. And since Kinski wasn't coming to Italy
until summer, because he was shooting another movie, they had to shoot the carnival in February.
It would have been impossible to recreate at a later time.
So I was there during pre-production with Lucidi and Alfieri.
They went to Venice in February to shoot the carnival footage, using some actors,
not the leads, but extras and minor characters.
But, most importantly, they had a perfect body double for Kinski, looking just like NOSFERATU:
bald with long nails, big canine teeth, etc.
They shot a lot of footage, at least two hours of footage, and they edited it to about 20 minutes.
It was very expensive to shoot those scenes.
Venice was particularly expensive during the carnival.
It was hard to find hotels and so on.
They shot this footage without Kinski, with the plan to shoot the rest with him in the summer.
If I remember correctly, it was the summer of 1985, and Kinski was very busy.
He always had other movies to shoot outside Italy,
and he kept on postponing this movie.
The distributors who were attached by Carlo Alberto Alfieri gave up on the project,
and he ended up without distribution for NOSFERATU IN VENICE.
So he contacted a producer who was working a lot at that time: Augusto Caminito.
The idea behind NOSFERATU IN VENICE was to redo Herzog's NOSFERATU. We wanted to follow that idea.
Kinski agreed immediately and there was a script, which I completely re-wrote, but it was good.
We had several directors. At first there was a guy called Lucchetti,
then Mario Caiano... No wait, before him there was Pasquale Squitieri,
who wanted to do a futuristic Nosferatu set in a future Venice, but he didn't get along with Kinski.
So we hired Caiano, who was brought on to shoot a more traditional movie, more his style and as it was written.
A friend introduced me to a producer/screenwriter named Augusto Caminito.
He was in a desperate situation.
He'd sent a director to Africa to shoot an adventure movie, a kind of INDIANA JONES,
and this guy did everything in Africa except shoot the action scenes.
So he came back with footage which couldn't be edited, and he told me,
“Mario, do me a favor. Save this movie for me.”
So I shot for 10 days. I was lucky enough to find a reconstructed mine at De Paolis studios.
Then I went to Tor Caldara, where I recreated Africa.
I shot 10 days of action scenes in order to save this movie.
I even used some of Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA locations.
Well, I did that for 15 days or so and I saved the movie. They edited it, he liked it, and he was happy.
He was so grateful that he told me, “You'll be the director of the next movie I produce.”
He even had me sigh a contract.
Around the same time he also promised Kinski that he would direct his next movie, which was NOSFERATU IN VENICE.
Neither Kinski or I knew about this conflict. I thought I was the director and so did he.
We knew Mario because we had worked with him before.
He was a professional and a good director. He knew his job.
He also knew that directing Kinski wouldn't be an easy task.
He never could've imagined just how hard it was going to be.
While we were waiting for Kinski to arrive, Caminito made a deal with Berlusconi at Mediaset.
Berlusconi was starting as a producer. Up until that time Berlusconi would buy movies cheaply,
but when the producers realized that they'd made bad deals they started asking for a lot of money.
Berlusconi then said, “"Well, if I have to pay so much for a movie,
it'd make more sense to co-produce them and own them.”
So Caminito closed the first deal of that kind with Berlusconi, and I remember it was a great deal,
everyone was happy about it.
So everything changed once again. The movie had to be expensive and spectacular.
It had to be an international production because they actually had money.
So the script was changed once again. This time they went big. Caiano was happy about it, because
when you tell a director he has a bigger budget than expected, he's happy.
Then Kinski arrived and he was like a hurricane, sweeping everything away. He was at the height of his madness.
There were moments when he was sweet and adorable, and then all of a sudden
he would start to yell like a madman having a nervous breakdown.
He always had wild mood swings, which were completely unexplainable.
When he was in a good mood, he was the most adorable guy on earth. Nice and kind.
But when he had his outbursts of anger, and it happened often, he was totally wild.
Kinski was grateful to Alfieri because he'd once had to escape from Italy. It was on the set of a movie
where he'd had a fight with an assistant director and he'd hurt him, so he was sentenced by a judge.
That's the reason Kinski suddenly stopped making movies in Italy.
Alfieri took care of his legal woes and he managed to get his sentence reversed,
allowing him to go back to Italy without going to prison.
Kinski was very grateful to Alfieri. They had a very good relationship, as he did with Caminito too.
Here's the first thing Kinski said when he came to the office of Carlo Alberto Alfieri, in Piazza Verdi, in Rome,
while Caiano was there.
They showed him the bald cap he'd have to wear since he was supposed to be Nosferatu,
big canines, long nails and so on. He said,
"I had to go through hell to make NOSFERATU.
There's no way I'm going through that process again.”
We were all in shock, and he said,
“I'll do this movie with my own long hair, my face, my teeth, my normal hands. I don't care about the previous movie.”
This scared all of us because, first of all, all that footage shot with the double,
bald, with the big canines, and long nails,
killing people in Venice, would be unusable.
So they actually discarded it, because the footage couldn't be used.
And then we were perplexed, because if he looked like that in the film
people wouldn't associate him with Nosferatu.
Yes, something like that happened.
Kinski was a bit bald on the back of the head anyway, but he didn't want to be shot from behind because of that.
Kinski didn't want to use the image of Nosferatu by Herzog, which was very beautiful.
He wanted something different, but the difference between him and Herzog
is like the difference between Tanio Boccia and Ingmar Bergman.
During pre-production Kinski was obsessed with one thing,
and I remember this because it was totally crazy.
Carlo Alberto Alfieri had an old Ferrari which was still in good condition, and Kinski wanted it as part of his payment.
They somehow made a deal and he got this red Ferrari.
So the movie started, and it started off with a bang.
The first day we shot in Tor Caldara, which is a rocky place by the sea near Rome.
We had to shoot the scene where they find Nosferatu's coffin after the shipwreck.
We had some extras in that scene.
We shot it. Caiano is very good, so it was shot on schedule.
Kinski only had to be in the last two shots of this first day.
I remember it was 5 PM and almost sunset.
Kinski arrived in the afternoon. I set up a close-up of his face, but I could see that he was ignoring me.
I said, “Action!” And he did more or less what he had to do.
It was a silent close up.
I said, “"Cut!” But he kept on making weird faces. “Hey, I said CUT!”
Caiano told Kinski what he was supposed to do in the scene, and Kinski responded
in a very impolite way and he threw his small mirror at him.
He always had that mirror in his pocket to check his hair and make-up
before every scene. He insulted him very badly, without any reason whatsoever.
It was a very normal scene, nothing peculiar was happening.
Caminito came up to me and said, “Please, he asked us not to say 'Cut' because he might do something after that.”
“No way. When I say 'Cut' he has to stop. He has to do the things I ask him to do.”
“But you know, it's a different situation...”
“Yes, sure, whatever, I got it. Goodbye.” So I left and I sued him. And I won.
The movie stopped. The movie stopped at the very first scene with Klaus Kinski.
They kept on shooting the movie between bottles of champagne and snorts of cocaine,
and they ended up with that unwatchable mess called NOSFERATU IN VENICE.
The first day on the set, in order to welcome the crew, I brought a bottle of champagne.
They told me, "We had to move Kinski's trailer so it's in the shade.”
"The Spanish extras will arrive soon. And the director left the set.”
They used a certain tone of voice. “He left?”
“Yes, because Kinski slapped him.”
Caiano touched his arm to instruct him where to go and Kinski said, “You don't touch me.”
And he touched his arm like this.
So I was with the whole crew, the Spanish dancers, and everyone ready to shoot.
I went to Kinski thinking: “This is the last time I'll see him. This time I'll slap him.”
When he saw me he was all happy and said, “This is great, we got rid of Caiano! You should be the director!”
That night I shot the scenes, somehow thinking I would find another director the following day.
But it was August 25th, and no one was available. Only one said yes, I think it was Giovanni Soldati,
but he asked me to postpone the shoot for 3 weeks so that he could prepare.
Three weeks later Kinski's contract would have ended, so that couldn't happen.
My acting career, how did it start?
Well, it started with Kinski. At that time I was already 18.
I want to say this because many people have said that I was underage.
No, I was already 18, and since I was “legal,” I was able to participate in a beauty contest
called “A New Face For Cinema,” which was a side event of the Venice Film Festival.
I won that contest and I was celebrating this success with my friends in a famous restaurant in Venice.
By chance, Kinski was sitting at the next table because at that time he was shooting NOSFERATU IN VENICE.
He was there with the crew and the director.
I didn't even know who he was because I was just 18 and I didn't have that kind of cinematic knowledge.
Back then I only knew Italian movies like CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS, and those kind of movies.
I didn't know important artists and actors.
Anyway, long story short, I didn't know who he was.
He had a peculiar face, though, and I was attracted to that kind of "mask” that was in front of me.
I couldn't help looking at him because he was very peculiar, very strange.
It was like he was wearing a mask.
He was shooting NOSFERATU IN VENICE and he had long hair with a particular color.
Well, I was very attracted by his figure, which was certainly very, very charismatic.
The same thing with him, for different reasons, of course,
so the owner of the restaurant - who was his friend -
introduced me to him and everything started there.
The following day he invited me to the set of NOSFERATU IN VENICE because he thought that a young girl like me,
who had never been on a movie set before, would be happy to be there,
and after that he invited me to dinner.
Being on that set was a real epiphany, since I had never visited one before.
For the first few months it was more like a friendship before he left for the States,
where he lived, in San Francisco, and so we talked over the phone.
Then, little by little, it became a real relationship which lasted 3 and a half years.
My acting career began with him. I can say this honestly.
It started that day in that Venetian restaurant when we met, and it was he who brought me into the world of cinema.
While shooting this movie I met two actors who I already knew, and I was happy to see them again.
Firstly Donald Pleasence, whom I'd met on the set of Argento's PHENOMENA.
Then there was Christopher Plummer, who acted in my movie STARCRASH,
so my relationship with him was even better.
We reunited on this movie and we were happy about it.
It was nice to have them there because the movie was utter chaos.
Every time Kinski was walking to set we would hear him screaming from the canal,
then from the stairs, and finally when he arrived on the set.
There was always a lot of confusion. But the funny thing about Pleasence was that he couldn't care less.
The set was a mess. Kinski argued with everybody from the still photographer to the camera guy,
the cinematographer... But Pleasence was always sitting on the sofa reading a book,
waiting to be called to shoot. He couldn't care less.
“Donald, are you ready?” “"Ready!”
He came to the set, he shot his scene, and then he went back to the sofa to read his book.
He was completely indifferent to the chaos on the set.
Plummer had a different attitude.
At first he put a lot of effort into the movie since he's a huge professional.
His first scenes were the ones of the duel against Kinski, when Plummer shoots
and puts a hole in Kinski's stomach. That was a blue screen effect I did.
I directly worked on that scene.
The surreal thing was that when we did rehearsal for that scene,
Plummer started saying his lines in front of Kinski.
Kinski looked at him in an indifferent way because, as I said, he didn't want to rehearse.
Without saying anything, he took his mirror from his pocket, the one he used every day to check his make-up,
took a comb, and started combing his hair while Plummer was saying his lines in front of him.
And then he answered him while he was still combing his hair, with the same indifferent look.
Plummer was flabbergasted and then he burst into laughter.
From that moment on he treated the set like a joke. He no longer cared.
One day I asked him, "How is it to act with Kinski?” He said,
“"Well, they're paying me so much money that I don't care."
Talking about Christopher Plummer, I can quote Kinski.
I asked him, “What do you think of Christopher Plummer? Is he a good actor?”
Kinski said, “"He's a great actor, but he doesn't know it.”
But Plummer was a great professional and great actor.
There was a scene with Barbara De Rossi in which he raised hell.
Barbara De Rossi was to be in her bed sleeping, and Kinski had to arrive at night and grab her.
The scene was to just be close ups of the actors.
I was there to record sound.
The rest of the crew couldn't see the bodies of the actors because I was in front of them,
and the camera was by my side.
While we were shooting this scene, I saw him pull away the blanket and put his hands “in her nature.”
Let's call it that.
I was like, "What the hell is he doing?” Because what he was doing was off-screen.
She didn't say anything, poor girl, she was petrified.
When the director said, “Cut!” She ran away crying.
Barbara De Rossi left the set crying and Caminito and Alfieri tried to calm her down.
They finally agreed that Kinski was not allowed to touch her anymore.
He couldn't do what he did earlier when they'd shot the scene.
She was in bed and he had to caress her, and maybe he was a little inappropriate
and she didn't like it, but nothing more than that happened.
Since the others didn't see what happened, because my body was covering it,
everyone asked, “What happened?” And I told them what I saw.
So everyone went to Barbara in order to console her.
A man, an actor who does something like that... You can call it what you like...
He always had a passionate relationship with women. Sometimes he was aggressive,
but he could also be nice and sweet.
There were no problems with Barbara De Rossi. Everything went well.
We sold it pretty well all over the world.
I think the movie was released 3 years later.
The relationship with Berlusconi was excellent in the beginning,
but then it turned into a living hell because he didn't like the movie.
While shooting the movie they were so thrilled that they signed a contract with Kinski
to shoot his PAGANINI movie, then another contract to shoot a movie in America.
They had big projects planned with Kinski, but everything turned into dust because of NOSFERATU IN VENICE
and the beginning of the shoot of PAGANINI, when Kinski's madness was uncontrollable.
Kinski said that he was the reincarnation of Paganini,
because it was a movie he'd wanted to do for many years.
He had that idea because one day he was in Paris
and he saw a picture of Paganini in a shop and it caught his attention.
From that moment on he started to study his life in detail because,
I say it again, he was an incredible perfectionist in this way.
And so he developed this movie for years, especially his character.
He identified with Paganini.
He said he was his reincarnation. The movie was to be called KINSKI PAGANINI,
because he did a sort of transfer with him.
Paganini too had quite a debauched personal life,
and so, just like him, he was “genius and disorder,”
and because of this they were one and the same.
There are two kinds of scripts: the very technical ones and the very descriptive ones.
When you read a very technical one you can “see” the movie,
because you imagine the camera movements and everything.
When they are descriptive it's like reading a story.
This script was neither one nor the other.
It wasn't technical. There were no descriptions like,
“the camera goes here and there, then the editing will show a detail of an eye...”
It was nothing like that. There were just sentences giving some impressions or ideas.
It was like looking at a detail of an Impressionist painting.
You can see the whole picture only by looking at it in its entirety.
You can like it or not.
But if you just look ata 5 cm x 5 cm bit, you only see some color blobs.
What was written in the script, in my very humble opinion, was just color blobs, that's all.
He loved Rome a lot, and he especially loved a villa on the Appia Antica street,
which he rented every time he came to Rome.
We lived in that villa when we were a couple.
It was a peculiar villa, almost ghost-like.
It was haunted by ghosts and they sat well with Kinski. It was a nice domestic partnership.
He loved that place a lot and we lived there when he was preparing PAGANINI.
It was very funny because he would dress like Paganini, even when he wasn't on set.
He asked me to do the same. He wanted me to wear the 1800's period costumes,
because I'd never worn them before and he wanted me to get used to them.
It was a very precise and detailed method.
He was dressed in black with his smoking jacket - or was it a waistcoat?
I don't remember - with his black hair, and he wandered the villa with candles all around. It was striking.
Kinski was left handed, though, and so he played the violin backwards.
I don't know how to say it, I'm not an expert.
Anyway, in the movie the violin was played by the great Salvatore Accardo,
who used his hands on the instrument.
When they had to edit the movie they had problems,
because in one scene the violin was on the right and in another one it was on the left.
In order to explain this he'd say, “"Damn! Paganini was diabolical,
he could play with both hands!”
Okay then, perfect, problem solved.
That movie was a reflection of life for him.
It was his redemption as a director, since he'd always hated his directors.
He always had a difficult relationship with them because he didn't like being directed,
so he had many conflicts.
This movie was his payback, because he was the director
and no one could tell him what to do.
It was him who told us what to do, because it was his movie.
It was him who brought the money into the movie,
at least that's what he believed, and how he behaved.
So he was the “owner” of these movies.
And so everything he said, even the stupidest things, had to be respected.
My first meeting with Kinski was when he ended up in jail.
I started the job and they told me, “Tomorrow Kinski has to inspect the location at Villa Pamphili."”
"The meeting is already scheduled, be there and see what happens.”
I talked to the person who had given us permission to go there,
and he talked to the office of Villa Pamphili.
And they prepared a minivan to visit the garden.
They provided it because, even in the 80s, it was absolutely forbidden to drive your own car there.
Then I saw a Ferrari Testarossa coming from Gianicolo,
heading full speed towards Porta San Pancrazio.
It stopped in front of the entrance.
The Ferrari had mirrored glass so I couldn't see inside.
It was Klaus Kinski and Debora Caprioglio.
He lowered the window and I saw him with his white hair.
So I said, "Good morning, Mr. Kinski. I'm Stefano Spadoni, unit manager of the movie."
"You can park your car here, the mini-van is ready, and we can take you to see the location.”
Kinski said, "I won't go anywhere in a shitty mini-van. I'll go in my car.”
He rolled up the window and took off towards Villa Pamphili at 100 km/h.
I looked at the permits guy and said, "I haven't seen you today.”
And he said, “I haven't seen you either. Goodbye.”
Kinski was then arrested and taken to the police station.
I came back to the production office and after a while we were told he was arrested
for entering Villa Pamphili at 100 km/h in his Ferrari Testarossa.
Altovito and Caminito asked me what happened and I told them.
Their faces turned pale because they started to realize who they were dealing with.
I remember a scene with the chariot and the four horses. They had to turn in a small square.
He said, “"Shoot! Shoot!” And then, of course, we told him,
“This is not a car, it has no steering wheel! Four horses can't turn here!”
And so they had to remove two horses in order to shoot that scene.
The whole movie was shot like this. It was like a bet.
On the set Kinski had a very protective attitude towards me because it was my first time on set.
So I probably had a different perspective than that of a normal movie set.
He was very demanding with me as well, and he didn't treat me differently.
When it was released I thought that PAGANINI was a masterpiece.
The film that would shock the international movie business.
Years later I consider it a very difficult movie, not least from the point of view of its making.
It's almost a visionary movie, certainly not a traditional movie, but it was very particular.
We arrived at the Cannes Festival out of competition,
because the movie was rejected by the official selection and Kinski was angry about that.
The movie was screened in a different section of the festival.
We arrived in Cannes and he called a press conference,
in which he said the worst things about the organizers of the festival,
especially about the ones who did not select his movie.
A very important and well-known journalist told him that his movie was bad.
Of course she did it in a provocative way, but Kinski lost it,
and he started insulting her, and throwing things at her.
The photographers were incredibly happy about it, because I remember
that they followed us across the Croisette and we almost ended up in the water.
Everyone talked about it. I didn't realize anything because I was 19, I was having fun.
I felt like laughing. I wasn't aware of the media buzz.
He was very good at that, he was a communicator. It was natural for him.
Anyway, this press conference created a lot of hype. There are pictures and videos.
It was very funny. Well, it's funny to talk about now, but maybe back then it wasn't.
The “private” Kinski wasn't very different from the “public” one.
He acted only when he was shooting movies, and I think he brought a lot
of his personality to the characters he played, especially from a physical point of view because,
as I said before, he wore a “mask” and he could be very beautiful or very ugly,
depending on what character he was playing.
When he did NOSFERATU IN VENICE he was Nosferatu,
in his face, it was the same thing in the previous NOSFERATU movie,
which was more successful and which is still popular today.
But he could be very beautiful as well, as he was in many movies he did,
not only with Herzog but, for example, 'IMPORTANCE D'AIMER.
He had a completely plastic face.
In his private life he was exactly how people saw him in public.
He was a very generous man, very loving, very jealous, even too much.
He alternated moments of extreme sweetness and calm with moments of rage.
When he saw something he didn't like, like someone cutting him off in a car,
he became very, very irascible.
And he wasn't afraid of anything, he never feared consequences.
In his private life, in his relationship with me, he was very sweet because he wasn't irascible.
You would think that a man like him, with such a peculiar nature, might have been different,
but he always had the greatest respect for our relationship, and he was also very protective.
Probably he was way too jealous, and that was the reason why our relationship ended.
His jealousy was obsessive and made our relationship end. And other reasons too, of course.
Sometimes relationships end because people want new experiences in life.
I was very young, he wasn't, and so...
Anyway, in his private life he could be very funny as well, because his outbursts of anger
only lasted 5 minutes and everyone knows that, even the people around him, not only me, his girlfriend.
Even his collaborators knew that. Even his maid Clara, who became my maid as well,
she knew that they lasted 5 or 10 minutes and then they ended. But while they lasted they were tough.
He didn't have many friends. He had some friends in Paris, but they were in the movie business as well.
Yeah, his friends were all more or less from the movie business.
Kinski didn't like mankind much, he often talked shit about it.
After many years I think that he was absolutely right in some ways, but he wasn't a social person.
When he worked he loved to stay with people, but he didn't have many friends.
He had a couple in Paris, but he had hardly any friends in the US, if I remember correctly.
The place he loved most was certainly his chalet in Lagunitas, California.
It was a fantastic place, completely isolated, in the middle of the woods.
The first time I went there I was like, "Mamma mia!” Because getting there was quite a trip.
You could only get there by jeep because the road was so narrow and steep.
You had to pray you arrived home safe and sound.
It was the place he loved most and felt the most alive,
because he also had a close relationship with nature.
This chalet was in the middle of the woods, and they found him dead there.
At least I think, because I lost all contact with him.