MEIN LIEBSTER FEIND T-SHIRT

Werner Herzog, Klaus Kinski and one of cinema’s most combustible partnerships

Werner Herzog begins Mein liebster Feind by returning to an apartment in Munich. Decades earlier, when Herzog was still a schoolboy, Klaus Kinski had briefly lived under the same roof. Herzog remembers an actor already capable of turning domestic life into theatre: shouting, smashing furniture and subjecting everyone around him to performances that did not necessarily stop when an audience disappeared. It is an appropriately strange starting point for a documentary about a professional relationship that would eventually produce five extraordinary films.

Released in 1999 and known internationally as My Best Fiend, Herzog's film revisits his long association with Kinski through memories, archive footage, interviews and journeys back to locations where their collaborations were made. The pair first worked together on Aguirre, the Wrath of God in 1972, before reuniting for Nosferatu the Vampyre, Woyzeck, Fitzcarraldo and finally Cobra Verde. Those films helped define both men's international reputations, while the increasingly famous stories surrounding their production became almost inseparable from the work itself.

"One can hardly define the notion of sheer genius."

Kinski's volcanic behaviour provides some of the documentary's most memorable material, but Herzog is interested in something more complicated than compiling stories about an impossible actor. He repeatedly returns to the contradiction at the centre of their relationship. Kinski could be exhausting, abusive and unpredictable, yet Herzog also believed that the actor possessed a screen presence capable of producing precisely the performances his films required. The rage visible behind Aguirre's eyes, the haunted stillness of Count Dracula and the feverish determination of Fitzcarraldo all emerged from that unstable partnership.

The film also revisits people who witnessed Kinski at work. Claudia Cardinale remembers filming Fitzcarraldo, while Eva Mattes reflects on Woyzeck. Herzog returns to Peru and to the landscapes that became inseparable from the mythology of his films. Inevitably, the notorious production of Fitzcarraldo looms large: a film about dragging a steamship over a mountain that required Herzog to attempt something remarkably close to the same feat in reality.

Herzog is also an unreliable narrator in the most interesting sense. He is fully conscious that stories acquire their own momentum, and Mein liebster Feind exists somewhere between memoir, documentary and mythology. Accounts of arguments, murder threats and towering rages sit beside unexpectedly affectionate recollections. Even the title contains the contradiction: Kinski is simultaneously collaborator and adversary, someone Herzog describes with irritation, fascination, admiration and occasional tenderness.

Kinski died in 1991, eight years before the documentary appeared. Distance allows Herzog to look back without attempting to settle the argument. The film instead becomes a portrait of artistic dependency: two radically difficult personalities discovering that, however intolerable their collaboration became, each could draw something from the other that proved almost impossible to reproduce elsewhere. Mein liebster Feind is therefore less an explanation of Klaus Kinski than a study of what happens when collaboration becomes rivalry, friendship becomes warfare and the resulting films somehow survive both men.

💬 FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (FAQs)

Why is the film called Mein liebster Feind?

The German title translates approximately as My Dearest Enemy, while the English-language release cleverly became My Best Fiend. Both titles capture Herzog's description of Kinski as simultaneously an essential creative collaborator and a deeply antagonistic presence.

How many films did Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski make together?

They made five feature films together: Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Nosferatu the Vampyre, Woyzeck, Fitzcarraldo and Cobra Verde, released between 1972 and 1987.

Did Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski really know each other before Aguirre?

Yes. Herzog has recalled that, as a teenager, he briefly lived in the same Munich apartment as Kinski and witnessed his extraordinary temper years before considering him for Aguirre, the Wrath of God.