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Klaus Kinski doesn't want to be interviewed. On the phone he says, "You're just mad about your child. Whatever your child does is beautiful. There is no high point or particular behavior. I cannot say she was like this or like this or like this or like this. I was just in love with her all the time whether she was a baby, three, four, five, ten, seventeen, or twenty. There is no difference. There are no childhood stories to tell." A few calls later he agrees to meet. He lives in Marin County, north of San Francisco. He waits on the steps of an Italian coffee shop in Sausalito, a town just across the Golden Gate Bridge. He isn't much taller than 5'6" or 5'7". He is wearing blue jeans, clean and faded, with a hooded, white cotton blue-striped top, and black rubber boots up to his knees. He looks weather-beaten. His hair is full and white. His curved lips are Nastassia's. His eyes are huge and blue, jumping wildly every second, as if they were caged and trying to get out. It looks as if his two front teeth are false, and every once in a while a hissing sound escapes from them. There is cold sore on his lip. It is impossible to think of the sore and the hiss as anything but signs of the entrance to some underworld or lair in him inhabited by God knows what. He talks incessantly, although by his own account words are meaningless and distract from life. "Words and words pulled me, pulled me away from life," he says, and he mimes being pulled and pulled until he chops his arm in a sudden gesture. We eat lunch at Japanese restaurant where he orders a plate of sushi. He argues with solicitous owner over the way his tuna has been prepared. He won't allow me to take notes or use a tape recorder. He says he prefers to get to know me before he talks. Instead he rambles about the nature of life, language, journalism (more bad words). And about Nastassia: "She is so young, young, young, younger than she is." And: " She was my daughter before she was born." And: "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."
After Lunch we go back to the Italian café, and Klaus starts to brawl with the waiter because the cappuccino takes too long. The incident prompts him to discourse on what is wrong with society. He then says he would be more comfortable talking where he lives because it would be silent and he wouldn't feel claustrophobic. We get into his four-wheel-drive truck and start. The backseat is littered with the toys of his son, seven-year-old Nanhoi, the child from his now ended third marriage with a Vietnamese woman half his age. (Nanhoi lives with his mother but visits Klaus regularly.) There is a pair of tiny leather shoes dangling from colored string behind the driver's seat, at little brown cowboy hat, a basketball, football, and soccer ball, and an Oakland A's green-and-yellow satin jacket. On the forty-five-minute drive to his house through the hills of Marin County, Klaus talks more: "The essentials: life, love, life, death." "Nothing changes the day of my death, the day of my birth." "I want to be simple. I want to be simple." "I am impossible to live with." "I don't listen to music when there is wind." "Nastassia is of me, as I am of something else." He also talks about the vibrations in nature and reincarnation.
We finally near his house. We start up a hill. Cows are grazing outside the window. As we enter the woods, the road into nothing but a deeply rutted trail. Deer and rabbits run about. We drive by a white Indian tipi about ten feet high that he has had made from surrounding trees for his son. We finally get to the house, on top of the hill. There is no path to his door except what he has beaten with his own passing. The house is one room, all wood. One wall is all windows opening out into a balcony hanging above the hill and trees. There is a modern bathroom in an alcove off the main room, a modern kitchen built into the opposite wall. But for those, it is like walking into a child's playhouse or a tree fort. There are toys everywhere: a paper tiger kite, big and orange, hangs on one wall next to a multicolored giant paper drgonfly. There's a child's desk made out of wood covered with coloring paper and crayons, a trundle bed with little boy's clothes, blue-jean shorts, and a few shirts carefully folded. Pictures of Nanhoi are framed and hanging everywhere, along with the child's drawing signed, "To Papa, I love you." A miniature pair of wooden clogs is on the floor, next to bigger ones. There are snowshoes on one wall. There is circular wooden staircase to the loft upstairs: more window, a king-size bed with no sheets, Grimm's Fairy Tales, and a set of Louis Vuitton luggage. In the main room the basic piece of furniture is large wooden table with two benches piled high with a typewriter, a Nikon camera, boxes of typing paper, and a phone. There is a hearth fireplace, the only heat source.
We talk, or rather Klaus rants for a couple of hours. He is elemental and powerful. My face feels sunburned from the encounter. His virtual monologue touches on Nijinsky, Baudelaire, critics, the French use of the word genius, competition, directors("They're growing now like mushrooms after rain. Is someone going to tell me how to die, how to cry?"), van Gogh, then finally Nastassia: "Tess I saw, and I was deeply shocked in my feeling. This sort of shocked me, this deepness, this depth. I didn't even care what movie it was. It was just this... words are too weak to speak this out, that's why I wasn't ready all the time to answer people who said, 'Aren't you proud of your daughter?' What does proud mean? Are you proud of somebody you love? It's like if you stopped on the street and went to a woman with a baby and said, 'Hey, you, do you love your child?' What does this mean? They would probably scream for help and say he's a madman. At the Cannes Film Festival the movie was there, and there were advertisements for Tess, posters on the hotels. And every time I passed this poster I say this face coming down, this look. My impression was so strong, I didn't know. I was shocked. When I saw it, I had this feeling that I have had very few times in my life. When I was shocked, crying and holding my face, and I was embarrassed that anybody could see me, but I couldn't help it, just because she appeared on screen. It was going in me. I didn't even think. The word shock came into my mind afterward.
I saw Stay as You Are and Tess only. I didn't ask her if she saw every movie I did. [Klaus has made more than 180 movies, most or all of which he did for the money. He is proud of this.] I could never think about that. Why do I have to see every movie she did? Why? Sometimes she did movie 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 blid, 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 respected her as a little child. I never felt I am the one who could give orders because I am bigger. That's ridiculous. In my brain doesn't exist politics, doesn't exist religion. Nastassja was growing up in love, always from her mother, except maybe mine was missing when I was not there. From the beginning she was naturally so much a part of me, a part of me, a part of me, that I didn't have to look at her because I just felt her, like a sleeping animal will cover its child with his fur. He doesn't have to look there, he is just doing, it't like your own arm. That's nature. People make this distance in life only by talking. When she was a child, I had no dreams for her. You know when a star is falling and you wish something? I always did it when I was a boy, but I could never say just one thing. I was always wishing something which was unspeakable by words. It was so much farther than anything. So how could I have this wish for her? I could only have for her all my deepest feelings, like a bird that takes off. One dream would have been too limited."
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