Directed by: Werner Herzog
Starring: Klaus Kinski, Bruno Ganz, Isabelle Adjani, Roland Topor
Warden: The patient that came in yesterday is having a fit.
Van Helsing: Which one?
Warden: The one that bit the cow.
Count Dracula: Death is not the worst. There are things more horrible than death.
Count Dracula: The absence of love is the most abject pain.
Factual error: The Captain of the ship writes in his logs that they travelled the Caspian Sea, the Caspian sea however is land-locked.
Trivia: The person who sticks his foot into the coffin and gets his toe bitten by a rat is the film's director, Werner Herzog.
Question: According to Werner Herzog, the rats that appear in the film behaved better than Klaus Kinski during the shoot. Is this true?
Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases. Addresses are not passed on to any third party, and are used solely for direct communication from this site. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Check out the mistake & trivia books, on Kindle and in paperback.
Answer: True, though the rats comment was deliberate hyperbole. Kinski suffered from mental illness much of his life. He was often volatile, erratic, disruptive, and sometimes violent on movie sets. Kinski and Herzog had a long professional collaboration but also a friendship pre-dating Herzog's directing career. Otherwise, though Herzog admired Kinski's talent, he probably would never have tolerated working with him; he is the only director who worked with him more than once. Herzog did a documentary about Kinski after his death, which included footage of his on-set rants. Clips are on YouTube.
raywest ★
Moreover, Herzog was initially reluctant to hire Kinski in Fitzcarraldo movie because he was afraid that Kinski would go "totally bonkers" if trapped in the Amazon for any length of time, and his fears proved to be well-founded.
To correct a slight factual error in the answer: Director Alfred Vohrer worked on more movies with Kinski than Herzog did.
lionhead