There have been many great partnerships between actors and directors over the decades, but it is hard to imagine a more combustible and endlessly fascinating relationship than the one between Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski. For 15 years, they challenged, inspired and tortured one another joyously into creating some of the most enduring and unique experiences of modern film. Herzog has directed over 40 films, but his best-known work forced him to confront his own evil twin, the demonic Kinski.

Herzog's stormy relationship with the notoriously difficult Kinski is the stuff of modern mythology. It has been recounted, explained, and analyzed by both principals: by the late Kinski (who died in 1991) in his autobiography Ich brauche Liebe, one of the most vicious attacks on the film business ever written, which has been withdrawn for legal reasons -he referred to Herzog as "the vermin", "this blowhard" and "a miserable, hateful, malevolent, avaricious, money-hungry, nasty, sadistic, treacherous, cowardly creep"- and by Herzog in his 1999 documentary, "Mein liebster Feind / My Best Fiend" - "Every gray hair on my head I call Kinski" Herzog tells the camera. The visionary German filmmaker and his muse and nemesis worked together five times -no other director ever worked with Kinski more than once- and driven by mutual feelings of mistrust, hatred and affection, the two men channeled these emotions into unforgettable tales of madness and passion.
Together they made "Aguirre, der Zorn Gttes / Aguirre: The Wrath of God" (1973), about a mad conquistador in the Peruvian jungle; "Nosferatu - Phantom der Nacht / Nosferatu the Vampyre" (1978), inspired by Murnau's silent vampire classic; "Woyzeck" (1979), about a 19th century army private who seems mad to others because he sees the world in his own alternative way; "Fitzcarraldo" (1982), about a man who used block-and-tackle to pull a steamship from one Amazonian river system to another; and "Cobra Verde / Slave Coast" (1988), about a slave trader in Africa. All of their collaborations, which resulted in the best films for both of them, contain extraordinary images, but the sight of Kinski running wild inside an army of naked, spear-carrying amazons in "Cobra Verde" may be the strangest.

Their battles were as legendary as their films. "It's not easy to explain our relationship", Herzog once remarked. "The only thing that counts at the end is what you see on the screen." Kinski, prone to irrational bursts of rage, would frequently throw tantrums on the set, but Herzog was willing to endure these because of the quality of the performance that would come afterward. One legend has Herzog threatening Kinski at gunpoint. It never happened. When Klaus Kinski wrote his savage autobiography, accusing Herzog of all sorts of horrors, few knew that Herzog himself contributed the filthiest insults as a favor to his old friend. When they really did fight, the screaming and threats could go on for hours Two combative and brilliant egos. Five films. One documentary to sew the legend together. The Festival offers all this in a comprehensive retrospective, which reveals new layers to Kinski's strengths as an actor, Herzog's talents as a director, and the obsessive relationship between the two men.

One of the most influential filmmakers in the New German Cinema movement, Werner Herzog (real name Werner H. Stipetic) was born in Munich on 5 September 1942. He grew up in a remote mountain village in Bavaria and never saw any films, television, or telephones as a child. He started traveling on foot from the age of 14. He made his first phone call at the age of 17. Herzog knew he wanted to be a filmmaker from an early age. And after unsuccessful attempts to persuade a production company to finance his films when he was still a teenager in high school, he worked the nightshift as a welder in a steel factory to raise money for his work. He finally made his first film in 1961 at the age of 19. He has studied history, literature and theatre, but hasn't finished it. He founded his own production company in 1963. Since then he has produced, written, and directed more than forty films, published more than a dozen books of prose. He has staged several operas, besides others in Bayreuth, Germany, and at the Milan Scala in Italy. He has won numerous national and international awards for his films.

Werner Herzog began attracting attention with his short films of the mid-'60s, and his first feature, "Lebenszeichen / Signs of Life", in 1968. As a writer/director, Herzog made a series of provocative, highly personal films, including "Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen / Even Dwarfs Started Small" (1970), the cryptic desert journey "Fata Morgana" (1970), and, perhaps his finest work, the stunning "Herz aus Glas / Heart of Glass" (1976), in which he hypnotized his actors to get properly somnambulistic performances. The director cast Bruno S., a lifelong inmate of mental institutions and prisons, to play a real-life man who was raised in a dark basement in "Jeder fr sich und Gott gegen alle / Every Man for Himself and God Against All" (aka "The Mystery of Kasper Hauser") (1975) and as an uncomprehending visitor to the United States in "Stroszek" (1977).

A long and tumultuous collaboration with the notoriously volatile actor Klaus Kinski produced Herzog's best-known films of the 1970s: his conquistador drama "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" (1972); his 1978 remake of F.W. Murnau's "Nosferatu the Vampyre"; and "Woyzeck" (1978), his adaptation of Georg Bchner's classic play. Notorious for dragging his cast and crew to remote and arduous locations, Herzog has made fewer feature films since the '80s; his notable works of that decade include "Fitzcarraldo" (1982) and "Cobra Verde" (1987), both with Kinski.

Werner Herzog is also widely admired as a superb documentary filmmaker for such works as "Land des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit / Land of Silence and Darkness" (1971), about the deaf and blind. During the 1990s, in fact, much of his work has centered around documentaries, whether playing himself in "Die Nacht der Regisseure / The Night of the Filmmakers", a 1995 piece featuring directors such as himself, Leni Riefenstahl, and Wim Wenders discussing the state of German cinema and the New German Cinema; as the director and screenwriter of 1997's "Flucht aus Laos / Little Dieter Needs to Fly"; or as the director and partial subject of "Mein liebster Feind / My Best Fiend", his 1999 documentary about his infamous collaboration with Klaus Kinski.

In addition to his directing and screenwriting work, Herzog has acted in a number of films, perhaps most memorably in Les Blank's 1980 documentary "Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe". The film was the result of a bet Herzog once had with an American film student: Herzog told the student -who was always talking about making a film but never actually doing it- that if he actually completed the film Herzog would eat his own shoe. The student was Errol Morris, who would later become well known for his documentaries such as "The Thin Blue Line", "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control", and "The Fog of War", and he did indeed make his film. Having lost the bet, Herzog made good on his promise, and the result was one of the stranger moments in documentary history.

"I am not the Jesus of the official Church I am not your superstar" once Klaus Kinski has said to Herzog. Kinski may have denied divinity, but his Olympian ego would have made even Nietzsche twitch. Born on 18 October 1926, in Zoppot, near Danzig/Gdansk, in the region of Silesia (German territory at the time, but now part of Poland), his real name was Nikolaus Gnther Nakszynski. He grew up in Berlin, was drafted into the German army and spent much of World War II as a British POW. The self-taught Kinski's theater career began after the war, and he was considered as a brilliant but -not surprisingly- "difficult" actor. He quickly gained a reputation for his ferocious talent and equally ferocious temper. He has once attacked a theater critic, who had failed to praise him sufficiently, with two hot potatoes and some cutlery. Even from his youth, he was a monster with a monstrous talent.

As a teen, the feral Kinski was dragged in from the street and into then 13-year-old Werner Herzog's life. "I was playing in the courtyard of the building where we lived in Munich", Herzog said, "and I looked up and saw this man striding past, and I knew at that moment that my destiny was to direct films, and that he would be the actor". He learned early about Kinski's towering rages. The budding actor actually lived for several months in the same flat with Herzog's family, and once locked himself in the bathroom for two days, screaming all the while and reducing the porcelain fixtures "to grains the size of sand". ''I never thought anyone could rave for 48 hours", Herzog reflected, remembering the incident.

After his cinema debut in "Morituri" (1948), Kinski appeared in numerous films, showing complete lack of discrimination as to their quality (a complete filmography is almost impossible to establish), in which he usually embodied eccentric villains. His collaboration with Werner Herzog in the '70s and '80s marked Kinski's breakthrough into "serious" cinema and established his reputation as enfant terrible of European film. Both manically extroverted and a tortured perfectionist, Kinski thrillingly depicted a series of malignant, obsessive and untameble characters film after film.

Klaus Kinski reconnected with Herzog years later for the arduous production of "Aguirre, the Wrath of God". Herzog had not grown into a prince either: the very camera he was using for the film had been stolen from film school. Kinski arrived on location from a one-man stage show as a raving Jesus, completely immersed in the part. He immediately threw a fit about the Peruvian rain, shot at extras with a rifle, and had to be threatened with death to keep him from fleeing the production. Herzog and Kinski would work together four more times, each would owe much of his own fame to the other, and their love-hate relationship would become the stuff of legend. Again and again, Kinski would produce masterly and shocking performances, combining iron professionalism with the ability to "lose control" unforgettably on the screen.

It was perhaps appropriate that Kinski's last film was also directed by Herzog. Kinsky arrived at the set of "Cobra Verde" after writing, directing (his debut) and starring in the bizarre film biography "Kinski Paganini" (1988). And that, according to Herzog, lead to immediate problems, as Kinski had come to believe that he was Paganini, the Italian violin virtuoso who was said to be possessed by the devil. "He brought with him into my film an unpleasant climate, something offensive, something that was alien to me", Herzog would say later. By the last day of shooting which, coincidentally, involved Kinski's final scene (Cobra Verde dying in the surf) Herzog had already decided that Kinski was beyond anyone's control -including himself- and that they would never work again. Four years later, on 23 November 1991, Kinski died of an heart attack at his home near San Francisco. As Herzog describes it, "He had spent himself. He burnt himself away like a comet."

Both Herzog and Kinski were megalomaniacs, and both men knew it. But at least they had a sense of humor. "My Best Fiend" is the final touch chronicling the tempestuous relationship between these two artists. As its slyly punning title suggests, the 1999 documentary is Herzog's tribute to his doppelganger, featuring bizarre stories of Kinski's cowardice and courage, shyness and savagery, artistic brilliance and terrifying ego. Herzog jokes about his plots to murder Kinski, and remembers how the native extras during "Fitzcarraldo" offered to dispose of the volatile actor.

It is important to note that, despite the many trials and tribulations that these two warriors of German cinema put each other through over the course of their working relationship, the end result was worth every struggle, and now, so many years later, the lovers of cinema can see the breadth of their accomplishment.

"There were times when Kinski would behave more instinctively and noticed that he was going too far. And in those moments, thank God, he became cowardly. There was one occasion on the Rio Nanay, at the end of the "Aguirre" shoot, and as usual when he didn't know his lines properly, as so often, he was looking for a victim. Suddenly he started shouting like crazy, 'You swine!', meaning the camera assistant, 'He was grinning!'. He told me I should fire him on the spot, but I said 'No, of course I'm not going to fire him, the whole crew would quit out of solidarity'. So he just went and packed his things he was so absolutely serious about leaving at once that he would just walk off the set; he packed everything into a speedboat. And I knew he'd broken his contracts 30, 40, 50 times already. So I went up to him very calmly by the way, I didn't have a gun, he just made that up later to cast a better light on himself. So I went up to him and said, 'You can't do this, the film is more important than our personal feelings and it's even more important than us mere mortals. It's impossible to do something like this. You can't do it.' I told him I had a rifle, and he would only make it as far as the next bend in the river before he had some bullets in his head the last one would be for me." - Werner Herzog