Very early, after my first few films, I was asked to stand in front of the camera as an actor. The first offer came from Edgar Reitz, one of the founding members of the New German Cinema, who had also supported me personally. Early on, he and Alexander Kluge, who ran a kind of film school in Ulm, had invited me there; I guess they both felt convinced that whatever it was, I had it. I turned them down. I was always an autodidact; I never believed in colleges. But both directors gave me valuable tips for my own productions, and what really mattered then was getting a stream of collaborators from them. I got Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, who for a long time was my editor. Beate has an extraordinary affinity for film; she knew instinctively, almost reflexively, what we would find useful. She was rough, even pitiless, in the way she treated me. On my first film, Signs of Life, we were going to look at a six-hundred-yard reel of material, but it turned out that it was back to front. She inserted the roll anyway and looked at everything in reverse at five times the speed. When the roll had rattled through, she took all twelve minutes out and threw it in the trash. “All bad,” she said laconically. Only after my repeated insistence that we look at the roll once through in the correct order and maybe make up a short sequence out of it did she agree to do so. She told me the material would be thrown away anyway, and another three weeks later, I saw that she had been completely right. This time I threw out the roll myself. Beate thought all my films were so bad that she refused to go to any of the premieres, including Aguirre’s. She allowed one exception, Even Dwarfs Started Small, which she thought was great, and she took a bow at the premiere. Later, Harmony Korine and David Lynch would rank the film near the top of their favorites.
At that time, everything was on celluloid. Analog sound was recorded and then transferred on wide awkward tapes that, like film tapes, had perforated edges by which sound and picture could be synchronized. Edgar Reitz owned a sound machine about the size of a gym locker and allowed me to use it for free in his production suite. At that time, the late sixties, he was making a series of short films, Stories of the Dumpster Kid, for which he got me to play a crazy murderer. I performed fairly creditably, and from then on, no end of madman and villain parts came my way. But there were some exceptions too. Edgar Reitz cowrote a multipart series of films for television called Heimat, which were set across the whole twentieth century and about village life in an agricultural area called the Hunsrück in Rhine-Palatinate, where he came from. At the end, he wrote a film called Home from Home, about emigrants from the impoverished village in the nineteenth century. For that, he asked me to play the visiting scientist Alexander von Humboldt, and I accepted provided that he appear in at least one scene with me. Reitz agreed and played a peasant holding a scythe on the edge of a field, whom Humboldt asks for directions. Reitz spoke in the regional dialect of the Hunsrück, which was practically incomprehensible to me. But I wanted the scene because that closed a circle of four decades for the pair of us.
In 1989 I played in Peter Fleischmann’s film Hard to Be a God, a science fiction film based on a famous novel by the Strugatsky brothers. I played a fanatical, prophetic preacher who is soon removed by the ambitious powers that be. I die when struck from behind by a spear. A stuntman thrust the spear into a plank of wood attached to my back, but he seemed to be a bit tentative about it. Both Fleischmann and I thought that it didn’t look like anything much, and I asked my murderer to show a bit more enthusiasm. What I didn’t know about him was that he had been a champion Soviet middleweight boxer. The next time, the jolt he gave me knocked out two crowns from my molars. We filmed in Kyiv, in Ukraine, in a vast studio from the golden age of Soviet cinema and on location in Tajikistan in the foothills of the Pamirs. My work on that film is one of my few direct contributions to New German Cinema. I don’t feel I fit into that category. My films were always something else.
Technically, my very first appearance is at the beginning of Signs of Life, where the wounded lead, Stroszek, is taken out of an army truck and tended to in a village. The extra I had engaged didn’t show, and in the emergency and because it didn’t fit anyone else, I pulled on the uniform. Today I am amazed to see myself as little more than a schoolboy. Much later, I played myself in a 2004 film by Zak Penn, Incident at Loch Ness. I play myself as a director who is forced by an unscrupulous producer, played by Zak Penn, to compromise—at gunpoint if need be. The gun is just a signal flare pistol, not really useful even to threaten someone with, but the whole thing seems so authentic that a large part of the audience thought it was real and was on my side even though it should have been clear from the opening minutes that the whole thing is a set-up. What I did in the film was 100 percent self-irony. Moments like that have always been good for me. But because the general sense of context has been lost—what is satire, what is make-believe, and what isn’t—a good part of the viewership didn’t realize that everything they were seeing was scripted and directed. The film is an early take on what dominates the media today by way of fake news.
In 2008 I was in another one of Zak Penn’s films, which he wrote this time and directed, The Grand. The scene is a casino in Las Vegas during a poker tournament where I play “the German” who cheats and is finally slung out of the tournament. “The German” is a pathetic character who takes his pet rabbit with him everywhere while at the same time wanting to strangle other small animals in their cages to remind himself how alive he is. Let me say—for the record—that there is no part of my character that might prompt a writer to create such a part for me. It’s pure invention on Zak’s part and hence pure performance on mine.
Before I worked with Zak Penn, who was interested in me because he loved my films, Harmony Korine had approached me. We had met at the festival in Telluride, where he was showing his film Gummo, which I was impressed with because here was a new voice in American cinema. He was disturbed by my films, especially the one with the dwarfs. His father, also a filmmaker, had taken him to see it when he was a teenager, and my film had left a lasting impression on Harmony. Later, he described it in an interview like this: “Suddenly I saw that there could be poetry in film, which I had never seen before as powerful.” For Harmony, I was a sort of model or avatar of his own films, and I agreed to play in his 1999 Julien Donkey-Boy, especially because he was playing the part of my crazed son in the film, and I was his father, the epicenter of a profoundly dysfunctional family. The older son, played by Harmony, kills someone in a fit of madness after possibly impregnating his own sister, played by Chloë Sevigny. The younger son is a loser, and the grandmother who lives with them in the same house is completely gaga. When I got to the location in Queens, though, Harmony had handed over his part to another actor and was only directing. Perhaps that had always been his plan, or maybe he lost his nerve. He didn’t work with scripts, just loosely defined dramatic situations. I had to come up with my lines on the spot, as I saw on the first filming day. At the supper table, my elder son reads me a poem he’s written, and I’m to crush him in front of his siblings in the most obnoxious way. The scene was taped by several video cameras at once. I had just sat down at the table, and I could already see the record lights flashing on the cameras, and I turned to Harmony, who was lurking in the background somewhere. “What do I say? What’s my line?” But Harmony just replied: “Talk!” There was nothing for it but to talk. I outdid myself in my villainy, which produced Harmony from his hiding place. He stood behind one camera almost in my eyeline, and I could somehow register that he was wildly enthusiastic, and I thought to myself, I’ll ham it up some more, and following my inspiration, I tell my son at the table that real poetry isn’t stupid and “artsy-fartsy” like the thing he’d just read me, but it has to be as grand as Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry. In the showdown at the end of that film, Harry is shooting it out with the worst of the villains. The villain staggers backward and lies on the ground, his revolver pointing up at Harry standing over him. Has he shot off all his bullets, or is there one left? Harry says something amazing to him: “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky?” The villain pulls the trigger, but the chamber clicks on empty. And Harry shoots him dead. Harmony must have been so thrilled with my performance that he whooped, and that wrecked the sound take, and the scene ends immediately. In film theory classes—which I can’t stand—the passage is written up as though Harmony and I had conceived of the scene as a profound statement on film history; in fact, it was made up on the spur of the moment purely from necessity.
I had imagined Harmony Korine’s style to be purely guerrilla, but being in his production showed me some of the things that hold the film industry in a viselike grip. The team, all of them young and enthusiastic people who wanted to be part of something radically new, fled in terror when a picture was taken off the wall and a dozen or so cockroaches beetled off from behind it. They were only prepared to go back to work when the production came up with hazmat suits for everyone that looked like the kind of thing you’d wear to clean up a radioactive site. Whereupon Harmony and his cameraman ostentatiously took off almost all their clothes and went on working in their Speedos. Harmony told me he bought them for this occasion. Another thing struck me: in the relatively small space of the house, there were any number of phones and walkie-talkies; team members who were standing practically next to each other would only communicate through their phones. When I came back to the living room after a two-minute visit to the fridge upstairs and could be seen by anyone going down, I could hear my whereabouts being radioed out—and the echo was audible on all the other electronics—“He’s on the stairs,” then another three steps, and “He’s back on site.” In kissing scenes in big Hollywood productions, they make you have an “intimacy consultant” onsite while a mob of seventy people, mostly just standing around, are talking on their walkie-talkies.
In 2007 I made Mr. Lonely with Harmony Korine on an island off the Atlantic coast of Panama. I play a fanatical missionary who as a pilot, with the help of Catholic nuns, drops aid packages for the starving Indigenous communities. One of the sisters accidentally falls out of the plane but survives because her faith helps her descend gently to earth. Other sisters follow suit to test their own faith, and one leaves the bay of the plane on her bicycle and carries on cycling after her gentle landing. When the crew filmed one last scene on the airfield without me at the end of the day and I was still in my costume, I noticed a man. Behind the tall wire fence of the small provisional airport building, among the handful of people waiting for the arrival of a short-distance flight, I saw a youngish man I’d first noticed some hours previously. He was Black and held a very small and very withered bunch of flowers. He looked deeply sad. I was eager to have a conversation with him, and he asked me if I could take confession from him even without having taken a vow because I was, after all, wearing a priest’s robes. I asked him back; this seemed so grave; perhaps he would like to confess to our camera. He liked the idea. I called Harmony and the camera crew over. All I said to Harmony was “Are you ready?” Neither of us had the least idea what would happen next. The camera was turned on. I took the man’s confession. He told me that his wife and three small children had run away from him, and for two years, he had reported to the airport every day in the hope that they might be on the next plane. He claimed not to know what had made his wife run away, and I told him that this was his opportunity to salve his conscience before the world. He was still evasive. “Were you unchaste with another woman?” I asked him directly, which he denied. “My son, you were unchaste with at least five other women.” Then all at once, he looked completely relieved and confessed: “Yes, father, I was.” I gave him absolution and blessed him. After we’d shot everything, he told me that it might only have been a film but it was much better than being in a confessional with an actual priest.
On occasions, my contributions were pretty minor. I had little cameo appearances long before the films with Penn and Korine—for instance, in two films of Paul Cox’s in Australia in the mid-eighties, one of them, Man of Flowers, where I again play a father of a sort one would sooner not have. In 1996 I played a small part in a film by the Austrian director Peter Patzak called Brennendes Herz, though I have nothing to say about the film because I’ve never seen it. I am often asked about two documentaries by Wim Wenders that I appear in, Room 666 and Tokyo-Ga, but I haven’t seen them either. My one clear memory of Brennendes Herz is this. The scene is sometime at the end of the Second World War. I am in a basement with a general. As we speak, a bomb lands nearby and causes the whole room to shake. Next to the general is a large wall mirror that gets a crack. Some special effects people had lined up a little explosion behind the mirror, and I was curious about what it would look like while the general was talking to me. So I offered to sit right next to the camera so I could stay in his eyeline. I wasn’t in the picture, but I was the length of a table away from him, and I was watching the mirror a yard or so farther back. Something in me told me to look away. There was a mighty bang, and more than a hundred tiny shards of glass the size of grains of rice but individually sharpened hit me on the side of the head. They had used way too much explosive. It took them more than an hour to pick the glass out of my scalp with tweezers. If I hadn’t looked away, I would have been blinded.
My kind of dark humor was appreciated earlier in the States than elsewhere. So it came as no surprise to me in 2002 when Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons, reached out to me to ask if I’d be interested in taking on a guest role in the series. To begin with, I wasn’t sure. I thought I’d seen printed versions of The Simpsons as a comic strip in newspapers, but it turns out that I was wrong; there was no printed version. But I had never seen them as animated cartoons on TV either. Matt Groening guffawed down the phone at me and said that The Simpsons had been famous for twenty years now. He thought I was kidding him when I asked him to let me see one of the newish episodes on DVD so I could hear the cartoon voices and practice my own version. But all he wanted was my own natural voice in English; that would create mirth enough. He may not have said that directly, but that’s what I took him to be saying.
At that time, I was asking myself more or less directly what I was doing in popular culture anyway, though at the same time I had the sense of myself as somehow mainstream. I couldn’t really separate the two categories. Rock musicians, skateboarders, and professional soccer players have always been drawn to me. Still, I asked myself what possessed the distinguished physicist Stephen Hawking to appear in an episode of The Simpsons. When I finally looked the show up, though, The Simpsons was so wild and anarchic that I felt a certain kinship. There was some speculation that I did it for the money, but you don’t make much working for The Simpsons, the rate is in the lowest bracket of the Screen Actors Guild scale; you make what you’d make as a small-part actor for any TV show. What persuaded me was the huge enthusiasm of the entire Simpsons crew for my films, so I agreed to do it. I spoke the guest part of Walter Hottenhoffer in “The Scorpion’s Tale,” then later on, I voiced a crackpot called Dr. Lund, and, just recently, a third part. What also interested me was the methodical preparation on such a series. The writing team invited me to one of their sessions where the balls went whizzing back and forth, wild and chaotic and creative. I’d never seen anything like it. Then there was a test run for the script, which impressed me. All the players are assembled for a so-called table reading to test the effectiveness of the story line and the gags. In a big room around the speakers at the table are about a hundred carefully chosen individuals who are the test audience. They are chosen for age, sex, social status, level of education, ethnicity—everything is considered. But then something else happened that astonished me. Before we actors read from our scripts, a comedian came on for an hour and told jokes. Not until the audience had been thoroughly warmed up did we get to start reading, with everything stopped and measured down to the fraction of a second: how long until the first laugh, how strong the laughter, how long it goes on for, how quickly the next line has to come. I asked about the role of the comedian. He is hired because the audience tuning in at home is primed to be amused, whereas the test audience, among strangers in a strange studio, will be far too restrained.
It’s a purely joyful experience for me to feel I’ve done really well. In The Simpsons studio, everything is technical; it’s only after the scripts have been recorded that the figures are drawn with their movements. But sometimes details are changed later, then during a rerecording you can see little loops of your character as in a post-synchronization. Normally, the sound recorder and director sit in a control room by themselves, but the director insisted on being in with me. Even before I had finished saying my line, he laughed aloud in the middle of the recording, which, of course, then had to be done again. Still, I felt emboldened to give it another twist, and he laughed again, even louder, into my recording. He was banished to the control room, but I knew I had done a good job.
I have never applied for any part. I never submitted myself to an audition. Nor was it any different when the director Christopher McQuarrie and his star, Tom Cruise, turned to me. They wanted me to play the villain in the first Jack Reacher film. That was in 2011; the film was premiered in 2012. Before I agreed, I looked closely at the screenplay and found it more intelligent than those of run-of-the-mill action movies. The part of Zec was a challenge to me. Of course, there was a whole row of villains, and they all lashed out with their fists and stomped about and opened fire on one another indiscriminately with their disagreeably large assault rifles. But I don’t carry a gun in the film. I have lost most of my fingers in a Russian gulag, and I’m blind in one eye. All I have to inspire terror with is my own quiet voice. There is one scene where I’m giving friendly instructions to a subvillain to make up for his dangerous mistake by eating his own fingers, just as I did to escape forced labor in a deadly Siberian lead mine. Of course, he is unable to, and he is shot without compunction. I noticed during the filming how the members of the crew doubled over with nausea and how, later on during the cutting, the scene was softened not once but twice to make it palatable to a younger audience. It’s normal for the film industry to do that when it’s a question of open violence, nudity, or swearing. But in that scene, I still remained so revolting, even in the final version, that my wife got a call after the premiere from one of her woman friends in Paris: “Lena, I can’t believe you’re actually married to that man. You know, we’re only a short flight away. We have a guest room; you’ll be safe with us.”
Tom Cruise was extremely respectful to me. For my part, I was impressed by his absolute professionalism. He was always thoroughly prepared, physically at peak fitness, alert. Among his vast entourage he had a dietician, who every two hours gave him a tiny scrupulously balanced meal. I jokingly asked if he had a shrink for his dogs there as well. No one else dared ask him that kind of question, and he seemed happy that there was someone on set who wasn’t rigid with awe. I had a similarly chummy relationship with Jack Nicholson some years earlier when he was interested in Fitzcarraldo. He invited me out to his place on Mulholland Drive sometimes, and we watched telecasts of Lakers away games. Once he and his then-partner, the actress Anjelica Huston, lay stretched out on their bed to watch. I was at the foot of the bed, tired after a long flight, and Jack finally had to nudge me awake to point out that the basketball game was over. He needed his bed for something else now. I was sprawled across his feet, and he gave me his best shit-eating grin. Marlon Brando had a place right next door then; he wanted to meet me. The tall iron fence slid up silently, but inside there were warning signs everywhere to keep car windows shut and not to get out until someone had taken away the dogs. I saw four ferocious German shepherds who seemed like they would stop at nothing. They would have set upon any incautious visitor. With Brando, who had expected me to turn up with some film project, I talked about books and his island in the South Seas. He was grateful that I was a rare visitor who hadn’t wanted something from him the way all the rest did.
The director Jon Favreau invited me to play in the Star Wars offshoot The Mandalorian. He is a great admirer of my films, and he offered to acquaint me with the Star Wars world a little when I confessed that I hadn’t seen any of the films. He showed me some costumes, trial storyboards, and models of remote planets that were extremely impressive. In the series, a new technology would be used with round horizons that would obviate the need for green screens that all previous fantasy and science fiction films required. All around them, the actors see the planet on which they are moving or the spaceship that is carrying them, and the camera sees the whole thing. You no longer have to pretend to be under dragon attack while standing in front of a green screen. The cinema is back to where it always was and where it belongs.
The amount of secrecy around The Mandalorian was extraordinary. In order to lay false trails, I was contracted for a Huckleberry Finn movie. While filming, you were not allowed to leave the studio, not even for lunch, unless you covered your costume completely with a long tunic. A security man at the gate checked you out. Fans were lurking outside who had somehow got onto the lot to sneak some pictures on their smartphones. The awareness of these films and the expectations of a worldwide community is astonishing. When the veil of secrecy was finally lifted at the premiere, I muttered something about the mechanical Baby Yoda, and within an hour, there were ten million comments about it on the internet. The downside of one’s participation in these things is that it draws attention away from my real work, my own books and films. In the media, there were reports that I had used my fee (not that much, not even on a Star Wars series) to finance my feature film, Family Romance, LLC, but that film was shot and edited before I ever embarked on that little digression.
Among the villains in my films, Klaus Kinski figured from the start. He had a screen presence to match anyone in film history. Michael Shannon is another such actor, and Nicolas Cage also is. He thinks that Bad Lieutenant is his most extraordinary performance, even ahead of Leaving Las Vegas, for which he won an Oscar. I agree with him. But of all the great actors and actresses I have worked with, one stands out: Bruno S. His appearance was always rough, as though he slept under bridges even though he had an apartment, but his face and his imposing speech gave him an unconditional dignity. He was like an outcast, someone reeling toward you in confusion from a long bad night into a worse garish day. He had a depth, a tragedy, and an honesty that I have never seen anywhere else in cinema. Bruno himself didn’t want his full name used for either our Kaspar Hauser film or for Stroszek; he didn’t want to be a star but more something like the unknown soldier of cinema. It was as Bruno S. that he had figured in police reports when he committed offenses as a juvenile. His childhood and youth were calamitous, full of tragedy. His mother, a Berlin prostitute who didn’t want him, beat him from earliest youth, and when he was three or four, he was beaten so badly that he lost the ability to speak. She then delivered him to a home for mentally infirm children, where he didn’t belong. From his ninth year, he tried to run away. There followed years of increasingly brutal homes and institutions, then a series of petty crimes. He broke into a car in winter to have somewhere to sleep, was arrested by the police, and spent four months in prison. No one knew what to do with him. He was transferred to a madhouse, but they put him out on the street as “cured.” He was twenty-six. At the time I got to know him, he was driving a forklift in a Berlin steel factory and making a little money on the side from singing ballads in the backyards of tenements. Acting brought him fame and attention from colleagues and strangers alike, which did him a world of good. He published a book of his aphorisms, had an exhibition of his naive paintings in a gallery, released an album of his songs. In so doing, he started to use his full name, and so will I here: his name is Bruno Schleinstein. He died some years ago. The cinema will never look upon his like again.