Werner Herzog says he helped Klaus Kinski find harsher ways to insult him in Kinski’s own autobiography. When Anderson Cooper read one of its attacks during a 60 Minutes interview first aired on March 16, 2025, Herzog replied, “Yes, it’s beautiful stuff, I actually helped him,” then added, “with Roget’s Thesaurus.”
The passage calls Herzog “a miserable, hateful, malevolent, avaricious, money-hungry, nasty, sadistic, treacherous, cowardly creep.” Herzog had told a similar story before, saying he arrived with a dictionary so they could “find even fouler expressions.” According to Herzog, Kinski believed the memoir needed “bad stuff” about the director to sell.
Their volatile history began long before the book. In 1955, Kinski spent 3 months in the Munich boarding house where 13-year-old Herzog was living with his family. They later made 5 films together, beginning with Aguirre, the Wrath of God in 1972 and ending with Cobra Verde in 1987.
Kinski’s German memoir appeared in 1975. English editions followed in 1988 and 1996, the latter titled Kinski Uncut. Herzog and Kinski still worked together on Nosferatu the Vampyre and Woyzeck in 1979, Fitzcarraldo in 1982, and Cobra Verde in 1987.
Herzog has called the autobiography “highly fictitious,” disputing Kinski’s account of an impoverished childhood while maintaining that he helped craft some of the abuse directed at him. He later summed up their partnership in My Best Fiend: “I needed him and he needed me.”