Udo Kier: “From now on, I will only do leading roles. No vampires "

Udo Kier, on January 2, at the Palm Springs festival in California.Rich Fury / Getty Images for Palm Springs In

A biography that begins with the words "eccentric as a person and in his characters" says a lot. In short distances, Udo Kier exceeds expectations. Friend of Andy Warhol, David Hockney or Keith Haring, the Palm Springs house (old modernist library built in 1965) of this German actor at the age of 77 is an extensive museum of modern art through which his giant tortoise

Han walks Solo

and his dwarf dog

Liza Minnelli.

The filmography that has taken him there is just as picturesque, a long succession of more than 200 cult titles full of secondary characters that in the hands of another would have gone unnoticed, but played by this provocateur with the eyes of a Siberian husky are a reference to a cultural age and a kind of cinema.

The one that in different decades shook the classicism of the seventh art.

Paul Morrissey, Dario Argento, Gus van Sant, Lars von Trier and, of course, Rainer Werner Fassbinder were his teachers and Kier, his fetish actor.

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Now Todd Stephens has counted on him in

Swan Song

to do something Kier never did in America: a starring role. The film is not yet guaranteed distribution in Spain. “The big difference is the technology. Now everything is video, digital, too technical. The actresses group around the monitor biting their nails and asking for a new take because they don't like each other. I am more 'old school'. To see the

dailies

[the footage filmed during the shooting day that is shown to the team members] the next day, working with Fassbinder without a monitor and looking in the darkroom for the film strip that he wanted to replace with another in the montage " , remember.

More things have changed and hence his interest in the character of

Swan Song

, a picturesque hairdresser who is taken out of retirement in a nursing home to return a former client who has just passed away to her glory years. “The tears you see are real, thinking of friends who died of AIDS. Now, with a pill, it is undetectable ”, he gets excited thinking about the advances of the LGTBIQ + community, to which he proudly belongs.

Everything that comes out of his lips sounds like a legend. Or to story. But this is his biography. She was born in Cologne, the son of a single mother and the only survivor (along with her newborn son) of an allied bombing that destroyed the walls of the maternity ward where she had just given birth. He was a forced vegetarian - "because my mother could only give me soups, soups and soups" -. So until he was 17, when he went to England. “Not because I wanted to be an actor. What I wanted was to work in a Bayer-type company and travel the world, ”he says.

There they convinced him to dedicate himself to acting, “when the newspapers spoke of the new wave of cinema”, and he liked the attention. Also at that time he met a young Fassbinder, 15 years old, in a truckers bar and their friendship turned into collaboration and camaraderie, "no

affair,

as has been implied," he emphasizes about the filmmaker with whom he worked on multiple projects such as

Berlin Alexanderplatz.

“I am a lucky man. All the directors have found me. I never asked anyone for a job because imagine if I said to David Lynch, 'I'd like to work with you.' I'm sure he'll answer me: 'And who doesn't? ”He laughs.

Kier doesn't remember the scripts for the movies he's made, but he clearly remembers the moments that led to "yes." For example, from when Van Sant, whom he met at the Berlin Festival, offered to work in

My Private Idaho.

"I thought that directors must feel very lonely at festivals and that's why they offer roles," he laughs again. He remembers Alexander Payne's tower of tuna and avocado that they ate together when he met him for

A Life Big.

And John Carpenter recalls the milk he was putting in his coffee, at Musso & Frank, when he offered him for

Cigarette Burns (The End of the World in 35mm

).

“Friendly talks.

There are so many actors who only talk about themselves.

Like me now.

But I'm doing an interview, ”he adds without trying to make an apology out of it.

He met Morrisey on a plane from Rome to Munich.

"As these Americans always want a conversation, he asked me what I did and when I answered which actor he told me he was Andy Warhol's director and he wrote down my phone number in his passport," he highlights from a moment that led him to interpret

Carne para Frankenstein

and

Blood for Dracula,

produced by Warhol.

Of beers with Lars von Trier

The relationship with Von Trier was also forged at a festival, but in this case it was Kier who initiated the search. He had just seen

The Element of Crime

and decided he had to meet him: "I was expecting someone like Kubrick or Fassbinder, well dressed but grumpy, and I ran into a student with whom I went out for beers." This is how they have continued working for more than 30 years. In fact, they continue because he has just concluded the continuation of his work on the series

The Kingdom.

Godfather of his eldest daughter, de Von Trier learned his maxim in acting. “He told us all, Lauren Bacall, Ben Gazzara, James Caan, Nicole Kidman. 'Don't act.' And you don't know how difficult it is not to act when you're acting. "

Kier was happy turned into a "man of the desert", someone who does not need to work to live, surrounded by the art that he accumulates / collects and that also includes works by Matisse, Giacometti, Jeff Koons or Robert Mapplethorpe, among many others. "As an actor, I always envy visual artists," he grumbled. And if he were not an actor, he would be a gardener, planting the seeds that his friends necessarily bring him for his garden.

Swan Song's

good reception

has awakened the bug.

“From now on, only leading roles.

No vampires.

Maybe playing William Burroughs, with his hat and glasses talking in front of his house about the prawns he caught in the lake ”, he describes a scene that he lived with the writer.

Or maybe he'll end his days face down in the pool, like Joe Gillis in

Twilight of the Gods

.

"When someone says I'm holding my breath, someone else will respond, 'No, he's dead.'

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