INTERVIEW: Udo Kier on his half century of making movies
Photo: Udo Kier stars as Wolfgang Kortzfleisch in the sci-fi comedy Iron Sky: The Coming Race. Photo courtesy of Vertical Entertainment / Provided by KWPR with permission.
Udo Kier, one of the most prolific actors of the past 50 years, is a man who doesn’t sit still. At the age of 75, he continues to constantly act in movies, often taking part in several projects every year. In 2018 alone, he appeared in seven films.
Kier loves creating roles — both dramatic and comedic — that interest him and keep him motivated from when the director yells “action” to when the director yells “cut.” He prefers characters who are completely different than the last one he portrayed. That’s why he can move from a silly comedy to a touching romance to a frightful horror with ease.
The actor’s iMBD page requires a fairly long scroll to the bottom, and near the early part of his career are some movies that have now become bonafide classics, many of them in the horror genre: Mark of the Devil, Blood for Dracula, Suspiria and Flesh for Frankenstein. In recent years, he has appeared in Alexander Payne’s Downsizing and Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac.
His latest is Iron Sky: The Coming Race, the sequel to Timo Vuorensola’s 2012 Iron Sky. The tongue-in-cheek sci-fi epic involves everything from a Nazi moon base to reptilian shapeshifters, and Kier, who played Wolfgang Kortzfleisch in the original movie, portrays both Kortzfleisch and Vril Adolf Hitler in the second part.
“When I met Timo, he offered me the part, and we talked about it,” Kier said in a recent phone interview. “The [first] film was very successful in Europe, and then he said, ‘I’m writing the second one, and I wanted you to come back.’ And then he came and visited me in California. I said, ‘Who is playing Adolf Hitler?’ And they didn’t now, and I said, ‘Why don’t I play Adolf Hitler?’ But I needed a dog, like Hitler had Blondie. They said, ‘Well, it’s going to be a bit difficult with the animal rights.’ I said, ‘It doesn’t matter. Just get a stuffed one, put him on a piece of wood with four wheels, and I carry it behind me, drag him behind me.’ And he liked the idea, and I liked the idea of talking to myself as a different character, the evil guy and the crazy evil guy. And then also riding on the T. rex was for me also something totally new, and I had to learn how to do that because they put me on a crane. And I had to do the movement like I would be on the T. rex, and they could later on technically animate it in. So I liked it because it’s so over-the-top funny.”
It should be obvious that Iron Sky: The Coming Race is not a typical film. The fantasy elements take over the screen, with whimsical and almost jarring images for the audience to behold. It’s probably the only movie ever created to feature Hitler riding a T. rex with a stuffed dog dragged behind him. For Kier, it’s all in a day’s work.
Creating the Illusions
Working with so much CGI was a challenge for Kier and the team, but he relied on preparation and storyboarding to envision all of the virtual oddities around him.
“Well, the thing is first you have to get used to it, but there is a storyboard,” Kier said. “The first one we shot in Brisbane in Australia, and the second one in Belgium in a big studio. You need a big studio, and then you make yourself marks. I have people put a mark on the wall where I want to look, in order to see what I want to see, and then it’s fine. It’s not easy. You have to get used to it.”
In addition to Iron Sky: The Coming Race, Kier is also appearing in The Painted Bird with Harvey Keitel and Bacurau, which was shot in a small town in Brazil. This latter film took him the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Right now he’s filming Swan Song in Ohio, and this particular one has been a welcome, but difficult, challenge.
“I’m in every scene,” Kier said. “It’s all about a hairdresser who goes out of the retirement home and goes back to this little town, and everything has changed. So I’m doing that now. Today is my first day off. I shot one week, every day 12 hours, and tomorrow I continue. … I like to work with people again and again because we know each other, and it’s much easier. They know how far you can go or willing to go, and that’s important.”
That credo worked for Kier when he considered joining the sequel of Iron Sky.
“Timo knows very well what he wants,” he said. “It takes a lot of time to do the storyboard and write the dialogue. He is a good director. He’s a funny person, good sense of humor, and that’s what a film like that needs. You cannot program it in a kind of documentary way. It is fantasy, and he has great fantasy.”
50 Years and Counting
Kier said he prefers to focus on the next project rather than look back at his illustrious career. He is perpetually living in the moment and wondering what the next cinematic obstacle might be.
“Of course, I focus on the new one,” he said. “I’m not living in the past. … I have never asked a director, ‘I would like to work with you’ — not even David Lynch, and I would like to work with him very much. I got a call once, and Alexander Payne says to me, ‘I would like to come with my wife to invite you for lunch to Palm Springs.’ And he comes, and two weeks later I have a contract to be in Downsizing with Matt Damon and Christoph Waltz, and that’s how it works, my whole life. People come and find me.”
This career, which is nearing the 55-year mark, was not planned out. In fact, Kier never wanted to be an actor, and if it weren’t for a chance encounter in a coffee bar in London, he may have gone in a different direction.
“I was born at the end of the war, October ’44, and it was a horrible time,” he recalled about his early days in Germany. “I grew up, and then because we didn’t have money for high school, when I was 18, I wanted permission from my mother to go to England to learn English. And I went to St. Giles School in Oxford Street and worked there. … One day somebody spoke to me in a coffee bar and said, ‘We’re doing a film. … We would like to offer you a role in a movie,’ and I said, ‘I cannot do that. I don’t know how to do that.’ They said, ‘OK, leave it up to us.'”
Kier made the short film — named Road to Saint Tropez — in the south of France in 1966. The director, Michael Sarne, had Kier come out of the water for one scene and look into the distance. The actor, new to the craft of cinematic acting, didn’t understand what to do because the camera was so far away. He felt that his movements would not be captured for the big screen.
He was wrong.
“I came out of the water, and I was looking,” he said. “I didn’t know that I was in closeup in Cinemascope on the screen, so when the film came out, I was the new face of cinema. And I liked the attention, and I said to myself, if I can exist nicely from this profession, I will become an actor. And that’s when I decided to make films.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Iron Sky: The Coming Race, starring Udo Kier, is now playing in theaters and available on demand and on digital. Click here for more information.
