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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died twenty years ago, was not an easy man to interview. Sometime in the late seventies, I sat with my back to a pink damask wall in one of the public rooms of the Algonquin Hotel while Fassbinder, dressed in his uniform of frayed white shirt, black leather jacket, and jeans, paced and darted in front of me. Then in his early thirties, he was pale and soft, with a patchy brown beard and mustache and matted hair, and he was smoking furiously. At one point, he lunged at me, arm outstretched, and I flinched. It turned out that he was reaching for a pack of cigarettes on a ledge behind my head. He lit a new cigarette with the one he was finishing, and went on talking, and we both pretended not to notice that for an instant a critic believed that a director was about to punch him out.
Fassbinder rarely stopped moving and slept very little; he frequently kept people off balance as a way of getting them to do what he wanted. Since he wasn't always sure what he wanted, working for him or living with him was a nerve-shattering but often irresistible experience (two of his discarded male lovers committed suicide; others stayed close to him...
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