Questionaire from
Mariane Comparato

FOLHA DE SAO PAOLO

What are your influences (academical, cultural, social) for your films?

Impossible to list all the stuff that influences a film, consciously or subconsciously. With just a couple of exceptions, my films all take place today. And I want them to be "contemporary", in the true sense of the word, so everything I experience and observe in preparation to a film somehow contributes to it. I'm often inspired by places, and I start writing a story for a film because I want to explore a city, or a particular landscape. I'm inspired a lot by Rock'n Roll, and I try to incorporate the music that has accompanied me during the film into the soundtrack....

....I'm influenced by painters and photographers. THE END OF VIOLENCE is in many ways a tribute to Edward Hopper, for instance. UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD paid hommage to Vermeer, or KINGS OF THE ROAD to Walker Evans. But all this is rather conscious. Of a more subconscious nature are the influences from other movies. I have learned my craft from the American cinema - Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray, John Ford or Anthony Mann - although I don't think I'm making American movies. I use the grammar of the American cinema, so to speak, but my vocabulary is German, or better: European. And this is where we get into the area that is most difficult to account. I've grown up in Germany, with all that German litterature and philosophy in my head. Nothing forms you more than your own language, and German is my mother tongue. And even if I live in Los Angeles, for the moment, I still dream in German, and my dreams are, after all, the biggest influence for my films. For me, movies are not only "the stuff that dreams are made of", they're also very much "the stuff that dreams turn in to".

When did you decide to make movies? What and when was your first experience behind the camera? How did you feel?

I never "decided" to become a director. All I ever wanted to be when I grew up was a painter or a writer. It never occurred to me I could become a director. That just seemed too unlikely, in Germany during the Sixties, when I finished school and started studying, medicine, philosophy, then painting. But on the other hand, I already "made movies" when I was a kid. I had an 8mm-camera and made little fictional films with my friends, inspired by a hand-cranked 8mm-projector that I owned ever since I was 6 years old. I had inherited a collection of short movies from my dad, all of them no longer than 2 or 3 minutes, and I showed them at all possible occasions, birthdays mainly, forwards and backwards, hundreds of times. They were little miniatures movies, Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, Disney animation and what not. Also I took photographs from a very early age on. Then, from 1967 to 1969, I went to film school. But I still didn't think I would become a director, even after my first or second movie. It was only when I was shooting my fourth film, ALICE IN THE CITIES, that I realized I could finally believe in what I was doing, that I had something to say in a movie, and that filming could really incorporate everything I liked, from painting to storytelling to photography to architecture and, of course, to music.

What is the parallel between your new film, THE END OF VIOLENCE, and the music of the american composer Ry Cooder, whom you called to do also the soundtrack of PARIS, TEXAS?

PARIS, TEXAS was a fabulous experience, as far as my collaboration with Ry was concerned. From the beginning, I had nobody else in mind to do the music for this film. I just knew Ry was the one and only musician for these images. And when he sat in front of the movie screen, in the Ocean Way recording studio in Los Angeles, and played his guitar over and over again, until he felt it was right, I had the strangest feeling, sitting in the control box, listening. I felt that Ry was reshooting the movie with his guitar, and that from then on these images of the American West and of this tragic little American family would be forever linked to his music, more so than I ever felt any of my images had been married to music before. So, that experience was so unique and so satisfying, that I was afraid to repeat it afterwards. A magic like this can only be ruined if you abuse it or "exploit" it. So only now, 14 years later, I called on Ry again. You see, Ry is not a composer in the sense that he sits down and writes some notes, and then an orchestra plays those notes. For Ry, scoring a film is entirely empirical. He slowly finds the music that is hidden inside the images of the film, so to speak, by playing in front of the screen, over and over again, until he feels it's there. And then he invites other musicians to join him, once he has found the right mood and the right approach. You can't come to Ry to score just anything, a film shot in Europe, or a historic piece, or a science-fiction film. Ry is really an "American voice", in the very best sense of the word, and in the broadest. Right now, he has finished a wonderful album with Cuban musicians. A masterpiece! Apart from being a great guitarist, Ry is also one of the most generous and humble and decent people I ever met.

It seems that the soundtracks of your films play an important part (U2, MADREDEUS, RY COODER, LOU REED, NICK CAVE for example.) What is your relation with the music in your films?

I love music. And ever since my first student film I feel that the most priviledged moment in the whole process of making a movie is that first time you see your cut together with the music made for it. Sometimes it seems to me that I make movies only for that pleasure of marrying the images to some music. Well, I shouldn't say "only", that's exaggerated. Making movies is an incredible priviledge, anyway.

How was your relation with the american culture by the time of PARIS, TEXAS and how is it nowadays?

I have grown a little older. I can distinguish a little better between the "American dream" - and I include the one I dreamed myself when I was a kid - and the reality of the United States of America. I have fewer expectations. I still like the American landscape a lot, and I still am very attracted to the "American culture". I can see it's best sides, and I see it's worst sides, and they can co-exist. I'm less ideological about it as I was 14 years ago, when I made PARIS, TEXAS. And somehow, all differences in culture seem to slowly get leveled, anyway. And inevitably so.

How do you chose the scripts of your films?

I develop stories and ideas myself, I don't go out reading and then buying finished scripts. But if you ask me about the ideas leading to a film, well, I'm not sure if I "chose" them or if they chose me.

Which films of yours did you write yourself? And how do your stories come about?

wrote ALICE IN THE CITIES, KINGS OF THE ROAD, THE STATE OF THINGS, WINGS OF DESIRE, LISBON STORY myself. Others, like THE GOALIE'S ANXIETY or WRONG MOVE were written in collaboration with Peter Handke, who also contributed the monologues and poems to WINGS OF DESIRE. Other scripts I wrote together with a screenwriter, like FARAWAY, SO CLOSE! or UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD. AMERICAN FRIEND was based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith, like HAMMETT was based on a book by Joe Gores. PARIS, TEXAS was a true collaboration with Sam Shepard. END OF VIOLENCE was developed as a story by Nicholas Klein and me, but Nicholas then wrote he script. There are almost as many ways to find a story and to turn it into a script as there are movies. All I can say is that I don't like to write alone anymore. I love to develop a story and to work with a poet, or novelist, or screenwriter on the script. But I don't fancy myself a very gifted writer, especially not of dialogue. That is a whole art in itself, and a gift, I don't really have. I wrote a lot of my scripts alone, even the dialogue, but I'm not necessary proud of the writing in these films.

Which film of yours got the closest from what you were expecting from it? Which one are you most proud of having made?

For a long time, ALICE IN THE CITIES got the closest to the dream that had started it. But WINGS OF DESIRE did, too. And maybe I'm the proudest of FARAWAY, SO CLOSE! because it was probably the most difficult film to make. And with movies it is a little bit like with children: You are most attached to the ones that are troubled and have problems growing up.

One of your most remembered films is WINGS OF DESIRE. What inspired you to make that film and which influences have you received for that movie?

The city of Berlin inspired the film and was it's muse. That city was a unique place in the world for quite a while. An island in an unfriendly sea around it. The wall had created an incredible infrastructure and a very protected territory. Then I was very inspired by my favorite poet in the German language, Rilke. Many of his poems are inhabited by angels. I made this movie trying to reconnect with my own country, and my own language, after an absence of 8 years in America. In hindsight, I must say that the angels I called upon in this film really were around us when we shot. Never in any other movie I felt so much carried, accompanied, helped, uplifted. And I had wonderful help in my French cinematographer, Henri Alekan. In the forties and fifties, he had photographed some of the most beautiful black and white films ever, THE BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, to just name the most famous one. Henri was the soul of the film. That's why we named the circus after him.

The way your characters deal with time seems to be a constant concern of yours. How do you work it?

"TIME" is the very material films are made of, and with. Films consist of pieces of time put together and put into a certain context. A sculptor has marble or wood, a filmmaker has time to chisel on. I don't really know how I work it. It's mostly rather unconscious the way you define time in each film, and with each film. In FARAWAY, SO CLOSE! I named a character "Mister Time", the one played by Willem Dafoe. He played a strange character, half devil, half human, half mythical creature. "Emit Flesti" was his name. Backwards for "Time itself".

Nowadays, there is a return to the apology of violence in films (?), and your new movie is precisely called THE END OF VIOLENCE. What is it about? Is there a social or a cinematografic motivation?

THE END OF VIOLENCE, as the title suggests, tries to deal with "violence" in a different way than other movies out today. Violence is one of the biggest concerns of mankind, one of our most important subjects, a great theme of human history from its very beginning. But we observe a strange and unsettling development lately: instead of being that important subject, violence more and more turns into some kind of an ingredient that is used in every movie, whatever it's about, sort of sprinkled over everything, the icing on the cake. Most of the time, when you see violence in a movie or on television today, you realize that it is not shown out of a certain necessity. That particular show could have just as well continued without any explicit violence. We have to face the fact that in our late consumer age, violence has turned from important human theme to lousy ingredient, part of the language, part of the very material films are made with. Our film dosn't want to be judgemental. It doesn't even come with a big message about violence, how bad it is or anything like that. (That would be pretty stupid, anyway.) our film just examines the phenomenon, and tries to look at it from all sides. Violence is terribly attractive in movies, that's a fact. Every film student knows that. Look at all the short films students make all over the world. See how many of them deal with guns abd killing and violence. Violence is seductive, and seducing. But do we really want to become consumers of it? Now that everybody stops smoking, do we need a substitute drug called explicit violence? If a film deals with rape, for instance, do we need to be a witness of it? Do we need to see it in detail? Films can deal so much better with violence than by exploiting it, by dwelling on it, by enjoying it, by MAKING us enjoy it! END OF VIOLENCE is a thriller. It tells the story of 8 people, all of them living in Los Angeles. Tey're unconnected at first, and only slowly we understand that one act of violence has linked them all together. Violence is powerful. It can turn everybody's life around. Yours and mine. But when it really happens to you (which I hope will not take place,) no movie you have ever seen has prepared you for it.

Back to September 2000 News Reel