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The
Inspiration Sam Shepard and I go back quite a long time. In fact, to 1978, when I was casting "Hammett." I was looking for an actor to play the title part, a semifictional version of the American writer Dashiell Hammett, and I found the perfect fit in Sam. Not only was Sam tall and slender with a face remarkably like that of the legendary novelist, he was also a great writer himself. And he had just proven that he could act, in Terrence Malick's "Days of Heaven." Plus: he could actually type. I had seen a lot of other actors struggle hopelessly with the typewriter, and this turned out to be an important asset, in my book. But none of these arguments were enough to convince the studio that I had found the perfect Dashiell Hammett. They insisted I should find a more... ...experienced actor, meaning more of a "name." Hollywood never seems to want to know more than it knows already. My favorite line about this is said by Burt Lancaster in Louis Malle's great film "Atlantic City": "We only do business with people we do business with." Anyway, Sam and I had to drop our hopes for collaborating, with regret, but with clear understanding that we were meant to do something together one day. Our time came a few years later. In 1983, Sam and I cooked up the story of "Paris, Texas." At the time, Sam was working on his play "Fool for Love" at the Actor's Playhouse in San Francisco. We spent most of our time at Tosca, our favorite bar, playing pool in the back room, telling each other stories, trying to find out what territory we had in common. When we finally found it, in the character of a catatonic man who appeared out of nowhere in the Texan desert, everything fell into place. More than that: from then on, everything happened with a sense of necessity. Oftentimes, "stories" come up in a completely arbitrary way. Anything can happen anytime. Sam and I somehow escaped that trap. Maybe because we never thought in terms of plot. Each scene, once it was discussed and defined and then written by Sam, led to the next one, but we wouldn't jump forward until that scene then was written, too. We never wrote an ending, out of fear we might rush it, might go beyond our knowledge of the truth of our story. We only wrote the end when we had reached that far with the shoot. Which isn't exactly the way they do business in Hollywood (I can't say that I recommend this approach. It is a bit scary). |
That experience was so special that we both shied away from attempting a second collaboration, feeling that you can only ruin a good thing by trying to repeat it. So we didn't, for 17 years. Nothing can stop us now, though. At first, it almost felt too good to be true to be talking again, to carefully try to assess a common territory, to imagine characters, to start thinking about the situations we would put them in, to dream up an itinerary. The itinerary! I guess we both like being on the road so much that we never even questioned where this new story would take place: on the move. We started our second adventure at the place where Sam lives now, in Minnesota. We met for a few days and worked mostly in his writing refuge, a cabin not far from the Mississippi. We were joined by a mutual friend, T-Bone Burnett, who generously shared this first exchange of stories tossed out and considered or rejected, of characters quickly evoked and just a quickly forgotten, Soon, a family shaped up. A father, two sons, a daughter. Lives that were so close but had never crossed, yet. And then, we started to write. That is, Sam wrote. I read. "Real pages," on a typewriter, not on a computer, so when he gave them to me each morning, they felt strangely precious and unique. We would talk about them for a while, and then about the next few scenes over the rest of the day. We would eat in between and walk around. Then Sam would write again at night. I would read the new pages in the morning. No typos. I don't know how Sam does it. We would never mump ahead. We would have no idea where our story would take us. No "dramaturgy." No forced ending. No storytelling recipes. No formulas. That's the way Sam will write the script, scene by scene, from now on. A process that in itself feels more like going on a journey than writing a film. I wonder whether we'll manage to write an ending this time. All I know is, like on any other real journey, being on the road is more important than arriving at the destination. -- Wim Wenders |
