The
following interview can be found in:
DoubleTake Twenty-Five, Summer 2001
A Conversation
with Wim Wenders by Michael Coles
Wim Wenders
was born in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1945. While studying
as a painter in Paris during the late '60s he became "addicted"
to moviegoing and started to write about what he saw. Aside
from this visual education, he also credits rock 'n' roll
as a significant influence on his work; his desire to become
a filmmaker was rooted in an urge to put images and music
together. He is now known as the auteur of such acclaimed
and greatly admired works as Wings of Desire (1987), Paris,
Texas (1984), and Buena Vista Social Club (1999). His intense,
searching eyes have combed and wandered the streets of cities
from Portugal's Lisbon to America's Marfa, Texas, and beyond.
His two most recent books, Written in the West and Once, both
published this year, offer poetic sketches and photographs
from such searches. A great enthusiast of road maps, Wenders
makes films that inspire the same sense of longing and wonder
a map can produce. Outside his home in Los Angeles, an old
Volkswagen minibus remains parked on a hill, with rocks lodged
behind its back wheels. The following interview took place
in his California home in February 2001, with his wife, Donata,
present.
Michael
Coles: How did you think and dream of America before you came
to this land-what got your mind going about it?
Wim
Wenders: I experienced America through all sorts of different
media.The first source of information I encoutered was the
comic strip. I was an ardent collector, and my fa- vorites
were Mighty Mouse, Superman, and of course Don- ald Duck and
Mickey Mouse. The Walt Disney comics came out only monthly
in Germany, from 1952 on. I still have the complete '52 collection.
Each volume was a revelation. I was seven years old and very
much aware of the fact that these gorgeous things came from
America. That's what made them so valuable! They were American
comic strips translated into German, with German dialogue
bubbles. Great translations. Very funny. The characters had
German names, too.
I never knew that my beloved Tick, Trick,
und Track were actually called Hewey, Lewey, and Dewey
until twenty years later. Or that Onkel Dagobert was Uncle
Scrooge, and so on. This incredibly rich guy, he lived in
America, that was for sure. In my imagination it was not just
the land of unlimited possi- bilities, it was also the land
of unlimited fun. I collected all sorts of comic strips, much
to the dismay of my parents, who thought they were ruining
their boy forever. Most of my comic strip collection, I had
to keep them secret and hide them. Not the Disney ones. My
parents approved of those. And then there
were the books! The first novels I read on my own were Tom
Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I knew them by heart
when I was seven or eight years old. I read a lot of books,
but all the American ones were special to me. Their sense
of adventure and excitement surpassed everything else.
I saw my first "real movies"
a bit later, when I was eight or nine, I mean in actual movie
theaters. But I was a film projectionist way before that,
because I had inherited a little projector from my father.
It was not an 8-millimeter one, but a 9.5-millimeter, an obsolete
format used in the '20s and '30s. Anyway, it had the sprockets
in the middle between each frame. This little hand-cranked
projector had survived the war, together with a box of tiny
little reels, one-minute or two-minute maximum. Mack Sennett,
Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton; not entire
films, just scenes.
I also had some early animated movies.
There was a box of maybe thirty films inherited together with
this hand-cranked projector. Of course, that was the time
before television. Television came up in Germany only in the
mid-fifties. So with this projector, I was the king of every
birthday party. It was a high-tech machine! You could go backwards
and forwards and freeze-frame whenever you wanted.
I never rewound a roll of it. I would play
the same thing backwards, which was even more fun. I projected
my twenty or thirty little films thousands of times, on any
wall or bedcover. Every time I was invited somewhere, I had
to bring the projector and the films. Come to think of it,
that was my first encounter with American culture, long before
I met comic strips, then literature, then, a little later,
real movies (which meant Westerns), and then, finally, in
the late '50s, the arrival of rock 'n' roll! It all came on
top of each other, as one confirmation after the other that
the real fun and the real world were somewhere else, in a
mythical place called America. I also collected all sorts
of magazines, anything with pictures of cars, women, incredible
open landscapes, and skyscrapers.
MC:
Who did you find more intriguing, Huckleberry Finn or Tom
Sawyer?
WW:
I liked the relationship they had, but I was probably inclined
to like Tom better. Huckleberry, he scared me a little bit.
He was "out there," somehow. Tom was more familiar.
MC:
Did you ever perchance see the Beatles when they lived and
played in Hamburg?
WW:
No, I never saw them, neither in Hamburg nor anywhere else.
But I saw some of my other favorites, like the Pretty Things,
the Yardbirds, and Van Morrison. I saw lots of English groups
play at the Marquee, in London, but I never saw the Beatles.
They were too big already when I started to go to clubs.
MC:
You spent some time as a painter before you made the transition
into film. At what point did photography and film begin to
appeal to your senses?
WW:
I was heavily influenced by the so-called New American Underground.
A lot of American painters made movies in the mid to late
'60s, Warhol being the most famous one. There was a whole
retrospective traveling through Europe at the time. I saw
these films in '66 or '67, and that was very important for
me. I wrote about them, too. I wrote about Michael Snow especially,
and a film that he had made called Wavelength (1967).
It was the first article I wrote. Wavelength was a
painter's film. It was actually only one shot, a painstakingly
slow zoom across a room toward the windows. Day and night
were passing. Nothing much happened. It was very painterly.
My first films were basically landscape paintings, except
that they were shot with a movie camera. I never moved the
frame. Nothing ever happened in them. Each scene lasted as
long as a 16-millimeter daylight reel, which was about four
minutes. There was no editing involved, other than attaching
one reel to the other.
MC:
You seem to evoke Edward Hopper in some of your films. How
has Hopper influenced your work?
WW:
I encountered Hopper on my first trip to America, in 1972.
I was in New York and spent quite some time at the Whitney
Museum. And I had known Hopper a little before, but he hadn't
made much of an impact on me until I actually saw the paintings.
He became very popular all over the world during the 1970s,
with calendars and books and postcards everywhere. But at
the time I saw him in the Whitney, he wasn't yet the postcard
artist of the twentieth century. The first film of mine that
was influenced by Edward Hopper's paintings was The American
Friend, which I shot in 1976. More than anything else
I liked his sense of framing. It was very cinematic and reminded
me a lot of classic American movies, of Anthony Mann or John
Ford. I especially liked the city paintings and his hotel
windows. Hopper's influence showed most in The Million
Dollar Hotel (2000). The entire film was shot in a brownstone
building that could have served as Hopper's studio. Of course,
later I learned how much Hopper himself had been influenced
by movies, and how often he had gone to see them whenever
he suffered from "painter's block."
MC:
Do you remember the first time that you started to see the
films of Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau?
WW:
I saw those films at the Cinemathèque in Paris, in
the mid-'60s. I saw all of the classic German cinema there,
when I lived in Paris to paint and to study etching. I spent
a year at the studio of a famous American etcher, Johnny Friedlander,
to learn that craft, and during that time I became addicted
to the Cinemathèque. Etching classes started at nine
in the morning and ended at two in the afternoon, and then
we were all on our own, except for the elder students, who
then printed the master's works, but we were not allowed to
do that yet. And so from two o'clock on, I was on my own,
and I had this tiny unheated room, one of those maid's rooms
under the roof that you find in all Parisian houses. It was
freezing cold and could not be heated. I was in bad need of
a warm place during the day. Going to the movies was too expensive.
It was like five or six francs, and I couldn't afford that.
But I discovered the Cinemathèque, where you could
see a film for one franc, which was like a quarter, and you
could start seeing films from two in the afternoon until two
in the morning. You could see up to seven or eight movies
this way. I also found out that you only had to pay once,
if you didn't walk out of the theater between shows but rather
hid in the toilets. This way you could stretch your one franc
to all the day's films. I saw the entire program for one year.
More and more I became addicted to watching movies. I saw
more than a thousand pictures, a real crash course in the
history of cinema. I saw all of Murnau and Fritz Lang then,
I had never seen any of them before. That was between '65
and '66. I was twenty-one. This experience didn't really start
my career as a filmmaker, though. I didn't think I'd be a
filmmaker, I still thought I'd become a painter.
I was attracted by the film camera, though,
especially after I saw that retrospective of "The New
American Underground" on top of my crash course at the
Cinemathèque. This was like the counterstory to the
history of cinema that I'd seen up till then. But, I still
did not see myself as a director. I had started to write about
movies. If you see six or seven films a day, when you come
out of the theater way after midnight you've completely forgotten
what the first film was like that you saw in the afternoon.
So I started to take notes-even while the movies were playing.
I filled notebook after notebook with badly scribbled observations,
and started to also read lots of books on film history (bought
second hand at those open-air book dealers by the Seine) in
order to place the stuff that I was seeing within context:
American films, Japanese films, German, French, European films
from the '20s. I saw huge retrospectives on John Ford and
Anthony Mann. I saw all of Fritz Lang's work. I saw an insane
amount of movies, and started to read and write about them,
in order to digest it all. So finally I thought I might become
a film critic and went to film school, basically with the
intention to know more about the history of films and to be
a better writer. I still did not think I could possibly become
a filmmaker.
MC:
How did you go from being a film critic and historian to picking
up a camera and starting a project?
WW:
I shot a few short films in those three years of film school
in Munich, basically on my own, because the school didn't
really provide the means to make short films. That was pretty
disappointing. It was all very theoretical, so if anyone wanted
to make a short film, you had to do it more or less on your
own. I made four, basically with friends, and with our own
money. The school finally acquired a film camera, but it was
always being used by somebody else. They also had only one
editing table, but you could only access it between something
like three and six in the morning, which was usually the only
time it was available.
In my first short films nothing ever happened.
It was just static frames, landscapes and cityscapes. Soon
I began combining these shots with music. That was the greatest
discovery: to sit at that editing table and see your shots
with some music from a tape recorder playing along with them.
So finally I put a magnetic track on my films and married
the images with the music. Doing all this probably steered
me in the right direction, and I started to taste what it
would be like to make movies.
The photographic or painterly aspect started
to recede more into the background. Other aspects like notions
of action, dialogue, and storytelling started to emerge. Of
course, I put on music that I never had the right to use!
I mean, I used the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Coltrane,
or Bob Dylan; God only knows what sort of music I put into
those films. I could never release them, because I never had
the money to buy the rights to use these songs. These first
films were made on nothing but shoestrings. The thrill of
combining music and images really pushed me to continue more
with the storytelling process. The only film the school actually
allowed me to do was one short in order to graduate and receive
some sort of diploma. We got enough money to shoot a twenty-minute
film, each of us, which was tremendous. I, however, stretched
the money, and instead of making a twenty-minute film in 35-millimeter
and in color like everybody else, I made a two-hour film in
black-and-white on 16- millimeter, for the same budget. That
became my first feature film, Summer in the City (1970).
The title, from a Loving Spoonful record (and a painting by
Edward Hopper), indicates how heavily I was influenced by
rock 'n' roll; the film itself was dedicated to the Kinks.
It had lots of music by the Kinks, and again, none of it was
cleared. So it was only shown in film school, and once or
twice in some retrospectives. Other than that, the film could
never be shown, because I never had the music rights.
That was the first time I made a long film.
It almost felt incidental that I made it. I liked it mainly
because of the music, and because I had begun to tell a story.
Not much happened, though. It was a story of a man who has
spent two years in prison. He comes out and the film observes
him for the next two or three days of his life. He tries to
visit old friends, but they're either not there anymore or
they don't want to see him. He vaguely tries to connect with
his former life, his girlfriends, but it's a story of one
failure after another. He has lost touch with all these people,
really, because he was in prison. The film is a description
of how he is trying to deal the best he can with reality.
Nothing much happens except that he listens to a lot of music
and drives around the city, so content to be at liberty again.
And that's all he ever does. He tries to contact people but
does not succeed.
Anyway, I liked the process of making this
film and I thought maybe I'd make another one, still not thinking
I would become a film director, but remain a painter and continue
writing. Even in my wildest dreams I didn't fancy I'd turn
into a filmmaker! Nevertheless, I was fortunate to have a
good friend in Peter Handke, whom I knew already before I
went to film school. I was in high school when we met. Peter
had written a best seller at the time, in Germany. It was
a novel called The Goalkeeper's Fear at the Penalty Kick
(1970). So I asked Peter if I could make a movie out of it,
and he gave me the rights to this novel practically for free.
He said, If you think you can make a movie out of it and if
you can actually get it made, then go ahead. Because the film
was based on a best seller and Peter's name was very good
at the time, I actually managed to get the financing together
and was actually able to shoot this film in 35-millimeter,
with a real professional crew. In a way, this was the first
real film I made. Summer in the City didn't really
count, because it was shot in ten days, with a crew of film
students basically, and never exposed. The Goalkeeper's
Fear was made under relatively professional circumstances.
I liked this one much more than the film I did before. It
gave me my first glance at the potential of storytelling.
Plus it was the ideal combination of everything I had ever
wanted to do: it combined the work of a painter, the work
of a photographer, and of course the writing was an important
aspect of it, as well as the music. So, all of a sudden, it
dawned on me that what I had just started was everything I
really had ever hoped for. You could do it all in one and
it was called filmmaking! I still didn't dare think I could
end up making a living from it. I just considered myself lucky
for making two movies already at the age of twenty-six. It
wasn't until the fourth one, Alice in the Cities (1974),
that I actually acknowledged myself as a film director. Until
then I had always identified myself as a writer. I remember
the moment exactly. When shooting the film in New York, we
registered at a hotel on Eighty-first Street, and I wrote
down my profession as "Film director." It seemed
preposterous, but ever since that's what I am.
_____________________
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