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A
Conversation Interviewed by screenwriter and
director Scott Derrickson for
Image: You've been working with Sam Shepard on a screenplay for a new film. Are the two of you approaching the creative process the same way you did with Paris, Texas? Wim Wenders: Since we had already worked on a script together, we knew enough about each other to assess the process beforehand. With Paris, Texas we had to start from scratch. We had to just tell each other stories for a week or two to see if we had a territory in common. The second time we didn't have to go through all that. The only problem to overcome was that writing Paris, Texas had been so thoroughly enjoyable, such a treasure in each of our memories, that we had refrained from trying to repeat the experience. We remained friends and spoke, but we were afraid a second attempt would ruin the whole glorious memory. But then seventeen years passed, and we felt we had waited long enough. Image: Will this be another road movie? WW: It is a road movie, although it comes to a grinding halt after the first act and then takes place in one location. But it's still a road movie because it's the story of someone who has never settled anywhere and has never belonged to a place. Image: The screenwriter in me suspects that you typically don't start the process of creating a film with characters or story, but rather with a location. WW: That's usually the case, in fact. Starting with a desire to tell a story in a certain place keeps things very open, because a place can tell a lot of stories. I knew where I wanted to make this movie before I even came to Sam, and luckily he accepted my idea. He knew the place well enough to understand my desire and to realize that it would be a great location-though no movies have ever been shot there, except the story of Evel Knievel. Image: What's the place? WW: Butte, Montana. I came there in 1978, driven by a novel that
took place there. Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett takes place in
a city called Poisonville, but Hammett admitted repeatedly that
Poisonville is Butte. I went there as I was doing research for Hammett,
and got completely sucked into this town. I took lots of photographs,
met people, and decided that I wanted to shoot there. I tried very
hard to get the rights to Red Harvest-or to somehow pull that part
of Hammett's life into the movie-but someone else already owned
the rights and I couldn't get them. Image: And you worked through the entire script that way? WW: Yes. We wrote the next scene, and then the next, but with never a thought to the scene after the one we were working on. With this method it's only possible to write chronologically, one scene at a time. Meanwhile, as director, I sit there and have lots of ideas while he's writing, but most of the time they don't lead anywhere because he has his own ideas. We talk, and in the end we come up with a third thing-something that is neither what his instinct wanted, nor mine, but that comes out of everything we talk about. Then we move onto the next scene, and again, I have all sorts of ideas about where this is going to lead us, and then I read the scene and it all evaporates. Image: Was there a lot of going back and rewriting? WW: Yes, often, because we would write to a certain point and then realize we didn't want to be there. We'd go back to where we felt that things had gone wrong and start again from there. It took eighteen months to reach a point where we could finally say, "Okay, this is where we begin, this is where we end, and this is what's in between." Once we had a beginning and end, we could look at our story as a whole and see what we had to fix here and there. We had to make sure that all the characters are really themselves-that all the action arises with a certain necessity out of these characters. And now we both want to sit on it for a month or two and then go back and look at it one more time. Our working title is Don't Come Knockin'. We initially wanted to shoot this in the fall of 2002, but that turned out to be too tight with financing, so we'll shoot it in the spring of 2003. The film should be out in early 2004. Image: Earlier in your career there was a real emphasis on the supremacy of the image over the story, but it seems you've been progressively acquiring more of a love for story. WW: That's true. When I started out, film for me was related to images and not to storytelling. I came from a non-narrative point of view-it wasn't even a documentary position, because I wasn't yet interested in documentaries. Certain people inspired me to work with film as a painter would. There were Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow, and others. Those underground filmmakers from the sixties were painters first and foremost, although some of them eventually ended up as storytellers, too. I really was trying to become a painter then, but I felt that a camera and a movie screen were more interesting tools than a brush and a canvas. I began from a very naïve first position, influenced by New American Underground film, traditional painting, especially Dutch landscaping, and even painting up to, let's say, Edward Hopper, who was himself very influenced by movies. I saw filmmaking as image-making-the difference being that by producing images and cutting them together, you get something weird happening from one image to the next. I began to see that once I put two images together, a third thing happened, something I hadn't even necessarily intended. Very slowly, over the course of making my first short films, this third thing became increasingly tempting. This didn't necessarily amount to a story, but a chain of events that link together can get you through the day-a bit like in life. Image: One thing that's consistent in your films is your love for wide-angle lenses-and not just in landscapes. I can't think of a single selective focus shot in one of your films. Is there a reason you always choose wider lenses over longer lenses? WW: I've always felt that with your own eye, you can't go to a telephoto shot. The narrowest you've got is something like a medium-wide angle. I never liked wide angles either-the fisheye lenses are distorting and remind me of hallucinatory states that I'm not so fond of. I've felt the naked eye is something that should be respected, and that long lenses are an artificial condensation. And I certainly hate what you can do with a zoom; you can go back twenty years without finding those shots in any of my movies. Image: Did you vary that perspective with Wings of Desire and Far Away, So Close! when you were seeing the world through the non-human eyes of angels? You certainly moved the camera more than you ever had before. WW: My first narrative films had a very selective narrative position.
They were basically shot from one person's point of view. Every
now and then you would see that person more subjectively, but the
movie could not possibly tell something which that person couldn't
see-it couldn't switch to another perspective. From the beginning
I was very much tied to the idea that a film had to have one point
of view, preferably that of the hero figure. I remember The American
Friend was very daring for me, because it had two points of view,
from two very different characters-and the points of view conflicted.
It was like my whole universe was exploding. Image: So for you, this attempt to render visible what is invisible wasn't so much about the angelic or the spiritual, but about love and affection. Those were the invisible things you were seeking an expression for. WW: At first, yes. In the beginning the angels were just narrative
tools to find a different point of view. But through the process
of making the film and evoking these spiritual entities, my perspective
on these figures slowly changed. As I was shooting, angels for me
were still metaphorical characters. The two actors had a hard time
because I could never give them any response to the usual actor
questions. Image: Do you believe in angels now? WW: Yes, because of the film. This didn't come about during the shooting, and not really during the editing, although that's when I started to wonder. It was seeing what the film did in other people, how the film affected them, that changed my mind. These figures that I created, my angel creatures, started to work on me and my spiritual life. They were an idea that I had put out there, not trying to represent a religious perspective, but a poetic perspective (as you might know, the entire film was very influenced by Rilke). But then, as I saw people respond to the film, I realized that the effect was nothing I had made. Of course I produced the film, I had figured it out, I was instrumental, but the effect it had on people was beyond anything I would have been able to do. That's how I slowly came to terms with the fact that the angels had been present, or that something had been present, that had used me somehow. There was no other explanation for it. I realized that I had been used in the most remarkable way. It's strange, especially for a director, to find out that you are not the creator. You are instrumental in creating something, but even if you fancy the idea that you pulled it out of yourself, you have to acknowledge that you could not have done it alone. Image: Do you look at the work you've done since then the same way? WW: I've looked at my job differently ever since. I'm much less uptight about it. I realize it isn't so much that I have to do my best, which is more or less the attitude I took the first half of my career. I looked at the history of movies and my models-Yasujiro Ozu, John Ford, Nicholas Ray. They made certain suggestions, and there I was, walking in their footsteps, but trying to do something that nobody had done before me. So there was always a certain pressure, a certain competition, but I never felt that way after Wings of Desire. Not in the slightest. When we were doing The Million Dollar Hotel, and we had a difficult day ahead, my wife, Donata, asked me if I was nervous. I said, "Not in the slightest." She couldn't believe it. I'm so much calmer now, because I realize it's not up to me. I do what I can do. If you really want to hold onto that idea that you create stuff as a director, fine-every now and then you are in a position where you can help create. But I've given it up, and it's an incredible relief, I must say. It's beautiful. Image: In The End of Violence, Bill Pullman plays a movie producer who loses his entire Hollywood world but gains his own soul. Does that character's transformation represent the sort of enlightenment you see Hollywood as needing to experience? WW: Maybe I can answer by starting earlier in the process with
my initial desire to make that film. There's always a first flame
that represents the desire to make a particular film, and if I get
through the process and manage to keep the flame going, then I've
made the film I wanted to make. So often you see people switch when
the flame goes out, and light a new one, but it's not the one that
they started with; it's an arbitrary one. Image: Let's talk about Until the End of the World. I was fortunate to have attended a very rare screening of your four-and-half-hour director's cut, and I don't think I've ever seen a more significant difference between a studio cut and a director's cut. I found the two-and-a-half-hour studio version that was released in theaters to be mildly interesting at best, but your version is, in my opinion, among your best works. What was the studio's response to your cut? WW: A lot of the people involved in the decision-making process
on that film never sat through my version. Many were convinced that
it was too idea-driven in the second half, and that I had really
made two films, an interesting film about a journey around the world,
and a brainy but less interesting film about making a blind person
see. As a science fiction film (it was conceived in the mid-eighties
and takes place at the turn of the millennium), its subtext was
the future of our image-driven culture. The greatest invention there,
it seemed to me, would be to give vision to the blind, and the worst
nightmare would be the inversion of that invention: to suck out
our dreams from our brains so that we could watch them like television.
Image: You were paying for it out of your own pocket? WW: Yes, it was all paid for by my company, Road Movies. And we owned my director's cut only for distribution in Germany. Convincing anybody to do anything with it was difficult. If the studio version had been successful, everybody would have wanted the director's cut, but since the reader's digest version was relatively unsuccessful in most territories, it was impossible to get distributors even to look at the director's cut. It took ten years even to make them aware of it. Image: What's its status now? WW: It will be out on DVD-accompanying the studio version in some territories, and hopefully on its own in others. We may have a limited theater release here or there. Image: You've made a tremendous amount of work. Your website lists, as well as your many distributed films, a good number of documentaries and shorts that aren't available to the general public. Have you ever experienced any kind of creative block or burnout? WW: Yes, when I was doing Hammett. For a while, it seemed that everything had come to a grinding stop, and everything I made was repeating something I had done before. I was just going through the motions, painting by numbers, so to speak. It was a pretty dark period of my life, when I wasn't in touch with what I was able to do, or even what I wanted to do. I didn't know anymore what kind of movie I had wanted to make in the first place. It had become so complicated. You write forty versions of a screenplay with four different writers, and in the end, you can't even tell what's good and what's bad about it. We shot Hammett twice-two entirely different movies, and only the second survived. We kept only ten percent of the first shoot. I just wasn't sure where I was in that picture. That was the reason I made The State of Things-it was made out of this creative hole. And it was a good move, a self-curing process. Normally I don't think it's all that great to make movies to find a cure for something, but in this particular case it worked strangely well. The State of Things was meant to say, "There's nothing you can do anymore. Filmmaking has come to an end. We have reached the end of cinema." It started as a desperate plan to announce the end, but instead it pulled me out of my hole. Image: I recently saw you quoted as saying, "The future of the cinema lies no longer in its past." What did you mean by that? WW: It's an idea I'm trying to develop about digital filmmaking.
I feel strongly that with the technology that is now available,
we are at a crossroads. For the first time since we went from silent
cinema to sound, we have a similar groundbreaking change to consider.
Digital filmmaking is not just giving us a few additional tools;
it redefines all the possibilities at hand. You can look at how
we were telling stories before, pick out a few things, and say,
"Hey, I want to keep those, they're useful," but you can
also take on a whole new stack of rules and start again without
any baggage from the history of cinema. A number of people are looking
at it this way, with no idea of the last hundred years of filmmaking.
They just started right now, and they're doing amazing things. Today
it's a privilege to be able to say, "I choose to carry in my
baggage these ideas that developed from Eisenstein to Ozu,"
but you can also say, "I don't want any of it." These
days, that's possible. I don't think filmmaking in the next decade
owes much to the past, unless somebody knows exactly why it should
owe something-and I think this shift has been helpful. I like to
see films in which somebody isn't quoting previous movies-I don't
like quoting at all-instead I like seeing somebody using their tools,
technique, and narrative craft, incorporating stuff out of the history
of cinema and making me see that it's still relevant. If it still
works, I'm happy. Image: I'm going to switch gears here and ask you about the spiritual transformation you've undergone in the last decade. You expressed some of that in describing the way you've changed since making Wings of Desire. How else have your experiences in the realms of faith and belief impacted your work? WW: Far Away, So Close! was a film that was clearly made with religious intent. I mean, it even starts with a quotation from the Gospel of Matthew: "The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness." Image: And aren't there other Bible quotations in that film? WW: Plenty. Isaiah is quoted quite often. As I edited the film,
I came to creating the level of voices, which is similar to the
level of voices in Wings of Desire, though more complex. In Far
Away, So Close! there's an entire film happening just on an audio
level, and it's filled with all sorts of quotes, many from the Old
and New Testaments. From the beginning, I felt that if we ever made
a second film with these angel characters, I couldn't pretend that
nothing had happened to me in between. I couldn't make another film
in which the angels were metaphors, because they were no longer
metaphors to me. If I made another film about angels, they would
have to be messengers of God, the go-betweens. They could refer
only to God, because as messengers, they were nothing in themselves-the
message was everything. So the film had to be filled with their
message. To do anything else with these characters would have been
to betray my entire experience. The film would have to be with God
from beginning to end, because that would be the angels' only intention.
Unlike Wings of Desire, where their metaphorical choice was to become
human, in Far Away, So Close! that was no longer an option. It does
happen that the angel Cassiel becomes a man, but only so that he
then can return to being an angel. In a strange way, in Wings of
Desire the spiritual world was a metaphor, but in Far Away, So Close!
life is the metaphor for something spiritual. Image: You were raised a Catholic, and now you attend a Presbyterian church. I wonder if this movement toward a more Protestant perspective has something to do with it as well. Catholic filmmakers are so rich in visual imagery, Martin Scorsese being the perfect example. WW: Or Bresson. Image: And when you compare them to say, Paul Schrader, who's a perfect example of a Protestant perspective moving into film, Schrader is very word-oriented, and the ideas are much more in your face. WW: Yes, with Far Away, So Close! I was too much the Catholic who had finally left it all behind and converted, which I just had the year before. Image: And yet your films have always reflected the Judeo-Christian view of man as a wayfarer and pilgrim. Do you feel a connection between your faith and the stories you've been telling all along? WW: During those twenty years when, though I always remained a
believer, I went as far away from the Catholic Church as possible,
I thought that all churches were the same. The Catholic Church had
made some tremendous mistakes, and I had taken these mistakes too
personally. For twenty years I never attended church anywhere. I
had left the church in 1968, and at the time I was very involved
in socialist politics. Image: And you were right. It did lead somewhere. WW: Yes. I probably owe that most of all to my family-though the
topic of family is not very present in my work, except in Paris,
Texas. I had to go back to square one and forget all my objections
about the Catholic Church. I had to look at the Word and forget
about everything that people have added over the centuries. What
really brought me to that place in the end was my father. He never
made a big deal about his belief. He was Catholic and went to church
regularly, but we never in our lives had a single discussion about
God. When it was obvious to him that I wasn't going to church anymore,
that I was angry with the church, and when I finally told him that
I had left it officially, it made him very sad, but we never spoke
a single time about Christ-and maybe this is a Catholic thing, too.
This is one of my biggest objections to the Catholic Church. They
are like the Pharisees of the New Testament; they create all sorts
of rules and regulations, and they think that this house of regulations
is the thing itself. My father was sort of caught up in the Catholic
Church and regretted that I had left it, but we were unable to talk
about it. Image: So much has already been said about the loss of life on September 11, but I'm interested to hear you comment on the loss of place. WW: They had just finished building the Twin Towers when I was
in New York shooting Alice in the Cities. In some of the images
in that film, there are still cranes on the top of one of the towers.
My first trip to New York was in the winter of '71 or '72 for a
program at the Museum of Modern Art, The New Directors' Season,
where I showed The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty Kick. Like anyone
who visits New York for the first time, I got a stiff neck, because
all I could do was look up at the incredible buildings. You step
in dogshit because you never look down. And as you see in Alice
in the Cities, in that view toward downtown, the Trade Centers were
the stronghold of the entire skyline. That downtown skyline inspired
a real sense that here was the center of the world. As we were discussing
earlier, my films are all rooted in a place, and a number of my
films have started or taken place in New York. The American Friend
starts on Spring Street and West Broadway. Lightning Over Water
starts with a shot of the towers forming the point on which all
lines converge. And Alice in the Cities was dominated by the sense
of place that New York offered.
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