Excerpts from the book SCREENCRAFT : DIRECTING by Mike Goodrich

An inside look at the art of film directing through intimate interviews with 15 of the world's best film-makers.

Wim Wenders:

I never intended to become a filmmaker. And I never saw movies like other filmmakers did, when I was growing up. I mean I liked movies, but I never understood what a director was. That came much later, when I was living in Paris, trying to become a painter. I was poor and it was cold and I would go to the Cinematheque [Francaise] in the afternoons to see movies, mainly because it was a warm place that only cost one franc per screening. The programme started in the afternoon and went through the evening until midnight, and at weekends the last show would be at two in the morning. The first thing I saw was an entire Anthony Mann retrospective. Later there was also a John Ford retrospective and a Fritz Lang retrospective. I was seeing an average of five or six films a day. If you paid for the first show and went to the toilet between shows, and waited until the theatre was filling up again, you could go back in without buying another ticket, so you could get away with spending only a franc for five movies.

I saw Japanese movies, German movies, American movies with Arabic subtitles - whatever Henri Langlois [the founder of the Cinematheque] could get his hands on. I think I saw 1,500 films in that time, a crash course of the history of' cinema. Then I bought books of film history to try and place all the films I'd seen, and then I started making notes about the experience of those movies. I slowly realised I was moving away from painting and in the direction of cinema.

I was then heavily impressed by what was called "The New American Underground" at the time - [Andy] Warhol, Michael Snow, directors who were also painters - and so it seemed to me there was an interesting crossroads between painting and film-making. After that period at the Cinematheque, I applied to the first film school in Germany which opened in Munich. Out of 1,000 applications, they chose 20, and I was one of them. Fassbinder had also applied, but they refused him, which was lucky for him, because it made him so angry that he started making movies right away, while us poor suckers sat there in the film school doing stupid courses.

I still never thought that I would become a director at this point. I had strictly applied because I thought I was going to take the writing more seriously and there was this idea in my head which tied painting and movies and writing together. The first time I actually thought I was a director was after I'd made my fourth film already, Alice in the Cities. After my third film, Scarlet Letter, I was very discouraged. It was sort of an aacademic picture, and I figured that if I was going to go on with this filmmaking business, I would have to prove to myself that I could do something that nobody else could, or else I would just have to stop doing it. And Alice in the Cities turned out to be the proof that I had something to say, and that filmmaking was worth continuing with. For me that film represented my very own invention of what I wanted to do in movies. The three previous films had been accidents, I felt.

Alice was personal and unique; the story was all mine, and I had turned it into imagery of my own as well. And for the first time there was no rupture between my initial desire for a movie and what it turned out to be. It was actually prettv much as I had envisioned it. Theere was a unity between conception, realization and result that made me feel I had actually controlled the process.

In those early movies - Summer in the City, Alice in the Cities, Wrong Movement, Kings of the Road and The American Friend - the topic of alienation ran through them all. The American reviewers summed them up under "angst and alienation", and I called those reviews the "Triple-A-reviews": "Angst, Alienation and America". I never thought those topics were really at the core of my films. My notion was that mv films all dealt with a search for something that I couldn't quite define. All I knew was that it wasn't there and had to be reinvented. You see I was born into post-war Germany. My whole thinking came very much from the perspective of somebody who had to put it all back together from scratch. And my films are also driven by the desire to leave my country behind. So there was a lot of travelling. I like to shoot on the road, and so I called my Company Road Movies Filmproduktion. I feel very comfortable when I am moving. I can work so much better on the road than at home.

In the beginning, I was totally obsessed with "framing". It was the most important aspect of the whole filmmaking process for me. I would design all shots in advance, and I would have my layout ready in the morning, when I would come on set. I would know exactly which shots I would do and then the scenes had to fit into that concept. That very exact notion of framing was my security blanket. Later I started to feel more and more, though, that it was a trap if I knew too well what I was going to do before I'd even start to work with the actors. The last film I made with that attitude was The American Friend. I only let my security blanket go after I directed a play for the first time, 'Across the Villages' by my friend Peter Handke. Working with actors on stage was such a different experience. There was a total absence of framing, for once. I learned a lot from it and the next film I did after that, Paris, Texas, was done without any drawings or preconceived notions about set-ups and framing. That was a conscious choice I made before the film.

On that film, I just went to work every morning without the slightest idea how I was going to shoot. I would just start working with the actors on the scene, and only when we felt comfortable with it, I would start to develop a "decoupage": where to put the camera, and how to cut from wide shots to close-ups or other angles. It was a much more flexible approach. And addictive. For the first time the actors became the principals. The actors and the story were the heroes, not the style or the look. Before, style and look had had a priority over the story. On Paris, Texas, I took the story and its emotions and the actors more seriously than the look of the film. The theatre experience had opened me up to a less formalistic approach to film-making and Paris, Texas profited a lot from that. My cinematographer Robby Mueller would come onto the set in the morning and wouldn't know what the first set-up would be, and we wouldn't know how many set-ups we had to do that day. I would just come and talk with the actors about what the scene was all about and what the emotions of the scene were, and then we'd walk around and see how and where we could do it. Then we'd try to play it, and only after that would I sit down discuss how to shoot it. That whole process was much more from the guts than from the brain. It felt pretty risky at first, but so much more connected.

Sam Shepard and I had not written a complete screenplay for Paris, Texas. We had only written the first half for good. The second half we knew was baloney, and we only presented it to show a full script. Our plan was that Sam would be with me while we were shooting, and that as we went along we would get to know the characters and our story better. We would shoot the film in chronological order, and when we'd get to the middle, Sam and I could then continue writing it. However, the film got postponed a couple of times and when we finally started shooting, Sam had a commitment to be in a film called Country with Jessica Lange in Minnesota. So he was up north and I was in Texas. Fax machines didn't exist yet. I had half a script, and when we came to the end of those written pages, the whole shoot came to a grinding halt. I sent everybody home and in the next two weeks wrote the second half. Kit Carson [who has a co-writing credit on the film] helped me a bit with the structure, and finally I was able to send Sam a layout of 20 pages of how I imagined the end of the story. And then Sam would call me every night with the scene for the next day. He would read it out to me over the phone and I would write it down. He basically dictated the dialogue, and the next morning I would photocopy it and we would shoot it during the day. In the evening we were back on the telephone.

The original ending was totally different, but then I had this idea about the peepshow, and again interrupted shooting for three days to write the outline for the new ending. Then Sam actually wrote the dialogue for that ending over one weekend. It was 30 pages long. I guess taking the dictation on it was the longest phone call I ever made. And then we had the entire peepshow section to shoot which consisted of two long scenes. Harry Dean [Stanton] and Nastassja [Kinski] had two days and two nights to learn it. We liked the two scenes so much that we decided not to shoot them piece by piece, but each of them in one go, as if they were a stage performance of two acts of a play.

I have a very sharpened sense of place. Most of my films were initiated by the desire to explore a certain place, and some of them, like Lisbon Story, The Million Dollar Hotel or Paris, Texas have been called by the place itself It's not just that places matter to me, it's the idea that stories are specific to certain places. I want the place to be so tightly connected to the story that I know in my heart that this story can only happen here. I think I have a good sense of how to approach a place and how to represent it so that as you follow the scene, you know exactly where you are. That's very important to me - to be able to let the audience enter a place and understand where they are. I think I learned that from watching the films of Anthony Mann or Howard Hawks.

With Wings of Desire, I wanted to make a film in my own country after an absence of eight years in America. Coming back to Berlin was a rediscovery. More than anything I have ever done, Wings of Desire was made strictly from the guts. There was never a written script whatsoever. The film was made like you would write a poem, very much improvised. I wasn't so radical as to shoot entirely without a plan, though. There was a wall in my office with ideas and scenes and images and hunches pinned to it, and at night, I would stand before the wall with Claire Denis,, my assistant, and we'd figure out what we would do the next day. Rather than putting pressure on you, I feel, this frees you up like nothing else. Scripts put much more pressure on me.

The story in Wings of Desire is so flimsy anyway: these angels are watching over people, and one of them falls in love and wants to become a human being. It's a fairy tale more than anything else. I never thought in terms of story; I always thought in terms of moods and situations. Each scene was a sort of poetic entity. I never knew exactly where the ideas came from. It was a deeply subconscious process, and I wanted to keep it that way.
The film looks very rich, and that is due to the fact that Henri Alekan shot it. He is the all-time champion, the master of the black-and-white craft. The actors were very adventurous and ready to work on a day-by-day basis. The two angel characters didn't have any biography or their lives to worry about. For once we didn't need any motivations or any psychology! I wanted to revisit Berlin later to make Faraway, So Close, because it was no longer the city that we had shot Wings of Desire in. It had changed more radically probably than any other city in the last century in such a short period of time. At first, I didn't think at all about using the same characters and started to write something about taxi drivers and children and firemen, and all sorts of people travelling between the two halves of Berlin. But then, the more I travelled through the city myself, the more I realised that the only appropriate approach would be to see it through the same eyes of the angels again. So I considered bringing these characters back, almost against my will or against better knowledge. Sequels are such a scary thing. I just never thought of Faraway as a sequel, though, more as a continuation.

I've made several documentaries or documentary-like movies that I rather called diaries or journals, like Tokyo-Ga and Notebook on Cities and Clothes or Reverse Angle. They are explorations of places or professions. Buena Vista Social Club started just like that, as an idea to make a personal account of the encounter with these musicians and of my first encounter with the city of Havana. I didn't have an aesthetic plan or smart approach to how to show them. I started shooting the day I arrived and tried to discover who these musicians were whose music I'd loved so much, ever since By Cooder had given me a cassette of a rough mix, when he had come back from Havana the first time.

The whole fun of the film was that there was no preparation and that it was done on a day-to-day basis. I first imagined I'd spend a month in Havana,,come home and edit it. But when we came back from Havana, the possibility opened up that these musicians' paths would cross in Amsterdam and that it might be possible to bring this non-existent band together in one place and have them play for real, for one time only. I wanted to be there, of course, so we got ready for a second leg of our shoot.

The concert then actually happened, and I shot for another week in Amsterdam, the two concerts and four days of rehearsal, and all of a sudden I had two very distinct parts to the film which I didn't know how to fit together. The concert was such a success, and became almost legendary overnight, and as a result the remote chance appeared that the Cubans might actually get visas to give one performance at Carnegie Hall! I couldn't possibly miss out on this one, so of course I got another crew together and went to New York and that gave me the third chapter. In the end, I had over 100 hours of material and spent almost a year trying to put the puzzle together. There had been no structure planned for such complex footage. We had to find the story that would tie it all together. That story had in fact happened in front of our eyes. A story bigger than life, almost a fairy tale: the incredible path of these artists from oblivion to world stardom. The whole process, from A to Z, never felt like I was actually working, because their joy of making music was so contagious, that it always felt like a sheer pleasure to be there with them.

I think the most privileged moments in movie-m.aking are when the work feels as close as possible to making music or poetry. And sometimes shooting can get very close to that indeed. I recently finished producing a documentary by a young American film-maker, Dominic Dejoseph, who followed the making of The Million Dollar Hotel and the making of the music for it, and he concentrated on the links between the film and its music. In their best moments, the two have a lot in common. The film is called One Dollar Diary.

When I was shooting the musicians at work in Buena Vista Social Club, we almost became members of the band, and the way we tried to move around them was as if our cameras were also musical instruments. And Wings of Desire was as close I think as you can get to poetry, considering you are working with the very organimcd machinery, equipment and logistics of film-making to live out the unorganised intentions of a poet.

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