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Training
The Script Factory Masterclass with Wim Wenders
Wim Wenders meets SCENE insiders in Warsaw 2005
In conversation with Tanya Seghatchian
October 2005, Warsaw International Film Festival
This event was presented as part of The Script Factory's SCENE insiders programme.
Tanya Seghatchian
I’d like to talk about Don’t Come Knocking and its similarity with Paris, Texas given the two were both collaborations with Sam Shepard. And then generally go on to talk about the rest of your work. What was the starting point for Don’t Come Knocking, and why did you decide to make it?
Wim Wenders
Don’t Come Knocking started about five years ago. I had written a little story, about twenty pages long, trying to figure out what I wanted to do as my next, and possibly my last, film in America. I realised that these twenty pages were something that I couldn’t handle myself. I’ve always felt that a director should always work together with a writer. I have written some of my scripts by myself, but I always felt better when I had a good writer on board. When I wrote this twenty page treatment, I realised that the subject in it was exactly Sam’s territory, that is an American family. But nothing of that story survived. I took the story, and I called Sam, and spoke to him for a long time; about six or seven years. We had worked together in 1982 on Paris, Texas, and at the time the two of us had decided not to repeat the collaboration because we were both very happy with the film and as far as a relationship between a director and a writer goes, it was too good to be true. We both felt that if we were to repeat it we could only damage it. So we thought that we would let it be. I lost touch with Sam for a number of years, but we met again by chance here and there. He invited me to a premier, and I invited him to a screening of some of my films. So we did see each other three or four times over the last twenty years, but not any more. It was understood between the two of us that we were going to wait. When I wrote that story, I thought, enough waiting. Sam would be the ideal person to write this. When I called him, he seemed very happy to hear from me. He had a lot of time on his hands, as he’s living mostly as a farmer. He has his cows, pastures and horses. It seemed a good time before the harvest. He said, come by. I flew to Minnesota, and gave him the story to read. When he read the first page, I realised that he wasn’t impressed. The main character was a New York banker, and that completely turned him off. He didn’t want anything to do with bankers. The thing that he liked was the idea that there was a man who was going to find his son that he’d never met. That bit he did keep. The pages were thrown away, and the working title was gone. And we realised that the two of us had better start from scratch. We kept the idea that there was a possibility of a son and a man who had never met his own child. In fact, this man didn’t even know he had a son.
Working with Sam is always a unique procedure. I’ve done it twice now, and both times he worked in the same way, so that must be the way he does it. In both cases, we first invented one character, and in the case of Don’t Come Knocking, that was Howard (of all names!). Then we tried to imagine what sort of man Howard was. We gave him different professions and it was clear to Sam that he couldn’t be a banker. So we tried different things. One day, Sam said, I think he’s a Western actor. I said, for heaven’s sake, no! I don’t want to make a movie that deals with movies. I wouldn’t have it. I didn’t want anything to do with films about movies. He said, I think it would be great because the professions don’t even exist anymore, which makes it interesting. He then tried to write the first page. He wrote the first scene, him hammering away on an old typewriter whilst I am standing by, watching him type. Every now and then I got my emails from my computer, but mostly I watched him type. Then he gave me the page, and I’d read the page and make comments, then he’d write the next page. I watched him type the first scene and he giggled a little bit, so I knew he was on to something. Then he gave me the first page, and it was the scene when Howard rides away. So we realise that’s he is a cowboy, and maybe this is a Western. But something is wrong – Howard is riding away from a set, away from the movies. But I liked the idea. I can handle him being a movie star if the first scene is that he goes away. Okay, let’s do it. So we kept Howard.
Sam Shepard in Don't Come KnockingFrom then on, I watched Sam type page after page, and Sam never thinks in terms of plots, stories, dramatic curves, or first act, second act; anything you learn at film school, he doesn’t give a shit. He only cares about the characters, and he writes it in chronological order, and you’re not even allowed to think two scenes ahead. As a director, I would think it would be great if Howard would do this or that, and maybe in two scenes he can get on a bus, and meet this or that person. But I would read the next page, and all my thinking go down the drain because the story had taken another turn. When we discussed it, I would sometimes say that I didn’t like this twist, and that it was a dead end, I’d rather go that way. But it’s completely chronological, one scene at a time. The advantage is that you’re always very close to your characters, and you know that the story is totally driven by those characters. You realise also when you’re shooting that the characters are true and the plot is never driving the story. It’s always the characters. The actors really enjoy doing Sam’s dialogue because it comes so naturally. I think his method of thinking in terms of what the actors do, their feelings and who they are is the reason why it took three and a half years. I wasn’t sitting there for three and a half years! Only Sam’s attention span was a maximum of two weeks, because the cows needed to be tended and the horses needed to be ridden. So over three and a half years, we met about fifteen times, mostly in his farm, but nearly always in remote places, sometimes in the places we would be shooting. At one point, he was making a movie in Canada, and he only had a small part so he had a lot of time. We were there for two weeks, but he always had to go fishing as soon as it was getting dark. So we had to stop and I had to wait until he’d caught a fish or gone riding: Sam has his own pace, and it all has to flow out naturally, and you wouldn’t want to hurry him. So you have to have a lot of patience.
TS
Was the method the same on Paris, Texas?
WW
Yes. Even the typewriter was the same.
TS
I read that when you started shooting Paris, Texas, you had only made half of the film and then Sam disappeared.
WW
He didn’t disappear. But in Paris, Texas, the idea was that Sam was going to be with me shooting on the set. Actually, I thought that Sam was going to be acting in the film, but that wasn’t what he thought. I just took it for granted that he would play the part, but then he made it clear that this was definitely not going to be the case. But he was going to be around to help invent the second half of the story. We felt it would be better to shoot Paris, Texas chronologically because it is such a linear story, it’s a journey. We figured that if Sam was there and we knew the actors and followed the story, then we would come up with a good second half of the script. We wrote a second half because we needed the money and we needed to finance the film, and the co-producers didn’t want to have just one half of a script. But the second half was complete baloney: we knew that we were never going to do it. I don’t even remember what it was, it was just to make everybody believe that we had a script.
Then, as we were shooting, Sam fell madly in love with Jessica Lange. I was a witness when they first met; they fell in love and it was a big secret. I always had to pretend that Sam was with me writing when he was really somewhere else. But I didn’t get any thanks for that because when we were finally shooting the film despite the agreement that if Sam wasn’t going to be acting in it, then at least he was going to be with me to help me write it., now he was gone. He had a chance to shoot a film with Jessica, and of course he did it. You can’t blame him; I would’ve done the same. So I didn’t have an actor or a writer with me. Sam and I discussed the rest of the story on the phone, and I would eventually write it myself – just the story. I’d send it by post because it was the time before the fax machine, then he’d dictate the scene over the phone and I’d write it down. This was 1982 with no computers. That was a different experience. But basically it was the same working process: we had a character, Travis, and we wrote the first scene, then would continue until a certain moment. That’s why Paris, Texas only took one year to write, because we only wrote half of it. So, Sam’s approach is really unique, to live the story and write it chronologically and never thinking in terms of how people usually think: the curve and the drama – he just doesn’t give a shit.
TS
When you started filmmaking, did you go to film school? Were you trained to think in those ways about story and script structure; that is, tools that you would normally use were you not working with Sam Shepard.
WW
I went to film school for three years – 1967 to 1969. I didn’t learn a thing. At least they never taught us anything about script. It was the first film school in Germany and they had no idea what filmmaking was all about. We didn’t even learn the history of film. Luckily, it was 1968 and we only stayed at the film school for a year, and learned even less. But we became our own teachers, we really took over, because we thought that what they had to offer was ridiculous. We then designed our own course of what we wanted to learn and hired our own professors. At least then we were taught the history of film. But nobody ever taught us about screenwriting; that was too advanced. Or that when you make a movie, and you put music in it, you needed to buy the rights. So I made my graduation film, which was about two and a half hours long. We had a budget to make fifteen minutes, and everybody shot it in colour on 35mm. But I figured that with the same amount of money, if I shot every scene only once, in black and white 16mm, I could stretch it. So we never shot more than one take, and made a two and a half hour movie. Then I put all the music that I liked in it. The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, everything. Then we finished the film, and we were told that we couldn’t do anything with it because the music cost a hundred times more than the movie. But it was too late. That’s why that film was never shown.
TS
The love affair with music has lived with you ever since. Most recently, you introduced the world to The Buena Vista Social Club, and you worked with Willie Nelsen, Bono and Ry Cooder. You’ve left a mark on our musical as well as cinematic imagination.
WW
I hope so!
TS
Is you musical passion as important to you as your cinematic passion, or do you see the two as interlinked?
WW
They are very interlinked. This passion started when I began shooting in that useless film school, although the Munich Film School is very good now, at that time they were useless! They had one camera, a 35mm, but they couldn’t even afford 35mm film stock. It only worked on a 220 current so you couldn’t take it out, you had to plug it in. I played the saxophone at the time, as I loved music. I realised that I was never going to make a movie with a camera that you had to plug into the wall, so I sold my saxophone and I bought a used 16mm Bolex. And that was the end of my musical career, but I had a Bolex and so I shot my first two or three short films while I was in film school using my own camera. I bought the film stock myself. I didn’t make prints because we didn’t know about prints. So I shot on reversal and I cut the reversal and we screened the reversal. I didn’t send it to a film festival until it was torn to pieces and there was no more film. Well, it was late at night about 3am and my first time, and because the film school only had one editing table which everybody needed, I only had a couple of hours in the middle of the night. For the first time, I put some of the shots that I’d put on the Bolex together with Scotch tape, and it had no sound. So I had a silent film that I had cut together, and I had my tape recorder (this was before cassettes as it was 1967 or thereabouts), and I put music around the images that I had cut together. That was the greatest night of my life, and ever since I realised that the connection between music and images is sheer magic. I had to continue to make movies just to have that kick. Sometimes you work on a movie for three or four years, and only eventually one day you have that kick when it comes together. That’s why I’m continually making movies.
TS
One of the qualities that I enjoyed in Don’t Come Knocking was the musicality of the film. Did you start with the music in mind or did it come to you during production, because the score was so integral to the film and to the mood.
WW
On the very first trip, when I went to see Sam Shepard with my twenty pages, I took Tibor Burnett with me. He was there when we cooked up our character, Howard. So he was involved from the beginning, and I always sent him the scenes. Then Tibor started writing the songs that were going to appear in the film, and he wrote them as part of the screenplay. Sam wrote some of the lyrics. So the music was an integral part of the screenwriting process from the beginning. Tibor was involved from the beginning. But that’s not always the case. With Ry Cooder, I waited untill I had the first rough cut before I showed him the picture, but I always knew I wanted him to do the music. When we were shooting, we were listening to his records a lot. When I knew he was going to do it, I involved the musician and the composer from the very beginning. Tibor had written music for two of Sam’s plays, and the two of them had already met when they were very young, in the early seventies. Tibor was lead guitarist on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder tour, and Sam wrote a story about that tour. So they travelled with each other for about six months – they knew each other really well.
TS
One of the interesting structural aspects of Don’t Come Knocking is that it doesn’t feel dialogue heavy. It feels as though the lyrics of the songs, and the mood of the piece, where you have the monologues or the confessions of the characters, they feel different. It doesn’t feel like a conventional Hollywood screenplay.
WW
It’s not! Sam never wrote for Hollywood, although he was invited quite often. They threw a lot of money at Sam, and he was offered, for instance, The Horse Whisperer and All the Pretty Horses. All these cowboy movies. But Sam always refused even though he could’ve made a lot of money. He never wanted to work for Hollywood. Sam’s mind is so different and that’s why the story and the film have a unique feel, because it happened so differently, and since he is an actor as well as a man of the theatre, he thinks a lot about the actors. When he knew Jessica Lange was going to play the lead, he re-wrote the entire dialogue because he knew her so well, and he wanted to make sure that her words and dialogue were perfect for her. Actors love his dialogue because it’s never pretentious or lengthy. If you read them they’re very short things – they’re very sparse and people always talk with each other, not to each other.
TS
There’s nostalgia in the film for classical Hollywood and America. What’s the distinction in your film making between a love for America and the Hollywood process, and where you have found yourself in that?
WW
I disagree with the way you asked that. I don’t think there is nostalgia. The film shows sides of America that almost don’t exist anymore, or are about to disappear. So the entire world of the film, in a way, is a world of classic American moves and westerns. Then again, the film has an ironic distance to all that, that’s why I resent the word nostalgia. The film takes all these places, structures and formulas that belong to the American cinema, and takes them apart. Even the hero, Howard, disintegrates in the course of the film, and there is almost nothing left of him by the end. It’s a decomposing act of everything that is the world of the genre. The America in the film is really beautiful. I tried my best to paint America as beautifully as I could, mainly because I realised that these places are not going to exist for very much longer. The little town of Beaut is about to disappear, and no one has ever made a movie there. The landscape in the opening, these are places that nobody has ever shot. A lot of the American West, as much as a lot of the country (this may be a generalisation), wherever there is beauty, it becomes a theme park. There’s a process that’s turning the whole of the US into a Las Vegas/Disneyland thing. Wherever it is beautiful, there’s a sign: you can take a picture here, and there’s an entrance fee. We didn’t want to make the movie with those signs. In the script, we started the film in Monument Valley – I’d travelled though it often and photographed it. When I went back, in order to double check that we were going to shoot there, it was gone. It had passed, and become invisible, in that it was over-exposed. You had to sit either in little buses or in trains. It was essentially a theme park with adventure rides. You could hire a horse, but you had to hire an Indian guy. It was ridiculous. A famous thinker said about twenty years ago that he had seen the future, and it was a theme park. How right he was. We tried to go into places that still existed in my book, that were still alive. At the same time, they were about to disappear, and the city of Beaut was already gone.
TS
Is that one of the reasons that you say that it may be your last film in America, and that you are more interested in the rest of the world?
WW
When I started Don’t Come Knocking with Sam, I knew that it was going to be a big effort to shoot an epic story in America. In 2000, I thought it was going to be my last, but then it took so long that I made So Long the Man, my film about the Blues in between. In the summer of 2003, when we thought that we were ready, I more or less had my locations and cast, and Sam and I had a first draft of the entire script; we thought that we were ready and that the green light was a formality. We had planned to shot in August and September 2003 but then six weeks before, Peter called me and said, sorry I have bad news, we have lost the co-production deal. In Montana, the summers are very short before the winter starts. We knew that we only had that little window. We lost about twenty per cent of the budget and we couldn’t replace it that fast, so we had to postpone and go for the next summer.
That allowed me to quickly make another little movie (little in terms of money, not ideas) called Land of Plenty. It was the total opposite of Don’t Come Knocking because it was shot very quickly on DV cam with a very light crew. I wrote the story in three days, and together with Michael Merridis we wrote the screenplay in three weeks, and then sixteen days later we were finished. From the first day to the last it wasn’t even two months. We still had to do the editing, but the writing and shooting was done. Very fast and furious. It’s also about America but it was much more explicitly political. It cost 5% of Don’t Come Knocking – and that’s despite Don’t Come Knocking only costing $10 million.
I had help writing the story for Land of Plenty from a screenwriter in Los Angeles called Kelvin Meyopa. When I first conceived the story, I had a stumbling block so I called him. Scott Erikson had written a couple of screenplays, and none of them had ever been made, but I knew that he had a good nose for a story. Land of Plenty was his first screenplay. While we were making Don’t Come Knocking, Scott called me and said I’ve sold my first movie, and sold a script – and they’ve allowed me to direct it myself. I said, fantastic, what is it? He said just a lousy little no money picture – they had budget of $33 million! Land of Plenty cost $500,000, with a huge cast. I shot in Los Angeles, then in the desert and finally ended up in New York.
TS
You’ve worked all over the world, and in many languages…
WW
… but not in Polish…
TS
There’s always time! How important as a filmmaker is language: either to use your own language or work in English, with the commercial predicates that come with that?
WW
I love the song by Laurie Anderson, Language is a Virus. She is so right. I work a lot in English because I’ve lived in America since 1996. I made my first five or six movies in English. When I conceived of Don’t Come Knocking, I thought it would be my last film in America, but then I made two more in the meantime. We finally made Don’t Come Knocking after experiencing the tiny, low, low budget no money movie, and it felt like classic film making in 35mm. In Land of Plenty we made fifty or sixty set ups every day. In Don’t Come Knocking the crews and the actors had their make-up car, their trailers – the whole thing. On a day where we worked hard, we got maybe eight or ten shots instead of fifty to sixty. It was very different film making. Both films were shot by the same guy, Frans Dierre. Land of Plenty was his first feature film. He is a very young DP, and because he worked so fantastically well in Land of Plenty, I gave him Don’t Come Knocking. He’s a great talent for a young man.
So, language! After making six films in English…I felt it was about time to speak my own language again. Peter produced both Land of Plenty and Don’t Come Knocking, and he and I thought it was time to make a movie in German again – I needed some time to arrive again into my own country. I know Montana better than I know Saxony or Bavaria.
TS
Many of your films seem to be about homelessness. Where do you think of as your home?
WW
I’m trying to think about all the places that I’m homesick for…it’s a lot.
TS
Do you live in Germany now?
WW
I live in Berlin. I finished filming Don’t Come Knocking late September 2004, and I decided to edit the film in Germany. It’s a German production like all of my films. All my American films are not produced with American money in any way. They are all strictly European films in terms of their financing and also in terms of their mental existence.
TS
Your commitment to European filmmaking and your role in the European Academy and as a producer is a great template to European filmmakers, but do you have to be your own producer in order to achieve that?
Gabriel Mann & Sarah Polly in Don't Come KnockingWW
You don’t, but together with your producer, you have to be able to control your material. I was my own producer for so long that I’m happy not to do that part of the process. The whole auteur theory is really long gone. The theory that you produce it, write it and shoot it yourself, that’s how we worked in German cinema in the seventies. But, for the last twenty years, I’ve worked with a writer and a producer. Always with a creative partner, so the whole auteur theory is really a long gone myth. I’m happy that I have a producer and a writer, and that I don’t have to do it all. By definition, the auteur has to do it all, otherwise he wouldn’t be one. I’m no longer an auteur, but I seem to be a protagonist of the theory. I like filmmakers to have control of their work, but that’s a different thing. Together with Peter, we control what happens to the movie: from the casting, shooting and the editing. I’ll never fall into the trap of an employed director. I did it once, and it was a big mistake.
TS
And you learn from your mistakes?
WW
Some people do, some people learn from their own mistakes, some from other people’s mistakes which is the smarter way.
TS
You’ve worked with and without scripts. Can you tell whether you think that there is a good balance to have in terms of the freedom of changing what you’re doing while you’re working, and having a template to work from?
WW
To work without a script is almost no longer possible, because the landscape of filmmaking is so different. Even somebody as experienced as myself, if I had a film like Kings of the Road where I had just one page, to finance the film with just the opening scene and the rest reading “and then we’ll see”, you couldn’t do it. Not myself or a young director could get a film off the ground with a one page script. I have made number of films with no scripts at all (although you of course do documentaries without a script), but it’s almost impossible. What you can do is write a script, then shoot something else.
TS
If you have a good producer…
WW
If you have a producer who has confidence in you. At the time, I enjoyed working without a script – I preferred it. Some people are scared if they don’t have one, but I’m more scared with one. My fear is with a script that you or someone wrote maybe a year before you shoot, before you’re at the location with your actors is that who can foresee the truth of that situation? My fear is being able to see things that I prefer, or seeing that something could be done another way. That’s the trouble with a script. Once you have a script you’re immediately forced, by the structure of the film making process to shoot it out of chronological order because your producer and production manager can say, in this script you can easily group these scenes together here, even though they are at the beginning and at the end, but they’re both in the same location. You can’t say that you want to shoot it in chronological order. So as soon as I have a script, you’re automatically forced to shoot completely out of chronology. In Don’t Come Knocking, we first shot in Beaut, Montana, then we went to Nevada, then we went to Utah, so we did everything in reverse. You only accept that as a filmmaker if you have a great script and you know that if you shoot the ending first, you can imagine how to do it. As we wrote the script in chronological order, it was easy to shoot it out of chronological order. If you don’t have a script, you can only shoot it in chronological order: that’s the beauty of it. Nobody can tell you not to do it. Even if in a week, you end up back at the same place, you have to shoot in that order. Doing that is a fantastic privilege, and I’ve only done it twice. The actors love it; for them it’s the best thing in the world because only then can they be really in control of their work. Even if you have a script, and you shoot the ending first, it’s a little mind boggling for the actors. Very often they don’t quite know how it fits together, and they’re lost. They live in the scene, but in their head, they don’t see the whole thing.
Audience Member
In terms of casting, what stage do you start putting faces to the characters?
WW
It would be hard to generalise, because everything has its own rules. In Land of Plenty, I wrote the part of the leading lady for Michelle. Don’t Come Knocking was spawned in 2003, and all of a sudden I had the entire summer with nothing to do; at first I was really disappointed and depressed, but then my wife said, maybe you were meant to do something else. Which is not what you want to hear. But she didn’t mean it like that. So I started thinking, and I realised that I was meant to do something else. While I still thought that I was going to do Don’t Come Knocking, and I was still casting, I had most of the characters. Sky was not cast. In the very last casting session, the day before Peter called me, I saw a young actress called Michelle Williams, and I knew that she was too young. The act of casting is very cruel, because the moment a person comes in, you know. But because you’re nice, you talk, but you could just as well say “go home” which will save your time and the actor’s time. But she came in, she was too young, she could go home, but she had something captivating. We talked for a couple of hours. I knew I was wasting my time, but she was fantastic, and the more we talked, the more I regretted that she was too young for the part and I didn’t have anything for her. When she left, I really felt bad about that. I thought that she was going to be a great actress one day. Then Peter called, and the film was pulled for a year, and after my wife said, you’re meant to do something else, I thought, oh yes! And I even have the actress. I figured that that was why I had met little Michelle. The story that I wrote in three days, I wrote for Michelle. I love it when you know the actors when you’re writing. It’s perfect – the best.
For instance, I need to know the places when I’m writing. When I wrote Don’t Come Knocking with Sam, I knew where the film would start as soon as Sam had the character. It was also clear how he would travel somewhere where it would be confronted with this past, and that it would be the town in Montana. I wanted to make a movie there for twenty five years, and I knew every corner and every house. I need to know the place, and most of my scripts are based around the place to begin with. It’s also great to know the people, but you don’t always know. With Don’t Come Knocking, I knew in my heart as soon as Sam suggested that Howard wasn’t a businessman, but a western actor, I knew Sam should play Howard himself. But as he had played the dirty trick on me, I didn’t ask him. When we had half the script, sixty pages or so, as I was sitting and he was typing, I just looked at the sixty pages, and I said, very casually, you know when we finish, and we give it to Jack Nicholson…? He’s going to be perfect – he’s going to love this part, don’t you think that that would be great? Sam looked at me very sinisterly; he didn’t say anything, but he made more mistakes than usual. Then he said, Jack Nicholson is too old to ride. From then on, it was clear that he was writing it for himself. When Doreen appeared, I knew that it had to be Jessica Lange but it seemed for a long time that that would be impossible. Even if we could have made the film in 2003, I would have had to think of somebody else. I was still hoping I could have her in 2003, but they were adamant [Sam and Jessica], that because they had been married for twenty years with two children, the rule was one stays at home and the other works. So Sam was going to be Howard, and it looked like we weren’t going to get Jessica. They were evasive about it, but Sam made it clear there was no two ways about it. I never wanted to think of somebody else, and maybe that’s why my wife was right. In 2004, the kids had graduated – and Jessica was ready. The two of them had not worked together for almost twenty years in front of a camera. I had to cast the other parts: but it was great to know from the beginning, that Sam was writing it for himself. I prefer it if I know the place and I know the actor that is walking through the landscapes or through the streets.
TS
Was Wings of Desire one of those films?
WW
Yes. With Wings of Desire, there was a desire to shoot in Berlin. The entire city was meant as an exploration of the history of Germany, vertically across Berlin. I knew that Bruno and Otto were going to play the parts. It’s good to write with actors in mind. And it’s necessary for me to write with places in mind.
AM
How did you team up with Peter?
WW
Peter and I go back five years. Peter started producing in Abelskurk when it was still East Germany. We didn’t know each other because we lived in two different Germanys. He came over in 1984 and had to start from scratch. We met in about 2000. Peter was going to go back to movies, and I knew in my heart that I wanted to find a creative partnership with a producer. We worked together on the Blues, and now we’re trying to work on the next one together.
AM
As someone who has spanned so many years of film making, with all the technological changes, do you prefer it today, with all the emails, faxes and DV cameras? Or has something been lost?
WW
It’s a fantastic situation now. You have all these choices. It seems you don’t have a choice to make a film without email, mobile phones and fax machines. If you said that your next film is going to be without these things, you probably couldn’t do it. Let’s go back to sending telegrams. In filmmaking terms, digital cinema is very exciting. If you have a project, from your very first idea, you can do it with a tiny crew, and keep it tight and spontaneous. You shoot it with a different style of collaboration with the crew. You’ll see that when you see Land of Plenty. Sometimes I was alone with the actors – just Frans, the actor and myself. You can shoot all the time. You can shoot the rehearsals, shoot the takes, and not even stop during the takes. You can just go again, and never stop. It’s a very different process. The energy flows in very different ways. When you go back to 35mm film again, it’s like going back thirty years – classic film making. Full of rails and cranes, and it took three hours to get the first shot in the morning. Like Sky, when she’s dispersing her mother’s ashes in the morning, Frans knew that at 6:05pm, Simon was just going to crawl over the hill. We had been there twice at the exact moment. So we figured that if we wanted to shoot at 6:05pm, the crew had to be there at 3pm. You need three hours. You need to put so much work into the shot, which is beautiful. But I am emotionally attached to the new kind of filmmaking. I can make a film with 5% of the budget – and it’s still Cinemascope and Dolby Stereo. And that amount of money gives you every freedom in the world. It’s exciting to choose from the outset what vocabulary or what grammar you want to be involved in.
AM
I appreciate what you say about not being an auteur in its strictest definition any more. But it seems that the idea for the film comes from you. Have you ever been in a situation where a writer had originated an idea that he or she had brought to you and that you had carried on to direct, and whether that made any difference?
WW
It happened to me twice. One was a long time ago and was the only studio movie that I made, it was the only time I was an employed director in Hollywood. They had the project and they hired me, and I thought, great. Some of my favourite movies were made in that system, and I wanted to check it out. It took four years. We wrote forty drafts of the script, with four different writers until we finally shot. It was a cruel process. I didn’t even half final cut, and I had Francis sitting next to me all the time. I was employed so it was a tough learning process, but I knew that I was never going to do that again. The other project that I didn’t originate was brought to me by a friend, and that was The Million Dollar Hotel. It was originally invented by Bono from U2. He did a video for a song called Where the Streets Have No Name on the roof of that hotel. He was incredibly impressed by that place, and he thought it was a metaphor for America. He figured that he should get me involved. So he wrote a story with a friend, and he pitched that story to me. That was the only time that I said yes to something that I didn’t start myself.
AM
Many of your films carry dedications which are interesting thank-yous in the history of cinema. Can you talk about your influences and thank-yous?
WW
Paris, Texas is dedicated to Rotta Heisner who was a great German writer and film critic. She wrote some of the greatest film criticism in the late twenties. She was the co-founder of the Cinemateque in Paris, and she was in her eighties when I first met her. She became a key figure in my film making life. Rotta died while we made Paris, Texas so she never saw it. I dedicated An American Friendto Henri Langois who was the first one to show my films outside of Germany. He was the director of the Cinemateque. That’s where I learned about filmmaking and about the history of cinema. While I lived in Paris dying to become a painter, I got hooked onto the Cinemateque and saw twelve hundred films in about a year. Henri introduced every single one of those films as the director of the Cinemateque, so I felt that he was my movie father, so to speak. I dedicated Wings of Desire to the Archangels: that is, Truffaut, Tarkovsky and Ozon. Although I was already making movies when I saw their films, I can say that I learnt most from. Tarkovsky was still working while I was working, but I saw his movies very late. But he encouraged me to make a film like Wings of Desire. I wouldn’t have dared to make that film without his influence. That was one of the films without a script, by the way. It was a film that I already had lots of photographs of places, lots of ideas and sub-plots, of histories of characters; but it never had a script. That’s why I dedicated it to the Archangels because they had very powerfully helped me through that process.
AM
When you’re writing and developing a script, even during the process of filming it, do you find the process of not trying to make a linear story, something that necessarily has to conclude in a conventional way, a freeing process that leaves you more freedom to explore the characters and their situation?
WW
I have my share of problems with ever making a movie with a story, the first time I succeeded was Paris, Texas and that was because of Sam Shepard and his linear approach to it. It felt great to be carried by the flow of story that took us along with him. Even when I made Wings of Desire afterwards, my approach was more meandering. I always considered the film to be more like a poem, and that’s the way we made it. I never knew what we were going to shoot the next day. We were guided by the next line, when we didn’t know what the next line was going to be. In order to find a linear approach, I always need help. I was too involved with characters, places and situations, and I had my share of doubts about linear story telling. State of Things is all about that doubt. It’s movie that tried to say that story telling had become impossible in the movies. By making that movie, it proved me wrong.
AM
What qualities did you look for in Peter, your producer?
WW
First of all, he’s the only partner that goes through the entire thing. When you first have that idea, you light a candle. And you’re either alone, or you do it together with your producer. Then it passes a through a lot of different hands: you have to give it to your actors, then the cameraman carries it, then the editor and the composer. And finally your distributor. It’s like the Olympic flame. The director’s job is to run along with it all the time to make sure that it’s not going to be blown out. If somebody fucks it up and drops it, then the film is gone. The producer is the only person who runs with it from the beginning to the end. And in order to survive that, you had better be in very close contact. It’s the most important relationship that you have. Everybody else comes in and goes out: the writer, the DP. But he continues with you.
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