WHEN WIM Wenders was making his first full length feature Summer In The City in 1970, he shot a scene while driving through a half-mile long tunnel in Munich, resulting in about a minute of total on-screen blackness. His refusal to later edit this sequence infuriated the tape-op involved in the film s sound mixing process. When people think they ve seen enough of something, but there s more, and no change of shot, then they react in a curiously livid way, the director reflected afterwards.
Indeed, such agitation is not an uncommon response to much of Wenders work, not least his latest film The Million Dollar Hotel, starring Jeremy Davies and Milla Jovovich. The director s dislike of non-sequential plot devices, his dogged keeping of faith with the natural passage of time, often provokes rather than pleases audiences. Even Kings Of The Road went under the original German title Im Lauf Der Zeit, which translates as the considerably less speedy In The Course Of Time.
Over 20 films in 30 years, Wenders has repeatedly returned to this method of letting the film reveal itself, of attempting to rescue the existence of things . And if his detractors maintain that the movies are like watching paint dry, then his adherents say much the same thing but with the proviso that the paint could ve been applied by an Edward Hopper (whose Nighthawks At The Diner is invoked in The End Of Violence), a Walker Evans (the photographer s prints of the Depression-era American south were as much an influence on Kings Of The Road as John Ford) or a Yasujiro Ozu (who got a tip of the hat in the Japanese passage of Until The End Of The World).
So, Wenders did not start out with the desire to tell stories so much as create landscape portraits . Even in a high profile venture like The Million Dollar Hotel, the most impressive set-ups are those least integral to the plot. For instance, there s the scene in which Lennon obsessive Dixie (Peter Stormare) is sitting by the piano attempting to convince Shorty (Bud Cort) that he co-wrote several of the Beatles best tunes. By way of illustrating the nebulous nature of authorship, he then plays a snatch of Beethoven s Fur Elise , which metamorphoses into the first line of I Am The Walrus .
Peter Stormare was just kind of improvising, explains the film s co-producer and originator Bono, and Wim was letting him, but it s one of the best scenes of the movie. In fact, you can see Bud Cort actually weeps in the scene, and at the end of it when the cameras went off him, he took off his gold watch and gave it to Peter Stormare and said, It s the best scene I ve ever been in.
Wenders himself, speaking from his Munich office, has his own thoughts about the significance of the scene in question.
In a strange way, that material the very name of Eloise and the Walrus song was there as an idea before Nicholas and Bono even wrote the first script, he explains. The name Eloise comes from the fact that the intro to Walrus is stolen from Beethoven, and of course I made the mistake to tell the actors about it. Peter Stormare, who was so totally obsessed with John Lennon and with his character, just did not want to let go of the chance to perform I Am The Walrus ..
Music has always functioned as a pilot light for Wenders films. Born in Dusseldorf in 1945, he studied medicine and philosophy before working as a journalist and attending film school in Munich. In 1971, he established the Filmverlag der Autoren, which nurtured the emerging wave of new German film makers, and whose ranks included Fassbinder and Herzog.
Steeped in the twin symbolism of rock n roll and the road, almost all of Wenders early films featured recurring motifs such as service stations and jukeboxes, while he eventually christened his film company Road Movies. Indeed, in the case of Kings Of The Road his existential antithesis to the American buddy-buddy variant of the form the director embarked upon making the film with a road map in place of a script. His is the cinema of impetus, or to use a phrase which Sam Shepard once intended as the title for Motel Chronicles, Trans Fiction .
Indeed, long before MTV and Hollywood grasped each other s grubby paws, Wenders was investigating the poetic possibilities of audio-visual synergy, using songs by Hendrix, The Kinks, Them, Ten Years After and Chuck Berry; employing Can to score much of his mid 70s work; eliciting the Paris, Texas dustbowl concerto from Ry Cooder; and later, throughout the late 80s and 90s, commissioning fresh material from REM, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Nick Cave, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, and, of course, U2.
In fact, it was Bono s script which provided Wenders with a motive to return to America 12 years after the award winning Paris, Texas. The films he has made in the interim (including Wings Of Desire, which scooped him the Best Director Prize at Cannes) have tended to cast a jaundiced eye on Amerika, most notably the US segments in the unexpurgated five-hour version of Until The End Of The World which depict the country as a Third World jackboot police state.
In many ways, Until The End Of The World was Wenders lost visionary classic. An outrageously ambitious venture, this ultimate road movie was filmed in every continent bar Africa and South America over the course of five months and cost the earth it traversed. According to film lore, Wenders might still be shooting its dream-denouement somewhere in the Congo with the indigenous pygmies of the region had the producers not pulled the plug for his own good.
Much like The Million Dollar Hotel, UTEOTW was greeted with a frosty reception upon its release, but its ideas and themes continue to haunt post-millennial pop-culture. Furthermore, Until . . . was a significant departure, in that it completely revised Wenders belief in the integrity of visuals alone (he formulated the phrase the disease of images around this time) and placed its faith in narrative and memory.
After Wenders 1995 collaboration with Michaelangelo Antonioni (who had lost the ability to speak as the result of a stroke) on Beyond The Clouds, he returned to America with the intention of shooting The Million Dollar Hotel, taking in The End Of Violence and Buena Vista Social Club along the way.
Peter Murphy: When you were doing press for The End Of Violence a couple of years ago, you mentioned that you had never really attempted humour in your films. Is The Million Dollar Hotel your version of a comedy?
Wim Wenders: Let me first throw a little comment on the term comedy . It s true, it s the funniest film I ve ever made, and it has a touch of comedy, and I think a friend of ours, John Hassell, the trumpet player on the movie, when he saw it he found the right category for it, he called it a screwball tragedy . I feel really at ease shooting in English, I must say. I feel that the English language especially the American connotation of it really lends itself to something that is lighter than anything you might want to do in Germany.
You quit America for more than ten years after Paris, Texas. Why did you return in 1996?
Once I had left in the mid- 80s after a seven or eight year stint and the three or four movies that I made in the US, I had left, in my mind, for good. With the film Paris, Texas I had said all I had to say, and had managed to make the film in America that I had gone to do in the first place. Hammett, The State Of Things, Lightning Over Water . . . the whole period was a difficult period, and I finally emerged with the film that I thought it was safe to come home with, Paris, Texas. And it was strictly the project of The Million Dollar Hotel that brought me back because it had to be shot there.
What had changed?
American film making was different from the mid 80s when I had left. Paris, Texas still had been guerilla film making, that was before the invention of the independent cinema. It was like a predecessor to it. And at the time it was dangerous, kamikaze film making, because I mean, the unions, immigration, anybody could at any given moment just bust you. And so I left, and then 12 years later when I returned for Million Dollar Hotel in 1996, it was a different picture. Our guerilla film making was the rule of the game now, so to speak, the entire independent film-making was made like this, so it was easily possible to make a European-financed film in America now.
When you returned to Germany after Paris, Texas in 1986, you began work on Wings Of Desire. From this vantage point, it s hard to believe that such an ambitious film was made on the run, with no script.
It is. We never had a script ever, anything on pages. It was really a wall full of notes, and that s the way it emerged, and, I must say, a number of security blankets, little islands that we were always rowing to. There were six dialogues that Peter Handke had written for me, and they were always the next piece of land we were rowing to for another week. And somehow we managed to structure the film just by having a few fixed points all the way through, and otherwise it was just like flying through the night without instruments.
Bono has voiced concerns that his cameo in The Million Dollar Hotel disrupts the spell of the movie. But this is almost a tradition with you, introducing figures such as Gorbachev into Far Away So Close! or bands like Crime And The City Solution and Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds in Wings Of Desire. The latter two were quite a risk.
It was a risk but I think it really worked out, especially with Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds. I think they were the perfect band to appear in that movie. Even now if I see it again, I think, Well that s exactly what Berlin was at that time in history . It was better represented through Nick than any other musician in the world.
Why did you cast Lou Reed in Far Away, So Close!?
Lou . . . good question. I think the very fact that Lou was in Berlin at the start of our shoot, and we go back a long time, so I wrote the concert scene with Lou and Cassiel into the script, and it actually turned out to be the first day of shooting.
Did his cameo have anything to do with the Berlin album?
I think that was probably the initial reason to want to do it, because I felt he was connected to the city with that album.
Artists often court disaster when they consciously set out to create their masterpiece. Can you give me an idea of the difficulties involved in making Until The End Of The World?
That, I think, was the largest production made in Europe at the time. It costed in 1990, $25 million, which was pretty big at the time. And I still maintain that it is in a way my masterpiece, but not in the Reader s Digest version that was distributed. I have now on several occasions, four or five times, shown my five hour cut once in the BFI, once at the Director s Guild, once in Australia and Munich, and anyone who s seen it, and has seen the Reader s Digest version, said, Now we understand what this was all about.
Is it true there was also a nine hour edit?
Yeah, but that was just the work in progress. To tell you the truth, my first screening, if you believe it or not, was 16 hours, and then we boiled it down. And the length that I was really happy with was just under five, and we kept a record of that before we kept cutting it down, and then it became obvious that all the distributors insisted on under three hours, and so it came down to two hours and 40 or something.
Because Until The End Of The World was a sci-fi movie set so near in the future, there were obvious difficulties with some of the gadgetry dating quickly. However, many of the ideas were remarkably prescient.
Some of it survived really well. And even the little mobile video phones I ve seen a model like this in Japan recently, entirely like the ones in the film. They re just a year late.
Then there was the disease of images idea: the protagonists becoming addicted to viewing their own dreams on small screens, growing more and more isolated from each other. Within a couple of years the Internet and video games had spread across the globe like a virus.
That became much more apparent a couple of years later, yeah. You see, I think there s no other film really like it as an endeavour and an epic story, but I felt like there was a brother in arms so to speak when I saw the Zooropa tour, I really felt, Hey, this is like the continuation of the movie. They are related thematically. I saw Zooropa several times, but when I saw it for the first time I was blown away. In a way, Until The End Of The World was a predecessor of it, and I think that movie that they projected with the Zooropa tour was never made. Even Oliver Stone never made it! I think a lot of screenplay writers could ve just gone and stolen a little bit of it and made it into a movie. They probably did!
Have you an itch to do another road movie?
Yeah, that s the next plan. It s gonna be two people travelling together who don t like each other at all, in the beginning.
Is this Kings Of The Road 30 years down the line?
Yeah, but it s a man and a woman, finally.
At last!
Yeah.
The Million Dollar Hotel opens here on April 28th.