Interview published in Issue 6, 2022

Wim Wenders

Wim Wenders is lauded as one of Germany’s most celebrated and inventive filmmakers, known for art-house classics Paris, Texas (1984), and Wings of Desire (1987). Having a legacy of directing over sixty films and counting, Wenders’ decisive eye and approach to filmmaking have gone down in the annals of time, portraying truth and beauty through his attention to every frame, and his singular process. Along with his continued work as a director, he and his wife, photographer Donata Wenders, founded the Wim Wenders Foundation. Their mission is to bring together, preserve, restore and make available Wenders’ body of work, as well as to support young film talents via the Wim Wenders grant and its commitment to film education for young audiences. In considering his output, Wenders reflects on taking action to assure the longevity of his oeuvre, and its place in the public.

“People around the globe have seen my films, many have been influenced by them, and some of these films have become classics or cult films. In this sense they no longer belong to me anyways, but instead to a collective memory of cinema-goers of every age and many nationalities. It has been my desire for many years that in the future my work might belong only to itself, and thus to everyone.”

In his films, Wenders’ approach to respecting time and the unique quality of each moment that passes is an integral part of his philosophy of constructing time in film. Each frame is reminiscent of a painting, and exists as an architectural building block. In his road movies Alice in the Cities (1974), Wrong Move (1975), and Kings of the Road (1976), the journeys dictate stories marking the passing of time. Filming them in chronological order was a revolutionary process. It enabled the films to capture the idea of continuous time flow. For Wenders, the idea of shooting in chronological order respects time as something that needs to be respected. To cut too often cuts the flow of time. Whatever happens in front of the camera only happens once, which Wenders describes as a miraculous, unique event to catch — rather holy.

I was able to catch up with Wim and Donata on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Foundation to see how it has evolved with time, and further reflect on the role time plays in Wenders’ films.

Interview by Leah Gudmundson

Wim Wenders during the shooting of Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders

Leah Gudmundson: The Wim Wenders Foundation is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. Its main tenet of restoring and making Wim’s works accessible for all is a radical idea in this day and age, not focused on individual gain. In honor of the 10th anniversary of the Foundation can you look back on the Foundation so far, and reflect on some particular moments where you have been proud of the Foundation fulfilling its purpose?

Donata Wenders: One of these particular moments is the award ceremony of the Wim Wenders Grant for Innovative Storytelling that the Foundation is giving each year to 4 or 5 filmmakers for the development of a promising project.

Wim Wenders: We do this together with the Film- and Medienstiftung NRW. This grant represents a considerable amount of money that enables filmmakers to take the time out and really develop an original and innovative new project. We started this in the second year of the Foundation, so next year will already be the grant’s 10th anniversary. And by then, ten films will already be out in theatres that had their starting point and initial spark from it, which we think is a great result.

DW: Another such moment each year is the color correction for our next digital restoration. By now, the Foundation has restored 21 of Wim’s films, and each of these processes involves Wim and I sitting down with the film in a studio, together with the colorist and restoring the color correction of the film from scratch.

WW: Depending on the degree of difficulty, this takes from 4 or 5 days to two weeks. As the films are scanned in at a maximum resolution from the original negative, that scan contains all the information that is on each frame, of course, except for the color correction that the cameraman together with me applied at the time. So, Donata and I now restore that, and in the process come as close as possible to the original first festival print, or even surpass it.

DW: To see one movie after another getting back to life, is just thrilling!

WW: Literally, because a film that exists only as analogue print today is as good as dead…

DW: They were bound to sleep on shelves, as the world of the moving image has become a digital world. What a joy each time to see these movies again on a big screen and in fantastic quality, like they were meant to be seen. And now they’re ready for the digital future, to be seen in optimal quality on the big screen or on Blu-Ray or streaming services.

Hunter Carson in Paris, Texas by Wim Wenders

Harry Dean Stanton and Dean Stockwell in Paris, Texas by Wim Wenders

LG: Donata, you mentioned along with the restoration and preservation of Wim’s films, you are dealing with archiving ephemera. What are a few objects you’ve encountered/re-discovered that have touched you or really brought you back to a moment in time?

DW: Among many objects, I found the stone that Damiel takes in his hands, while it remained lying on the shelf, in the scene in Marion’s caravan in Wings of Desire. I was moved to see the real object, because seeing that scene for the first time, long ago, was like the perfect expression of how I imagined our world. I thought: How beautiful: Damiel takes the ‘soul of the stone’ with a great tenderness and is in awe of it, while the physical part of it remains lying there. I was touched and went back to see the movie at the time for many evenings in a row. My love for it had somehow started with that stone…

Bruno Ganz in Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders

Solveig Dommartin in Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders

LG: Wim, you deal with time in a very specific way in your films, often with characters moving ‘out of time.’ In Paris, Texas, Harry Dean Stanton’s character Travis Henderson arrives from the desert having been missing for four years. In Wings of Desire, there is time standing still as the angels can hear the thoughts of human beings all at once. In your road movies, time is transient and unrooted. What is your personal belief system of time?

WW: ‘TIME’ is an essential element of the act of filmmaking. Whenever a camera is running, even on your iPhone, but so much more impressively with a real film camera (analogue or digital) you are dealing with time, with capturing and repeating time. That is a relatively new thing in the history of mankind, or in the history of art, but even if it only started in the late 19th century with the invention of the moving image, we took it quickly for granted that we were able to ‘store’ and manipulate time. For me, film still has a lot of that initial mystery. And that’s why my favorite part of filmmaking has always been the editing process, because that’s where you are confronting time the most. You are ‘building in time’, so to speak. Every shot is like a brick of time, and you are making a visual construction ‘in time’.

LG: In the lore of the making of Alice in the Cities it is said that you stopped the production of the film after watching Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon (1973), feeling it was the same story. What are your thoughts on originality in cinema? Do you feel as though every film has already been made in one way or another?

WW: At the time, that thought really bothered me - that I was working on a film with that many astonishing similarities, well, basically a man traveling together with a young girl. Luckily, Sam Fuller then took me under his wings and made it obvious to me that I was wrong, that it didn’t take much to turn Alice in the Cities into a film in its own right. Since then, I have come to terms with the fact that each and every film not only has to invent its story from scratch, but also its language and its very identity. (Nonetheless, I’m bothered by the huge amount of remakes or strictly formulated films we see today…)

Yella Rottländer in Alice in the Cities by Wim Wenders

LG: Loneliness and the human experience are themes found in many of your films. In Wings of Desire Damiel wants to become human. In your road movies, you have described some characters as “drifters and searchers looking for something.” What is it that you think these characters are looking for? Do you believe as humans we can ever be totally fulfilled?

WW: Some people might achieve that fulfillment and I wouldn’t dare call it impossible. But for me it doesn’t seem so attractive, to arrive at your final destination, or to come to a lasting conclusion, or to find a total ‘fulfillment’. I see the human condition rather as a transitory state, as being on the way to something. Not ‘on the road to nowhere’, as the song by the Talking Heads goes, but on the road to somewhere, even if that somewhere is not so precisely defined or not even very clear. Being on the way there, for me at least, is desirable, and sometimes a state of bliss.

Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper in The American Friend by Wim Wenders

Sam Neill and Rüdiger Vogler in Until the End of the World - Director’s Cut by Wim Wenders

Wim Wenders

Dylan Solomon Kraus