Wim Wenders: The Hollywood Interview

Filmmaker Wim Wenders.


WIM WENDERS: MILLION DOLLAR BABY
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: The following article appeared in the February 2001 issue of Venice Magazine.

One of the world's most influential and innovative filmmakers, Wim Wenders was born Ernst Wilhelm Wenders August 14, 1945 in Düsseldorf, Germany. The son of a doctor, Wenders was one of the leading directors of the young German cinema of the early 70's, making an astonishing feature debut with The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1971), a moody psychological study of a man losing his mind, which employed three frequent themes that would go on to punctuate much of his later work: alienation, wanderlust, and American pop culture. Having directed nearly 40 films, just a few highlights of Wenders' career include: Kings of the Road (1976), The American Friend (1977), Lightning Over Water (1980) a tribute to his mentor, director Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause), Hammett (1983), Paris, Texas (1984) for which he won the Palme D' Or at Cannes, Tokyo-Ga (1985), Wings of Desire (1987) for which he received Best Director at Cannes, Until the End of the World (1991), Faraway, So Close! (1993), Beyond the Clouds (1995) which he co-directed with the legendary Michelangelo Antonioni, The End of Violence (1997), and the documentary The Buena Vista Social Club (1999).

With such a vast, and diverse filmography to his credit, one never knows what to expect next from Wim Wenders, and his latest, Million Dollar Hotel, certainly serves up the unexpected in spades. The story of disparate characters in a skid row Los Angeles hotel, the story revolves around Jeremy Davies, whose best friend has mysteriously jumped (or been pushed) to his death from the hotel roof. The man's wealthy father brings in the Feds (Mel Gibson) to investigate. Throw into the mix a wild bunch of characters (and actors) played by the likes of Jimmy Smits, Milla Jovovich, Peter Stormare, Bud Cort, Amanda Plummer, Donal Logue and Gloria Stuart, and you have what has to be one of the wildest cinematic rides of the year. Oh, and did we mention that Bono (yes, that Bono of U2 fame) wrote the film's original story?

Wim Wenders sat down with usat his Hollywood Hills production office recently. It was a suitably surrealistic environment with scaffolding covering all the buildings, construction workers pounding away, frazzled-looking office and production workers doing their own thing and in the middle of all the chaos comes Wenders, tall and patrician in his dark suit, exuding an air of European elegance and élan. Much like the angels in Wings of Desire he seemed amused by the frantic activities of the mortals scurrying around him. Without further adieu, a few thoughts from a cinematic immortal...

Tell us about the genesis of Million Dollar Hotel.
Wim Wenders: Years before I got involved, the real moment this movie was born was when U2 shot the video for "Where the Streets Have No Name" here in Los Angeles in the late 80's. They shot it downtown and Bono found the Frontier Hotel, which is the former Million Dollar Hotel. They shot on the roof and he was very taken with the hotel, thought it was the most incredible thing he'd ever seen. He even came back after they were through and started to write a story that would take place in the hotel. (Guitar player) The Edge had a bet with Bono that he could jump from the hotel roof to the next building, which was about a ten foot jump. So the idea of that jump started something in Bono's head, and he shared the story with his screenwriter friend Nicholas Klein, and they worked together on the script. Soon enough, they were looking for a director. Bono said "I know the right guy," although he didn't give it to me saying "I think this is a script you should do," because he knew I'd probably say 'no,' since I've never worked from an existing script. So Bono was very smart and sneaky, came to see me in Berlin and said "I've got this project that I'm in trouble with. We don't know if it's a studio picture or an independent. It would be great if you could help me out and read it and maybe help us choose a director." And that was a very smart approach...and at the end I was about to give him my short list for directors, and Bono didn't want to hear it. He just smiled because he knew I was hooked, and I was. Bono stayed involved all through the process of making the film. He was great.

You got an amazing cast together.
You can say that again. I don't think I've ever gotten such an amazing group together in front of my camera. And not just Jeremy and Milla and Mel, who were great, but the residents of the hotel who were surrounding them. I found this incredible ensemble. I knew from the beginning it had to be an ensemble film because it had from the very beginning a certain resemblance to the ensemble of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Because the hotel's more an asylum more than anything else. For the people really living there it is very much an asylum, with 800 people living there while we shot. We had one floor to ourselves, but the rest, the lobby, the elevators, the staircases, we shared with the residents of the hotel.

Tell us about working with Gloria Stuart (Titanic), who's been around Hollywood almost since sound came in.
That right, since the early 30's. I did not even dare to offer the part to Gloria. I thought of her, but thought I was way out of line. Gloria showed up on her own in the casting office one day, and said she wanted to read for the part. She read and it was obvious she was the one, gave a very funny reading together with Jeremy. I think basically she wanted to be able to say for once to say all the curse words she was never able to say in those old movies! (laughs) She went at it with a vengeance. She was very, very funny.

How was it working with Mel Gibson?
Mel hadn't thought about being in the film originally, but had an option on it to direct himself before I got involved. He's really fabulous in it. We had him for just three weeks and he had to work very, very hard. Usually he works for 30 weeks. He worked his ass off every day. He was fantastic. It really wasn't easy, though. After a few days of shooting he turned and mumbled "This is more difficult than Hamlet." (laughs) And he knew what he was talking about.

Let's talk about your background.
I was born right after the war ended in Germany. My father was a surgeon. We moved quite often, until he became head surgeon at a hospital. Catholic. Middle-class, although the first few years of my life we were very poor. After the war, the lowest paying jobs were assistant jobs...Had heavy-duty American influences in the 50's. The only radio I listened to was the American Forces Network. Rock and roll was the only music I liked.

When did you fall in love with film?
When I was a kid, I inherited an 8mm projector from my father. We were very poor then, had no toys really. So there was just this projector and this little box of film reels, all about one to three minutes long: Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, early Disney. They were my father's films from when he was a kid, they were all scratched up, but were all little treasures, you know? So I was a favorite at all the birthday parties of my friends, with this little hand-cranked projector. I had an 8mm camera when I was 8 or 9 years old, and made movies all through my childhood, but never thought of doing it professionally. I studied medicine, but didn't finish. Then I studied philosophy for a while, and finally went to Paris to become a painter. Then in Paris I discovered the cinematheque, where you could see a movie for 25 cents a show, and they showed the entire history of world cinema. I saw five to six films every day, from German silents to American classics. I saw in one year more than a thousand movies and became totally addicted, and got a crash course in cinema. From then on, painting was over and I wanted to make movies.

Your first feature, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick was an amazing portrait of madness.
That was exactly thirty years ago. I wouldn't know how to do that film today. We were just sort of inventing our own filmmaking techniques as we made it. I was heavily influenced by Hitchcock when I made that film, in terms of how he used film language, his framing, his pacing. Hitchcock was my filmmaking hero then, he and Anthony Mann. Although the content of the film was anything but Hitchcock.

Kings of the Road is both an homage to road movies and one of the best of the genre.
We shot it in chronological order with no script, just an itinerary...I like to find the story and the characters through improvisations and every now and then it's nice to let somebody loose, like Peter Stormare in Million Dollar Hotel, singing "I Am the Walrus." That was all improvised. Peter didn't even play piano and he said to me "Give me a day." The next day at the end of the shoot we had just half an hour left. So we decided to try it. Bud Cort was in the scene, and had nothing to do but sit there and get drunk as his character and listen to Peter sing. At the end of the scene, Bud was so moved that he demanded Peter accept the gift of his gold watch because he said "I've never been in a better scene in my life as an actor." So sometimes through improvisation, you can get things you never dreamed of.

Is casting the most important part of the filmmaking process?
Yeah, very much so. With your casting, I would say 80% of your decisions are made, much more so than by your directing actors on the set.

The American Friend was the first film I ever saw of yours. I didn't realize 'til much later that the Dennis Hopper character was the same "Tom Ripley" character from The Talented Mr. Ripley. That film also featured two legendary directors, with whom you became very close, in supporting roles: Nicholas Ray and Sam Fuller. Tell us about them.
That's how I first met Nick Ray. The script demanded a number of scenes in America. What we did not have in the script is the character in the Patricia Highsmith novel who is the painter of all these paintings. In the book, he's already dead. So I met Nick Ray through a mutual friend in New York, and then again through Dennis. So Nicholas and I wrote the part of the painter in the script almost overnight, and it was a reunion for Nicholas and Dennis. I remember Sam Fuller came into the room, and they met for the first time. That was a great moment to see the two of them shake hands for the first time. Isn't that extraordinary? These two men who were so much alike, both in person and in the sorts of films they made.

Lightning Over Water was a wonderful tribute to Nick Ray, who was dying at the time of its production. What was he like?
Nicholas had wasted a very precious part of his life through drug and alcohol abuse and his career in Hollywood had ended because of that. He was down and out for a number of years, then got himself back together, started to teach acting and filmmaking. He was a great teacher. He regretted, I think, that in the public eye he was regarded as the guy who had failed and ended up in the gutter. He very much wanted to correct that image and was longing to make another movie, and that became, in the end, Lightning Over Water. As we were making it, it became very obvious that he wasn't going to live long enough to finish it. He co-directed with me in the beginning, but then the cancer took over and the script was re-written by his illness. The film then became about his death, and that 's what he wanted in the end: he wanted to die working. Nicholas was one of the greatest men I ever knew, and one of the most youthful. It's no mistake that he discovered James Dean.

What's your favorite Nick Ray movie?
Wind Across the Everglades (1958), which isn't so well known, or maybe The Lusty Men (1952), which we referred to in Lightning Over Water. Of course, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) is a great film, too.

Tell us about Sam Fuller (The Steel Helmet, The Naked Kiss, 40 Guns).
I had the privilege of knowing Sam during the last 30 years of his life, and worked with him as an actor in four of my films. Sam was one of my best friends, and a great adviser, and the greatest storyteller I knew in my life. In the hundreds of hours I spent with him, he never repeated the same story, which is an incredible feat. He could read a script and instantly put his finger on what was wrong. He'd written so many scripts. He told me he wrote whole books in two nights, scripts in a week.

What's your favorite Sam Fuller film?
Probably The Naked Kiss (1964) or Shock Corridor (1963). I also like a lot of his later work, like The Big Red One (1980), which is an extraordinary war film and White Dog (1982), which was so unfairly attacked. If you ever needed help or advice from Sam, all you had to do was knock on his door. He was a great guy.

Tell us about what happened with Hammett, which was a troubled production.
Francis Coppola, who was the producer, and I went through some hard times during the production, which lasted four years. We went through about 40 drafts of the script with four writers. I shot the film twice. First, I shot it on location mostly, in San Francisco, and in the course of shooting did change a lot of the script and in the end, was suggesting a very different film than the one we'd set out to do, but which made sense based on all the changes I'd made. Francis wasn't so sure about the whole thing, but I made it the same way I made The American Friend, and the rest of my films: based largely on intuition and changes that I made during the shoot. So we had one last scene left to shoot, and Francis wasn't sure that was the ending the studio would accept, we were shooting for Orion at the time. So he wanted to wait to shoot the ending until after we edited it. He said "If you can convince me based on your cut that this is the right ending for this picture, then we'll shoot it." So I went and edited it, and when I showed it to him, everyone realized that it was more about a writer than a detective story, which is what people thought it was about. So they wanted more action in it, and basically demanded a total re-shoot. I had to wait another year to shoot the new ending and everything else that went with it because Frederic Forrest, who played the lead, had gained so much weight for One From the Heart (1982), that we had to wait another year for him to slim down again so he'd match what he looked like before. In the end, we wound up re-shooting almost all of it, and only about 10% of the original remained. All the other parts were re-cast for the second version as well, new crew, all down the line. Two different films.

What did you take away from it all?
Well, the amazing thing was that Francis and I stuck by each other and ended up having a great deal of respect for one another. And just the fact that we finished it, I think, was a tremendous achievement. I think of all my films, it's the least personal, but I still think it's a good film. Contrary to many stories out there, Francis did not take the film away from me and re-shoot it himself. He didn't do a single shot himself.

Tell us about the genesis of Wings of Desire.
I had been away from Germany for eight years. After Hammett, it was time to go home. I was rediscovering my own country, so to speak. It's a film that's very much about how I connect with Germany and my childhood. It was made without a script, with lots of notes, and one big wall full of ideas. It was made very much the way you would write a poem. It was very much made on instinct, and really doesn't have much plot to speak of, if you think about it. I did it with a great old French cinematographer called Henri Alekan who was 80 years-old at the time, and really put his stamp on it.

You worked with Antonioni on Beyond the Clouds. How was that?
It was a very wonderful and strange experience because he had a stroke ten years before the film and had lost his ability to speak, but not at all his intelligence or his mind. He was as sharp as ever. He was never able to put a film together after that, because the insurance companies figured a director who couldn't speak was too big a risk. So finally, the only way he could make a film was with a stand-by director. He approached me, and I agreed. They came up with a concept of Michelangelo shooting four episodes of the film, and I would be his assistant and the stand-by director in case he couldn't do it. Afterwards I was to do a framework that would tie these four stories together. Well, from day one, Michelangelo proved that a lack of speech was no handicap for him at all. I didn't have to step in once. I was really more of a first assistant director, a voice and an organizer. It was an amazing thing to see a director who can't speak insisting on what he wanted, and getting it!

Any advice for first-time directors?
I think the hardest thing, and it's getting harder, is to have a vision and see it through to the end. It sometimes takes years now before you get to make a film. It's difficult today not to drop the ball with all the pressure and expectations that are placed on young filmmakers today. It's hard with all that to sometimes hold onto the ball, and see their vision through. At the end they don't know why they want to make it anymore, because there are so many elements. So make sure you know why you want to make it, and try like hell to hold onto that ball while you do.