Don't Come Knocking (2005)
Interview with Wim Wenders
Wim Wenders
German director Wim Wenders was awarded with a Leopard of Honour at the Locarno Filmfestival 2005. His newest film Don't come Knocking celebrated world premiere in Cannes already but since it was shown on a Saturday on the town's main square, the Piazza Grande with the largest open-air screen in Europe, it was watched by more than 7000 people that night.
OutNow.CH met the legendary filmmaker on the next day in a five-star hotel in Ascona to which our trip was almost as crazy as Howard's life changing journey to find his lost children in Don't come Knocking. After some minutes of "Waiting for Wim" in the hotel's herb garden we were granted time with the director behind the hotel's complex. We guess the live band playing classic big band sound by the pool would have disturbed any serious recording of the director's words any place else in the hotel. But alas - the wind blew very strong with no harm done to the director's hair style but there were some concerns on the other journalist's faces when looking at their Mini Disk recorders. It turned out to be no problem for OutNow.CH. Wenders talked so slowly he was still still perfectly understandable even when the tape was played with twice the speed while typing up the interview afterwards.
OutNow.CH (ON): You said in 1984 after Paris, Texas that for the first time in your life what you saw on the screen was exactly what you had in mind before. Can you say the same thing about Don't come Knocking?
Wim Wenders (WW): With Paris, Texas I had started the film with an unfinished script. Sam Shepard was supposed to be with me when we made the film, but he wasn't. With Don't come Knocking Sam and I have worked for so long that the script was really immaculate when we started shooting. It was a very elaborated script. In a way you could say that the film was even more thought through and structured than anything I did before. It was very much the film Sam and I wanted to make. All the other films I made over the last view years where done from the stir of a moment. Land of Plenty was shot in some weeks. Over all those films - also Soul of a Man - we had continuously worked on the script. It had taken us three and a half years. The film was almost like a good wine when we finally sat down to make it.
ON: How much of Sam Shepard is in Howard?
Howard the Coward?
WW: Sam is only a little like Howard. He's very independent. He likes horses. He is not much into technology. He still writes on an old typewriter. But Sam has a great sense of family. His children mean more to his life than anything. We knew when we wrote Howard that he was hopeless. We had a distance to him from the first scene on. We knew that Sam as an actor would have to work to make Howard appear. We had to rely on other characters to be strong since Howard was so weak. Especially the woman had to be strong. That's why the casting of the three women in his life was so important. Especially his daughter Sky was such a crucial character. She is the one that manages to turn Howard around and give his life a new direction. When I saw Sarah Polley for the first time I knew she would be it.
ON: Could you say that the American landscape is almost a character for itself in the movie?
WW: The American West is a very powerful place. I don't know any other place in the world that adds so much to the story. As soon as you put your camera and your people in front of these places the story becomes bigger than life of its own. Of course we could have told the story some place else. The lost father is a universal story. But the American West belongs to everybody. It is almost a landscape outside of America. The young boy in Japan could probably as much identify with it as a young boy in Germany like myself when I saw the first western movie and I read the books from Karl May, who wrote more then sixty books about the American West although he never left Germany. I felt the American West belonged to me as well, because I knew all the people who had discovered and explored it. They were Germans and French and Scandinavians. I knew when I was very little already, that Americans didn't exist. Americans were just people that arrived in America. It was us. That West belonged to me.
ON: You seem to have a very close relationship to the town Butte in Montana. Did that change in any way when you had finished the movie?
WW: I feel even closer to Butte now than I did before. I felt very much responsible for it because I have discovered it 25 years ago. I wanted to make a film there already a quarter of a century before. I continued to come back and photographed it. I had the feeling I owned it somehow. Nobody knew this city. Each time I asked the people jealously if anybody wanted to make a film there. But they said nobody wanted to come here. So I felt relieved. Now that I finally shot there I almost feel responsible. For instance we managed to open up the M&M coffee shop again that was closed. I had breakfast there 20 times over the years. When we finally came there before we started shooting it was closed for the first time in a hundred years. Nothing had changed inside but it was sold and the new owner closed it. We thought it was a scandal, so we managed to convince the owner to let us clean it up again. He liked it so much that he opened it again and now it is very successful. We have our share in the making of that success. I really hope Butte will become more lively again. It has an amazing history. It is a very liberal little town in a very right-wing conservative state. Unions where founded in Butte. It has its history of strikes and working class movements. It's a unique place. I hope Americans wills start to recognize that. They have very little respect for their own history.
ON: How do you explain that?
WW: I don't know. In American lives everybody gets used to the fact, that everything needs to make profit. And the history doesn't make profit unless you make it a theme park and sell tickets for it. They forgot some of their most precious treasures. The Blues for instance would have been forgotten if it hadn't been for a number of film makers who just in time when some of these people were still alive made a film about them.
ON: Do you consider the probability of making profits before you make a movie?
WW: That is a good new approach. I will have to think about this in the future. (laughs). No. I've never made movies with the idea of making money. I make movies because I'm a storyteller and because I like landscapes and characters and because I want to find out something that is essential and necessary to tell in a certain place. If a lot of other people would like to see it the better for me, but that's not why I make a movie. I am not an industrial filmmaker.
He.... is.... a.... german.... Director.
ON: Do you think the Americans understand you when you go to America and do the kind of movie like Don't come Knocking?
WW: Americans yes. But I doubt that the American critics can. When we made Paris, Texas they all wrote, we don't need these European filmmakers to tell us how we live. We know better ourselves. This was the basic tone. Americans don't like to be observed and described. They like to do that themselves with everybody else but they don't want people to put the mirror in front of them.
ON: Are your two last movies sort of a description of American Society today?
WW: If you see the two films combined you see that there is a vacuum in this country and that the country is about to implode politically and culturally because of this void inside.
ON: Could Europe be the answer to that emptiness?
WW: No. Europe has a whole different traditional culture. In Europe we always had neighbours and boarders and languages. There's local colours and a culture of dialogue that America never had.
ON: Speaking of that local colour in Europe. Did you actually ever comment on the Hollywood remake of Der Himmel über Berlin City of Angels?
WW: It wasn't such a bad movie. It could have been much worse. I thought the actors where good. It was amazing how my film that didn't really have a story was turned into something that had nothing but story. The story of City of Angels is driving this movie recklessly. A lot of things happen. In my film nothing happens. That's why I sold them the rights for the remake. They offered me money for the rights of a story that I've never even wrote. I said yes and thought they were crazy.
ON: Once you made a commercial for the Swiss cigarette brand Parisienne. What made you agree on doing that?
What he did with his 'Carte Blanche'...
WW: It was the only commercial I was ever offered that had "Carte Blanche". They said we don't want to know what you make. David Lynch and Godard and all these filmmakers made a little movie of one minute. It's not even important that the people smoke. I thought that was interesting. You never get to do commercials where they say: here's a little budget you can do with it what you want and you can show it to us at the end. Beautiful. That was the only time I was offered such a job.
ON: So you had perfect conditions?
WW: Yeah. And you can only do it once because the next one went to the Coen Brothers.
