'I Wouldn’t Want To Be A Young Person Today': Wim Wenders on Cinema, Alienation, and The Ruined Reputation of 3D

As a journalist, when you ask questions expecting clarity, desiring people to make neat, deep impressions with their feet as they walk, what Wim Wenders offers is floatation. His answers, like his films, have no center. They are, as film writer Alexander Graf notes in The Celluloid Highway, “de-centered narratives” — “Wenders uses objects as unimportant to narrative development in order to draw attention away from the progression of the story and to the wider, visual environment.” In a film about a man who commits a murder and then goes back to his village and lives out his days in langour, without a trace of tension — The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty (1972) — onwards, he decided to keep a second camera to shoot objects, say an apple, unrelated to the story, “an imaginary film … a parallel film, a film of objects, no story”. Wenders calls this the “art cassette”, and he used that as inserts within his film. 

In a conversation post the screening of the 4K restored Wings of Desire (1987) — which opened his multi-city retrospective tour organised by Film Heritage Foundation along with the Wim Wenders Foundation — Wenders was asked about working with Claire Denis, who was as an assistant on this film.

Wenders did not immediately reach out to adjectives — “great” “comfortable”, etc. Instead, he began his fragmented storytelling, beginning with Paris, Texas (1984) being a German-French co-production, and that requiring a certain proportion of French presence on set, which he did not have at the time. What carted the French Denis onto his set was a logistical formality. He described the first time he saw her, getting off a plane — back then you could walk up to the tarmac and wait. Another image builds in our heads. He describes the first thoughts that came to his head as she disembarked — how will such a tiny woman keep my set on its toes, what with all the Texan men. He also joked about how, as the film began shooting, all his inhibitions melted away. His story moves in different directions — Denis’ desire to make a debut feature only after Wenders shoots another film after Paris, Texas; Wenders feeling lost after the success of Paris, Texas, not making another film for three years until Wings of Desire happened; them coming together again. The answer never arrives — if that is what you are waiting for. It is always arriving.  

Also Read | Filmmaker Wim Wenders To Visit India For Landmark Retrospective Tour

His answer demands something more from the question, sometimes by skirting it, sometimes by sharpening it, rarely, by sticking to it. He sometimes makes a question better by answering it — when asked how he would shoot his own memoir, given his aesthetic of lingering, he speaks, instead, of the desire to linger as both form and meaning; he speaks of his wife who “loves to linger”, he jokes, before adding, “she taught me to linger”. His films have a similar relationship to clarity — he arrives at it by evading it. 

In this interview, edited for length and clarity, Wenders speaks discursively, thoughtfully, poignantly about his journey as a filmmaker, alienation, and the use of technology to “see” more. 

A retrospective offers you a chance to look back. You made your first film in 1970 as a film student. 55 years later, what is your relationship to your filmography? Nostalgia?

It is not nostalgia. While restoring the films, yes, I remembered the man I was and the circumstances I was in, but now presenting it is a moment in the present tense — I am doing it because I want to meet people, talk to the audience. It is about being here, today, in India. Meeting the film in the restoration process — scanning, grading, mixing — though was sometimes difficult. 

Difficult, because of the materiality of the process or emotionally? 

Emotionally. If you restore something, you are not allowed to change anything. Quite often, I wish I could have improved something. But the restoration process is an ethical process. You are not redoing it but revisiting it. 

I did find my early films excruciatingly slow. I wish I could speed them up. But that is that. 

Is there distance between that film and you — any disenchantment? 

No. I recognise myself, that young man who is doing these movies. I realise it was a moment of innocence. My filmmaking was based on my knowledge of the history of cinema; not any practical experience. I was never an assistant to anybody, and was never on a film set before I made my own movie. [In his Masterclass, he will note, the only time he ever assisted someone is Michelangelo Antonioni in Beyond the Clouds (1995), where he was the link between Antonioni’s fading health and the crew.]

Making movies was an invention process, then. It was not trying to recreate something I had seen — it was a total invention. 

Even the profession of a “filmmaker” was a total invention. I did not dare to call myself a filmmaker for years. I thought it was so pretentious — what does it even mean? I always wrote “painter” or “writer”. Then I met a few directors —  Nicholas Ray — and I realized they were of the same breed. Not following any image. They also learned from scratch. 

You cannot rely on experience to make films. I never made a film based on my own experience. A film is something you have to find how to do from scratch. If you make a film from your experience it is a form of betrayal to what the film wants — it wants to be the first.

Also Read | Boman Irani On Parenting, Relationships, And Turning Director With 'The Mehta Boys'

What about the desire to memorialise yourself through your cinema? 

I do not have that desire. I have a desire for my films to continue living. They are their own entity — almost its own prison.

Prison? 

Person! Its own person. It has its identity, it has its life. Maybe because I always treated my films like they were my children. So they have a right to grow up.

And then I’m not telling them anything anymore. They have to fend for themselves. And they can do it. Especially if they’re restored. If they only exist as prints, they are pretty fragile and lost. But if they exist as a restored film, they have to face the future. They survive me, like any child.

What did you mean by innocence? 

The filmmaking process was linked to writing, it was linked to photography. It was linked a little bit to theater. It was linked to all the arts I like. 

But it was also something that was done in the moment. And each moment that the camera is running was almost a wholly unique moment.

And it was amazing that shooting it, I could then watch it again. So I was always in awe of the procedure. And I always felt it was such a privilege that I could produce something or create something or invent something, that then could be used again and edited. 

I never saw myself in the context of film history. I always felt I was doing something in the spur of a moment. And that I had to do justice to what was in front of me — the light and the people and the places.

And that is the filmmaking process. I worked like that for 50 years, and I only succeeded for the first time in Perfect Days (2023) — it is almost like I have rehearsed for 50 years to get there. I didn’t know I was still rehearsing. 

Also Read | Siddharth Roy Kapur On Bollywood's 'Unhealthy' Box-Office Trends and Why 'Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham' Is A 'Mass' Film

So that innocence never left? 

No, if you lose innocence, you lose your creativity or you lose the impetus to do anything. Innocence is really the opposite of experience.

And if you work from experience, then you can just make cars. Because you need experience to make a car. You don't need innocence to make a car.

A film is not a car. 

Amit Chaudhuri, an Indian writer, was talking about this distinction, and he said that people always think that experience comes after innocence — or as you said it is its opposite. But what if, he asks, it is innocence that comes after experience — what if it is something you arrive at having experienced, like you did with Perfect Days?

Thank you. It’s exactly the right order. And I had the best possible help of my actor, Kōji Hashimoto, who is also, you could say, an experienced actor. But he let go of that experience. 

In the fictional context, it is difficult to do something without rehearsal. But sometimes you can do it if you work with people you are familiar with and they know your approach.

But with him, on the second or third day, we gave up rehearsing because he understood that he could make it happen or it happened even if he didn’t realise it. I had the same feeling that if you just shot as if it was a documentary that it could happen — the gifted present could happen. He had the courage to do it and I had the desire to do it. And so it became that gift all the way through. 

Also Read | Sooraj Barjatya On Bringing Rajshri's Values to OTT Platforms, and Cracking a New Story for Salman Khan

I want to bring up three films of yours — Wings of Desire, Paris, Texas and Perfect Days. All three films, like most of your films, have this deep strain of alienation running through them. But for some reason, there’s something culturally specific to the alienations you’ve produced in a European film, in a film set in America, in a film in Japan. In Paris, Texas, the alienation was debilitating. The one in Perfect Days was affirming, while Wings of Desire was a more coherent, matter of fact. Do you think that alienation is culturally specific or was it just who you were at the time of making these films? 

I think alienation is specific to the cultural moment when it happens —  in Europe or anywhere in the world. Alienation is not a constant thing. It evolves. 

The amount of alienation I witness today — the digital age is 10 times more terrifying than anything I’ve ever witnessed before in my life. But I’m an old man and I’m not terrified for myself. I’m terrified for people and for the world. I wouldn’t want to be a young person today. 

So I witnessed alienation in a different way in Wings of Desire than in Paris, Texas, certainly in Perfect Days. 

Place is something that can give security to people and it can destabilise them, too. The American West, I felt, was a very destabilising place. The island of West Berlin was a unique place in history and in time where people had a great sense of identity because they were so protected on that little island. It was a place where you could feel history more than anywhere else and see the wounds of history. But people were not that destabilised. 

You started off as a painter, you moved to photography, then cinema, then theater, and now 3D. As you move from one form to the other, is it the inadequacy of the previous form that you’re trying to get rid of? Or is there something more that you’re searching for with each new form? 

I always felt I was very lucky that I lived in that transition from the good old film age, where celluloid and negative was the only thing that was there to produce the image. As a photographer and as a filmmaker, when I started, I was able to work with people who had worked at the beginning of cinema in the silent ages. 

So I was able to still feel the beginning and then move into the digital age and find out how to work in three dimensional space. Because 3D is a space phenomenon — in 3D you see much more, because our brain is activated in areas that don’t even work if you see a flat image. 3D involves every person much more. So, if you see a film in 3D, your attention is magnified, but what you’re given in 3D today is underestimating your capacity, so to speak. 

3D is an incredibly realistic and poetic medium. But it is never used as that. It’s used as the opposite. It’s used as an action medium, really. That is the drama and tragedy of this medium, because it is young, but it is already ruined. I made a few films in 3D now trying to reestablish its reputation as a meaningful way to see much more than ever before.

Also Read | ‘Bad Girl’ Filmmaker Varsha Bharath and Actor Anjali Sivaraman Address Backlash: ‘Surprising That People Have Such A Huge Problem With It...’

The word that often keeps coming up with respect to your films is “gentle”. Is there a way that gentleness can be fetishised in cinema? 

Gentleness escapes fetishising gentleness. If it is fetishised, it is no longer gentle.

This multi-city retrospective is a road trip, essentially of your films, not just of you. Is this a prelude to cinema? Are there working sketches for a possible movie? 

Always! All my films came out of such first encounters.

But you can’t force it. You can’t want it to happen. It is my first day today. I saw a few roads. It is too early.  But some of my favorite cities come to mind. I love Havana and I love Palermo and now, Mumbai.

All seaside? 

I love harbour towns. I love movies that are chaotic. I love cities that are chaotic. I got my dose of that today.