“This is a round table? Where’s the table?”
On that disarming note, renowned German director Wim Wenders began a discussion with a group of Indian filmmakers on Friday in Mumbai. The wide-ranging conversation, one of several events planned during Wenders’s first ever tour of India, shed invaluable insights into Wenders’s creative process.
The guests included filmmakers and cinematographers from across the spectrum of Indian cinema. Payal Kapadia, Sriram Raghavan, Lijo Jose Pellissery, Rima Das, Dev Benegal, Aamir Bashir, Nikkhil Advani, Piyush Shah, Kiran Rao, Nandita Das, KU Mohanan, Shonali Bose, Kartik Vijay, Dibakar Banerjee, Vikramaditya Motwane and Amole Gupte were among those who sat in an oblong formation at the IFBE cultural centre in Mumbai, lobbing questions and encomiums at Wenders.
The 79-year-old filmmaker is touring five Indian cities with 18 features and documentaries that he has chosen himself. The event has been organised by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s Film Heritage Foundation, in association with the Wim Wenders Foundation and the Goethe Institut.
The retrospective includes films that rank as classics of world cinema – Alice in the Cities, Kings of the Road, Wings of Desire, The American Friend, Buena Vista Social Club and Paris, Texas. One of the most reputed filmmakers to emerge out of Germany, Wenders is especially celebrated for his metaphysical road movies.
The screenings kicked off on February 5 in Mumbai with Wings of Desire. Wenders will be in India until February 23, during which time he will also visit Pune, Thiruvananthapuram, Kolkata and Delhi. His recent documentaries Pina and Anselm are being shown in 3D. Wenders’s 2023 feature, the Japanese-language Perfect Days, is also part of the package.
The conversation between Wenders and the Indian directors ranged from specific queries about the use of certain motifs or elements in his films to a broader understanding of what it means to pursue an independent approach in the age of the algorithm. Wenders patiently and extensively replied to questions about his craft that also reflected the concerns of his local interlocutors.
Vidhu Vinod Chopra set the ball rolling by asking Wenders about his well-documented fascination for Japanese culture, particularly the films of Yasujiro Ozu. Wenders’s interest in Ozu, whose intimate family dramas popularised innovations in cinematography and editing, was directly reflected in the documentary Tokyo-Ga (1985) and indirectly in Perfect Days.
Wenders earned a filmmaking degree from the University of Television and Film Munich, making his first feature, Summer in the City, in 1970. His formative years were marked by a heavy exposure to American cinema, but that changed when he watched Ozu’s films, he said.
“My relationship with Japanese culture started in the mid-70s, when I was very much influenced by American cinema and American auteurs,” Wenders said at the IFBE event. “I saw for the first time in my life three films in a row by a Japanese filmmaker I had never heard of – Yasujiro Ozu was his name. It transcended anything I had ever seen. I was so impressed that I went to Japan for the first time for the sole purpose of seeing more films by this man.”
Wenders called Ozu his “declared master”, adding that the Perfect Days protagonist Hirayama, played indelibly by Koji Yakusho, is named after the main family in Ozu’s masterpiece Tokyo Story (1953).
More than Ozu, American cinema, particularly the Western genre, has been the greatest influence on Wenders. He spoke at length about his preoccupation with depopulated American landscapes, the figure of the questing hero based on the lone cowboy, and the recurrence of the road as both a stylistic device and a metaphor for personal journeys.
Hollywood productions were prominent during Wenders’s formative years in the 1950s and 1960s, he said. His own films, especially Paris, Texas (1984), contain some of the most evocative instances of typical American phenomena – wide highways, journeys in cars from one small town to the next, motels and billboards, itinerant heroes, Blues music.
“The American West was a huge attraction to me,” Wenders acknowledged. “It was part of the American culture that had been a failed experiment. These little towns with their gas stations and motels were remnants of an America that had been abandoned by Americans, and which could I occupy with my own imagination.”
In the road movie, Wenders found the best possible outlet for stories that, while unfolding in chronological order, were loosely structured and freed from schematic storytelling.
“This [American] landscape was where I could explore myself,” Wenders said. “I went to Hollywood thinking that it would enlarge my life, but it didn’t. It was painful – it was a useless time in a strange way. But I learnt more about myself staying in America than if I had been at home. I learnt to accept that I was German in America. I realised that I would rather make small movies and work in a system where cinema wasn’t a product.”
One of Wenders’s earliest breakthroughs was the road movie trilogy, comprising Alice in the Cities (1974), The Wrong Move (1975) and Kings of the Road (1976). “The road is in itself a story,” Wenders observed. “The road movies and the time I spent on the road were important in my life as a way to come to terms with storytelling, a sense of responsibility towards the truth of the story more than its dramaturgy.”
Movies such as Kings of the Road and Wings of Desire (1987) imaginatively harness the tropes of American cinema for stories set in what was then East Germany and West Germany. In Kings of the Road, two men travel along the length of the Wall that used to bisect Berlin from 1961 to 1989, meeting several characters while attending to decrepit movie theatres.
“As the young men travel along the border, they see signposts of American culture since American soldiers were watching the border,” Wenders explained while responding to a question by Harud filmmaker Aamir Bashir on the colonising effects of American cinema. “My generation was slowly coming to terms with the colonisation of our minds. Who are we and what are we doing here and what is this country we are living in – we had this huge image of America over us, but we were also facing a reality of a country [East Germany] that was involved with the Cold War.”
Wings of Desire, about two angels watching over Berlin, is understood to be a metaphor for the Wall. In response to a question by Sooni Taraporevala, Wenders spoke about his frustration at not being able to include more than a few shots of East Germany, which was mostly out of bounds for West German filmmakers at the time.
Wenders narrated his experience with an East German official who had the authority to grant shooting permissions. The official was perturbed to learn that Wings of Desire had angels who were not only invisible to the human eye, but could also pass through built surfaces, including the Wall.
Did Wenders believe that angels exist? Not literally, but there are “invisible angels” who step in to bail out a beleaguered production or make the impossible possible, Wenders said.
Wenders’s lasting influence on filmmakers, photographers and music video directors is largely because of his lengthy association with the brilliant Dutch cinematographer Robby Muller. Wenders met Muller when he was studying filmmaking in the late 1960s.
“In my second year as a film student, I was hired as an extra on an American movie being made in Munich,” Wenders recalled. “The director had a young assistant who was the focus puller. He was pulling focus with one hand and rolling a cigarette with another hand.”
That was Robby Muller. “We worked together for more than 20 years, and we were like twins,” Wenders said. “He was adventurous, he never stood still. He knew a lot about Dutch painters. He was a master of light and colour.”
Although Wenders’s films are celebrated for their technical virtuosity, especially in image making, he evolved to privilege meaning over visual beauty, he said.
“When I was a young filmmaker, I very much thought that it was my duty to produce beautiful shots,” Wenders said. “I reluctantly started taking away those beautiful shots – if you produce too many of them, you risk not making the film. Now if someone says that my film is good-looking, it means I have failed.”
Some portions of the discussion revolved around filmmaking hacks. On dealing with actors, Wenders said, “Some actors are so much better when you don’t tell them anything, while others get better when you prompt them. If you are ready to question yourself, it’s an amazing process.”
Asked by Rima Das about maintaining creative control, Wenders stressed the importance of being closely involved with budgets – a trick he picked up while working in Hollywood as an assistant and later as director of the troubled production Hammet (1982).
“If you have knowledge of a film’s budget, you are in control of what you do,” Wenders asserted. “If you are not also your own bookkeeper and your own lawyer and your own travel agent, if you don’t have an idea of how much money is being spent and what money can do, you are not getting the best out of yourself. Your ideas are somehow floating around and they lack precision. As much as it is a nuisance to read contracts, it is good to maintain the freedom of ideas and to know what you can put on the screen. It is very healthy to get involved in all department.”
To points raised by Amole Gupte – about the future of cinema at a time when a film can be made on a cellphone “like making tea” – and Nandita Das, about the prospects of independent cinema – Wenders was cautiously optimistic.
“We are in the digital age where everything becomes a product or content that is consumable,” Wenders observed. “Understanding the world today has become increasingly difficult – channels determine how we do our work, function and communicate. We are less free than any generation before us. We are in structures that don’t respect expression. They respect information, not communication.”
He spoke of the difficulty in finding freelancers for his productions, since nearly everybody is “working for Netflix or Prime Video or Apple TV+”. He expressed his gratitude at having begun his career in the analogue age.
“Independence is no longer needed – the structures that govern our world are more and more abstract and are driven by algorithms,” he said. “Independence is something you have to want and stand up for.”
Yet, there is scope for hope, Wenders asserted. “Hope is an amazing driving force – it is something that an atheist and a religious person share,” he said. “Hope is an entity that can give depth. It enables you to not be fake. What you can hope for, nobody can take away from you. Hope gives soul to whatever you do.”
