Peering through his small blue spectacles, Wim Wenders looms in owlish close-up on the screen from his suite at the Sunset Marquis, the very rockstar hotel in West Hollywood. It might seem odd that the veteran German director, whose films include Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire and Buena Vista Social Club – and whose latest, Perfect Days, is a very modest, very delightful film about a dutiful Japanese ablutions cleaner – is ensconced deep in luxury La-La Land.
But he’s there on a campaign. The new film is on the Oscar shortlist of 15 for Best International Feature after the Japanese awards committee named it as the country’s entry. Yes, Wenders was surprised when he got the news. He thinks it’s due to the high regard in which his leading man Kōji Yakusho is held in Japan, especially after his best actor award at Cannes last year for his expressive, minimal-dialogue performance.
So, Herr Wenders and Yakusho-san are in Tinseltown with a translator to drum up votes for a nomination. In the charm offensive, Wenders says he’s playing second fiddle to the man he calls the greatest actor in the world. “I’m just his German director sidekick.”
The Oscar category they are vying for was previously “Best Foreign Language Film”. What a pity, the Listener suggests, there isn’t one for “best foreign language film in which the language is foreign, even to the film’s director”.
“That category I would win,” he replies, laughing.
Talking to the dry-witted godfather of European cinema about his low-budget Japanese film while he’s at Hollywood ground zero might seem incongruous. But Los Angeles – and indeed America – once loomed large in the 78-year-old’s wanderlust career.
Düsseldorf-born, now Berlin resident Wenders is a former Angeleno. He headed to Los Angeles having made his name in the New German Cinema of the 1970s with his Road Movie Trilogy. He followed those with The American Friend, his adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game, starring Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper.
He was hired by Francis Ford Coppola to direct Hammett, a fictional noir film about the detective writer. It ended up deep in a studio bin but Wenders went back to America and made Paris, Texas, his brooding, bluesy Palme d’Or winner, which is possibly the most influential art film of the 1980s. Today, any rancour he has with Los Angeles isn’t about failing to succeed in Hollywood. It’s because someone stole his guitars there.
“Yeah, I had a beautiful Stratocaster,” he says, after noticing some instruments in this writer’s home office. “I was just learning how to play guitar and I had a beautiful dobro, too. It was the first time I was in Hollywood when I lived there in the late 70s. One night I came home, and all my guitars had been stolen. I was so pissed that I never touched one again.”
Still, there’s been plenty of guitar in his films. Yes, Perfect Days is named after the singular Lou Reed song. It appears on a soundtrack based on the lead character’s cassette collection – which becomes its own analog tech subplot – of classics by the Animals, Kinks, Rolling Stones and Patti Smith.
Reed appeared as himself in two Wenders movies. The director’s best-known musical associations have been with Ry Cooder, whose slide guitar haunted the Paris, Texas soundtrack among others, and was behind the Buena Vista Social Club recording which led to the hit doco. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds appeared in their Berlin-period ravaged pomp in Wings of Desire; and U2, with whom he traded video-directing for songs for his films. As well, Bono is credited on the director’s LA-set The Million Dollar Hotel.
That film, starring Mel Gibson, sank into oblivion. So have most of Wenders’ drama features since the mid 1990s. Meanwhile, his artist documentaries such as Buena Vista, Pina, and The Salt of the Earth, have won him Oscar nominations. Perfect Days is finding acclaim and an audience after a drama fallow period.
“Well, you can never know and that’s a good thing. If the American movies knew what connects and what doesn’t connect, they would only produce blockbusters. Luckily, they do produce stuff that doesn’t work either.
“Sometimes a movie works – like Barbie, which they didn’t even believe in in the first place – so I think it’s a good thing. I’ve made, like, 50 movies and some of them connected and some of them didn’t. Some of them connected much later. It’s also that movies have to be at a certain moment in people’s lives … and they have to come out at the right moment. Buena Vista Social Club came out at the right moment, and I think Perfect Days also came out at the right moment.
“Perfect Days hits a nerve right now. It’s good if it happens and if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t make it a bad movie.”
Yes, if Wenders’ drama film career was in the toilet, its reprieve came from there, too. The film about Yakusho’s janitor Hirayama started out as a documentary proposal. Wenders was invited to make a series of four short films on the prominent architects behind the Tokyo Toilet Project, a set of 17 extravagantly designed, hi-tech public loos in the capital’s flashy Shibuya district.
Instead, he saw the potential of a story about something specifically Japanese he had noticed on past visits. Wenders first went to Japan in the early 1980s when he made Tokyo-Ga, his documentary about his favourite director, pioneering film-maker Yasujirō Ozu.
“I didn’t think I was ever going to make a movie including toilets, but I saw the pictures and I saw there was something really interesting in there because it represented a certain sense that exists in Japan – there was so much respect for what they owned in common by people, their parks and cemeteries but also their toilets.”
“I said, ‘Come on, instead of doing four short subjects in 16 days, let me tell a story. Let me tell you a real film and the toilets will appear in them because they are lovely. And the story should deal with the caretaker who’s responsible for them and who represents this very pronounced Japanese sense of service, a common good and responsibility for everything that is owned by everybody together.’
“I thought I talked myself out of the job.”
But the response was positive. All that Wenders says was needed was a script and an actor to carry the film. Wenders wrote a one-page treatment. Yakusho saw it and signed on.
His Hirayama lives a simple single life of gentle habits in his backstreets apartment. You might wonder if he’s a latter-day angel like the ones in Wings of Desire. He is kind to lost children, reads one second-hand book a week (mostly 20th-century American fiction by William Faulkner and Patricia Highsmith), dutifully waters his plants, takes photos on his film camera in the park, regularly visits his local bathhouse and ramen shops, where the owners warmly greet their taciturn regular customer. It’s a very zen film.
“He is very particular with the way he consumes things and having reduced his life to the essentials, it makes him a very free and very happy man.”
The only challenge to Hirayama’s quiet equilibrium and his dedication to his job is a teenage niece who has run away from home and a young colleague who doesn’t share his work ethic and wants to flog his valuable 1970s cassettes.
Unsurprisingly, Wenders is a fan of ye olde analogue music formats. “If you can do a compilation tape, that is a precious thing because you can tell a real story, you can really give somebody something. You can tell something about yourself, and the playlist is anonymous. You’re your own logarithm.”
Wenders smiles when the Listener suggests he’s been his own logarithm for quite some time. But if there has been a camera development in his time, he has embraced it. He has had gallery exhibitions of his Polaroids. His recent artist documentaries like Pina – about the late German choreographer Pina Bausch – have been delivered in digital 3D. When it comes to 3D, Wenders is the James Cameron of the arthouse.
“I’ve done my share of 3D films. I love the medium because it allows you to see so much more, and it allows the audience into a certain place and really have them be there.”
So has Anselm, his 2023 documentary, which also screened at Cannes and at the NZIFF about confrontational German artist Anselm Kiefer and his grand-scale works – many about Germany’s fascist history – housed across his own town-sized studio in France. Wenders made Perfect Days in breaks on the complicated post-production work for Anselm.
“In order to take in Anselm’s work, which is really gigantic, I needed the tool of 3D to take people into his universe.”
It’s a challenging film about – and by – a challenging artist.
“Anselm’s reputation in Germany is very ambiguous because a lot of people resent the way he represented German history and the way he created a discussion on Germany’s past. He’s asking people to not forget and not pretend that fascism and the Third Reich didn’t happen. His whole art is a fight against forgetting.”
Both movies feature guys handy with a brush. But it’s the simple life of Perfect Days that has given Wenders a late-career spotlight at a time when cinema, it could be argued, is going the way of the cassette. “Digital cinema has changed the nature of film-making drastically; it is now changing the nature of distribution. In the pandemic, billions of people got used to the fact that cinema was something they had at home and now, after the pandemic, theatres are fighting to get these audiences back. It’s in an interesting transition process and it’s still not quite decided what cinema will be.
“I think it’s important that the young generation understands the institution of being in a place with many other people to see a film together in a crowd and what sort of an experience that is – and how that is life-changing, as opposed to seeing everything on your own little monitor. The fight for what cinema will be in the future is being fought right now.”
A real ear-Wender
Given the length, depth and breadth of his film career, Wim Wenders has some stories to tell. Here’s some he told the Listener.
On getting the rights to Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game, which became The American Friend, in 1974, after the writer with the merciless reputation took pity on the young film-maker. There’s an amusing Highsmith reference in his new Perfect Days.
“I loved Patricia Highsmith and I would have given my right arm to do a film on any of her books. I drove to visit her in Switzerland – she actually gave me time – where she lived alone in a house with lots of cats. I said, ‘I want to make a movie of my favourite book, The Tremor of Forgery’, and she said, ‘Oh, young man. Sorry, but this book has been optioned by American studios, you cannot have that.’ And I said, ‘Well, then let’s use The Cry of the Owl, which I love just as much.
“And she smiled and said, ‘Sorry, young man, but that book has been optioned by another American studio.’ And so we went through all the books that I liked, and none were available. Then she had so much pity on me – and I must have passed some tests – because she opened the drawer of her working desk and pulled out a manuscript and said, ‘I just finished writing this. Even my agent doesn’t know. So I know that nobody owns the rights to it and you can read it and if you like it, you can make your film with it’. And that was Ripley’s Game.”
On making long-time bit player, the late Harry Dean Stanton, a leading man in his classic Paris, Texas, and the effect of the Palme d’Or win for the film on the director’s career.
“Harry was one of a kind, and he had been in a hundred small parts in Hollywood. He was the best supporting actor you can imagine. But he never played a really leading part until Paris, Texas. It was almost tragic that it happened a bit too late in his life. Because after the success of Paris, Texas, Harry decided to not play anything else but leading romantic parts. The problem was he didn’t get any. For years afterwards. Harry just toured as a musician. He had his own van and said, ‘I’d rather play music than going back to playing little bit parts.’ So it was a little tragic in his life. Then again, he was a glorious actor, and he was proud that Paris, Texas showed his potential and showed what he was capable of.”
It was a breakthrough film that changed everything for you, wasn’t it?
“It changed my life. It exploded all over the world. In Russia alone, they made 3000 prints of it. It propelled me into another kind of world of film-makers and it was very hard in the end to overcome the success of Paris, Texas and remain myself and continue making what I was doing and not being tempted to just make something like that again. It took me three years to make another movie – the longest ever between my films – and then I made what I could only imagine was the most opposite film to Paris, Texas. That was Wings of Desire, in black and white. Luckily, that risk paid off in the end.”
On being along for the ride on the traditional Cuban music uprising that became Buena Vista Social Club.
“When we shot in Havana, we knew these guys were all old and they were stubborn, and they were considered obsolete when we made the movie. Ry (Cooder) discovered this music and turned it into something very fresh and new. But that music was obsolete even in their own country, in Cuba. They were old-timey and their music wasn’t interesting. When we started shooting, [singer] Ibrahim Ferrer was still shining shoes – and at the end of the movie, he was there with all of them at Carnegie Hall. They were like the Beatles. People stood on their chairs to applaud them. With the help of the film, but certainly with the help of Ry Cooder’s production, it became something fresh and new that the whole world wanted to listen to.”
It did wonders for Cuban tourism.
“Probably … I’m happy for the Cuban people and that it helped them survive, because Cuba was not even on the map before we made the film.”
On being one of the most prolific directors featured in the New Zealand International Film Festival. Last year, the Listener revealed there were a dozen Wenders films in past programmes. But that was less than his one-time assistant director Claire Denis (13) and rather less than his German New Cinema compatriot Werner Herzog (26).
“Yes, of course, Werner. He and I were together last week in LA. I was showing Tokyo-Ga [Wenders’ 1985 doco about Japanese film-maker Yasujirō Ozu] at the cinema and he’s in that documentary and he’s never seen it. I was, ‘Please come and see it.’”
Wouldn’t him and Werner in the same room together be like the Mt Rushmore of German cinema?
“More a sort of crumbling cliff.”
Perfect Days is in cinemas from January 25.
