The man on my right grumbled every time I whispered to my friend the names of songs as soon as they began playing in Perfect Days, excited that the director of this lullaby of a film, liked the same kind of songs as us. I was knowingly making the rookie mistake of attaching the whims of the protagonist to the director who shaped him. Wim Wenders, the German genius who floated into cinema at the turn of the 70s, clutching onto a new wave of ideas, had to have the same fixations as Hirayama, the toilet cleaner with an enviably content life, leading the story of Perfect Days. Hirayama lived alone in a cosy little apartment in Tokyo, with books on the floor and plants in the balcony he cared for like a parent, drove his truck with tapes of classic rock, and took film photos of tree tops when the light was right. No wonder that the man on the right was annoyed, even the smallest whimper would disturb the web of tranquility that Hirayama, and by extension Wim, had seamlessly cast on their audience.
A little more than a year after his Perfect Days screened in Thiruvananthapuram for the yearly film festival of Kerala, Wim Wenders bestowed upon hundreds of eager admirers his presence, walking into the Kairali theatre complex to the sounds of a welcoming gathering of theyyam and chenda artists. At 79, and with all the acclaim he had gained through decades of filmmaking, Wim betrayed no airs, patiently answering every question asked of him, smiling for the cameras that kept flashing, slipping in a joke or two, comfortably merging into the crowd.
For two days, a selection of Wim’s films was screened at the Kairali complex, as part of the Thiruvananthapuram leg of his Indian tour ‘King of the Road’ - named after one of his celebrated road movies. The Film Heritage Foundation, in association with Wim Wenders Stiftung and Goethe-Institut of India, has made it possible for Wim to make his first visit to India – delayed only “out of respect or some sort of shyness”, in his own words, because it should not be just for a visit, and there had to be time at his disposal to travel. The tour is for 25 days with screenings of 18 films across five cities - Mumbai, Thiruvananthapuram, Kolkata, Pune and Delhi. Wim will occasionally slip away to other locations – Aranmula in Kerala or the Thar Desert – but he will show up at the venues to engage with the audience.
In a Q and A session after the screening of one of his most revered films, Paris, Texas (1984), Wim shared anecdotes of how the film came about, allowing a glimpse into how he created works of art. “Sam Shepard wrote the first half of the script. We loved working with each other, and it was agreed that Sam would be with me during the shooting. I have always dreamt of having the writer next to me. We shot the first half and then were to write the rest so that we would have a story that is truthful to the characters. But then something happened. Sam Shepard fell madly in love with [actor] Jessica Lange and I couldn't blame him. They started making a movie in the north of the US and I was shooting in the south. We stopped the shooting,” Wim said. He and his assistant Claire Denis (who’d go on to become a known filmmaker) would figure out the rest of the story and get Sam to write the dialogue for it over long-distance conversations. (Sam and Jessica would later play the ‘heartbreaking husband and wife’ in his 2005 film Don’t Come Knocking, a western.)
It helped Paris, Texas that Wim had always liked to film chronologically, in the order in which things happened because he liked the idea of a continuous time flow. In an earlier interview, he spoke about the early days of his career when he found it hard to say cut on a scene, hating to disrupt the flow of time. That’s why his films are a little slow, he’d say. Wim’s words can, like his films, turn poetic when all he does is answer a question. (“I discovered films were like paintings, except they were moving – the wind was blowing, the clouds floating, the sun came out and the birds flew”).
The first time Wim was drawn into the art of movies, he was an artist who painted, who grew up discovering new worlds through paintings when the country he was born into was just recovering from the wrath of war. 1940s Germany was flattened, Wim would say, and as a child, he had accepted that as his reality. Paintings threw open a different picture and Wim, slipping out of his adolescence, wanted to paint. Water colours changed to oil and acrylic.
Photography had also come into his life very early. He had a camera with him from the age of six, and he fell in love with frames – “what became part of the picture that would last, and what was outside of it that would be lost”. His love for capturing frames switched to moving images when he spent time in Paris as a young man, watching up to four or five movies a day. He began making short films, without a narrative. Before he knew it, he was also writing scripts and became a filmmaker. Interestingly, he trusted others to do the cinematography, especially Robby Müller, with whom he shared a love for natural light.
Wim's second feature film (after Summer in the City) The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty (1972) is part of the India tour, and clearly, Wim was not following a formula or approaches that had ensured successful runs before. The protagonist – a suspended goalie – turns overnight into a murderer without giving you a reason, and the camera simply follows his life as he skimps town to meet an old girlfriend, flirts with other women and picks up fights with men. The man had lost it, there seemed no need for an explanation, and yet, you wonder and sit with your questions, unaccustomed to leaving things unsaid.
By 1974 Wim made the first of his road movies, Alice in the Cities, discovering his fondness for the genre. A journalist, who was supposed to travel through America and write about his experience, only has a bunch of photographs to show when his deadline comes. Selling his car, he decides to go back to his home in Germany when unexpectedly he is given charge of a little girl called Alice, while her mother slips away. Much like you connect Hirayama to Wim, you tend to find pieces of the director in Philip Winters, the journalist whose face breaks into a smile every time Alice speaks her mind, the way children do. Wim has a way with children. He brings out the child in children by simply letting them be.
In Paris, Texas, a boy called Hunter plays the crucial character of connecting the protagonists, tagging along with a dad who had for years abandoned him, to find out about a mother who has been missing for so long. The film is more known for the intense conversation that takes place between his father Travis and mother Jane, separated by a mirror that lets only one of them see the other. Nastassja Kinski in her pink sweater and blonde hair looking uncertainly at the screen, and Harry Dean Stanton watching her from the other side with a telephone receiver in his hand, have made the iconic ‘peep show’ scene unforgettable.
But after watching the restored version of his film 40 years later, Wim says that the part of the little boy appears much more important for him, while back then his entire attention was on Travis and Jane. Hunter Carson who played the boy told Wim that "it was important" that he did not learn the dialogues exactly but only what should happen and he would use his own words. "I think he was plain lazy but it worked well. He always surprised us. When he looks at his mother [in the film] for the first time and embraces her, he falls in love with her at that moment,” Wim said.
This is the first female character he was happy with, in representing truthfully, he says. A decade earlier, when he made Scarlet Letter - an adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s book – he had not been happy with how he brought out the character of Hester Prynne, the leading woman who bears the brunt of becoming an unwed mother. “With Paris, Texas, I broke through that invisible wall of not being able to represent a female character. It was the first time I thought I could handle women characters,” Wim says.
Like in Paris, Texas, Wim set part or whole of his films in the US (including making American films in English), a country he lived in for 17 years, and had a fascination for since his youth. He made The American Friend in 1977, adapting a book by crime novelist Patricia Highsmith with her famous character Tom Ripley. In 1982 he made Hammet, a neo-noir American film adapted from a crime novel by Joe Gores, and produced by the great Francis Coppola (who made the Godfather movies).
Interestingly, names of his favourites would be scattered across his works – Patricia’s books are among those that Hirayama reads in Perfect Days, scrawled on his bed on the floor at night. His fondness for the artist Edward Hopper would bring that name to his ‘diary film’ Reverse Angle (1982) and lead him to make a short in 2015 called Two or Three Thoughts on Edward Hopper. More famously, his love for music and especially classic rock would come out in his films as comforting voices in the background or BGMs that tug at your heartstrings. The sliding guitar in Paris, Texas, the classics in Perfect Days, Bono’s music in the One Million Dollar Hotel (which was also from a story by Bono), and of course he made an adorable documentary of ageing musicians in Cuba in the Buena Vista Social Club.
At the beginning of the screening of Goalkeeper’s Fear, a message said that the film was not allowed to be screened for 30 years because Wim had played in it all the music that he liked and violated copyrights. Oh, Wim. By the time he designed a personal playlist for Hirayama (which I again suspect is his own), he must have learned the trick of the trade for it includes many great musicians of the 70s like The Animals, The Velvet Underground, Otis Redding, Patti Smith, The Rolling Stones, Nina Simone, Van Morrison, The Kinks and of course Lou Reed singing Perfect Day.
But his love for American things - from music to roads – did not stop him from swaying to other countries. He went to Japan when he made the documentary Tokyo-Ga (1985) about the filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu, and of course, Perfect Days too pulled him to Tokyo. He uses his road trilogy of movies featuring Rüdiger Vogler – Alice followed by The Wrong Move and King of the Road – to explore cities in his home, Germany. For The State of Things, another road movie in 1982, he packs a crew to Portugal. The Salt of the Earth, a documentary on Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, is set in Brazil, France and Italy.
Wim has always been open about his love for documentaries, wanting to follow that approach for his fictional films as well. “Whatever happens, happens once,” he’d say, meaning, he’d like to capture them as they happen, not manipulating his actors, not interfering with the process. He is not keen on having his actors rehearse. You can’t help seeing the artist in him refusing to go away, not for the interests of popularity or fame, not for business, or money. When an American distributor insisted that he change the ending of Paris, Texas with a simple edit (“make it a happy ending by having the protagonist who is seen driving away take a U-turn”), Wim stood his ground, refused to change a part he was very convinced about. The film ended up not getting a wide release and the lead actor Harry Dean gave him a hard time for it, he says laughing.
The outward tranquility that he seems to exude, you imagine, has to do with the love for all the different forms of arts he can’t help capturing and merging into his work. If it is music in Bueno Vista, it is dance in Pina (important to catch it in 3D), painting in Anselm and photography in The Salt of the Earth. The love for literature comes as adaptations of books and characters who read. I have already given him the image of the therapeutic Hirayama and the adventurous Philip Winter, but I’d like to end by giving him wings, putting him on top of a building looking down at the world of people, as Damiel the angel does in Wings of Desire (1987). It is easier to picture him emerging into view from the shadows, to listen to the people and calm them with stories.
In Room 666, Wim’s film from 1982 where he asks several filmmakers if cinema is dying, he reserves his own judgment. In 2025, when I ask him the same question, he says, “I think it has a future, but it depends on you [the viewer?].”