Wim Wenders
Wim Wenders
Ernst Wilhelm "Wim" Wendersis a German filmmaker, playwright, author, photographer, and a major figure in New German Cinema. Among many honors, he has received three nominations for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature: for Buena Vista Social Club, about Cuban music culture, Pina, about the contemporary dance choreographer Pina Bausch, and The Salt of the Earth, about Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth14 August 1945
CityDusseldorf, Germany
CountryGermany
For years all I seemed to be doing was lobbying politicians and others to persuade them that European culture needed movies, and that we had to protect it.
To evoke the classic period of Italian cinema in a little film seemed like a great, fun thing to do. I had relations to that period. I had known Fellini and I had known Antonioni. I had made a movie with Antonioni and I had visited Fellini in his studios. So, it seemed like something worthwhile doing. You bring yourself to that mythical cinema.
The Cuban people have an amazingly strong and unbroken spirit.
Filmmakers and critics wrote about each other and sometimes very harshly. This no longer exists.
Butte was once a grand city. To me, that city is like one big stage for Edward Hopper. You could put your camera anywhere, and you felt you were looking at his paintings.
The Yanks have colonized our subconscious.
Loving photography and wanting to be a painter, it all ended up in the process of filmmaking. It's strange professionally be to connected because it connects you to architecture, it connects you to painting, it connects you to writers, to actors. It connects you to really all of the arts.
What is generally referred to as American-style films are, in fact, studio productions.
Cinema is a worldwide phenomenon.
For us music is mainly part of the entertainment world and is often a luxury.
The culture of independent film criticism has totally gone down the drain and this seems to come with the territory of the consumer age that we are now living in.
The world of fashion. I'm interested in the world, not in fashion! But, maybe I was too quick to put down fashion. Why not look at it without prejudice? Why not examine it like any other industry, like the movies for example?
On the contrary a film can promote the idea of change without any political message whatsoever but in its form and language can tell people that they can change their lives and contribute to progressive changes in the world.
Maybe it's the music that enables them to function like that, to always take everything as it comes and never complain about the misery, hardship or injustice.