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Louis Pasteur said that chance favors the prepared
mind.
What's true in science is true in art as well, if
filmmaker Wim Wenders is any gauge. Whether it's
working with Bono, filming in Butte, or producing
movies under a tight budget, Wenders prefers to leave
room for the unexpected.
After a marathon 90-minute Q&A the night before,
the soft-spoken and thoughtful Wenders still had
stories to tell about his newest film, Don't Come
Knocking, and about his career. Considering how
many of these stories involved chance and
serendipity, Wenders must have a very prepared
mind.
The German filmmaker, best known for Wings of
Desire and Paris, Texas, finds one of the
primary differences in European and American
filmmaking in the handling of the screenplay itself.
While Americans tend to view the screenplay as a
blueprint to be strictly adhered to, Wenders is more
comfortable with the German approach, wherein
filmmaking itself is still regarded as a sort of
adventure.
That dichotomy ultimately led Wenders down the
independent path. "I produced everything myself,
after Hammett, which was the only time I was a
hired hand. I realized my kind of movies—I
could only keep making them, and I could only do what
I was good at, if I just took it upon myself to
produce them. And it's a hassle sometimes and a
waste of energy in many ways, but it's the price you
pay in order to do exactly what you want. Sam and I,
we controlled this film 100%. There was nobody who
ever interfered.
"I'd rather do movies with little money but be able
to exactly say what I want than a lot of money and
you can't say anything you want; you can do a lot
with it, but you can't say a lot with it."
By European standards, the $10 million budget for
Don't Come Knocking is at the upper reaches of
the independent "low budget" movie, but still a long
way off from the typical Hollywood production. And
by Wenders’ own standards, the budget was a
nice sum, having come fresh off directing Land of
Plenty on a modest $500,000 budget.
While working outside the main Hollywood system,
Wenders still loves to make movies in ? and about ?
America. It's the American landscape that offers
plenty of inspiration for Wenders and his
work.
"Most of my films have been made because I found a
city or landscape that I felt needed to be told, or
needed to tell me a story. And then I found a story
that had to take place there."
"When I shaped up this guy Howard, this idiot, who
was eventually ending up somewhere where he was going
to find the life he didn't have, I told Sam this is
my chance in a lifetime to finally make a movie in
Butte, Montana. And I told him, however he gets
there, when he gets there, it's going to be
Butte."
Wenders’ first taste of apple pie was Paris,
Texas, released in 1984. It was his first
collaboration with playwright and actor Sam Shepard,
and it earned him the Golden Palm at Cannes.
Their success was so satisfying that the two agreed
to leave well enough alone. “We enjoyed
ourselves immensely. As a writer and director it
doesn’t get much better. We then realized it
was probably much better if we lost each
others’ phone number, and not touch it again.
Because repeating it would just ruin it.”
The two were as good as their word. They lost
contact with each other. And even if they had tried,
Wender says of Shepard, “there is one man you
cannot be in constant contact with. He is very
evasive.
At least he does have a cell phone now. For years he
didn’t have one, so you could never find him.
He would be gone for weeks and you couldn’t
reach him, and he [would be] on some rodeo trip.
He’s not exactly a writer of letters,
either.”
But chance stepped in a few years ago when Wenders
bumped into Shepard.
“One day I met him at a Lou Reed concert, of
all places, in New York. He said ‘How long has
it been?’ We realized it was 18 years, and
maybe enough of abstinence.”
Half a year later, Wenders had a treatment for a
movie that sounded like a cross between About
Schmidt and Broken Flowers. He showed it
to Shepard who "shredded" it, but plucked out one of
Wenders'
tangents and made it the focus a full-fledged
screenplay. Wenders'
dissatisfied banker Howard was now a fading cowboy
actor on the run from the prison of
Hollywood.
Music always plays a significant role in
Wenders’ films and this time is no different,
with T-Bone Burnett providing the score and
U2’s Bono and The Edge providing the title
song.
That U2 connection goes way back, with the band
providing songs for several of Wenders’ movies
and Wenders directing some U2 videos.
Wenders even directed Bono’s screenplay for
The Million Dollar Hotel.
The title song to Don’t Come
Knocking is a duet between Bono and Andrea
Corr (of the Irish group The Corrs) that accompanies
the film's end credits.
But even getting that title song is another story of
chance to add to Wenders’ history. Having seen
a rough cut of the movie, Bono loved what he saw and
volunteered to possibly write the title song.
As Wenders explains, "We finished editing the movie
and T-Bone recorded the entire score and soundtrack
and everything. We put some other music at the back
to just hold the place of our title song, but we
never got a title song."
Undaunted, Wenders took Don't Come
Knocking to Cannes last year without the
elusive title song, using instead one of T-Bone's
songs as a temporary track over the end
credits.
"U2 were doing the Vertigo tour, Bono was involved
with Live 8, the One campaign; if you wanted to reach
him he was either talking to Bush in Washington, to
Blair in London, to Chirac… I mean, it seemed
ridiculous to believe he was going to write a song,
let alone record it."
With release dates looming, Wenders finally had to
draw a line in the sand and begin striking the film's
first prints for Germany and France, where the film
was released late last summer. "So we told the lab,
from next Monday on we're going to make
prints.
“The Friday before, Friday night I got an
e-mail with a very long attachment. From Bono. I open
it, and it was the song, but it was just Bono's voice
and Andrea's voice and there was a temp track
underneath it Edge had done on the computer, because
they just didn't have time to record all of it, to
polish it."
Wenders then passed the e-mail attachment on to
Burnett, who was in turn challenged with completing
the song's background track over the weekend.
As nutty as the assignment may have been, Burnett was
able to reassemble his band, record Edge's
arrangement, mix the track on Sunday, and Monday
morning, when Wenders got back in the studio, he had
the complete song.
As Wenders sums it up, "It was as narrow as it can
get."
But the mere fact that the film was called
“Don't Come Knocking"
is also a matter of chance.
Wenders recalls, “the title for
Don’t Come Knocking,”
(and thus the song), “came in the course of the
writing. I think my first title was ‘In
America,’ until Susan Sontag had a book [by the
same title]. And then before I knew it, Jim Sheridan
had a movie [by the same title], so that title was
gone. And for a while we had the title of the film
inside the film, that was ‘Phantom of the
West,’ but that was too much on the
money.”
The movie was also nearly named after a highway sign
that Wenders and his crew weren't even supposed to
see. The final shot of the movie frames a highway
sign reading "Divide: 1 / Wisdom: 52."
When Wenders and his crew were filming Shepard
driving across the country, they were so enamored by
the landscape that they overshot their exit. When
they finally pulled off the highway, they stopped
directly in front of that sign. Wenders found it to
be serendipitously perfect for the story of the
cowboy still looking for wisdom and trying to bridge
gaps after all these years. Wenders nearly called the
movie "Wisdom 52"
or "52 Miles to Wisdom."
Watching the movie, you can see why Wenders might
want to film on the Montana highways. Even the town
of Butte is perfect for the story.
Butte, like Howard, was once a Western star, and
still plays one in the movies. But modern life sneaks
in, and the old glory is mostly facade.
The fanciest hotel in town has a rich, expensive,
antique-looking lobby.
But when Howard gets into his room, the
“antique” looks so old you can almost
smell the musty years. Another scene takes place on
the old plank sidewalk in downtown Butte… right
in front of the plate-glass windows of a gym, where
health nuts doing cardio watch the unfolding drama
with disinterest.
Surrounding the town are buttes and bluffs,
mountainous terrain with clean, clear air. As filmed
by Wenders, you can almost feel the brisk
high-altitude temperatures in the crisp blue
skies.
Key to capturing the small-town feel is the
cinematography. Wenders takes credit for framing.
“Since my first film the framing is
mine.” But cinematographer Franz Lustig
contributed as well. He has worked with Wenders for
years, shooting mostly smaller projects, including
Land of Plenty, which was a digital
shoot.
There was a scene with an unnatural-seeming change of
light that was so jarring, it seemed like either a
mistake by a rookie or a calculated, bold stroke by
an artist.
The scene in question is one in which Howard,
standing in the wreckage of an emotional fight,
watches his son storm off and out of frame. We stay
on the figure of Howard as the entire scene
darkens.
“It’s not what you think,” says
Wenders. “We shot this scene on a completely
sunny day. Blue skies. Not a single cloud. And just
at the moment that Earl is running out of the shot,
out of nowhere this incredible shadow came down the
street and threw a big shadow on Howard. It could not
have been timed more perfectly.
“We just stood there, our mouths open. We
looked up and there was the tiniest little cloud,
just one little thing, there was nothing else in the
sky, and it had timed itself perfectly.
It wasn't Lustig's inexperienced hand on the
aperture, it was chance.
Interview conducted by Marty Mapes & Matt Anderson
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