Jose Oliva |
Barcelona (EFE) contest, and that he has announced his new project, which will revolve around peace.
“I don’t know how Woody Allen does it”, the director of “Paris, Texas” added in this regard: “I am an optimist for the future of cinema and for the future of society, because only optimists can change the world, Pessimists always hide their heads under their wings.
New Wim Wenders project
Regarding his new “great project”, Wenders has advanced that “it will revolve around the idea of peace, since without peace there is no truth and without peace there is no common good”.
The German director recalled that “9/11 changed the world, as happened with covid-19, confinement and the pandemic” and where this incidence is most noticeable is in “the feeling of the search for the truth, a species in danger of extinction, and the concept of the common good, which for the new generations no longer has any importance and will continue to decline”.
Without concession to nostalgia, Wenders thinks that “those good times of the past have completely disappeared and will not return, and now we must ask ourselves what we can do for this truth that we are looking for and for the common good”, a reflection that in the last four days has led to think about the new project.
He does not hide his satisfaction at returning this year to the Cannes festival, where he will compete with “Perfect days” and will also present the 3D documentary “Anselm”, about the figure of the German neo-expressionist painter Anselm Kiefer: “I love that nobody knows anything about these two movies. I’m not afraid of competing, maybe a little afraid, but it doesn’t worry me, and I can say that they are two films that are nothing like my previous films”.
Passion for cinema
Wenders has confessed that he makes films because one day he discovered that it existed: “As a child I wanted to be a painter, an architect, a priest, a writer, a musician and in the end I chose painting, in fact I was a painter when I made my first film, and I realized that the movies included everything I wanted to do in my life.”
What he is least enthusiastic about in his job is writing the script, “because I don’t like spending time alone” and he declares his admiration for those directors who write their own scripts, something he has only done on two occasions with little satisfaction.
He had praiseworthy words precisely for two of his scriptwriters, the Austrian Peter Handke and the American Sam Shepard, who “have been and continue to be very important in my life” and he adds: “I never thought of scriptwriters, writers always came to mind ”.
For Wenders, Handke, with whom he worked five times, evolved at the same time as him, to the point that “his first success coincided with mine” and Shepard’s case is different, as he met him as a playwright in New York and San Francisco, and loved the quality of the dialogue in his works.
“When I saw Shepard I realized that he had an explosive personality, he was tall, thin, super intelligent, he didn’t like airplanes, he rode horses and he was a very adventurous character; he was larger than life and he was also a writer. He was an actor in one of my movies and wrote two of them. He was one of my best friends in the last twenty years ”, he pointed out.
Wenders has also referred to the recently deceased Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura, who had always declared himself an admirer of the German: “For me, Saura never changed, he was always the great person, the great poet, the great director, the great writer that he was, and I am sure that he will be waiting for me up there to do projects together when we meet again”.
After assuring that “how old one is is irrelevant”, Wenders thinks that “what counts is who you are and what you do”.
For those starting out in film, Wenders advises not to listen when someone tells you that movies are a product that must be successful: “It’s a big lie, and if you think movies are a product, go designing.” cars, but not to the cinema” and adds that “even if they force you, keep in mind that cinema is culture and forms part of the oldest European tradition like literature or painting”.