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Wim Wenders
Contributed by Sara Schieron
Tuesday, 14 March 2006
Wim Wenders' newest film, DON'T COME KNOCKING marks the first
collaboration of Wenders and writer Sam Shepard since PARIS, TX in
1984. A breathtakingly beautiful film about family, identity and the
now civilized West, the film features Sam Shepard as the main
character, Howard, a washed up Western Hero who knows only how to run
away; Shepard's wife Jessica Lange plays the love he left behind; Eva
Marie Saint plays his abandoned mother; and Sarah Polley and Gabriel
Mann play his estranged children.
photos copyright Donata Wenders
Set mostly in Butte, Montana, this film about a lost cowboy plays with our preconceptions of the Western and of Wenders. As Howard sneaks away from his movie set, so too does Wenders sneak away from his tendency to make movies about movies - though he doesn't sneak too far. As richly conceived as it is shot, DON'T COME KNOCKING is a unique look at America, its citizens and the divides they straddle.
The film is distributed by Sony Pictures Classics and opens theatrically Friday, March 17th.
SARA SCHIERON: Has anyone referred to your westerns as "spaetzle westerns"?
WIM WENDERS: As what?
SS: Spaetzle Western? A German - pasta - Western as opposed to an Italian one?
WW: You mean sch-pet-zel-luh?
SS: Yes!
WW: No! Most Americans don't even know what spaetzle are.
SS: Well, then, about confusion, I've heard some people discuss your new film DON'T COME KNOCKING as a sequel to PARIS, TX. Do you feel this is in any way a continuation of PARIS, TX or do you think people are just expecting another road trilogy from you?
WW: Some people just love to compare things and I think in this case they're comparing oranges with apples. It's true that both stories take place in the West and Sam Shepard wrote them, and there's a father looking for his son in both but two films couldn't be more different. PARIS. TX is pretty tragic and DON'T COME KNOCKING is far from tragic. It's sort of farcical.
SS: Farcical?
WW: We didn't take our Howard character too seriously. You can't take him too seriously. He's ridiculous. He's an idiot.
SS: But he's also got these identity issues that you have frequently dealt with in your other works. Sam Shepard said something about that too: that Americans have "a strange lack of identity".
WW: And the character he wrote and played is a great example of that. Howard is a man who doesn't know where he belongs. Here's a man who's actually missed his entire life while he plays heroes, cowboys and archetypal American figures in Western Films. In the movie of his life he's not the hero, he's not even a supporting actor he's an extra. And he missed all the love he could have given and received, he slipped out on his own life. He seemed to be giving up on this incredible freedom that he thought he was living, but it wasn't freedom, it was just his running away from responsibility.
SS: Visually as well as in the narrative, there seemed to be homage and reversal of the traditional conventions of the Western.
WW: You can call it reversal, you can call it deconstruction, and you can say that we're making fun of it.
SS: Tell me what you mean.
WW: He's running away from the westerns and for a good reason. I think the Western today is not a genre or art form that applies to anything any more. The traditional western gave some image of America and the American man that today is pretty obsolete. Howard, let's face it, is not a grown up man. He's a boy in his heart and it's the women of the story that have really grown up and who know how to deal with conflict and with truth and have two feet on the ground and Howard doesn't have any of that. He's great in the movies when you write good dialogue for him but when he's facing his son he doesn't know what to say. The first thing that happens is fist start flying. That's how these guys deal with conflict. Women have a more cultured approach than that.
SS: Jessica Lange and Sarah Polley were amazing in the way they handled their parts. How did you direct Jessica Lange - her responses to the conflicts were as ambiguous as they were specific.
WW: You have to rely on your actors and you have to trust them to take the part and run with it. And as a director, you try to make sure they remain true to the spirit of the character your writer has come up with. Jessica explored her character in a big way. She surprised Sam. Sam had written it but when it happened, he was...not prepared. Same with Sarah Polley and same with Eva Marie Saint and same with Fairuza Balk: all four women really took their parts and went very far with them and explored these ladies in a really big way.
SS: I had read that Howard was originally going to be a banker and not a runaway actor. How did the story play with that characterization?
WW: Well, it's a story I brought to Sam and wrote myself: a full 20 pages. It was a pretense to get Sam's attention, because you know he ripped it to pieces and he didn't like my story but he liked one little grain and that that was this story of the prodigal father, so to speak. I didn't regret that we started from scratch that's really what I had in mind. I just needed something to show him and we had to start from somewhere and even if we threw it away we were talking.
SS: You have a number of films that deal with making films, the film industry, the process of confusing life with story and it seemed as though it was so logical Howard was an actor.
WW: Well, in hindsight, when Sam first suggested it, I was completely against it. I said "Sam, I don't want this to be a movie about movies, this is a family story" and he said "I have a hunch you're going to like it, just let me write it first." And then he was giggling as he was typing it and I realized that when I read the pages, this guy running away from the movies - I can handle that. It's not really a film about filmmaking, that's just a background, the western is just a strange shape and form in the background and it's just a sort of reference you can't escape as long as you are shooting in these places. And then, of course, Howard is on a horse in the beginning, with full paraphernalia and you can think ‘this is a western' and then you find out he's just running away from a western.
SS: Can you tell me about the cinematography and color symbolism in the film? The colors were so vibrant and beautiful: women in blues, men in reds, and hallways in green. It was like seeing THE LAST PICTURE SHOW thirty years later, through the lens of WRITTEN ON THE WIND. - I hope that doesn't offend you. I understand you prefer Ray to Sirk.
WW: I love Sirk as well, but Nicholas Ray is one of my great masters and friends. We knew each other very well. I grew up on the westerns of Anthony Mann and John Ford. One of the few films that in any way a reference to DON'T COME KNOCKING, was LUSTY MAN by Nicholas Ray, with Robert Mitchum. Western is the only genre that deals with the questions: "Where do I belong?" And "What's my purpose in life?" That's what's driving all these lonesome riders, and they inevitably meet the women of their lives but they inevitably have to go on towards the horizon because they have something to do. So, with all these movies, somehow, secretly in the back of your mind, these guys are wasting their time.
SS: What about the colors?
WW: You can't be afraid of color when you get to the West, because the light is gorgeous and some of these bleached colors are just out of this world and in the city of Butte, Montana, where the film largely takes place, some of these walls on these buildings, some of them are like paintings and you just have to go with them. Butte is like a big outdoor studio full of Edward Hoppers. You cannot refuse to think of him and you have to accept Hopper as a visual reference. And I like the west and loved shooting there. I like the red rocks and blue skies and all the favored colors that you see: these places that are slowly disappearing.
SS: There's a sign in the last frame of the film that reads "DIVIDE 1m, WISDOM 52m". Did I read that right? Is this a real sign?
WW: You remembered it correctly. The sign actually stands there on the highway -it's a real sign and I discovered it by pure coincidence because we were shooting on that highway with Sam when he's driving towards Butte in his father's old car. We overshot our exit because we were shooting, so we went to the next exit and we pulled out and there it was - the sign. And I couldn't believe it. I felt it would be the perfect ending shot and I told the kids "you have to sing that song, that they sing, right here on that road." They had to quickly learn it so that they could do the shot because I so wanted it for the last shot. It seemed to quickly sum up the whole movie in a strange way: wisdom was far away and divide was pretty close.
