The Best Christian Writing 2004:
An Interview with Wim Wenders

Renowned German filmmaker Wim Wenders has collaborated over the years with figures such as Francis Ford Coppola, Nicholas Ray, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Sam Shepard. His best-known works include Until the End of the World, the award-winning documentary Buena Vista Social Club, and Wings of Desire and its follow-up, Far Away, So Close!, which inspired the Hollywood film City of Angels. In the following conversation, excerpted from an interview with screenwriter and director Scott Derrickson, Wenders discusses the effects of these films upon his later life and work and his resulting spiritual transformation.
-- Editor

Image: I'm going to switch gears here and ask you about the spiritual transformation you've undergone in the last decade. You expressed some of that in describing the way you've changed since making Wings of Desire. How else have your experiences in the realms of faith and belief impacted your work?

WW: Far Away, So Close! was a film that was clearly made with religious intent. I mean, it even starts with a quotation from the Gospel of Matthew: "The eye is the lap of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness."

Image: And aren't there other Bible quotations in that film?

WW: Plenty. Isaiah is quoted quite often. As I edited the film, I came to creating the level of voices, which is similar to the level of voices in Wings of Desire, though more complex. In Far Away, So Close! there's an entire film happening just on an audio level, and it's filled with all sorts of quotes, many from the Old and New Testaments. From the beginning, I felt that if we ever made a second film with these angel characters, I couldn't pretend that nothing had happened to me in between. I couldn't make another film in which the angels were metaphors, because they were no longer metaphors to me. If I made another film about angels, they would have to be messengers of God, the go-betweens. They could refer only to God, because as messengers, they were nothing in themselves -- the message was everything. So the film had to be filled with their message. To do anything else with these characters would have been to betray my entire experience. The film would have to be with God from beginning to end, because that would be the angels' only intention. Unlike Wings of Desire, where their metaphorical choice was to become human, in Far Away, So Close! that was no longer an option. It does happen that the angel Cassiel becomes a man, but only so that he then can return to being an angel. In a strange way, in Wings of Desire the spiritual world was a metaphor, but in Far Away, So Close! life is the metaphor for something spiritual.

In hindsight, I must say, I was too didactic. The film was way too cerebral. In the first year you become a missionary or a priest, you probably, make nothing but mistakes because you're too upfront about things. You're too filled with a certain desire, and that kills everything you want to achieve. When I see the film now, and I hear all those quotes, I must say that I was filled with too much missionary fervor.

Image: You were raised a Catholic, and now you attend a Presbyterian church. I wonder if this movement toward a more Protestant perspective has something to do with it as well. Catholic filmmakers are so rich in visual imagery, Martin Scorsese being the perfect example.

WW: Or Bresson.

Image: And when you compare them to say, Paul Schrader, who's a perfect example of a Protestant perspective moving into film, Schrader is very word-oriented, and the ideas are much more in your face.

WW: Yes, with Far Away, So Close! I was too much the Catholic who had finally left it all behind and converted, which I just had the year before.

Image: And yet your films have always reflected the Judeo-Christian view of man as a wayfarer and pilgrim. Do you feel a connection between your faith and the stories you've been telling all along?

WW: During those twenty years when, though I always remained a believer, I went as far away from the Catholic Church as possible, I thought that all churches were the same. The Catholic Church had made some tremendous mistakes, and I had taken these mistakes too personally. For twenty years I never attended church anywhere. I had left the church in 1968, and at the time I was very involved in socialist politics.

During the seventies, I was involved in psychoanalysis, another substitute religion, like socialism, which strangely enough has religious roots. Then in the eighties I was involved with Asian philosophy and Buddhist ideas, although that never really showed in any of the work I did then. When I came back to the church, it was a return to the beginning after going through a long circle - and Until The End of the World marks the end of the circle. At the end of that film, the writer character says that he has started to pray again. He quotes the gospel of John, "In the beginning was the Word," when he rediscovers the word against the image.

In the twenty years I had been absent from church, my films' main subject was alienation, being on the road, being on some sort of pilgrimage toward understanding, or realization, or fulfillment. Even though most of those characters didn't know what it was they were after, they were on the way somewhere. For twenty years, being on the road itself became the topic, as the destination was so uncertain. Looking back, I was like a pilgrim who didn't believe in the marked path anymore, but still believed that being on the road had to lead somewhere as long as I was relentless about it.

Image: And you were right. It did lead somewhere.

WW: Yes. I probably owe that most of all to my family -- though the topic of family is not very present in my work, except in Paris, Texas. I had to go back to square one and forget all my objections about the Catholic Church. I had to look at the Word and forget about everything that people have added over the centuries. What really brought me to that place in the end was my father. He never made a big deal about his belief. He was Catholic and went to church regularly, but we never in our lives had a single discussion about God. When it was obvious to him that I wasn't going to church anymore, that I was angry with the church, and when I finally told him that I had left it officially, it made him very sad, but we never spoke a single time about Christ -- and maybe this is a Catholic thing, too. This is one of my biggest objections to the Catholic Church. They are like the Pharisees of the New Testament; they create all sorts of rules and regulations, and they think that this house of regulations is the thing itself. My father was sort of caught up in the Catholic Church and regretted that I had left it, but we were unable to talk about it.

During the last six months of his life, as he was dying of cancer, I took care of him at home, which included all the things you do for somebody who needs shots every three or four hours and can't take care of himself anymore. Even then he wouldn't talk about Christ, and we wouldn't really have theological conversations, but what he lived and what he showed me -- the confidence he had in God, and the way he died fearlessly, without a single regret, without a single worry that anything bad was going to happen, and with a total belief that he had done his best, and the way he was looking forward to what was coming -- that really got to me. He didn't have to talk about it much, and for some reason we never had the kind of relationship where we could talk about spiritual things. He just lived it.

My father's example, the total conviction he had, his total confidence in God, and finally in Christ -- I only realized in the last few weeks of his life that his entire life had been based on that, though he was never able to verbalize it. That really opened my eyes, and that year, which was 1989, I came full circle. There was no way for me to come back to the Catholic Church, but I came back to praying and began reading the Bible. I once had been very religious. In fact, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I thought I would become a priest, but, believe it or not, I had no knowledge of the Bible. If you grow up in the Catholic Church, your belief is not based on knowing the Word. In 1989, when I started to read the New Testament, I thought, "Wait a minute, why did they conceal this from me?" They read it, of course, in a Catholic service, but it's like a formula, a ceremony, and when I heard it then, it had nothing to do with my life. I couldn't really connect it to my deepest, innermost self -- it was artificial somehow. So I started reading as if I had never read it before. It was all new to me.

Image: So much has already been said about the loss of life on September 11, but I'm interested to hear you comment on the loss of place.

WW: They had just finished building the Twin Towers when I was in New York shooting Alice in the Cities. In some of the images in that film, there are still cranes on the top of one of the towers. My first trip to New York was in the winter of 1971 or 1972 for a program at the Museum of Modern Art, The New Directors' Season, where I showed The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty Kick. Like anyone who visits New York for the first time, I got a stiff neck, because all I could do was look up at the incredible buildings. You step in dogshit because you never look down. And as you see in Alice in the Cities, in that view toward downtown, the Trade Centers were the stronghold of the entire skyline. That downtown skyline inspired a real sense that here was the center of the world. As we were discussing earlier, my films are all rooted in a place, and a number of my films have started or taken place in New York. The American Friend starts on Spring Street and West Broadway. Lightning Over Water starts with a shot of the towers forming the point on which all lines converge. And Alice in the Cities was dominated by the sense of place that New York offered.

To come to terms with the loss, I had to go there and see it for myself. I couldn't live with just pictures, and I certainly couldn't live with the images I had seen on television. In order to accept it, and overcome it, and to know what to make of it, I had to see it for myself. I was fortunate that Joel Meyerowitz, the only photographer who actually had a pass to go into the site daily, the mayor's official photographer, was kind enough to take me seriously, and smuggled me in as his assistant. It was a day about eight weeks after the towers had fallen. Usually I take photographs in order to preserve a place, when I have a feeling it might not always exist the way it is. Of course, at Ground Zero, there was nothing to preserve, but it was incredible to photograph this great wound that the planet was carrying -- and to see that it was healing. You felt it; you saw it; it was obvious. The city itself was actually healing.

The early morning sun hit the site and was reflected from the towers surrounding the wound. It burst through all the smoke and the fumes and created a glorious sense of peace and hope and new beginning. Joel would look at me every now and then, shake his head, and say, "How lucky can you get? I've been here every day, but I haven't seen the site like this." Everybody working there was affected. I had never experienced a place like that, where all the people present -- the firefighters, the police, all the workers -- were carried by the same solidarity, the same responsibility, the same serenity. I had never felt like I did that morning, as if all those present were being lifted up, not so much by the sun, but, for lack of a better word, by God's friendliness. People all over the world had prayed nonstop for weeks -- and that morning I felt I was moving around at the center of gravity of millions of prayers.

Still, the site was hell -- it was smoldering and smoking, and everyone wore a mask to breathe through, and every now and then they would find a piece of a body, and everyone would be evacuated. It was as hellish as it could be, but the place showed me -- and I see it in the pictures I took -- that it was surviving. Something was beginning. There would be a future. It wasn't me trying to impose some wishful thinking on it. It was the place that showed it to me.