Paris, Texas introduction and post-screening discussion with Haden Guest and Wim Wenders.

Transcript

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

Paris, Texas introduction and post-screening discussion with Haden Guest and Wim Wenders. Saturday April 7, 2018.

Haden Guest  0:02

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Haden Guest. I'm Director of the Harvard Film Archive and it's a real honor, a real thrill to be here tonight as we welcome and celebrate a true visionary, an extraordinary filmmaker and artist, Mr. Wim Wenders. Mr. Wim Wenders is here, not only to present his work, but also to deliver two lectures as a Norton Professor of Poetry. The second of his lectures will be on Monday at 2pm, in Sanders Theater. These lectures are free and open to the public, and you can obtain a ticket by going to the website of the Mahindra Humanities Center.

I want to thank, first and foremost, the Mahindra Humanities Center for making possible the Norton Lectures. This is the first time, the 2018 Norton Lectures, that this extraordinary lecture series, which celebrates under an expansive rubric of poetry, expansive definition of poetry, the arts and brings to Harvard some of the most important artists of their time. This is the first time that the Norton Lecture series has included cinema into the ranks of great poets, the likes of T.S. Eliot, E.E. Cummings. And artists like William Kentridge. Writers like Toni Morrison, Orhan Pamuk. And this year, of course, we welcomed Frederick Wiseman, first, and then Agnès Varda and now we have the real joy and privilege to welcome Wim Wenders. And I want to thank not only Mahindra Humanities Center, but also its director Homi Bhabha, as well as executive director Steven Biel, as well as Sarah Razor, who is the dynamic events coordinator there.

And as an extension of the Norton lectureship of Mr. Wenders, or Professor Wenders, I should say, we have been screening an expansive retrospective of his work here at the Harvard Film Archive. And we began by showcasing his early work as a pioneer and a leading voice to the New German Cinema of the 1970s, with films like Alice in the Cities and Kings of the Road, that asked crucial, and still at the time, very difficult questions about the identity and image of post-war West Germany. About the dark cloud of history still hovering over its small towns, and landscapes, and popular imagination. In an early and rightfully celebrated trilogy, Wenders reinvented the road movie as a way of advancing new ideas about place and memory in the cinema. Ideas being actively explored at the time in contemporary photography and literature. Ideas of the non-place. Those inbetween places and sites charged with a kind of floating, ghostly meaning. A kind of hauntingly empty iconicity. We are also, however, in this retrospective screening works across the full arc of Mr. Wenders’ long, still remarkably active, filmmaking career, including very recent work such as his powerful documentary The Salt of the Earth, about Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado.

Now, tonight, we're really honored, we're really absolutely thrilled to present one of Mr. Wenders’ most indelible and influential films, Paris, Texas, from 1984. In many ways, this film can be read as a bold, dynamic expansion of Alice in the Cities, which traces the strange path and unlikely pilgrimage taken by two strangers. The drifting, uncertain writer and photographer and a young girl, the eponymous Alice, as they set out in search of her vanished mother and family. In a similar fashion, Paris, Texas centers around another unexpected pairing of adult and child. Here a father and son reunited and embarked on a voyage, a road trip, a pilgrimage of sorts, now across the vast expanses of the Southwest stretching from Los Angeles to Houston, Texas. Towards the end of Alice in the Cities the photographer hero reads the obituary of legendary American filmmaker John Ford, mourning the death of an older form of romantic landscape that was so central to the classical cinema. This photographer also expresses his own frustration about not being able to capture, understand American landscapes through his own Polaroid images. In Paris, Texas we find Wenders boldly embracing that very challenge. To capture and to understand the American landscape. Returning now to the monumental mesas and valleys that so inspired John Ford and the great artists and visionaries of the Western film. Paris, Texas is, however, a very different kind of Western, if in fact, it can be considered as such. It begins, as you'll see, like so many Westerns, like the films, for example, of Budd Boetticher, with a lonely figure. A man in a vast and inhospitable place. An arid, uninhabited land. And yet he wears not a cowboy hat, but a red baseball cap. And he does not ride a horse, but walks wearing a pair of weather beaten huaraches. And he wears a dark pinstripe suit, as if he wandered from a 1940s film noir. This enigmatic and mute figure, this cowboy/hard boiled wrong man/holy pilgrim embodies the nexus of romantic imagery and iconicity, which Wenders' film simultaneously embraces and holds at a certain meditative distance. The romance of the road haunts Paris, Texas, as it does so many of Wenders’ films, as an escape, a romantic ideal, and perhaps, at times, an existential dead end. I'm very thrilled and really, really pleased that Mr. Wenders will join me, and will join all of you in a conversation after the screening of Paris, Texas. I'd like to ask everybody to please turn off any cell phones, any electronic devices that you have on you. Please refrain from using them. I also want, though, to thank and to welcome two friends, now we can count them as friends. I refer to Sophia Hofinger of Neue Road Movies, as well as photographer Donata Wenders. Let's join them as well.

[APPLAUSE]

Oh, I'd like to ask you to please remain in your seats during the screening. People have recently been standing up randomly and trying to stand in the back of the room and they're actually getting in the way of the projection, the projection beam. So please don't do that. And now, with no further ado, please join me in welcoming the one and only Wim Wenders.

[APPLAUSE]

Wim Wenders  7:13

Thank you. I hope you're not as intimidated as I am now.

[LAUGHTER]

Professor Wenders. Poetry lectures. Don't worry, you're just watching a movie.

[LAUGHTER]

And I'm so happy that Haden really pronounced me “Vim Venders”, because I lived in America for a long time and I just got used to introducing myself as “Wim Wenders”.

[LAUGHTER]

Because I figured it was better they spelled it correctly.

[LAUGHTER]

And you know, the first time I ever heard it correctly was at a Yankee game, against the Red Sox by the way.

[LAUGHTER]

When there was an announcement for “all stadium vendors”.

[LAUGHTER]

Yes! I can't really say much about the film before. It is older than some of you. Yeah. Shot in ‘84. Written by a man who knew so much more about the West than myself, by Sam Shepard. And it's a little sad, as much as I love the movie, to announce it shortly, well, almost a year after Sam passed away, as well as our leading actor Harry Dean Stanton. So I'm very much looking forward to seeing you afterwards. And remember, don't just stand somewhere in the middle. I'm going to be in the back watching.

[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]

 

Haden Guest  9:12  

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming back Wim Wenders.

[APPLAUSE]

Wim Wenders  9:36  

Thank you.

Haden Guest  9:40

Great. So I thought I would begin with some questions up here, and then we'll have a short conversation here before opening it to all of you. And I wanted to begin, Wim, by speaking first about landscape. I mean, you explore a kind of landscape throughout the film that I think is more than a backdrop, it has a presence in the film. We begin in this, as I said in the introduction, as almost a John Ford-like setting. And then we enter into these cityscapes that are drifting open. As much desert it seems as fluid landscapes, or cityscapes, I should say. And I wanted to talk to you about the ways in which you discovered the places in this film, whose very title itself is a location. And the ways in which the sort of research you did as a photographer informed this film. Because I know you spent a long time taking photographs of sites. Some of which would appear in the film, some that wouldn't.

Wim Wenders  11:02  

I was a little scared of the West. Exactly, as I'd seen all these movies, and I'd seen all the Anthony Mann’s and John Ford and Raoul Walsh, and you name them, Westerns. So I was a little scared to shoot there, because I didn't want to make a film that in any way imitated any of them. So in my way to prepare myself was by taking several months on my own, just myself, taking photographs. Because I also knew this was going to be a color film and the colors in the West was something I was also not quite prepared for. And taking photographs on my own for a few months, and in the end really knew every back street of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona. So that was a good preparation. And also, when we shot and when we needed places that we didn't really scout for, I knew the area so well that we could shoot basically anywhere. And also, it was very helpful for the ending, because we didn't know yet where we're going to end the film, in the peep show. So finally, having traveled all the way down to the coast and to Port Arthur, where I had found the Keyhole Klub, actually, was a moment when the locations really offered a solution for the ending. It was that I found such a place. Not exactly that place, that place we built. But I found this sort of peep show that then gave me the idea to write a different kind of peep show into the film, as the ending. So landscape and places were really helpful and, as you said, they were sort of a permanent character in the film. And in the end, the film carries the name of a place, where we never shot by the way. And the people of Paris, Texas are still pissed off.

[LAUGHTER]

Haden Guest  13:15  

[LAUGHING] And so, let's speak a little bit about this ending. I mean, the film begins without language. And then it ends in this remarkable kind of theater, right? Of pure dialogue, of sort of imaginary places and memories that are coming alive through words, spoken so movingly by this man who we don't even know can speak at the beginning of the film. So you didn't know how this film would end when it began, so how did you come to this extraordinary and deeply moving ending?

Wim Wenders  13:50  

It took a while. Sam Shepard and I had deliberately only written half a script, counting on the fact that Sam would travel with us and would then get to know the characters and really follow the story. And then we would be able to imagine a better ending for the film, because we both felt when we were writing it, that the way this story started and evolved, we didn’t know how to end it. And we thought it was good that we didn't know. So we left ourselves with a chance to find out ourselves, what this necessary story ending would be. And then everything went wrong. And Sam didn't travel with us, because he had fallen madly in love with Jessica Lange and decided to make a movie with her in the other part of the country, somewhere up north, actually a film called North [Far North]. So he didn't travel with us. He wasn't able to write the second half of the story. When the story gets to Los Angeles, when father and boy– The story went to the moment when father and boy leave the house. We shot up to there–

Haden Guest  15:18  

With Sam Shepard until then, right.

Wim Wenders  15:20  

That's what Sam and I wrote. The script went up to the moment when they were about to leave from Los Angeles. And then, from there on, we knew nothing. They were going to go back to Texas and find her. But we didn't know where and how. So we had to break, because I ran out of script. And desperately, I tried to figure out the second half of the story. And the only way to communicate with Sam Shepard was on the phone, because that was 1983. That was the only thing you could do. There was no fax machines, nothing. You can send letters. Telegrams wouldn't help. I could have just written “help”.

[LAUGHTER]

So we had a hiatus of three weeks. And I was just left alone with my assistant, Claire Denis. And in Los Angeles with– I still don't know how we figured out an ending.

Haden Guest  16:20  

With Claire Denis?

Wim Wenders  16:22  

With Claire. And Hunter’s father, Kit Carson, was helpful and he was a sparring partner in imagining an ending. I finally typed it all up on four or five pages and sent it by mail, express mail, to somewhere up in Minnesota. And then Sam wrote it, actually. It needed a few nights. And then one night, from midnight to early morning, he dictated the whole thing to me. On the phone. That was the only way.

Haden Guest  17:01  

So on the telephone just as the characters themselves would.

Wim Wenders  17:05  

I typed it all out. I wrote it all down and typed it up and then gave it to the actors. And then they had three days to learn it. Much to the dismay of Harry Dean. He said, “I can't possibly learn this. Give me two weeks, I can learn it.” I said, “We only have three days, Harry.” And then with the help of Nastassja. And me. One of us was always there. And Allison Anders was a PA on the film, and she spent hours and hours with Harry, when Nastassja and me had to go to sleep. She studied with Harry and three days later Harry was able to do–

Haden Guest  17:53  

So like Travis, he really didn't sleep.

Wim Wenders  17:56  

No, he never slept. He was too anxious. He was too nervous. He was worried all the time. He was worried that he was too old, and that he wasn't good looking enough and that his acting wasn't good enough. Harry had made 100 films as a supporting actor and this was, in his mid 50s, the first time he had a leader. And he just was sheer angst, everyday.

Haden Guest  18:28

Well, I have to say, I mean, I did want to ask you about the casting because it's not just Harry Dean Stanton, it’s also Dean Stockwell. Throughout your career you've given major parts to underappreciated actors. Also to non-actors, to musicians. And you have a real talent for this, I think, to bring into the screen, again, people who can embody their roles, differently. And I was wondering if this is something you could speak to. I mean, here we have musician John Lurie as the pimp character here. And so, the ways in which you discover and think about characters and actors in the ways in which maybe roles emerge out of those figures themselves or vice versa.

Wim Wenders  19:17  

I always feel that the person who plays the part has to be that part. I'm always uncomfortable when I realize somebody starts playing it, because I feel he or she has to be it, and has to invest everything he or she has in her into it. And so I'm really very demanding. Not in terms of acting. I don't want them to act. I just want them to be in front of the camera and become that person and put everything in there that they have, and find in themselves. So the non-actor can sometimes do that better. But in that case, I think I needed actors. And Harry Dean was exactly the actor to carry it off. And even if he was so afraid that he couldn't, he was perfect. And even his fear and his angst was really perfect for the part. And Hunter. Hunter did it, Hunter comforted him like nobody else. Because, when he had complained with me that he was too old and not good looking enough, and when he had complained to Nastassja, he went to Hunter. So, but Hunter had a very cool way. He said, “You’re okay!”

[LAUGHTER]

“You're okay, Dad.” He kept calling him Dad in between. And that did Harry Dean a lot of good.

Haden Guest  20:45  

I mean, I already compared the film, with my earlier comments, to Alice in the Cities, in the way in which the child has such an important role. And it seems to me that the child in both those films is a kind of zero degree of performance. And I mean, I think the way that you work with the children in these two films is really profound. You allow them to keep their innocence and yet they see and they understand things differently. And you give us that strange wisdom of youth, as well. And in both cases, you have this older man who's also a kind of a naive. So I was wondering if you could speak about– Because there's a long history, of course, of films that use, and filmmakers who've used children to sort of break through a kind of narrative barrier. I’m thinking about Rossellini, thinking about.... So I was wondering if you could speak about working with children. The challenges and possibilities.

Wim Wenders  21:53  

Children can correct everything you do. You cannot lie to them. And they don't lie to you. And there is a truth in their performance that is just—especially with children who haven't done movies before. I never tried to cast a kid who had already been in a movie because that is sometimes very, very, very difficult. And then they have from their other experiences, they think they have to play something. So, but kids who are just themselves can be such incredible corrections to everything you want to do. And they are quite a challenge for the grown up actors, who they are with. And they don't get away with anything, with kids. If it's not right and true, you can’t get anything past the children. And both Hunter and little Alice really had a tremendous instinct. They both didn't want to learn their text. And they both, independently, they never met each other, but they both said, right in the beginning, they said to me, “You tell me exactly what the scene is about, and then I’ll find the words.” And that is, of course, a challenge for the actor. And there's a number of scenes here that Hunter didn't want to tell me about. Like, when he's telling the story of how the earth was born. He wanted to keep that until the camera was rolling. Because he also realized if he did it twice, it won’t be that good anymore. And he was right. We only did it once.

Haden Guest  24:01  

That's quite amazing. And both of those children, and Hunter especially, have really just incredible presences in the film. I mean, I would like to talk just a little bit about music, because this film is really striking for the Ry Cooder score. But also I wanted to speak, though, in general about your approach to music. And I feel like in so many of your films, you have multiple layers of music. There's the diegetic music, the role of this, as I mentioned before, this kind of jukebox logic, where songs are suddenly dropped into a film like a record, selected with a button. Either a character sings them or somebody plays them on a jukebox, which I know you're very fond of having. But then there's also, oftentimes you have a score that repeats a kind of motif. At times more hypnotic, at times quite, you know, punctual, that seems to sort of structure and give the film a kind of breathing, a rhythm. So I was wondering if you could talk about these different approaches to music. The ways in which they work at times contrapuntally in your films, and yeah.

Wim Wenders  25:16  

In this particular case there is almost no music, except for Ry Cooder’s. There’s the girl band in the end, plays a little bit of rehearsing.

Haden Guest  25:33  

We hear the Mexican music when Harry Dean Stanton is walking by.

Wim Wenders  25:36  

Mexican music is drifting by, but there is no source music. There is basically just Ry Cooder’s guitar. And I knew that this was going to be the score when we were shooting it. And I actually knew it before, because Ry and I had been friends for a number of years, and we had tried to work together once before, for a movie I did four or five years earlier, called Hammett. And I tried to convince the studio to let us score it together, Ry and I. Sort of with the urban city blues. And the studio said, “No. What are you crazy or what? This is a guitarist, we need a composer.” So they hadn't let us work together. And Ry and I had sort of promised each other that next time, nobody looks over your shoulder, then we're going to do it the way we want to do it. So I was completely– I loved his music. I loved his guitar playing. And I knew from the beginning that this was the one film we could do together. And that was a number of things that came together. It was not just Ry. It was also with Sam and I had been friends for years and had really wanted to do something together. And this was the first opportunity. Robby Müller, the DOP, and I had done all my first six, seven, eight films together. And then Robby hadn't been able to work in America, and we had a hiatus of five years where we didn't work with each other. So we were so eager to get back together. So this film, in some way was... in all these collaborations, these essential collaborations, with your writer, with your musician, with your cameraman, we were just so close and we finally, we're all wanting to do this, and finally we could. So it all came together really well.

Haden Guest  27:37  

Well, you know, you mentioned Hammett, and which I know, was a very difficult film. And in that film, though, you were working within a sort of quintessentially American genre. Here the detective, the crime film, the film noir. And you’re working with the private eye, of course, based on Dashiell Hammett’s. And I'm wondering, in this film Paris, Texas, so much of it comes out of Hammett, again. The collaboration with, you mentioned Cooder, but also with Sam Shepard, as well. But I'm wondering, in what ways was this film, Paris, Texas, an attempt then to really make a film that was about America? That was about, let's say, the heartland. I mean heartland in this double sense. This sort of emotional-like place. This place where one is searching for a kind of belonging, a kind of place, a kind of connection they can’t have. And it seems to me again, and working with Sam Shepard, one of the most sort of quintessential poets of the West, of the loneliness of the West, and you, who’ve had this long fascination with America from the very beginning of your careers. I was wondering if you could speak about this, in that sense.

Wim Wenders  28:54  

I had been waiting so long to make the film that I’d come to make in the first place. I came to America in late 1977 to do Hammett, and I thought it was going to be a year or two. Became five years. And it wasn't the American film I had dreamt I could make. And I realized, in the making of this film over five years, I didn't have it in me to make an American movie. I was never going to be an American film director. I made another film in between, State of Things, which was also a very European film. Shot in America, partially. And I made a film with Nicholas Ray in New York in ‘78, ‘79. But all of that was not why I had come in the first place. And I actually had not spent five, six, seven years in America, and I hadn't done what I had promised myself. I promised myself I was going to make some form of—at least for me—some form of film, valid film on America. And it didn't happen. None of the three projects was that. And so finally, this was my last chance. And as I said, it all came together. And I had this great help with Sam and Robby and Ry. And I knew from the beginning it wasn't going to be an American movie. This was a film on America by a European film director. And Sam knew this very well and Sam was fine with this condition. Actually, this was the very first script that Sam had ever written. Before he had only done screenplays. So, he felt this was a good approach. He felt Hollywood just wouldn't go for this kind of script.

Haden Guest  30:55  

In some ways, the title itself, Paris, Texas, you know, a European capital on American state, represents this in between-ness, right, of this film as well.

Wim Wenders  31:05 

Yeah, the title is a strange little haiku in itself. It is really what the film is all about. And it describes Harry Dean so well. The story, when he talks about his father and his mother, and the awful joke his father used to make when he introduced people to “the girl he met in Paris, Texas.”

[LAUGHTER]

That was the film. That was the film in a nutshell, yeah.

Haden Guest  31:30  

Let's take some questions from the audience. And we have microphones on either sides, if you raise your hand and then wait patiently.

Wim Wenders  31:36  

Can I first find out, who of you have just seen the film for the first time?

[AUDIENCE MEMBERS RAISE HANDS]

Haden Guest  31:43

Oh, nice.

Wim Wenders  31:45

Wow. Thank you very much. Wow. It's always– Because the film is so old, you think everybody must know.

[LAUGHTER]

Haden Guest  31:54  

Questions or comments for Wim Wenders? Yes, right here.

Audience  32:00  

Hello. Wow, thank you. This is such an honor to see this film with you. This is actually my favorite film. And I wanted to ask you if you could speak a little bit about the scene, I guess, both consecutive scenes, in the peep show. And your intention behind that scene. For me, there's so much in the images there, and it's so rich, that I wondered if you could speak about the process and maybe even your collaboration with Robby Müller.

Wim Wenders  32:35  

The initial idea of the scene came with this defunct peep show I saw in Port Arthur. And I'd only gone to Port Arthur because Janis Joplin was from there and I needed to see that town.

[LAUGHTER]

And I fell upon this defunct peep show. And it was the only interesting place in Port Arthur. The Keyhole Klub. But, while it was defunct, it was an interesting experience, and it stayed in my head. And I wondered what sort of people would go there. What sort of men would go there and what sort of women would perform there? Just from seeing the architecture. I didn't see anything. And I actually had no concrete experience of peep shows. But it stayed with me. And when we ruined our brains to find out how could this film possibly end, at some moment I had this vague recollection of Port Arthur and this peep show. And I thought about it.  And I thought it was an interesting place, if one could sort of turn it around and make it more of a therapy club. Where men would talk to women. Or women would talk to men. And they wouldn't see each other. And I started to like the idea and then I liked the idea that the woman wouldn't see the men, because I think that was the initial idea from peep shows, to begin with. And I discussed it with Robby and... Well first, I sent the idea to Sam and Sam sort of liked it. Sam liked the condition of it and he liked the fact that it was almost like a one-act play. And that's what kicked his juices and that's why he started to write it. I didn't actually write these two scenes. And he wrote both of them in one night and dictated it. It was almost longer, probably, to dictate them than to write them. And then I had these scenes, and I thought they were fantastic dialogues. Really beautiful and very rich. And I was so proud that I had these two scenes as the ending of the film. And that Sam had taken my idea so far.

So then the actors, when they realized how much I was infatuated with the dialogue, they got it in their head that they should do it like on stage. They should do it in one take. And both Harry Dean and Nastassja—they are long speeches—they did them on condition that I would let them start from scratch. And I said, “Yes.” Little did I know that in these three days,we shot it, or four days, we used more film than for the rest of the shoot. Because each time, when Harry made a blunder, and he did, a lot, he said, “Okay then, now, let's start again.” And I said, “Wait a minute, Harry. We have to refill the camera. Do you know how much film stock we're using up?” He didn't care, he just said, “You promised we could start from scratch.” So we did it always from scratch. The entire scene. And that was great for both actors. It was really good to get into. And to do it over and over again, because we then had to do it so often. Because one of them always made a mistake. And it was these long takes. And they got really, both, into it. But the secret of the scene was my DOP, Robby, because when we first thought about it, and I told Robby, “Well, we can just put a glass in there and she pretends that she can’t see him and when we shoot on her side, we put a mirror. So she actually sees us.” And Robby said, “No, wait a minute, wait a minute. We could actually get such a glass that is a two-way mirror, that is transparent on one side and not transparent on the other.” Because these things do exist—at least, at the time they did exist to shoot film special effects on. And so he found an address on his own, where one could fabricate the size of this mirror. And it cost a fortune. And we only had one of them. And then he just got it in nick of time. Just when we started shooting, we got this piece of glass that worked exactly... The situation was totally real for both actors. Harry would see her and she couldn't see him. And when she turned the light off, and Harry turned the light on himself, she saw a little glimpse of him. It actually worked. The condition was no fake. It was the real condition. With the only drawback that we had to pump so much light into her little cell because that damn mirror took two f-stops. So it was blazing hot on her. We had so many lights in there, that after each scene, she had to completely redo her makeup. She just fell into pieces. But it was wonderful that they had the real situation and that was, for both of them, made it so much easier to play. So she didn't have to fake that she couldn't see him and vice versa.

Haden Guest  38:13  

I love the way the end of the film echoes this as well. Like he's looking at Hunter now and Jane, Nastassja Kinksi, through the hotel window and I was wondering, is that something then that fell into place too, after?

Wim Wenders  38:28  

That was after yeah. We shot that, not...? Yes, we shot that in chronological order. And I fell in love with this parking lot on the top floor of it. This empty lot, elevated lot, and you saw the hotel so nicely with them. It was the right direction for the evening light and it was just... The skies in Texas are mind blowing.

Haden Guest  39:02  

Other questions? Yes. Nina has a question, on the aisle.

Audience  39:06  

Thank you. The question I'm about to ask seems, in some ways maybe, the least important of the many I could ask, but for some reason it's really stayed with me. The color red is so pronounced in the film, and I was just wondering if you could talk about that a little bit. I don't even know how to formulate what I want to ask about it. But just something about red.

Wim Wenders  39:33  

Yeah. I did think about it.

[LAUGHTER]

And I had this little theory in my head that it was going to be something that was gonna go through the entire film. And that's why the film starts with his straight little hat. His baseball hat, in red. And the color goes through, and then Hunter has this red sweater, and it continues and it was always this sort of– It stood for Travis's unconscious longing or for his desire. It was a color of longing and it was there all the time. I had lots of discussions with Robby about the colors in the film. And the colors in the West are so primary to begin with. So red is always sticking out because everything else is blue. In between I thought it was a little too simple with the red as the red herring. Or the red line or whatever you call it. But you know her sweater?

Haden Guest  40:47 

Oh, that pink sweater, or red?

Wim Wenders  40:50  

The pink sweater. That was sheer luck. We started shooting in the peep show and had at least one real rehearsal and we didn't have a good dress for her. And Nastassja wasn’t happy. And my wardrobe person wasn't happy. And I said, “Well, if you find something else until tomorrow morning, go for it. I'm ready.” I realized that could be better. And then she went out and we were ready to shoot the next morning and our wardrobe person wasn't there. And we were lighting the scene and eventually I said, “Well, now we have to shoot. Nastassja, I think you have to get ready to shoot with your...” whatever it was. Yellow something. And then my wardrobe person came in panting, and she had found this sweater,at a thrift store. Salvation Army thrift store, exactly. It was a Salvation Army store. She got it for three dollars at the Salvation Army store. And it was the scene. That sweater alone. I could have cut half the scene.

[LAUGHTER]

Haden Guest  42:24  

Wim, I wanted to ask you, just thinking about colors, about -- I mean, a photographer who I often think of when I see your films is William Eggleston, and I was wondering if you could speak about—because again, you have, it seems to me, your films, this film in particular, references a certain kind of photography. A certain sense of place that derives a texture from color and the sort of rhythm of color across different spaces and across time through light. And I was wondering if you could speak about, you know, Eggleston or color photographers who might have influenced your work and your sensibility.

Wim Wenders  43:05  

I did find a beautiful book the next year, when we were done with Paris, Texas. It was called New Color and it had Eggleston and Stephen Shore in it.

Haden Guest  43:18 

Harry Callahan.

Wim Wenders  43:19 

Yes, it was too late for me.

[LAUGHTER]

We have already shot the movie, yeah. I love that book. And I like these– especially Stephen Shore, I really like, very very much. And Joel Meyerowitz, who was also in the book, I discovered.

Haden Guest  43:35

Well, who you worked together with, as well.

Wim Wenders  43:37

Who we worked with, eventually. I discovered all of these guys in the same book. In New Color. I don't know when it came out. It's a beautiful book, but we had already shot the movie and I was glad I saw that other people had similar tastes.

Haden Guest  43:53  

Well, what's so extraordinary about you saying that is I feel like Alice in the Cities is a film that is Stephen Shore before Stephen Shore. The way he's dealing with serial photography. The way he's looking for these “no places”. What Stephen Shore would later call Uncommon Places.

Wim Wenders  44:07

But did he photograph in black and white?

Haden Guest  44:10  

He did. He began doing serial photographs in black and white. There's a show at the Met Museum right now, at the Metropolitan Museum that showcases all of his work.

Wim Wenders  44:18

I’ll check it out.

Haden Guest  44:20
Yes, right here in front. If you’ll just wait for the microphone, then people in the back can hear you as well. Thank you.

Audience 44:26 

Hello. Mr. Wim. Wenders, what is your relationship to Walt Whitman?

Wim Wenders  44:34  

We have the same initials.

[LAUGHTER]

Haden Guest  44:37  

It's not a family relation, is it?

[LAUGHTER]

Wim Wenders  44:44

I like the man. I like him very much. I don't know when I discovered... I think I discovered him when I was preparing Hammett. It was ‘77, ‘78. And I was sort of obsessed with Walt Whitman for a while. But it never had any influence on the work. Maybe subconsciously. Difficult sometimes, to get the poet into movies. Do you like him especially?

Audience  45:22  

Yes. He’s one of my best friends. You are too!

[LAUGHTER]

Wim Wenders  45:29 

The W.W.’s. We have it, right?

Haden Guest  45:32 

Yes, the gentlemen and the baseball hat.

Audience  45:36 

The movie was, yeah, it was brilliant. The mood and the, you know, the feeling, if you've ever been in southwest Texas, Arizona, New Mexico. That loneliness and emptiness. The cinematography, the music. But the thing that bothers me is the message of the movie. Using the, sort of, this beautiful, innocent child. This eight-year-old, beautiful person, as sort of a salve and a salvation for the characters. And I started thinking, did you consider an ultimate message? You know, when you rewrote the script? Or when you spoke with Sam and Kit Carson? It was bothersome to me that the people, who took this child as their own for four years, were just sort of left out. And is it really better for the child to be living with this woman who, you know, was in this peep show? You know, was there ever a consideration of an ultimate message? [LAUGHTER] I mean, it was sort of scary to me to think, what's going to happen to this child? And it was sort of a kidnapping, actually. Illegal kidnapping. But anyway, you know, I love the discussion of the technical stuff, but maybe because I work in human services...?

Haden Guest  47:11

No, this is an interesting question, yeah.

Audience  47:11

I’m thinking of the–

Wim Wenders  47:14

Maybe it’ll–

Audience 47:15

If you guys actually had a message? Or did you consider that, or is it just something we’re supposed to write? Thank you. I’m sorry about–

Haden Guest  47:25

Oh no, it’s fine.

Wim Wenders 47:26

We were very much worried about Walt and his wife. And it might console you that we did shoot a lot with Walt following Travis and Hunter. We shot an enormous amount of time that he followed on their heels. Driving after him. And eventually I put a stop to it, and told the actor, “I don't think we're going to use it.” And then we had it in the editing room, and considered it for a while, and then cut it out, because in a way, I felt that Travis had all the right in the world to travel with his son on the search for his mother. And of course, it was heartbreaking that Walt and his wife had so much cared for the little boy and really had become his parent. So I figure they're gonna eventually solve it. And Jane had a good relationship with her sister-in-law, so I think they’re all living happily ever after.

[LAUGHTER]

Haden Guest  48:42  

Other, other questions or comments for Wim Wenders? This gentleman here, and then we'll take the question in the very back.

Audience  48:49

Hi. Yeah, you mentioned that–

Wim Wenders  48:53

Where are you?

Audience  48:54

Back here.

Wim Wenders  48:55

Ah, sorry.

Audience  48:56

You mentioned that it took you awhile before you were able to make the American film that you wanted to make? And you said it was something about being a European filmmaker. What exactly do you think, was it a European sensibility that you have? Or style? Or can you speak to that at all?

Wim Wenders  49:16

I don't think it has anything to do with style. I think it's strictly an attitude or you might call it sensibility. I think like to shoot a film as we go along, and not even have a second half written, was not exactly an American approach. And when the film came out, a lot of the reviews said, “We don't know. We don't need these Europeans to show us how we live.” It was actually quite hostile. And I realized that, even though Americans shoot all over the world and make movies everywhere, they weren’t used that somebody would look at them. Actually, they're kind of pissed. And Paris, Texas had to overcome quite a hurdle to be seen in America, really. Because American, at least critics and the studios, weren't really used that other people made films here. While in Europe, we’re totally used– In Berlin they shoot 10 American movies every year. And that’s good. And I was sort of happy that I was, in a way, not necessarily a pioneer there. Other Europeans will make movies in America. But that sort of movie, made on the road, non-union, and by the way, with my own crew on tourist visa.

[LAUGHTER]

Shh!  That sort of guerilla filmmaking became, soon afterwards, the new American independent cinema.

Haden Guest  51:14  

Yes. In the back.

Audience  51:17  

Following up to my friend's question, who spent some time worrying during the film. I thought there was a lot of vulnerability. You know the child, but Travis too. Lots of vulnerability, the entire time. You're never quite sure if people are going to be safe. And I'm juxtaposing that with sort of the Western mindset around kind of machismo and the toughness of the Western environment and landscape. And I wonder if that figured—if that internal tension of vulnerability and toughness was in your thought process or in Sam Shepard's thought process?

Wim Wenders  51:53

Well, a lot of Sam's plays take place in the West. And a lot of them show pretty tough characters. Especially fathers and sons. A lot of them have really very hard and almost brutal scenes between family members. And if you look at the history of Western, there are some very, very gruesome stories in there. And my favorite Western, in terms of story, and also the book it was based on was called The Searchers. And The Searchers is one of the toughest stories you can ever want to read. So, the American West is full of not very pleasant stories. And our characters were vulnerable, yes. Harry Dean, well Travis is a vulnerable person to begin with, and sort of shaky. And he had to sum up his courage to assume his part as father. And I think it's more that Hunter was so courageous, that he wanted to go along, that made Harry, that made Travis believe they could do it together, I think. Initially, he probably was prepared to do it on his own. But the little boy was very courageous. So the West is full of these stories, I think. And a lot of them are much more merciless than ours.

Haden Guest  53:38 

Dan, there's a question right here, in the very front row. Yes. If you speak in the mic.

Audience  53:50  

I was very moved that here, you come to Los Angeles. You come to Texas. And you're filming American culture, American landscape. And it's all Mexican. And here is Hollywood, filming in Los Angeles, and you seldom see a Mexican. And you seldom hear Mexican music. They are at least 40-50% of Los Angeles. And so that you, in a way, that you were paying homage to the Mexico that has not disappeared. That somehow it is there. It was there 200 years ago. It'll be here 200 years from now. So it's, to me, very moving. The undertone of the music. The old fashioned Mexican music is right there and you really pick up the single tones and the guitar. They hang, they hang. And it is not slapstick. It is not Broadway. But it is just all Mexico. I was very moved by that.

Wim Wenders  55:07

Thank you. And I think both Sam Shepard needs some of that credit and Ry Cooder as well. I mean, Ry really was thriving on Mexican music and he loved to bring in all these undertones of, especially, Mexican guitar. And my favorite scene is the one with the Mexican maid, when she teaches him how to walk. And I made a movie a few years later, called End of Violence, that is strictly about the Hispanic population of the city.

Haden Guest  55:40  

There’s also “Las Mañanitas” that Harry Dean Stanton is singing when he's washing the dishes.

Wim Wenders  55:46

Yes. Harry Dean was a great singer.

Haden Guest  55:50

Right. He was, yeah.

Wim Wenders  55:53

His favorite were the Mexican love songs that he was really performing beautifully.

Haden Guest  56:00

Boleros.

Wim Wenders  56:02

Yeah. And much to the dismay of Ry Cooder in the end. Because Harry Dean was singing every night. If you shoot in the American West, you're bound to stay in a Holiday Inn. Every night you stay in some Holiday Inn. And there's always a lobby. And there's always a piano and there's always Harry Dean singing a song.

[LAUGHTER]

And so every night, Harry was singing and the crew was listening. First of all, there was no other places in these towns. And second, we loved Harry and we knew it was great fun. So  Harry sang his Mexican songs. It was great. And Ry even recorded one with him. “Canción Mixteca”. Right now, I forgot the title of it. And we actually put it on the soundtrack of the album. And Harry was very angry with me that I didn't use it over the end credits. But I felt I couldn't do that, because here was the character, sort of driving away, and then I couldn't go to a Mexican love song, sung by the same guy. So, but it had an after story, which was, a couple of months after the film came out, and Ry Cooder went on a long tour, touring all of Europe and Asia and America. And he called me one day and said, “Wim, you're gonna have to help me out.” I said, “What is it?” He said, “Harry. Harry's a problem. Wherever we go and play a concert, Harry comes and he comes on stage.”

[LAUGHTER]

“And he sings his song.”

[LAUGHTER]

“And each time we are nice and we play this song. And the band knows the song. But now we can’t do it anymore. He thinks he's part of the show.”

[LAUGHTER]

“Can you talk to him?” So I had to convince Harry that he was not part of Ry Cooder’s concert. And he understood. And then he started his own band and sang strictly Mexican music. And really beautifully so.

Haden Guest  58:22  

We'll take a few more questions. Yes, the gentleman here with the glasses.

Audience  58:29

Hello. Thank you very much. I was wondering if you could speak a bit about the scene with the man prophesizing on the highway bridge, and how that came to be or how that functions. It’s always stood out to me as a very special little scene in the film. Thank you.

Wim Wenders  58:45  

This is the scene when Travis is walking over the freeway. The 16-lane freeway there. And he runs into this prophet. And it's a scene that Sam had written for the film. But we didn't know exactly where we could place it. It was a monologue. And Sam said “At one point, it would be great if Travis runs into this character, this prophet.” And so I didn't know where we're going to place it either. So this friend of mine, Tom Farrell, who is an actor from New York, was with us on the first day of shooting. And I didn't find a spot for this prophetic monologue in Texas. And in the end, we didn't find it in Los Angeles. So he came with us, we traveled to Texas. We had finished the movie and he hadn't done his speech. And we all traveled back to Los Angeles and I said, “Okay, we had one more day of shooting.” And Travis walks the bridge. And Tom could finally, at the end of the shoot, after he had been with us for five weeks, he could finally do the monologue. And he was really courageous and it was beautiful. But he'd been ready every day of the shoot to do it.

[LAUGHTER]

He knew I was going to do it. I promised I was going to do it. And then we finished the movie. And I had to keep my promise, so we did one more day of shooting in Los Angeles, that long traveling over the freeway. And that was, of course, the perfect location for it, and I was so glad that finally, it was in.

Haden Guest  1:00:44  

What's so great about that scene is, first we think it could be a radio, we think it could be a distant voice. And then it's, I mean, it's marvelous that he emerges from it. The way it's choreographed. And so I was wondering if you could talk about the role, as a sort of choreography of space and characters, and how you work with Robby Müller on that. Because some of these tracking shots, and that one especially, is so striking, so precise.

Wim Wenders  1:01:14

Robby and I had worked so long together, and we were almost like twin brothers. And then we were separated for years. And in all our previous work, Robby and I—in all the first films, in Alice, and American Friend and all these films—we had set down the night before, and we had designed the shots for the next day. And then when we did Paris, Texas, we said, “We're not going to do this, because this is such incredible country, and we're shooting in these amazing places.” It would be a pity if we'd had it, sort of, storyboarded before. Done our little drawings the night before. So on Paris, Texas, from the first day of shooting, Robby and I came to the set in the morning, we did not know how we’re going to do the scenes. And we always walked around and let the place impose itself, and then, in the end, let the place dictate the shots. Including that last shot. So it was all very much informed by landscape and informed by the place.

Haden Guest  1:02:24  

Okay, well, let's take this question the front and then we'll probably take one more.

Audience  1:02:34  

From the very beginning, I got the feeling that Anne and Travis had, like, some sort of romantic connection. And I'm not really sure why. But by the end of the movie I had totally forgotten about that, obviously, because it just wasn't a thing. But I'm wondering why I thought that and if you ever were aware of that.

Wim Wenders  1:03:00  

You have to say that again, what you thought of her in the beginning?

Audience  1:03:03  

I thought that Travis and Anne had like a romantic history or like a potential.

Wim Wenders  1:03:09 

Ah. Travis and Anne. Not that I know of.

[LAUGHTER]

Of course, there was a link with his mom being, so to speak, French from Paris, and his brother then had actually married a French wife. There was something. There was something in the family that was the “French Connection.”

[LAUGHTER]

Audience  1:03:37 

I think I thought it was because, when he was singing, and she woke up, and then she was like, listening to him and she, like, touched her mouth. I don't know, something about that. I was like...

Wim Wenders  1:03:46  

No, I think you made that up.

[LAUGHTER]

Haden Guest  1:03:50  

She seems pretty devoted to Dean Stockwell. This gentleman in the black, you can have the last question, please.

Audience  1:03:57  

What I love about the film, and many of your films, is the way that you use space much like a jazz musician, and seem to favor characters with a wandering spirit, which you express in long form. I was wondering, as you make films now, those techniques and themes, how are you able to express those in an era where immediacy seems to be favored.

Wim Wenders  1:04:25  

It gets more difficult to make films with a lot of space in them. And editing has gotten so much tighter over the years. Like, you couldn't possibly edit a movie like this anymore, with all these long shots. And we all have learned to look faster, and grasp shots faster. And we restored the film a couple of years ago, and so, really scanned all the negative and redid the color correction, my wife and I. And really worked on it for years until I really got back into the skin of the film. And I realized that I was such a different person when I made it. And that the learning process ever since these 30 some years since then—34 by now—learning, or if you want, unlearning, I don't know, that audience and us filmmakers went through is sort of tremendous. And I don't know if I could make a film like this again, because times have moved on, and storytelling has moved on, and we're so much faster with making connections, and understanding a shot, and seeing. And actually, in movies today, there's so much less space. And I could never ever again make a film with half a script, let alone without a script. And I've made several films, fiction films without a script at all. And I couldn't, for the heck of it, get it done anymore. Even Paris, Texas, Sam and I wrote a finished script so I could get the financing. But we knew that the second half was baloney.

[LAUGHTER]

Wim Wenders  1:06:26

And I couldn't use it. I mean, when we get to the middle, I couldn't possibly shoot what was written. But that's more and more difficult today. Filmmaking is so much more formulated. And it's difficult to let all this air blow in and be so loose with your story. I mean, Paris, Texas is pretty loose in its storyline. Thank you so much.

Haden Guest  1:07:02  

Thank you all for being here.

[APPLAUSE]

Please join me in thanking Wim Wenders, once again. We'll be back tomorrow night with Wings of Desire and we will see you then.

Wim Wenders  1:07:12

Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

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