Wim Wenders

[MacGuffin]

Javier Bardem Reveals The Invisibles
A portmanteau pic with Wim Wenders
Source: Variety

Portmanteau films have a bit of a hit-and-miss history. For every New York Stories, there's a Four Rooms.

But the risk clearly isn't putting off Javier Bardem, Wim Wenders, Fernando Leon, Isabel Coixet, Mariano Barroso and Javier Corcuera, who are putting together just such a movie - albeit a much more serious effort -  with the working title Invisibles.

Their various entries will tackle the world's overlooked conflicts and the human suffering they cause. The subjects include sleeping sickness in Africa, Uganda's young soldiers, a documentary about displaced Columbians and Wenders' film about violence against women in the Congo.

The plan is to release the pic next year, to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Spain's Medicos Sin Fronteras, the country's contribution to Doctors Without Frontiers.

[MacGuffin]

Wenders readies Sicilian "Palermo Story"

German director Wim Wenders said Monday he is beginning work on "Palermo Story," a drama based on a Sicilian love affair between a middle-aged German man and a younger local girl.

Wenders, the 61-year-old Oscar nominee for his 2000 documentary "Buena Vista Social Club," announced the plans for the film in Palermo, his first visit to the city in nearly 40 years. Although the story is only partially written and the cast not yet selected, he plans to start shooting in September or October.

Funded partially with cash from the Sicilian Regional Film Commission and the regional government and tourist boards, Wenders said that the story would strongly reflect its location.

"I want this city (Palermo) to tell me its story," Wenders said, adding that the cast would be made of a mix of local talent and foreign actors.

Wenders will be spending a lot of time in Italy toward the end of this year. In addition to the shooting of "Palermo Story" in Sicily, the director will be honored with a special retrospective at the Turin Film festival in November.

[MacGuffin]

Mezzogiorno joins Wenders' 'Palermo'
Pic starts shooting in Sicily
Source: Variety

ROME — Italian actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno has joined the cast of Wim Wenders' "The Palermo Shooting," which has just started shooting in the Sicilian city.

Mezzogiorno — recently a lead in Mike Newell's "Love in the Time of Cholera" — is playing an angelic art restorer in "Palermo," which Wenders has described as a "romantic thriller."

"Palermo" is the first European fiction pic the helmer has tackled in more than 10 years.

Cameras started rolling Monday in the exotic Sicilian capital, known for Baroque and Arabic architecture, which Wenders said he will pay tribute to, in a somewhat similar fashion as his depiction of the Portuguese capital in "Lisbon Story."

"Palermo," which will contain cameos by Dennis Hopper, Lou Reed and Patti Smith, is centered around a hotshot German photographer, played by German rock star Campino, who travels to Sicily in the throes of an existential crisis and falls in love.

Wenders' relatively low-budget latest is produced by his own Wenders Images shingle in collaboration with Teutonic web ZDF and Arte, with backing from several German regional entities, including the North-Rhine Westphalian fund Filmstiftung, and the Province of Palermo.

[MacGuffin]

Q&A: Wim Wenders
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Returning to Cannes Competition for the ninth time you'd think there'd be no surprises left from German auteur Wim Wenders. But his latest, the thriller "Palermo Shooting," is generating more excitement than anything Wenders has made in a decade. The story of a photographer who flees his hometown in Dusseldorf, Germany and rediscovers life in Palermo, Italy the film stars German punk star Campino. Wenders sat down with The Hollywood Reporter's German bureau chief Scott Roxborough in Cannes to talk about childhood, photography and the art of genre bending.

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: You were really down to the wire getting this movie ready for Cannes. Is it finished?

WIM WENDERS: I finished the end credits Monday night and had the final version delivered Wednesday. It's been a little nerve wracking. We knew that we were going to be late and that's one of the reasons we are at the very end of the festival. When we watched the opening of the festival on television we were in the medium stage of mixing. It was close.

THR: "Palermo Shooting" is the first film you've shot in Germany since "Faraway, So Close!" 15 years ago and the first you've ever shot in your hometown of Dusseldorf. What brought you back?

WENDERS Yes, I've never shot a film in my hometown, except for shooting some Super 8 as a kid. Partly it was my choice of lead actor. Campio is from Dusseldorf and he is a true Dusseldorfer and a local hero because his band, Die Toten Hosen, are the biggest rock band in Germany and they are from Dusseldorf. I wrote the story for Campino. Having in mind that he is not a professional actor at least not before the film, although now he is.

All we'd ever done together was shoot a music video -- a three-day shoot. But I knew he had a very enigmatic presence. Nobody knows him as an actor but he is exactly the kind of character I had in mind to play this photographer. I wanted the actor to be from Dusseldorf because Dusseldorf is the home of all the great contemporary photographers in Germany. The Dusseldorf school is the great German post-war photography school. My hero, being a photographer, had to be from Dusseldorf.

THR: Place and architecture always play a major role in your films. What was it like to shoot your hometown?

WENDERS: The strange thing in filmmaking is that places you know best are the hardest to shoot and I usually go to places that I did not know like San Francisco or Lisbon or Tokyo or now Palermo. As a foreigner, a stranger you see places better than you would if you lived there. At least that's my theory. It is very difficult to see something that is so close to your heart. If you spend your childhood at the river Rhine and you come back 50 years later, it is hard to think of the river Rhine without seeing your own childhood and without thinking about your own childhood. And I didn't want to make a film about my hometown. I wanted to make a film about photography and about all the questions that contemporary photographers are exposed to and the one that they are most exposed to is the question of truth. There's no other profession that is facing the question of truth as photographers.

THR: "Palermo Shooting" is a thriller. You've often played with genre elements in your films, something that is becoming de rigeur among many art house directors.

WENDERS: I've always played with genres, especially with the thriller -- with "American Friend" or "The End of Violence." I've never been able to make a film inside that genre, though and "The Palermo Shooting" is not a film that stays inside the boundaries. It is very hard to stay inside the boundaries of a genre film; I admire people that are able to do that. I just don't have the discipline.
What I like about genres is that you can play with expectations and that there are certain rules that you can either obey or work against. But genres are a funny thing. They're heaven and they're hell. They help you to channel your ideas and they are helpful to guide the audience but they don't help you in what you want to transport other than the genre itself. Genres get angry if you want to tell other stories -- because they are sort of self-sufficient. They like to be the foreground. Then it becomes difficult, because in my case I want to tell all sorts of stories.
But my next film will be a genre movie. Full on. It will be a horror film. It is going to be very exciting. Horror is one genre that is used much less than others to transport other things. Lots of people have used great thrillers to transport political messages but the horror film is rarely used to transport anything but fear. And that I think makes it very interesting to try. It's called Miso Soup and is based on a famous Japanese novel. Willem Dafoe is attached to star. We will shoot in Tokyo next spring. But I'm not telling you anything else.

[MacGuffin]

Wim Wenders stops Pina Bausch movie

BERLIN (Hollywood Reporter) - German director Wim Wenders has stopped production on the planned 3D dance film "Pina" following the death of the film's subject -- the legendary choreographer Pina Bausch.

Bausch, who is often credited with having revolutionized modern dance, died on Tuesday after being diagnosed with cancer only days earlier. She was 68 years' old. She had been preparing the film project with Wenders, which was to be the first dance film shot in 3-D.

Wenders' production company Neue Road Movies said it had stopped all pre-production work on the film. After a mourning period, the company will discuss with Bausch's dance company in Wuppertal whether and how to proceed.

[SiliasRuby]

I've been a huge fan of 'paris texas' for a long time. Strange and delicate that film is. Man, I sound like yoda. The performances in that film really stood out in that delicate film. But I am not here to talk about how much I adore that film. I am here to talk about only my second Wenders experience: 'Wings of Desire'.

Its pure cinema in its loudest, most distinct. Something you can't take your eyes off of when viewing. Something that demands to be watched. To eviscerate your thoughts of what can be done with the medium to what is constantly produced. It expands your mind and doesn't condescend towards it. In the wrong hands this film could have been desperately pretentious. In fact it could come off that way to most. That's one of the reasons why I am hesitant to show it to anyone else. That and because I got such a visceral experience from it myself. I felt like it was a very inspiring and existential film. I might be rambling but I really don't care. This film really affected me. Why haven't more people talked about it here?

[samsong]

i would suspect it's because wenders is somewhat irrelevant, as he hasn't made a good film in a long, long time, and not for lack of trying.  the most notable and worthy thing he's done in the past ten years is rave about the new world.  that said, he's got a few masterpieces under his belt, and wings of desire may be his crowning achievement, even more so than paris, texas, which i think of more as sam sheperd's movie as taxi driver is considered paul schrader's by scorsese.  it's the consummate european art film and one of the most overwhelmingly beautiful and poetic--and not just because there's constant recitation of poetry throughout--films ever made.  if ever i were on the verge of suicide, i'd need only to watch the scene in which peter falk is explaining to bruno ganz the loveliness of being human--the feeling of rubbing your hands together on a cold day, the blissful combination of coffee and cigarettes.  glad you enjoyed it, it's one of my favorites.

[children with angels]

Wim Wenders taps into 3D for documentary on Pina Bausch (From The Guardian)
First 3D arthouse film may inspire further experiments from the world of performing arts

Until now, the 3D revolution has embraced large-scale action films such as Avatar, and children's animations, such as Up and Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland.

But, as Wim Wenders premieres his tribute to the great avant-garde choreographer Pina Bausch, arthouse audiences may find themselves donning those flattering 3D specs as well.

Pina, the highly anticipated cinematic homage to the director of the famous Tanztheater Wuppertal in Germany, may be the first 3D arthouse documentary, but this year will bring further 3D experiments from the world of the performing arts.

The Royal Opera House is planning a theatrical release of a 3D film of Bizet's Carmen this summer, and has also been experimenting with shooting ballet in 3D. Meanwhile, Michael Flatley's enduringly popular Irish dance troupe has been shot in 3D, for a film set for release on St Patrick's day (17 March).

Speaking at the Berlin film festival Sundayabout the future possibilities for 3D, Wenders said: "It will still be blockbusters and animations, but I think the other future for 3D is documentary. It can make us discover our planet and its people in an immediate and gripping way." He added: "3D is almost tailor-made for dance."

The German director of Wings of Desire and Buena Vista Social Club had known Bausch for 20 years, and the idea of making a film together about her work had been on the cards for almost as long.

However, said Wenders: "I never knew, with all my knowledge of the craft of film-making, how to do justice to her work. It was only when 3D was added to the language of film that I could enter dance's realm and language."

3D, with its illusion of depth, could, it was felt, open out the flatness of the cinema screen and give dance the depth and sculptural quality it needed to work cinematically.

Wenders and Bausch – who, with her pioneering art, brought to bear an incalculable influence on the worlds of both dance and theatre – developed an idea for a film, centring round a handful of her most famous works including the classic pieces of the 1970s, Le Sacre du Printemps, Kontakthof, and Café Müller.

However, two days before the shoot was due to start, in June 2009, Bausch died suddenly, five days after being diagnosed with cancer. When what Wenders called this "unimaginable" event occurred, the film was cancelled. "The film we had prepared had Pina Bausch as the central figure," Wenders said. "She was to have been next to me when we shot it. We would have followed her in rehearsals, watched her give notes to the dancers. And we would have gone on tour with her to Asia and South America, so it would have been a road movie."

Eventually, encouraged by Bausch's family, company, and dancers, it was decided to go ahead after all – not least so as to film a document of the choreographer's work "while her eye upon it was still fresh". But, Wenders said, "the main difficulty was that the film we had planned for could not be made any more." A new concept had to be developed for the film.

Footage of her dance works performed on stage was still to be a central element, and "then we slowly developed the idea that her orchestra, the dancers, could be her voice. And her own method of constantly asking her dancers questions should be the method of the film."

The documentary – which is due for release in Britain on 22 April – interleaves excerpts from the stage works with interviews with the dancers, who express themselves briefly in words, and perhaps more eloquently in danced solos.

Speaking about Bausch's influence on him as an artist, Wenders said: "As a film director – and I have made a number of films – one has the impression that one has the mastery of a craft. And a movie means movement, is about movement. But it was only when I saw Pina Bausch's work for the first time that I realised I might know about movies and movement, but I could never decipher or create movement in the way that she could. In fact compared to her, we are all bloody beginners in the art of seeing.

"Pina had trained her eyes to what the soul can teach us through the body."

[jenkins]

found out that Wim Wenders is adapting this book, which excites me because i'd been thinking about reading this book. it was well reviewed, and i most liked hearing it called "postmodern literary airport fiction. Offering myriad pleasures in its prose..." i like the sound of this and i'll probably see the movie first, which sounds ok to me since we're chatting Wenders.

[cronopio2]

the name J. M . Ledgard reminds me of this inability to take a person seriously: