Lesley Gilb Taplin recently interviewed visionary film director Wim Wenders while he was in Berlin and Los Angeles preparing for his next film shooting in Montana this summer. As reflected in all of his movies his sense of place endures and includes a deep affection for our very own Downtown. We are honored to have this exclusive interview.
web_ed

LGT: Wim, I had the privilege of traveling with your film crews during the making of 'Until the End of the World', which took us literally around the world. At each location in that journey, a very different aspect of the story was played out. Though there was an overriding mission that drove the action, it was as if certain emotional truths, physical actions, and character interplays could only be lived, played out, in certain locations.

WW: That's right. My films are much more driven by a sense of place than by anything else. I often know WHERE I want something to happen before I know WHAT it could be. I try to let the story come out of my characters as well as out of the place they find themselves in. I do believe that places (cities, landscapes, deserts, roads…) carry a potential of stories in them that they want to have told, formed by the history of that place, the sum of everything that happened there. I like to be guided by those untapped reservoirs. Places have memories. And places have character, too.

LGT: Recently in an interview for the New York Times that accompanied a photographic exhibit of yours, you said, to paraphrase, that you prefer to take photos of different locations without people in the shots, because you believe that each location has its own story to tell, and it is that story that you are revealing as a photographer. You went on to say that was often the impulse for your movies, to dramatize the story inherent in the place itself, as for example in Paris, Texas. Have I understood your thoughts correctly?

WW: Indeed. There's little I can add. PARIS, TEXAS started by the desire to explore the American West from scratch. WINGS OF DESIRE was a way to describe the city of Berlin in the most complex way possible. BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB was also a discovery of Havana, as END OF VIOLENCE was a portrait of Los Angeles…

LGT: You have in the last few years shot two movies in the Downtown Los Angeles area, Million Dollar Hotel and most recently Land of Plenty. Did writers just happen to bring you these ideas for stories set in the downtown area, or were you interested in downtown as a location for its own sake, and the screenplays followed that interest?

WW: MILLION DOLLAR HOTEL was brought to me by my friend Bono, who had discovered that very hotel in the heart of Downtown LA, on the corner of 5th and Main, when he had shot the video for WHERE THE STREETS HAVE NO NAME there. He took me there and I was mesmerized immediately. I understood why that place had become such a metaphor for America for him. And as I was attracted to the hotel, and the story that Bono had sensed there, I agreed to make the movie. It happens entirely on that one street block, mostly inside the hotel. I got to know the neighborhood, and began to be very intrigued by Downtown LA. As you know, many movies are shot there, all the time, but very few of them actually show it as Los Angeles. They use the place as a "location", not as itself. I wanted to explore the area more, especially when I learned that LA was in fact "The hunger capital of America". I knew a bit about the situation of the homeless people who gather there, but I wanted to dig deeper. That's how LAND OF PLENTY came about.

LGT: Would you say that the life of downtown itself was key to the telling of these two stories? Could the same stories have been told in New York or another urban setting?

WW. No, both movies were very specifically located in Downtown LA, and could have happened nowhere else. Maybe that's a very European distinction, that "sense of place". Many American films take places in rather anonymous settings. And even if the place has a name, you can't help the feeling that the story could take place anywhere. American cinema always had a tendency to generalize, partly as it was trying to please a very wide market, both in the US as in the world. European cinema, by tradition, has always been much more specific. Local color, local languages and accents, local customs and habits have always played a much more important part. Of course Europe is a continent composed of many different cultures, while the United States always were the "melting pot" that turned all these cultures into one single new one. I say that without any judgment or opinion whatsoever. You know how fascinated I have been with America, and how much my films have always explored that "American Dream".

ILGT: In viewing Land of Plenty, will the audience be able to easily recognize that the film was shot in Downtown Los Angeles? What locations did you feature to make it clear this is Downtown Los Angeles? The skyline, specific buildings?

WW: We shot all over Downtown. Of course, you see the skyline a few times. But also the financial district, the Garment District, the Toy District… We were all over the place. Our main location was a beautiful old fire station on Winston Street. I had shot there before once, in a different lifetime, so to speak, when I did HAMMETT for American Zoetrope. At the time this fire station had been transformed into a casino in San Francisco's Chinatown. (That was a studio picture that I had wanted to shoot entirely on location in San Francisco, and that we ended up shooting in LA, mainly on the sound stage.) Anyway, I felt I owed that fire station something…

LGT: Were there certain local usages of language in the dialogue of the film that will identify this as a Los Angeles story? Did your characters speak any languages other than English?

WW: No, not really. Some Spanish occurs in the background, but the overall language was English.

LGT: You shot 'Land of Plenty' on a very low budget using digital equipment. Could you briefly describe the technical side of this shoot?

WW: This must have been one of the fastest movies ever made in this city. I wrote the story in 3 days, basically, with the help of my friend Scott Derrickson, then we wrote the script in 3 weeks, with Michael Meredith, the writer, practically tied to his laptop. In the meantime, we financed the film, with the help of IFC and InDiGent, as well as with our German company Reverse Angle, and then we were already shooting. I already knew my locations, as the film was written with them in mind. Apart from Downtown LA we also shot in a small town in the Mojave desert, in Trona. The shooting schedule was ridiculously fast, I had 16 days. This was only possible with the help of digital equipment, a new generation DV camera by Panasonic that shoots full frames, and that was the first camera that brought progressive mode to a consumer standard. That camera cost 3.000,- dollars. The result, blown up to 35mm cinemascope, looks staggering. The entire film cost less than what most studio pictures spent in an afternoon. But I promise you: the range and the look of the film go beyond your wildest expectations of a "low budget film". That was possible because everybody on the set worked for the same salary of a 100 dollars a day. But cast and crew share 40% of the film's gross, from the first dollar earned.

LGT: How did using digital equipment affect the number of crew members you needed for Land of Plenty, compared to Million Dollar Hotel?

WW: We were a relatively small crew, but still almost 30 people. Okay, half as much as on MILLION DOLLAR HOTEL. But twice as fast.

LGT: How many parking spaces did your crew need for 'Land of Plenty', versus Million Dollar Hotel?

WW: We had one big truck for all the equipment and the lights. 2 vans, a few more vehicles for the art department, props etc. Altogether a really tiny car park.

LGT: As you might have guessed, it has occurred to me that shooting digitally in the downtown area might alleviate some of the congestion that conventional shooting creates for the residents and businesses of downtown. Would you say that was true?

WW: We certainly didn't disturb anybody. We didn't even stop traffic, but went with whatever happened in the streets. Which wasn't easy. This was NOT a documentary, but a fictional story. Actually, we were treated very friendly by the locals, the residents as well as the homeless. I remember one guy looking out of his tent, shaking his head: "Man, you ARE low budget!" I feel we were able to capture the atmosphere of Downtown LA much better with our small unobtrusive digital equipment than any film camera would have ever allowed us.

LGT: Did you use local residents for any of your crew members on Land of Plenty, or did you bring in your own crew from outside the area? If you used local people, how did you find them?

WW: One of our leading actors was "local": Richard Edson lived just a block away from our main set. For extras we used a lot of real people living out there. And we paid them decently.

LGT: What are your favorite parts of downtown - restaurants, bars, great views, life on the streets?

WW. I like two places a lot. One is Phillipe's, "the home of the French-dipped sandwich", on Alameda, and the other is a very old and funky place, with sawdust on the floor, half under street level, COLE'S, on 6th Street.

LGT: What emotions does the downtown area evoke in you?

WW: Sadness, to see a place with such a history go down the drain. Hope, that it might come back. Anger, to see people so abandoned, with all social nets pulled from under their feet.

LGT: Did you happen to shoot any of Land of Plenty around the Arts District area, between Alameda and the River?

WW: Yes, we shot some street scenes as well as driving scenes there.

LGT: Does the Arts District interest you as a location? Do you sense a story there waiting to be told?

WW: Downtown LA is amazing, as it contains so many distinctly different areas in its relatively small boundaries. The Art District is maybe the most interesting development, with the … in the middle. I had the feeling that it was still in an "experimental" state, and that it could become either real and vibrant, and therefore remain, or lose its vitality eventually and disappear again.

LGT: Thanks, Wim.

WW: You're so welcome, Lesley…