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Wim Wenders LIVE in Berlin: 50 years of rock-n-road movies · MUBI Podcast

• 0:00
  Heads up, this episode contains adult language and spoilers.
• 0:07
  I went to Paris to study painting, and I had no idea that cinema was an art form, because there was no film culture in my country, in Germany in the 50s and 60s.
• 0:17
  We just didn't know.
• 0:19
  Movies were movies.
• 0:19
  It was entertainment.
• 0:22
  And in Paris I found out about cinema being an art that was connected to photography and writing and acting, architecture.
• 0:31
  Everything that I loved, I realized, was actually part of the movies.
• 0:36
  I'd just not seen the right ones.
• 0:39
  And I got completely hooked and realized that that was it.
• 0:43
  I went to Paris to become a painter, and I came back wanting to be a filmmaker.
• 0:50
  That is German director Wim Wenders.
• 0:52
  And for him, that epiphany in Paris, circa 1966 kicked off what's turned out to be a 60 year long road trip around the planet, making some of the best movies ever.
• 1:03
  From his early flicks about angry young men trying to bust out of postwar Germany, to classics like Paris, Texas, about a guy fleeing a painful past.
• 1:11
  His heroes are seekers.
• 1:14
  I'm afraid of walking away again.I'm afraid of what I might find.But I'm even more afraid of not facing this fear. The travelers, fueled by beauty, art, love, rock and roll or all the above.
• 1:29
  And so is Wenders himself.
• 1:35
  I'm Rico Gagliano, welcome back to the MUBI Podcast.
• 1:38
  MUBI's, the global film company that champions great cinema.
• 1:40
  On this show we tell you the stories behind great cinema.
• 1:43
  Happy new year! 2026 stretches out ahead like an open road.
• 1:46
  Seems like a great time to bring you my latest interview with the King of the road movie, Wim Wenders.
• 1:51
  You longtime listeners will remember we talked to him in 2024 about his Oscar nominated Perfect Days.
• 1:57
  But just last fall, he and I sat down to talk about his whole career before a live audience at MUBI Fest in his hometown of Berlin, Germany.
• 2:05
  Please help welcome Mr Wim Wenders.
• 2:11
  We're going to hear us cover everything from his childhood to my favorite of his movies,Wings of Desire, shot in late 80s Berlin, to his music doc Buena Vista Social Club, shot in Havana, Cuba, to his epic Until the End of the World, which is set everywhere.
• 2:25
  And we shot in four continents, in eleven countries.
• 2:29
  And every place I ever wanted to go was, of course, in it, and that was the problem of the movie.
• 2:35
  It was the-- That journey was just too much.
• 2:38
  But just to organize things, I focused on three obsessions of his that show up in his work over and over again: travel, music and movies.
• 2:49
  And my first sort of frivolous question to you is which of those, if you had to rank those, what would be like the number one influence on your life?
• 2:57
  What's the first of those topics that speaks to you?
• 2:59
  Listening to music while traveling.
• 3:03
  That's the first two.
• 3:04
  Why did you pick those two?
• 3:06
  I don't know what would have happened to me without the jukebox.
• 3:11
  You remember these things?
• 3:11
  You're too young.
• 3:15
  You put a dime in, or whatever, a quarter, and you get a song or two or three.
• 3:22
  And this was rock and roll, mainly.
• 3:25
  These machines changed my life.
• 3:28
  I couldn't hear this music at home.
• 3:28
  I'd never heard it before.
• 3:32
  I then started listening to rock 'n' roll and blues on American Forces Network.
• 3:39
  I was fortunate to get that on my little radio and I became a different person because of it.
• 3:48
  I don't think I would have dared to become anything than a doctor or a lawyer or a priest or something like that.
• 3:57
  Now, in a perfect world, we would now start talking about music.
• 3:59
  Unfortunately, we're going to play some clips, which I hope people are excited to see.
• 4:03
  For technical reasons we have to show those in order.
• 4:05
  So I'm going to start with travel.
• 4:06
  So I sort of got it right.
• 4:06
  I sort of predicted correctly.
• 4:09
  Let's start with traveling.
• 4:09
  It's fine with me.
• 4:11
  There's a story that you have told before about being put on a bus at age five by your mother, alone, something that would get her arrested now in America.
• 4:20
  But apparently back then they could do that.
• 4:22
  Tell the story, for those who haven't heard it.
• 4:25
  - It wasn't the bus. It was a train.
• 4:25
  - Okay.
• 4:27
  My mom was getting pregnant, and she was very often sick and fragile.
• 4:33
  My father was getting to work in another city, so they had to move and they're going to have a second baby.
• 4:40
  So they decided it was better if I was not there.
• 4:45
  My father was a doctor.
• 4:45
  He couldn't be home.
• 4:47
  So they decided to get me for three months to a great aunt- who lived in the country on a farm.
• 4:52
  - Okay.
• 4:55
  We didn't have a car. This was 1950, and it was decided that I was going to take the train on my own.
• 5:05
  And it was the most exciting day of my childhood.
• 5:09
  To travel alone and sit in the train.
• 5:12
  I had been in trains before.
• 5:12
  I loved trains, but alone was the top.
• 5:18
  So the day came, my mother took me to the train station.
• 5:22
  The train arrived and then she started looking in all the compartments, and I realized she was looking for somebody to accompany me.
• 5:30
  And my dreams were about to be shattered.
• 5:34
  So then next door, I physically pushed my mom out of the train, and she let it happen and just stared at me in disbelief.
• 5:43
  She didn't know that side of me and I was sorry.
• 5:47
  I didn't want to harm her, but I didn't want her in the train.
• 5:52
  It's interesting because actually I have a theory about travel that in a way, it's the way-- people who really like to travel like to feel like they control their destiny through the world.
• 6:02
  In a way, it makes you feel competent and not afraid of the world if you can navigate it.
• 6:06
  Do you think that's what was going on?
• 6:08
  Not necessarily competent, but you're your own master.
• 6:11
  Yeah. And somehow you make the train move.
• 6:14
  But you can sit by the window and it's a big movie screen, and you see the world, and it's something very grown up to travel alone.
• 6:21
  And I wanted to grow up, and I wanted to sit by the window.
• 6:26
  And I didn't want any old grandpa to be looking over me, so...
• 6:30
  And then I had this train ride on my own, and I knew from then on that was the best.
• 6:36
  Traveling was the best.
• 6:38
  Your very first movie immediately is about travel, right off the bat.
• 6:42
  I want to show a clip from it.
• 6:43
  This is The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick.
• 6:46
  And just for those who either haven't seen or haven't seen it in a while the main character has just hooked up with a woman, he's killed her seemingly for no reason, and now he's traveling away from the scene of the crime by bus.
• 6:58
  We're not sure exactly where he is headed or if he even knows where he's headed.
• 7:02
  Actually, he's the goalkeeper and he's disturbed because he got a red card.
• 7:06
  So that explains everything.
• 7:09
  So let's see this clip.
• 7:13
  The scene starts with the anti-hero, Bloch waiting for a bus at a country inn, drinking a beer at the bar, and giggling at a weird jukebox...
• 7:23
  which operates by loudly clacking through a big stack of singles before dropping a needle on the right tune.
• 7:34
  But almost as soon as it does, block's bus arrives.
• 7:37
  He hustles on board, and as it drives into the dusky night, he hunkers down in a back seat and fires up yet another tune on a transistor radio, he holds up to his ear.
• 7:51
  Out the window the sun sets.
• 7:54
  A train passes by in the twilight.
• 7:56
  Car headlights appear in the bus's rear view mirror and blow past on their way to somewhere.
• 8:10
  I have looked at comments under that and under many of your films on YouTube clips from your movies, there are so many that are along the lines of "This movie made me want to travel.
• 8:21
  "This movie captures the feeling of travel" and I'm wondering what you are doing because it's true, I feel it, but what makes for a great traveling scene?
• 8:30
  What is it that you're capturing there?
• 8:31
  Well, first of all, it's better if it's not scripted.
• 8:35
  If you shoot while you're traveling and you let the travel show you what you can shoot, it's so much better than you have a script and a shot list and stuff.
• 8:44
  That never works.
• 8:45
  This was my first movie, and in the script it says Bloch takes the bus to the country.
• 8:51
  That was the one liner, and we had to go from Vienna to the Hungarian border in the story.
• 9:00
  And the production manager thought, well, we all have to go there.
• 9:04
  There's a bus in the movie, so let's hire a bus and let's take all the equipment and the whole crew, and let's see if anyone wants to shoot something on the road.
• 9:13
  He didn't know me really well.
• 9:15
  And then we shot like maniacs from morning to evening.
• 9:18
  More shots than on any other day.
• 9:20
  And nothing was planned, that he would listen to this little radio, wasn't planned.
• 9:25
  There was a train passing or that that took a stop in this country inn.
• 9:31
  And that there was a jukebox with this unbelievable record changer.
• 9:35
  Never seen anything again in my life, this thing that popped the records down.
• 9:41
  - Yeah.
• 9:41
  - And it deserved a close up.
• 9:44
  So, and for myself, that was quite new too I didn't have any storyboard for it, and I just realized that there was a bus, we're going to go somewhere, I had a whole day with no script, and I could do whatever I wanted,- and that was fabulous.
• 10:00
  - Oh man.
• 10:02
  And that gave me the taste for the next three movies afterwards.
• 10:06
  I was going to say so, it feels like a travelogue because it is a travelogue.
• 10:09
  It was just a tiny moment, but that was a full day.
• 10:13
  It was the day that pleased me the most.
• 10:15
  And I realized, wow, there is something in making a movie while you're traveling.
• 10:20
  There's something fascinating.
• 10:21
  So the next three movies, that's what you did.
• 10:23
  Like you would really like take the trip that the characters took?
• 10:27
  Yeah, we took the trip that the characters took.
• 10:29
  Actually, I had some other questions, but just let's see one of those movies.
• 10:33
  We have a clip from Kings of the Road.
• 10:35
  This is the meet-cute of the two characters right at the beginning of the movie.
• 10:39
  These are two friends that are going to spend the rest of the film together.
• 10:41
  - And this is how they meet.
• 10:41
  - They don't know each other yet.
• 10:43
  They don't even know each other's names in the beginning.
• 10:47
  But that's a good beginning for a journey together.
• 10:53
  The clip opens with one guy driving down a country road at top speed.
• 10:58
  He might be suicidal.
• 11:00
  At one point he shuts his eyes for a few seconds, like he might let the car crash.
• 11:05
  Meanwhile, another guy is parked in a truck by what looks like a lake.
• 11:09
  Shaving himself quietly in the rear view mirror...
• 11:13
  when suddenly the first guy blows past in the car.
• 11:18
  As he drives it straight into the water.
• 11:21
  Still cranking the wheel around angrily even as it starts to sink.
• 11:27
  Meanwhile, watching from the shore, the second guy is stunned and then can't help but kind of giggle.
• 11:39
  I feel like in a lot of these movies, this movie and actually the movie that came before it,Wrong Movement, travel is something that your characters do out of anger.
• 11:47
  It's like they're sick of where they are, and they just got to bolt and get the hell out of town, even if it means they're driving straight into a lake.
• 11:54
  Well, it was the river Elbe that separates the two Germanys.
• 12:00
  On the other side you see the fence and the towers.
• 12:03
  This is East Germany at the time.
• 12:03
  I see he's trying to get there.
• 12:07
  I guess.
• 12:09
  But first of all, that feeling of wanting to break out and the kind of anger at breaking out.
• 12:14
  Well, it was my very own anger was to be in this country and to be caught in this country.
• 12:20
  When I grew up and realizing the whole world was different and better and more open.
• 12:27
  I grew up in a city made of ruins, and after three or four years, I realized the world was not just all ruins.
• 12:35
  I mean, I took it for granted that this was the world, living in ruins.
• 12:40
  And then I realized the world was beautiful.
• 12:43
  Only not where I was.
• 12:45
  What made you realize that?
• 12:46
  Pictures, paintings, photographs and newspapers.
• 12:52
  The encyclopedia of my grandfather had lots of cities all over the world.
• 12:57
  And they're all beautiful.
• 12:58
  Not like mine that was bombed and disappeared, basically.
• 13:03
  I lived in a country that didn't exist anymore, and I wanted to get somewhere else where life was different.
• 13:11
  There's a moment, though, where I feel like your movies shift and it's not people sort of like fleeing anger.
• 13:18
  They're going because either you, like in your documentaries want to show us something beautiful in the world, or they are going on a trip to mend something in a way.
• 13:29
  Are you aware that that shift happened?
• 13:30
  And if so, like when did that happen for you?
• 13:33
  In that film?
• 13:34
  It was this film andKings of the Road.
• 13:36
  I asked you?
• 13:37
  I think, that it's in Paris, Texas. The first half of Paris, Texas is a guy basically, like, has fled a terrible situation and is just going It's just like Kings of the Road.
• 13:46
  He's just going straight out into the middle of nowhere.
• 13:49
  But then he meets family members, and the next part of his journey is to mend something, which is to bring his child back with his long lost mother.
• 13:59
  That is accurate.
• 14:00
  He wants to fix his life.
• 14:00
  And he did something wrong.
• 14:04
  This family fell apart because of him, because of his jealousy.
• 14:08
  And he ruined it.
• 14:08
  And he disappeared into Mexico.
• 14:13
  And he comes back out of the desert.
• 14:13
  So yes, then it- started to make up for it and mend it.
• 14:18
  - Yeah.
• 14:22
  Was there something happening in your life that made travel less like fleeing some sort of ruins and more kind of going towards something beautiful?
• 14:31
  In that point in Paris, Texas?
• 14:33
  That's what I feel like is when it happens.
• 14:34
  Something very beautiful happened to me.
• 14:38
  I had spent 5 or 6 years in America trying to make the movie I thought I should make in America and couldn't do it.
• 14:46
  I'd made a movie for a studio,Hammett, a detective movie, and it was not a great experience.
• 14:53
  But then finally it was finished and I realized I didn't have it in me to make an American film.
• 15:00
  But I also didn't want to leave because I didn't want to get home without having something to show for, because I'd been watched by the whole country.
• 15:10
  I was the first young filmmaker who went to Hollywood.
• 15:13
  I mean, after the war, I was the first of the young generation Germans who went to Hollywood, and everybody observed me, and everybody wanted me to come back with something.
• 15:24
  And Hammett the film that I did wasn't what I hoped for.
• 15:29
  But in the course of the film I had had to give up on many collaborations because of the studio system.
• 15:35
  They didn't want my DOP with whom I'd made all my films before.
• 15:39
  Robby Müller.
• 15:40
  Robby Müller couldn't shoot it because of the union.
• 15:43
  I wanted Sam Shepard in the lead role.
• 15:43
  They said, no, he's a writer.
• 15:48
  We want you to cast an actor, a movie star, and I wanted Ry Cooder to do the score for the film.
• 15:55
  And they said, we don't want you to hire a guitarist.
• 15:58
  We want you to hire a composer.
• 15:58
  Don't you get the difference?
• 16:01
  So I remembered all these things that I've missed working with Robby again, working with Sam Shepard, working with Ry Cooder.
• 16:10
  And I made this movie Paris, Texas.
• 16:10
  And I was happy like a clam.
• 16:15
  I was like a fish in the water.
• 16:17
  I did it without anybody looking over my shoulder with a very loose script.
• 16:23
  I could make any decision I wanted.
• 16:26
  Nobody told me to do this or not to do this.
• 16:29
  It was beautiful and I was happier than ever in years and in a long time.
• 16:34
  And you see that in the film.
• 16:36
  It's even if the character Travis is miserable, at least in the beginning, not in the end.
• 16:43
  It's a movie made by people who are happy to do this.
• 16:48
  Sure. And then you come back, the movie right after it is a homecoming movie.
• 16:54
  This is Wings of Desire, of course, and it's almost like you treat Berlin as a destination instead of a place that you had been before.
• 17:02
  - Tell us about that process.
• 17:02
  - It was a destination.
• 17:05
  I had lived in America for almost eight years.
• 17:08
  I had started to dream in English.
• 17:10
  I started to put English words into my German conversations.
• 17:15
  Like anybody who lives in America for a while.
• 17:18
  And I didn't want that to happen.
• 17:18
  I didn't want to lose my own language.
• 17:22
  And then I decided to go to Berlin, because Berlin, for me, was the place in Europe, and it was an unknown city for me.
• 17:30
  I had lived there before, but after these eight years in America, it was a different planet and it was exciting.
• 17:37
  And there was so much adventure, musically as well.
• 17:42
  And I wanted to make a film about the city more than anything else.
• 17:47
  But then again, I knew too well that you can't make a documentary about a city.
• 17:50
  You need a story for a city to bloom and blossom.
• 17:55
  I mean, the movie that made me want to go to San Francisco was Vertigo by Hitchcock.
• 18:00
  It's not a documentary, not at all.
• 18:03
  But you know what it is to live in San Francisco.
• 18:06
  And you know when you want to see this city after this thriller by Hitchcock.
• 18:13
  So I realized I wanted to make a movie about Berlin, but I also knew I had to have a story in order to make the city exciting.
• 18:21
  Yeah. What about the city did you specifically want to capture?
• 18:24
  It was a unique city in the world at the time.
• 18:27
  There was no other city like this on this planet.
• 18:31
  A city that was also an island.
• 18:33
  A city that in each four directions there was East.
• 18:37
  It was amazing. And it was very free.
• 18:39
  I mean, there was a lot of musicians, painters, young people in town because you could dodge the draft in Germany if you lived in Berlin.
• 18:49
  So there are a lot of young people living there, young men and women.
• 18:53
  And it was a very free city, even if it was an island.
• 18:57
  It was great to be in Berlin, and it was pretty wild.
• 19:00
  It was also strangely, I mean, that's not a contradiction.
• 19:05
  - It was also strangely melancholy.
• 19:05
  - Yeah.
• 19:07
  That's why all these musicians came and all the romantics in the world were in Berlin.
• 19:14
  It's interesting because when-- I'm not the only person that that movie made us want to travel, but it also set a bar for what I want out of urban travel, which is this kind of dilapidated romanticism like the ultimate is Havana.
• 19:28
  Havana is like this, not even preserved in amber, is like this dilapidated, this place that is falling apart.
• 19:34
  - Let's go!- I know man, it's so romantic.
• 19:37
  I don't know if that's even something that you intended necessarily to do.
• 19:41
  That's what Germany was.
• 19:42
  Does it surprise you that people come up and go like, yeah, now I want to like, find some really romantic ruins to go play in basically.
• 19:48
  Well, maybe the ruin idea was a big topic in my life.
• 19:53
  I mean, I did love ruins as a little boy.
• 19:57
  It was the world and it was everything I knew and I loved it.
• 20:01
  I was not allowed to play in the ruins, but of course, we always played every day in the ruins and we just didn't tell them afterwards.
• 20:10
  And I loved ruins.
• 20:11
  And Berlin was a city with many blind spots, many no man's land.
• 20:16
  I mean really big places in the middle of the city where there was nothing.
• 20:21
  Not even a park. There was just nothing.
• 20:24
  And there's nothing more beautiful than blind spots in the city.
• 20:27
  I love Berlin simply for the no man's land, but also for the fact that it showed its wounds like no other city I know.
• 20:37
  And I love if you see history enough, if you can feel it.
• 20:40
  And if if you're not trying to cover it up.
• 20:43
  Berlin wasn't covering up anything.
• 20:43
  Especially not East Berlin.
• 20:47
  Except that I couldn't shoot there.
• 20:50
  - That's right.
• 20:50
  - I tried to, but I failed miserably.
• 20:54
  I went to the film minister, They had a ministry of cinema...
• 20:58
  - In the East?
• 20:58
  - In the East.
• 21:01
  And I'd been able to showParis, Texas in East Berlin.
• 21:04
  They had invited me because for some reason they had considered it an anti-capitalist movie.
• 21:12
  - And I didn't object that.
• 21:12
  - Yeah.
• 21:17
  So, and they showed it in theaters, really. People could go see it.
• 21:21
  And the film minister at the time said,"Wim whenever you need something, when"you want to shoot here, you're welcome." So I thought it was my moment when I was planning Wings of Desire.
• 21:34
  One day I took a trip over to East Berlin and met the film minister and said,"I would finally remind you of your promise that I could shoot here.
• 21:43
  "And this is now or never." And he said, "Oh, great.
• 21:47
  "We'll see what we can do.
• 21:48
  "Just let me read the script.
• 21:48
  Just put it there." I said "I don't have one."- Oh, yeah.
• 21:52
  - And he wasn't so nice anymore.
• 21:57
  And then he said,"But just tell me the story." And I said, "Well, the story is about two guardian angels." And then his bad mood turned even worse.
• 22:03
  "You mean invisible?" He got that right away.
• 22:12
  "Invisible?" I said "Yes, they're invisible.
• 22:15
  "My two main characters are invisible." But he interrupted me.
• 22:19
  And then he said, "If they're invisible, they can go through walls." Oh, man. Seriously?
• 22:25
  Yeah. He realized that right away.
• 22:28
  His mind was ticking and he said,"They can go through The Wall?" I said, "Yeah, The Wall is not an obstacle for them."- And that was the end of any...
• 22:37
  - Wow.
• 22:41
  - I was never invited back.
• 22:41
  - Yes.
• 22:44
  For those who haven't seen the film, you just built a wall to shoot, anyway.
• 22:49
  - We had to build a wall.
• 22:49
  - Yeah, ironically.
• 22:51
  We had to build 200 yards of the wall because we couldn't shoot there.
• 22:56
  We had to build it.
• 22:57
  Real quick before we move on to music.
• 22:57
  What-- if I was in your shoes, I know what my answer would be, but is there a movie that you have made or a scene where you're like, I just want to go to this place, so I'm going to set it in that place.
• 23:10
  You could shoot it in your backyard, but you know you're going to set it in Tokyo.
• 23:14
  Yeah. Tokyo was one of the places.
• 23:18
  You see.
• 23:19
  The ultimate road movie I did in my life was called Until the End of the World, and we shot in four continents, in 11 countries.
• 23:28
  In every place I ever wanted to go was, of course, in it.
• 23:33
  And this is right after the success of Wings of Desire.
• 23:36
  This was after The Wings of Desire.
• 23:36
  We had to even cut some.
• 23:39
  I had to cut South America and Africa because after we shot for a whole year,- I had a rough cut of 12 hours.
• 23:46
  - You're like, maybe we should cut Africa.
• 23:54
  If Wenders sometimes had to dial back on the travel in his movies, though, his stereo was always cranked up to 11.
• 24:01
  How rock and roll became the soundtrack of his life, his travels and his movies.
• 24:05
  That's coming up in just a minute.
• 24:05
  Stay with us.
• 24:14
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• 24:22
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• 24:23
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• 24:30
  And of course, we are streaming some of Wim Wenders flicks.
• 24:33
  If you're in the US, you can watch his beautiful documentary Pina, about the late, great choreographer Pina Bausch.
• 24:39
  In the UK and elsewhere we have got his Oscar nominatedPerfect Days that is about a janitor living a simple life in Tokyo, and it's just wonderful.
• 24:48
  I love that movie, but I also want to direct you to another award winning movie from two up and coming filmmakers you're going to want to keep an eye on.
• 24:56
  It is called My Father's Shadow, directed by Akinola Davis Jr and written by his brother Wale.
• 25:01
  First Nigerian movie ever selected for the main competition at Cannes.
• 25:05
  And it's this poetic look at Lagos circa 1993, during an election crisis through the eyes of a child.
• 25:13
  This movie was actually at MUBI Fest Berlin the same weekend I interviewed Wim and everyone was talking about it and about Akinola's direction.
• 25:20
  My Father's Shadow hits theaters February 6th in the UK, February 13th in the US, and it is coming to other countries too.
• 25:27
  Check the show notes for details.
• 25:29
  And one more thing I would like your help on something.
• 25:33
  We're already planning our next full season of the MUBI Podcast, by popular demand it's going to be a follow up to one of our most popular seasons ever we are going to be taking a look at more great needle drops in movies.
• 25:45
  These are moments where directors take preexisting tunes, drop them in their film, and magic happens.
• 25:51
  And as we consider the literally thousands of possible movies we could cover for that season, we want to know what your favorite needle drop ever is and why there's a great story behind it that makes it worth devoting a whole episode to.
• 26:04
  I just know you people are going to help us to some deep cuts.
• 26:07
  Email your picks to podcast@mubi.com that's podcast@mubi.com Thank you in advance.
• 26:14
  We've also got links and info about everything I just mentioned in the show notes of this episode.
• 26:19
  Speaking of which, let's get back to the episode.
• 26:26
  Flashback to 1969.
• 26:28
  Wenders is a film student in Munich, Germany.
• 26:31
  He's watching as many movies as possible and one in particular makes a huge impression.
• 26:36
  Get your motor running Head out on the highwayEasy rider.
• 26:41
  It's rock soundtrack kicking off with Steppenwolf's 'Born to Be Wild' was gonna stick in his memory forever and so would his brief encounter with the movie's star.
• 26:52
  For all the wrong reasons.
• 26:54
  I was also writing about movies.
• 26:56
  I also worked as a film critic while I was a student, so I was assigned to do my first interview with Fonda.
• 27:04
  - Really?
• 27:04
  - Not Henry, his son.
• 27:07
  - Peter Fonda.
• 27:07
  - Peter Fonda, sorry.
• 27:10
  Sorry, Peter.
• 27:12
  Peter Fonda and I really fucked it up because I was so excited.
• 27:19
  I forgot to turn on the tape recorder.
• 27:22
  - I've been there, man.
• 27:22
  - And then I went home and it was empty.
• 27:26
  - And I had to reinvent the whole thing.
• 27:26
  - Oh, man.
• 27:30
  But it was...
• 27:31
  I always told myself it was better than before.
• 27:35
  But I know this can happen in interviews, so I'm always worried for people to turn it on.
• 27:40
  My understanding is, by the way, that was also your first inkling that there was such a genre as a road movie.
• 27:45
  So did they always go together for you road movies and rock and roll like that?
• 27:50
  Yeah, they were very tightly linked.
• 27:50
  I mean, I loved traveling.
• 27:54
  I had a car when I was 18, a second hand car, but it was a car and it was driving and there was nothing like cassettes yet.
• 28:03
  And in your car you had your radio as the only source and radio sucked because they never play what you want to hear.
• 28:11
  So I learned how to travel with a tape recorder.
• 28:15
  Like a reel to reel?
• 28:16
  A reel to reel tape recorder, which ate all my fortune in batteries.
• 28:22
  And the car was loud and the loudspeakers couldn't do it, so I had to drive with a headphone.
• 28:28
  But at the time, headphones were these things with these big things.
• 28:32
  So from behind, I looked like Mickey Mouse.
• 28:36
  It's also incredibly dangerous because you can't hear the road or anybody beeping at you.
• 28:40
  I was always driving on the right because I couldn't pass anybody else.
• 28:44
  My car was too slow.
• 28:45
  - Okay, so you were fine.
• 28:45
  - It had 12 horsepowers.
• 28:48
  Sure you're not Peter Fonda on a chopper?
• 28:51
  No, no, not at all.
• 28:53
  But I think rock and roll is very linked to moving and driving and and listening to music.
• 28:59
  Well, actually, a question that I have for you is that you're so motivated by rock.
• 29:03
  You've also done rock videos and both your rock videos and your movies do not do the obvious thing that one would do with rock. Rocks all about energy.
• 29:11
  It's all about the beat.
• 29:11
  It's all about driving energy.
• 29:15
  And yet your films are very, I would describe them as very, you luxuriate in the moment.
• 29:19
  They're languorous.
• 29:23
  They're not that kind of thing.
• 29:23
  Even your rock videos are not like that.
• 29:26
  - Why does it work?
• 29:26
  - Langurous, I never heard that word.
• 29:28
  - Languorous?
• 29:28
  - Languorous.
• 29:30
  That's a good one.
• 29:31
  - File that away.
• 29:31
  - I will, I will use it.
• 29:35
  - I realize what it means.
• 29:35
  - Sure.
• 29:37
  - It sounds like what it is.
• 29:37
  - It's a good word.
• 29:39
  - I'm glad to be here for you.
• 29:39
  - The word of the day for me.
• 29:44
  But then why does it work?
• 29:46
  Why does rock and roll work with your movies?
• 29:48
  Because you got to be specific.
• 29:48
  You can't just play any rock and roll.
• 29:54
  You have to play the song that fits that moment and the mood and the character and the situation.
• 30:01
  And there's always the one perfect rock and roll song for every moment, and it excludes everything else, so there is only one, but you have to find it.
• 30:12
  What's the pinnacle of that for you?
• 30:12
  What's your best needle drop?
• 30:15
  The best needle drop?
• 30:17
  - There's a lot of them.
• 30:17
  - There's a lot of them.
• 30:19
  - It's got to be Lou Reed or something.
• 30:19
  - Yeah, right.
• 30:22
  Yeah.
• 30:24
  - But--- Is it 'Perfect Day'?
• 30:26
  Let's not get into that.
• 30:29
  Okay. I'll play you one of mine.
• 30:37
  It's from, of course, Wings of Desire.
• 30:39
  The moment where the movie's heroine, Marion, is out at a Berlin nightclub watching the band Crime & the City Solution play a song called 'Six Bells Chime' for a crowd of rapt goth kids.
• 30:57
  Also in the crowd is the angel Damiel, who's in love with Marion.
• 31:01
  As she dances sensually to the music, he stands beside her and reaches out, trying to hold her mortal hand.
• 31:08
  She can't see him, but she can sense something.
• 31:20
  There it is again.
• 31:22
  She thinks to herself in voiceover, a feeling of well-being, like a hand inside, gently tightening.
• 31:35
  Great scene. Which came first?
• 31:38
  The song, 'cause you're talking about every scene, has the perfect song.
• 31:43
  Did you have that song in the back of your head and you're like, at last, here's the scene.
• 31:46
  Or was the scene, and then came the song.
• 31:46
  What was the process?
• 31:49
  Well, the scene came first in this case, but then the song was just as important and it was this one.
• 31:58
  They were the coolest performers.
• 32:00
  I mean, they used to be punk, but now they've made this transition and were, I don't know what it was, some sort of glam or whatever.
• 32:09
  They were pretty unique.
• 32:11
  And the guitar player and the bass player, the Rowland brothers, they were the kings of rock and roll.
• 32:15
  Both of them.
• 32:18
  - In Berlin at that time.
• 32:18
  - Yeah, they lived there.
• 32:20
  'Cause I will say it makes sense.
• 32:23
  It totally makes sense.
• 32:23
  But I can imagine because it's this and then there's Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds doing 'From Her to Eternity'.
• 32:30
  And the first thing that comes to mind when it's like, oh, I'm going to do a love story about an angel who falls in love with a mortal woman is not like two dark brooding songs, one of which is about killing your lover, by the way, 'From Her to Eternity'.
• 32:46
  The idea was just because you were capturing Berlin maybe, that it was important to put this music in here?
• 32:51
  What about it made it make sense to you?
• 32:53
  Nick Cave was the underground hero of Berlin and being out and about every day from morning to night, just trying to find out what it was about Berlin that I wanted to show.
• 33:07
  I saw several Nick Cave concerts, and it was clear I couldn't make a film about Berlin without him.
• 33:15
  And then I also saw the other half of the gang, The Crime & City Solution, with- Simon Bonney as a singer.
• 33:19
  - Simon Bonney, yeah.
• 33:21
  And they were just as good.
• 33:23
  And so I tracked them down and finally managed to speak to Nick.
• 33:28
  He could only talk to him either very, very late at night, like in the early morning hours.
• 33:34
  - Sure.
• 33:34
  - Well, actually, no other time.
• 33:37
  Yeah. He's kind of a vampire.
• 33:39
  Yeah, he was a vampire, but he was the king.
• 33:41
  And he was grunge before the word was invented.
• 33:44
  And there were people who lived for the next concert.
• 33:48
  Yeah. Tell me about, I mean, like, how did that become the case for those who don't know.
• 33:51
  He's Australian originally and then moved to Berlin.
• 33:55
  Like, describe the impact he must have had on this scene for him to have that impact on you.
• 34:00
  He single handedly created the scene, and he created all these people who followed him.
• 34:06
  And this whole nightlife was centered around Nick.
• 34:08
  Was he going to come tonight?
• 34:08
  Is he going to play somewhere?
• 34:12
  It's not 2: 00 maybe, you think he's still coming?
• 34:16
  It's not 2: I mean, Nick was the king of Berlin, and he was a glorious figure.
• 34:21
  It's not 2: I mean, self-invented very romantic figure in a strange way, with all these biblical texts of his songs.
• 34:30
  It's not 2: And when he got wild, it really got wild.
• 34:34
  It's not 2: He was really rock and roll and punk at the time, but the film was about many things.
• 34:40
  It's not 2: But that was one aspect of Berlin that I couldn't miss was the music scene, and that was undoubtedly Nick Cave.
• 34:47
  It's not 2: This is kind of a sidetrack, but I have to ask you about this.
• 34:50
  It's not 2: This movie looks like no other movie to me.
• 34:52
  It's not 2: The black and white sequences in this look like no other black and white sequences in modern cinema.
• 34:57
  It's not 2: Henri Alekan shot it, and my understanding is he had a special filter for this that is basically irreplaceable.
• 35:06
  It's not 2: Tell us about this.
• 35:07
  It's not 2: There was a time in the history of cinema when movies were black and white.
• 35:11
  It's not 2: There were only black and white movies, and the undisputed master of the art of black and white was this French guy, Henri Alekan, who made glorious movies in the 30s and 40s and the most beautiful black and white film of all ages, according to everybody who knows anything about black and white is The Beauty and the Beast.
• 35:34
  It's not 2: And that was Henri who shot it.
• 35:36
  It's not 2: This was the masterpiece of black and white.
• 35:39
  It's not 2: He's-- he invented a sort of lighting that didn't exist before.
• 35:43
  It's not 2: But that was in the 40s.
• 35:45
  It's not 2: And Henri had settled down and taken a retreat.
• 35:50
  It's not 2: And I knew when I decided to make a movie with these guardian angels, I wanted to shoot it in black and white.
• 35:56
  It's not 2: So their world was black and white and only people knew how to see colors.
• 36:02
  It's not 2: So I traveled to Paris to speak to Henri, and his wife was scared when I showed up at the door because she wanted to protect his retreat.
• 36:12
  It's not 2: When she saw me knocking and opened the door, she already said, oh-oh, she realized something was up.
• 36:20
  It's not 2: And then I started to tell Henri the story, and I only told two lines.
• 36:26
  It's not 2: I told him about the angels and that their world was in black and white.
• 36:31
  It's not 2: And he said "Ah!" and he went down to the basement.
• 36:34
  It's not 2: I didn't know why he went to the basement.
• 36:35
  It's not 2: He came back with a suitcase, and he said, "No, I can do it." And it was the suitcase of The Beauty and the Beast.
• 36:43
  It's not 2: He had all his filters from that film kept for 40 years in that suitcase.
• 36:49
  It's not 2: And he said, "I can do it with this." And he showed me all the filters and he showed me especially one.
• 36:55
  It's not 2: It wasn't very special.
• 36:58
  It's not 2: It was a filter, yes, okay, but it was not, not glass.
• 37:01
  It's not 2: Most filters are glass.
• 37:03
  It's not 2: This was a filter with a piece of cloth on it.
• 37:06
  It's not 2: Very fine cloth.
• 37:08
  It's not 2: And he said, "This is my grandmother's stockings in nylon.
• 37:12
  It's not 2: "These were the first nylon stockings.
• 37:14
  It's not 2: "And this produced the entire atmosphere of Beauty and the Beast." That's crazy...
• 37:21
  It's not 2: The way the whites sort of blur a little bit.
• 37:24
  It's not 2: I mean, the film is such an incredible look.
• 37:27
  It's not 2: And he said, "It is my grandmother's stockings that produced it, and no other"filter can do it, I tested everything.
• 37:33
  It's not 2: "But this is the only one I have.
• 37:36
  It's not 2: "And she didn't leave me any other stockings. So this..." We made the movie and each shot had to have, at the last moment, the stocking was put in front and then everything melted underneath that stocking.
• 37:51
  It's not 2: At some point, it broke.
• 37:53
  It's not 2: Yeah. I was going to say, where is that filter?
• 37:55
  It's not 2: At some point it broke.
• 37:56
  It's not 2: And then we had to sort of we couldn't fix it, but we put it from the other side of the other filter.
• 38:03
  It's not 2: There was a little left, so we had to choose a smaller ring, and it just fitted in front of the lens.
• 38:10
  It's not 2: And it was the greatest treasure of the film at the end of every shot.
• 38:14
  It's not 2: The assistant cameraman always put it into his own box because, yeah.
• 38:19
  It's not 2: - You'd be screwed.
• 38:19
  It's not 2: - It produced the whole magic of the film.
• 38:23
  It's not 2: Do you know if it exists anymore?
• 38:25
  It's not 2: - No. That film was the ruin of it.
• 38:25
  It's not 2: - Oh, man.
• 38:31
  It's not 2: And we shot the last part of the film in color.
• 38:34
  It's not 2: When the angel becomes a human being, everything is in color, and for color we decided not to use it.
• 38:41
  It's not 2: And it was a good thing because it had fallen apart.
• 38:43
  It's not 2: - Yeah.
• 38:43
  It's not 2: - There was nothing left of it.
• 38:49
  It's not 2: Wenders and I had moved on from music to talking about cinema history, kind of, which flowed nicely into my last bunch of questions about how movies themselves figured in his life and his art.
• 39:00
  It's not 2: You remember at the top of this episode, we talked about his epiphany in Paris, circa 1966, where he realized that he'd spent his life missing out on, "the right movies".
• 39:09
  It's not 2: Well, he had that breakthrough after stumbling into a legendary Paris institution.
• 39:17
  It's not 2: The Cinematheque, initially simply for the fact that I had this cold room like today, and I was freezing.
• 39:27
  It's not 2: And in the morning I did my studies until two, and then I was released.
• 39:33
  It's not 2: And then I couldn't stay in this room.
• 39:33
  It's not 2: It was just so freezing cold.
• 39:36
  It's not 2: Fucking cold.
• 39:36
  It's not 2: And movies were too expensive.
• 39:39
  It's not 2: I couldn't afford movies, but the Cinematheque I was told by somebody was the cheapest way to see movies because you would pay a quarter for one show and you could see one, two, three, four, five movies, depending, on the weekend even more.
• 39:55
  It's not 2: So I got addicted because I really soon realized, movies were something different than I had always believed.
• 40:03
  It's not 2: Because all these films I saw were introduced by Henri Langlois, the director of the Cinematheque, and he is the history of cinema in one person.
• 40:13
  It's not 2: He always introduced each film just for a few minutes, and after that you knew the context and you knew about the director and you knew about the art of making it.
• 40:23
  It's not 2: And I saw about a thousand movies in a year and got completely hooked and realized that movies was-- Painting was really, and movies were related.
• 40:34
  It's not 2: Movies were just painting just using different means, a camera and stuff.
• 40:40
  It's not 2: Actually, Wings of Desire, you dedicate to three filmmakers, and I'm wondering what you got really quickly from each of them.
• 40:46
  It's not 2: - Ozu, Truffaut and Tarkovsky.
• 40:46
  It's not 2: - You know these guys?
• 40:50
  It's not 2: I hope so.
• 40:51
  It's not 2: Ozu is stands for Yasujiro Ozu, which is my master as a filmmaker and the great hero of filmmaking for me.
• 40:59
  It's not 2: He made about 50 movies, and he died in the early 60s.
• 41:04
  It's not 2: But his movies are still very exciting, I think. And...
• 41:07
  It's not 2: What one thing do you think you'd take from him that.
• 41:11
  It's not 2: That characters is everything and story is nothing.
• 41:15
  It's not 2: It's all about characters, and his movies are all about only he only has one subject, except when he was young.
• 41:22
  It's not 2: He made some thrillers and some make believe American movies, but then he dedicated his entire work to the family.
• 41:31
  It's not 2: And don't think that the family is a boring subject.
• 41:34
  It's not 2: You see his movies and you realize life is in there.
• 41:37
  It's not 2: And even if all the actors are Japanese, I never, ever saw my own father represented so well, like in a Japanese movie.
• 41:47
  It's not 2: Because these fathers were The Father and The Mother and and you realize that every person in the world has a mother and a father, and that is what we are.
• 41:57
  It's not 2: We come from a family.
• 41:59
  It's not 2: This forms us. So very, really, truly exciting.
• 42:03
  It's not 2: And the other one was Truffaut, who I discovered also in Paris because his films were so personal and so unusually constructed.
• 42:15
  It's not 2: And he loved American movies just as much as me.
• 42:18
  It's not 2: But he managed to make a film that didn't follow any of the rules of American movies and still looked like it. I loved that.
• 42:28
  It's not 2: I mean, you saw a little piece ofThe Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick that was shot like a Hitchcock movie, but I didn't have the suspense And there was nothing wrong with it.
• 42:40
  It's not 2: You could still evoke Hitchcock even if you didn't have the slightest amount of suspense.
• 42:47
  It's not 2: So I like the idea that film is also a language and that you can use some of the language, but in order to tell something very different.
• 42:57
  It's not 2: - And then Tarkovsky.
• 42:57
  It's not 2: - Tarkovsky. Yeah. Well.
• 43:02
  It's not 2: The end! He's the most metaphysical of the European filmmakers.
• 43:09
  It's not 2: And maybe you go to see one of his movies next.
• 43:12
  It's not 2: Or! Look what they have on MUBI.
• 43:15
  It's not 2: Yeah. Thank you! Your favorite movie you have said that you've made is Until the End of the World.
• 43:20
  It's not 2: You mentioned it earlier.
• 43:22
  It's not 2: It's the director's cut, which I think is five hours long. Something like that.
• 43:26
  It's not 2: No, it's much shorter.
• 43:26
  It's not 2: It's four and a half.
• 43:28
  It's not 2: Okay. Yeah, it's a relative breeze.
• 43:31
  It's not 2: Why is it your favorite movie then?
• 43:31
  It's not 2: Just overall?
• 43:34
  It's not 2: Because it was such an incredible discovery.
• 43:38
  It's not 2: It was a movie made in 1990, about the year 2000, which was only ten years away.
• 43:44
  It's not 2: But the thing was, we sensed the arrival of the digital age in 1990.
• 43:50
  It's not 2: And I wanted to make a science fiction film that showed where that could lead us.
• 43:55
  It's not 2: We invented the internet.
• 43:59
  It's not 2: In the film.
• 43:59
  It's not 2: We invented navigation systems.
• 44:03
  It's not 2: We invented mobile phones where you have a screen and you can talk to somebody.
• 44:07
  It's not 2: We invented search engines.
• 44:07
  It's not 2: We invented Zoom calls.
• 44:10
  It's not 2: We did invent a whole shit load of things that nobody ever heard of.
• 44:16
  It's not 2: Yeah, there's a quote that I have from you from Wired magazine in 1997 that is prescient beyond belief.
• 44:22
  It's not 2: You called the current social condition 1997 "the disease of images".
• 44:27
  It's not 2: You have too many images around so that finally you don't see anything anymore.
• 44:32
  It's not 2: We're living in a time right now, you said, "When narrative disappears.
• 44:35
  It's not 2: "And as for images, the more there are, the emptier they seem to be."- Now, here in 2025...
• 44:38
  It's not 2: - I said that?
• 44:40
  It's not 2: Yeah.
• 44:42
  It's not 2: But you, I mean, we've talked about this a little bit before.
• 44:45
  It's not 2: It's a very dim view of of technology.
• 44:47
  It's not 2: Even that quote has a sort of dim view of technology.
• 44:49
  It's not 2: But you embrace technology.
• 44:49
  It's not 2: You've made 3D, multiple 3D documentaries.
• 44:53
  It's not 2: You seem to constantly be into technology.
• 44:56
  It's not 2: Now AI is coming along, potentially threatens to cut you and I and everybody completely out of the equation.
• 45:02
  It's not 2: They can just make a movie.
• 45:03
  It's not 2: I don't care, I'm old enough to survive it.
• 45:06
  It's not 2: - So tech is fine.
• 45:06
  It's not 2: - You should be scared shitless.
• 45:10
  It's not 2: What do we do?
• 45:11
  It's not 2: Do you plan to embrace it at all?
• 45:11
  It's not 2: To use it at all?
• 45:14
  It's not 2: You have with other technology?
• 45:16
  It's not 2: Yeah. Maybe there's a field here or there.
• 45:20
  It's not 2: I love Nick Cave's answer.
• 45:23
  It's not 2: He thought that if artificial intelligence could write a good song, he said, "No, it cannot suffer."- Yeah.
• 45:31
  It's not 2: - That's a good answer.
• 45:33
  It's not 2: I'll take it.
• 45:34
  It's not 2: And I know about suffering as a filmmaker, and if some of you are making movies you know that side of it.
• 45:40
  It's not 2: Suffering is an important source.
• 45:47
  It's not 2: Wim Wenders recorded live last October at Silent Green in Berlin, Germany, that was part of MUBI Fest, which will return to Berlin in 2026.
• 45:55
  It's not 2: Stay tuned for more information.
• 45:57
  It's not 2: And that's the MUBI Podcast for now.
• 45:59
  It's not 2: Follow us so you don't miss our next episode, which we're putting together as we speak.
• 46:03
  It's not 2: It's a deep dive into the making and meaning of the award season's juggernaut Sentimental Value, featuring interviews with Golden Globe nominees director Joachim Trier, writer Eskil Vote and almost the whole cast, including the great Stellan Skarsgård, who, turns out isn't so sentimental.
• 46:18
  It's not 2: I've been lucky enough, to since '89, when I stopped at the Royal Dramatic Theater I've been working four months a year.
• 46:25
  It's not 2: So it's four months a year I've been in front of the camera, and the rest of the time I've been changing diapers and wiping asses and snot and shit.
• 46:33
  It's not 2: Oh the glamor.
• 46:33
  It's not 2: Follow us to hear all about it.
• 46:36
  It's not 2: Meanwhile, if you've got questions, comments, or just want to geek out about your favorite Nick Cave tunes, I'm here for it.
• 46:41
  It's not 2: Our email is podcast@mubi.com
• 46:44
  And now let's roll credits: This episode was written and hosted by me Rico Gagliano Ciara McEniff produced it along with assistant producer Kat Kowalczyk.
• 46:51
  And now let's roll credits: Christian Koons edited this one and Stephen Colon mastered it.
• 46:54
  And now let's roll credits: Our original music was composed by Yuri Suzuki.
• 46:56
  And now let's roll credits: Giant thanks this week to Elodie Fagan, Ibti Omer, Marie Kloos and everyone who made MUBI Fest Berlin a most excellent time.
• 47:03
  And now let's roll credits: Also Linda Winkler, Kai Kern and the Silent Green team in Berlin, who did tech and recorded this event.
• 47:09
  And now let's roll credits: The show's executive produced by me along with Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman and Mike Tacca.
• 47:13
  And now let's roll credits: And finally, to watch the best in cinema subscribe to MUBI at mubi.com Thanks for listening and my New Year's resolution is to support my local indie cinema.
• 47:23
  And now let's roll credits: Perhaps you'll join me.