European Parliament/Pietro Naj-Oleari (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Wim Wenders, 2010.
As he nears eighty, Wim Wenders shows no signs of slowing down. The acclaimed, multi-talented filmmaker is back with two very different productions—Perfect Days, a 123-minute feature, and Anselm, a ninety-three-minute documentary shot entirely in 3D.
Perfect Days follows Hirayama, a janitor, as he makes his rounds in Tokyo cleaning toilets. Kôji Yakusho won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival for this role, while Wenders snagged Cannes’ Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, and the movie itself was nominated for the French film fete’s top prize, the Palme d’Or.
Anselm also was nominated for an award at Cannes in 2023 for its nonfiction chronicle of the controversial German painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer, who creates monumental works of art, often with anti-Nazi themes. Wenders, whose career stretches back to the late 1960s, was a trailblazer of the postwar New German Cinema, winning critical accolades for 1984’s Paris, Texas, 1987’s Wings of Desire, 1999’s Havana-set Buena Vista Social Club, 2011’s Pina, 2014’s The Salt of the Earth.
In this wide-ranging conversation with The Progressive, Wenders discusses his filmmaking process and philosophy, his views on class, his cinematic influences, music, how Perfect Days got its title, and why he makes narrative movies and documentaries.
Q: We live in a time in America when superheroes and crime dramas dominate the screen. Why did you choose to make a film about a proletarian protagonist?
Wim Wenders: Because it turns out in the course of the film that he is a superhero. [Laughs.] And he does amazing things and he’s able to live in a content way. And if that isn’t a superhero power, to live today and be happy and content with what you have, then I don’t know what else a superhero should be able to do.
Q: What is the role of class in your work?
Wenders: My films are all done on the basis that people are all equal. Equality is one primary characterization of my movies. The angels in Wings of Desire make that very clear. They make it very clear that people are people. They are no better and no worse. There are no important and unimportant ones. And Hirayama sees the same thing. He sees the homeless [person] who lives next to the toilet just as well as the banker who doesn’t even notice Hirayama. For Hirayama, people are all the same and he treats [all] people alike. He sees everybody and has respect for everybody.
Equality, for me, is the key word in the French Revolution. Not just liberty and brotherhood.
Q: Perfect Days reminds me of postwar Italian Neorealist films by De Sica and Rossellini. Are they an influence on you and Perfect Days?
Wenders: You could also add an American—he’s very rarely mentioned—Frank Capra. But the one filmmaker that really was on our minds when we made the film was a Japanese one, Yasujiro Ozu. We called the character Hirayama because Hirayama is the name of the hero of the [1953] film Tokyo Story. He carries that name Hirayama because Shukichi’s [family] name is Hirayama in Tokyo Story, and that’s one of the key films in my own film history.
Q: Is Perfect Days dedicated to Ozu?
Wenders: Yes.
Q: Press notes for Perfect Days state that “Hirayama is someone with a privileged and rich past who had fallen deeply.” In that respect, Perfect Days also reminded me of 1970’s Five Easy Pieces.
Wenders: The music Hirayama is playing in his car and he has his old crummy van and only has a cassette [player], and luckily, he didn’t throw his cassettes away when he was young in the 1970s and 1980s, he kept them. Music is part of the story. There’s not much dialogue in the film. Some of the storytelling is done through the music.
And yes, Hirayama had a different past. I like your idea about Five Easy Pieces. It’s one of my own favorite films and one of the great road movies. And Jack Nicholson getting into that truck at the end is one of the great moments in film history.
Music is part of Hirayama’s life and part of his way to be content. He listens to cassettes because he doesn’t have much technology around him. There’s not even a television in his room and he doesn’t have any digital media. He still has lots of analog equipment—an old camera and this cassette recorder and it actually does everything he wants to do. He wants to take a few pictures of things he likes. What he likes most are trees and light shining through trees—what the Japanese so beautifully call komorebi—and the music he likes he can just as well listen to on his old cassettes.
All the young kids who meet this man in the course of the film, while he’s outdated and some of his technology—they don’t even know how to put it into the cassette [player], but then they realize there’s something about it. It is, in the end, pretty cool, actually. These cassettes, you can get a lot of money for them, because they’re sold as vintage cassettes with the price of $120 for the Lou Reed cassette, that’s not fiction . . . . You could finance your next trip to Tokyo by taking your old cassettes.
Q: Lou Reed’s song “Perfect Day” is in the score of your film?
Wenders: When we shot the scene when he’s listening to “Perfect Day,” we realized in that scene, on that day, that this was going to be the title of the film. The film was called Komorebi before, in the script before we started shooting. On the day when Hirayama is lying on his tatami [on the] floor and listening to “Perfect Day,” we looked at each other, my Japanese co-writer Takuma Takasaki and I, we nodded and realized that was the real title. Of course, we had to clear it because if you use the song and then you call the film Perfect Days, you need to clear the song and the rights. But luckily, we were able to do that.
“Equality is one primary characterization of my movies, all people are equal.”–Wim Wenders
We played all the songs in the film during the shoot. Of course, in the end, he’s playing Nina Simone and he puts the cassette in and it’s the actual song [“Feeling Good”] that plays. That’s the case in the entire film. We always played the real songs in the film. It helped telling the story and making music [was] an integral part of the storytelling process.
Q: Hirayama is similar to Jack Nicholson’s character in Five Easy Pieces in that it’s suggested he comes from a very refined background, but somehow, instead of pursuing a [musical] career, he pursues a blue collar lifestyle, in Hirayama’s case as a janitor cleaning toilets. What is your backstory that is not on screen?
Wenders: I really didn’t want to give this away. I gave it to [Kôji Yakusho, the actor who played] Hirayama, so he could read it. So he would know. But other than that, I figured people would have to put it together on their own.
I’ll give you this much: He was a businessman and he was rich and he was unhappy and he was drinking a lot and his life was going down the drain. One morning he wakes up in this crummy hotel room, doesn’t even know how he got there, doesn’t even know if he had sex or whatever happened. He thinks his life is shit, and he doesn’t like it. He actually plays with the idea of ending it.
Then, miraculously, early in the morning, there’s this ray of sunlight appearing on this wall in front of him. And it falls through the little tree in front of the window. There is this play of leaves and sunlight and shadows moving, and he looks at it and stares at it and he starts crying, because he’s never seen anything so beautiful. He probably has seen it, but he hasn’t noticed. Then he realizes that’s the answer to his existential crisis, to become somebody who notices that.
He gives up his expensive car, his business job and becomes a gardener and eventually, the guardian of these toilets, because they’re all in little parks. Somehow, they found Hirayama as the ideal character to take care of them. That was the backstory. I did give it away—against my will.
Q: You’re one of those versatile directors who helms features and documentaries. Why do you make both?
Wenders: Well, you want to know the truth? Of course [you do]. I felt more and more that what I was really good at, I [was able to] do less and less. What I was really good at was making movies without a script, fictional stories. I made Paris, Texas basically without a script. We did write it as we went ahead, and I made Wings of Desire basically without a script. [1976’s] Kings of the Road was done with half a page of script—the rest was invented.
I like storytelling on the road and I like it because the road is the only way to allow you to shoot in chronological order. And if you shoot in chronological order, you have the freedom to turn the story around, whenever you want. If you shoot your ending in the first week you cannot change anything anymore.
I love inventing my films as I go, and that became a no-no, already in the nineties and then in the twenty-first century, more and more so. Films are very much formulated, they have to be written through and through and designed and predesigned and everybody wants to know what they get when they finance the film. You already have to define what they will get before you even make it, [so] some of what I’m good at was not possible anymore.
And I realized it’s still possible in documentaries. Nobody wants you to write a script for a documentary—although they [have started] doing it now. I make more and more documentaries because I felt I had more freedom there. A lot of directors who do only fiction, every now and then should do documentaries to set their heads right again.
Q: Your latest documentary is Anselm. It’s hard for me to find the words to describe Anselm Kiefer’s artwork. Can you describe it?
Wenders: No, I couldn’t. It’s too vast and too complex. He’s the only painter on the planet who’s not afraid to paint anything. He thinks that each and every thing is subject to art, and everything can be painted. The universe, as well as the macrocosm and the microcosm, science and history, mythology and religion, everything can be painted. I don’t know anybody else who is that daring and who has such a huge opinion of what painting can do.
We were both born in 1945 in Germany after the war, so we both lived through the same story of growing up in a country that didn’t exist anymore. We had to reinvent the world basically for ourselves in a country with no history and no past. Anselm is a person who very courageously addressed that [lack of] past history and opened it up to Germans and the world again and revealed some of that German history that so many people around us tried to repress and forget and make unhappen.
I made a film so people could experience what his art is. It’s not an opinion on his art, the film is more of an experience than anything I’ve ever made. That’s why it’s intriguing.
Q: Please elaborate on why some Germans find his work to be controversial? Can you expand on the anti-Nazi character of his work?
Wenders: Anselm put the subjects of fascism, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust back on everybody’s table in the 1960s and 1970s when there was a consensus not to talk about it. And many Germans felt that somebody who uses German mythology, that has been abused by the Nazis—and they abused a lot of German culture, from the nineteenth century especially, and Romanticism, and exploited it into their own mythology. [Amselm was] somebody who would give us access back to everything the Nazis abused. A lot of people in Germany therefore thought: “Well, he must be a Nazi himself if he likes these things.”
But he only wanted to reveal the fact of how much of German history and mythology and art had been abused and misused. He really dug deep and opened the lid on things that were put under the carpet. He’s a courageous man and he was of course misunderstood, and more in Germany than anywhere else. The Americans really discovered Anselm and he had a huge tour of museums in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. At the time they called him the greatest living artist and they understood how controversial his art was in Germany, but they didn’t have that burden and that personal involvement with that history to [keep them from seeing] how great his work was.
Q: What’s next for you?
Wenders: I’ve been working on a documentary for a number of years already. It’s a long-term project and it will take another couple of years. It’s on a very remarkable architect who is a Pritzker Prize winner. He didn’t build much, and most of the big contemporary architects, if you ask them who their favorite architect is, it’s the same—Peter Zumthor, a Swiss guy. He’s right now building the new LACMA [Los Angeles County Museum of Art]. He’s very radical and only builds what he really thinks is useful and needed. I started [on this film] five years ago.
Perfect Days is in Japanese with English subtitles and opens in Los Angeles and New York City on February 7, before extending elsewhere on February 23. Anselm has opened in most of the top markets in the United States. It opens in Chicago February 2.