Observations placeholder
Wenders, Wim - Don't come knocking
Identifier
028232
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Don't Come Knocking -Wim Wenders (2005)
A View from Outside: An Interview with Wim Wenders - By Spencer Lewerenz
Your latest movie, Don't Come Knocking, was released here on March 17, after its premiere at Sundance. Are you pleased with how the film turned out?
I couldn't be more pleased. I had the greatest cast I could have dreamed off. With Sam Shepard playing the lead himself, I have Jessica Lange play the love of his life, Sarah Polley as his daughter and Gabriel Mann as his son. Then there is Eva Marie Saint as his mother, Tim Roth as a bounty hunter chasing him, Fairuza Balk as a crazy chick and George Kennedy as a Western movie director. Hey, what more can you want?!
Don't Come Knocking reunites you with Sam Shepherd, who you collaborated with some 20 years ago on Paris, Texas. How did this reunion come about?
Paris, Texas was such a great experience and achievement for us both, not just as a result, but also in terms of a writer/director relationship, that we were both weary to repeat that collaboration too quickly. You can easily ruin a glorious memory by trying to redo it or to top it. So we waited for 20 years. A sufficient period of abstinence, we both felt. I had an idea for a film and had written a story that nobody in the whole wide world could write better than Sam Shepard. So I gave him a call. He asked me to come see him right away. Well, we started talking and very soon, there was nothing left of my story, because together we had come up with something even better. We wrote Don't Come Knocking over a period of three years. You might say we tried to stretch the experience. It just felt so good again and so right. Not that it owed anything to Paris, Texas. We didn't want to repeat ourselves.
How do you think this film fits into your overall body of work?
I'm not sure if it's up to me to state that. I'm utterly pleased, that's a fact. When I was asked that question in Cannes, I said spontaneously: "I can't do much better." I guess I still feel like that.
April 14, 2006