6 Filmmaking Tips From Wim Wenders

Celebrate the wisdom of a living cinematic legend.

On August 14, 1945, Wim Wenders was born in Düsseldorf, Germany— the very same day World War II fighting ended in the Pacific. While he has said that growing up in post-war Germany was unsurprisingly not the most joyful of places, Wenders spent his childhood consuming a cultural diet of primarily American imports, ranging from Elvis to Westerns. As such, it’s perhaps not surprising that many of Wenders’ most iconic works are imbued with a vibe that might be described as the American Beat Generation meets German Romanticism, yearning and wanderlust mellowed with a strong dose of ennui.

One of a trio of filmmakers who rose to international prominence in the 1970s as part of the New German Cinema/German New Wave movement (the other two being Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog), Wenders’ career has been marked by a paradoxical combination of consistency and constant evolution, from fiction to documentary and back again, traversing genres and languages. He broke onto the scene with his first three road films, Alice in the Cities (1974), The Wrong Move (1975), and Kings of the Road (1976), now commonly regarded collectively as the Road Trilogy due to their narrative and stylistic similarities, even though they were never intended as a series. Wenders’ best-known films include the 1984 Harry Dean Stanton starrer Paris, Texas and the romantic fantasy steeped in existentialism that is Wings of Desire, released in 1987.

He’s won the Palme d’Or and Best Director at Cannes Film Festival (for Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire, respectively) and the BAFTA for Best Direction (Paris, Texas), and he’s been Oscar-nominated for Best Documentary Feature three times (The Salt of the Earth, Pina, and Buena Vista Social Club), among other honors. When it comes to filmmaking, Wenders is a living legend, and he’s shared plenty of advice along the way, including the following six tips.

Make The Films Only You Can Make

Wenders took part in Louisiana Channel’s “Advice to the Young” video series in 2014 and shared a youth-specific version of one of his favorite (or at least, most frequent) pieces of advice to give in interviews:

“My advice to a young artist — painter, photographer, filmmaker, video artist: whatever you do, nobody else can do that better than you. And you have to find what you can do better than anybody else and what you have in yourself that nobody else has in them. Don’t do anything […] that you know, deep in your heart, somebody else can do better. But do what nobody else can do except for you.

 

Your Best Film Will Probably Hurt

In a 2012 interview with Point of View magazine, Wenders talked primarily about his nonfiction work, especially Pina, his 2011 3D documentary tribute to the dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch. But some of his responses deal with the filmmaking process more generally, including the following comment:

I think it’s very rare that you make a film where there are no obstacles to overcome and everything runs smoothly. And it’s very rare that such experiences turn into a good movie. In my own experience, those films where you really stood in front of a mountain of problems and had to overcome huge difficulties, where you were heartbroken that you couldn’t do things and you had to come up with ideas in order to cover up for something — those are the interesting films. Those are really the films that count, not the films where everything goes smoothly. They rarely have that power afterwards. I think the films that break your heart in between also have the potential to break other people’s.

There Are No Rules

In 2013, Wenders submitted a list of 50 pithy filmmaking tips to MovieMaker magazine for their “Things I’ve Learned” series. Some of the tips listed include shorter versions of tips listed above, but also a number of other, frequently more practical concerns.

He had, for example, the following to say regarding continuity:

“Your continuity girl is always right about screen directions, jumping the axis and that sort of stuff. Don’t fight her. Bring her flowers.”

This particular warning to give about rain:

 “Rain only shows on the screen when you backlight it.”

And a cautionary word about considering the rest of the crew:

“If your dolly grip is grumpy or your electricians hate the shot it will all show on the film.”

However, Wenders ended his list with perhaps the most important rules of all:

49. There are no rules.

50. None of the above is necessarily correct.

What We Learned

As a preeminent filmmaker who has been a major name in world cinema for over 40 years, Wenders has given a fair share of filmmaking advice. However, the one key point he returns to time and time again is not something that can be learned or copied from him or anyone else, but precisely the opposite: the filmmakers who make a mark are those who dedicate themselves to stories that truly speak to them, and who push themselves to find their own unique voices as artists and storytellers.

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