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May 14,2006 - May 21,2006 |
Wim Wenders returns to the Far West
In Don't Come Knocking, German director teams up again with Sam Shepard
By Angela Baldassarre
Originally Published: 2006-04-23
At the age of 61, German filmmaker Wim Wenders still represents European art cinema at its core, despite the fact that some of his most popular films are obsessions with the American west.
The American Friend (1977) featured his director heroes Nicholas Ray and Sam Fuller, and Paris Texas (1984), followed a drifter through the Lone Star state. His most famous German film, Wings of Desire (1988) won him an award at Cannes (he donated the $5,000 prize to Canada's Atom Egoyan); and followed it with the massive Until the End of the World.
With Don't Come Knocking, his latest film, the six-times married Wenders has reunited with his Paris, Texas screenwriter Sam Shepard to tell the tale of another drifter, this time played by Shepard himself. Howard (Shepard) is an aging movie star who walks off the set of his latest movie. He stops off to visit his mother (Eva Marie Saint) before heading to Butte, Montana where 25 years earlier he had an affair with a local named Doreen (Jessica Lange) while shooting a film. It turns out that Doreen had a son (Gabriel Mann) Howard knew nothing of, and now it's time to make amends.
Tandem talked to Wim Wenders about Don't Come Knocking.
How did Don't Come Knocking come about?
"It took Sam Shepard and me a long time to get back together. Paris, Texas had been such a perfect collaboration, as far as a writer/director relationship was concerned, that we hesitated to work together again. You can only ruin or spoil a great experience by repeating it too eagerly or too quickly. So we waited. And one day we met by complete coincidence at a Lou Reed concert in New York. And we realized how much of a pleasure it was to see each other again. But we didn't say: 'It's been 18 years, let's do it again!' And a few months later I was writing a story by myself, a family story that was supposed to take place in Montana, and all of a sudden it dawned on me: I knew the perfect writer for this stuff. So I called Sam and he invited me over to show him my story. Which I did. He didn't particularly like my treatment, I must say, and the only little grain that we kept was the idea of the missing father and his unknown son. But before we knew it, we were already in the middle of a discussion about a new character. And that was all I wanted, anyway. In a way, my own 20 pages had been just an excuse to propose something to Sam."
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