At 79, the busy director isn't just collecting honorary awards. He just started a new 3D project about the architect Peter Zumthor

It has just been announced that Wim Wenders will be honored this year by the European Film Academy with the Lifetime Achievement Award. He will also be presented with the Great German-French Media Prize 2024 in Paris on September 17th. And at the Cannes Film Festival in April, the restored 4K version of his masterpiece Paris, Texas premiered, 40 years after it won the Palme d'Or there. With such honors, the 79-year-old filmmaker could sit back, relax and enjoy his fame. But Wenders remains awake and active. And always surprises with new, exciting projects.

Over the next two years, filming will take place at more than a dozen locations around the world - including the Witches' Memorial in Vardø, the Brother Klaus Field Chapel in the Eifel, the Kolumba Museum in Cologne, the Secular Retreat in Chivelstone, and Luzi House in Jenaz and the thermal baths in Vals as well as upcoming architectural projects such as the extension of the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen near Basel and the new building of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). 

The film is shot in 3D because “no other art (besides dance) needs the third dimension as much as architecture,” says Wenders. After his films about the choreographer Pina Bausch (Pina, 2011) and the German über-artist Anselm Kiefer (Anselm, 2023), the Zumthor project is Wender's third film in 3D technology. In 2023, the tireless filmmaker also delivered the magical feature film Perfect Days, a meditation on clean toilets and the meaning of life in the urban jungle of Tokyo. Architecture also plays an important role in this film. Wenders sets his plot around Tokyo's stylishly designed public toilets.

In the film, a silent man finds happiness in his simple everyday work as a toilet cleaner. During breaks he photographs trees, light reflections and shadow plays with his analog camera. He has the films developed and sorts the prints in search for the perfect image. He throws away most of them. Only a few get filed into his personal image archive. These scenes made me think of a conversation I had with Wim Wenders in 2015. Back then, we talked a lot about his ways of finding images, the importance of photography for his filmmaking, the influence of classical landscape painting on his work and why, as a “pronounced gadget freak,” he still relies on analogue photography. In the interview, Wenders, who was born in bombed-out Düsseldorf in 1945, also gives rare insights into his youth in post-war Germany. Back then he spent a lot of time in art museums. He was particularly impressed by the Dutch landscape painters with their high skies and wide horizons. He started taking photographs himself back then. As he got older, all he wanted to do was get away from Germany. In the vastness of America, but also in Edward Hopper's fine composed paintings, he finally found his soul landscapes.

Here are a few enlightening quotes from the conversation that appeared in the September 2015 issue of the art magazine ART. I am attaching the complete interview (unfortunately only in German) as a PDF.

Many of my films begin with the desire to tell a story in a specific place. They must necessarily belong together. But the place is the very first thing. If I have a feeling for a place and understand it, then I also know how to reproduce it, how to frame it, either as a painter, as a photographer or with a film camera.

I always found the most interesting paintings in which people were only seen from behind or small in the landscape.

The very first impressions were Dutch and French pictures that hung in my parents' war-damaged apartment, two small rooms on the ground floor, the rest of the house was gone. They were art prints of pictures by the landscape painter Camille Corot, large trees with small people from behind. I stared at them for hours when I couldn't sleep. Later it became the large landscapes in museums. I grew up in this broken city. Art was the first glimpse into another world.

My story as a photographer only begins in 1983 with the purchase of a 6 x 7 medium format camera and my very first color photos. That's when I started taking photographs in preparation for the film Paris, Texas, to better understand the light and colors of the American West. Paris, Texas, um das Licht und die Farben des amerikanischen Westens besser zu verstehen.

I take quite a few iPhone photos. These are picture notes, but for me this is not photography. For me this is only possible with the negative.

But I don't want to see the damn photo on the back of the display while I'm still taking it! For me, that is the ultimate outrage: when I see the picture so early, too early, I am only interested in the product and no longer in the dialogue with what I have in front of me.

As a filmmaker, I was the first to switch to digital, trying out everything, including 3D films and, soon, perhaps virtual reality. But when I take photos, I like the direct trace that the light leaves through the lens on a negative and which is then reflected on the print. For me, this is the chain of evidence that I hold dear and sacred.