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MillimeterFade to Black: Wim Wenders, Director
Apr 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Darroch Greer
Wim Wenders has returned to his roots. The German director of The American Friend, Wings of Desire, and Paris, Texas returned to the American West with Sam Shepard to make Don't Come Knocking. It has all the hallmarks of both men's work: rootless, lost souls adrift across the iconic, ironic American landscape.
Ever referencing the filmmakers in whose footsteps he follows, Wenders knew exactly how to capture the West. “Always shoot in Scope,” Wenders says. “For this story, for the landscape, for the big sky, and for the horizon, I needed it to be on film. It was great to rediscover, after quite a lot of years, the beauty of film. You just have to be ready for those colors. And if you're not afraid, you can really do some amazing paintings out there with your camera. Especially if you fall into a place like Butte, Mont., that looks like a big outdoor studio for Edward Hopper.”
Wenders' most recent films had been digital. “I think Buena Vista Social Club was one of the first feature films that was done all digitally,” he recalls. “I think the format is tremendous. You can do things now that only 10 years ago we could not even dream of.” But Wenders wanted a return to classic form with Don't Come Knocking — shooting Super 35 on Arri cameras with Scope lenses. As Wenders says, “That's as much information as you can get on present-day filmstock. I don't think any digital support can get that much depth of information.” Only the second shot in the film is digitally manipulated. When the aging cowboy star (played by Shepard) escapes from his movie set to seek what went wrong in his life, he gallops off under Owachomu Bridge in Utah's Natural Bridges National Monument. The Park Service wouldn't permit riding there, and the scene had to be constructed from two shots.
This was DP Franz Lustig's first feature on film. A commercial and music video cinematographer, Lustig just won the European Award for Best Cinematography with Don't Come Knocking. “We shot all, of course, in Kodak,” says Wenders. “We had the 500 ASA and the 100. Most of the outdoor shots we shot on the 100 ASA, the fine grain. The prints are made on Vision Premier. It looks fantastic. If you make a print from the original negative, it looks like nothing else, and no digital intermediate, at least to now, [can improve it]. … We just graded the old-fashioned way. And if it's shot correctly, I think you still get a better result than any digital tools — if your DP knows what he's doing.”
Wenders continues, “I'm not speaking against digital, because, as I said, my last four films we did digitally. I love color correction on digital, but it's unbelievable to see rushes printed from an original negative. It's almost three-dimensional. A good screen and a good projector, you can just walk into your shot.”
After learning from his mother (Eva Marie Saint) that he has children, Shepard's character, Howard, heads to Butte to look for his family. His enraged son throws the entire contents of his own apartment out the window to the street. Just as the son leaves his father standing amidst the wreckage, a cloud passes over the sky, leaving Shepard in shade. “Franz, my DP, had the presence of mind to walk up to the camera and open the diaphragm, so it gets dark, and then it slowly gets brighter again. That's all we did. I don't think that's something you can do digitally. It was too perfect to be true. We all stood there with our mouths open.”
Shepard's character collapses on a couch in the middle of the street, his life in ruins, and stays there the entire night. In a series of continuous 360 shots, Shepard puzzles over his life and is visited by his daughter. “That was the most difficult job on the entire movie because we went 360 degrees around that sofa, 40 to 50 times. We couldn't place any light anywhere. The entire neighborhood was in the shot. So, Franz had to light it all from rooftops and from cranes. Finally, Howard's daughter [Sarah Polley] shows up in the shot, and sits down and goes into a two-shot dialogue. So it was really very tricky to do it without being able to light anything from the ground. And Franz really started sweating because that was difficult.” But Germans have always loved the American West, and it shows.
