The
photographers refused to sit down. Some of the questions
left Bono, Wim Wenders and co looking baffled. Milla Jovovich
was asked if she was an alien. ("People who know me best
say I am," she replied.) Two of the actors (Gloria Stuart
and Peter Stormare) turned up late. In other words, the
press conference for The
Million Dollar Hotel (the first ever at the
Berlinale-Palace) was as rowdy and chaotic as any of its
predecessors over the past 50 years.
An emotional
Wenders declared that "it would mean a lot to any director
on the planet" to open the 50th Berlinale, but that being
in Potsdamer Platz had a special resonance for him: many
of his movies had been set in the vicinity. Million
Dollar Hotel, he suggested, was about "losers, left-overs,
forgotten ones... you can see in them the beautiful, valuable
people they still are and the lives they could have led."
When
you write a song, Bono ruminated, "you stick your own ass
out the window." With a movie, "it's lots of other people's
asses." But it helped that he had a "365lb gorilla" called
Mel Gibson as a bodyguard...
Bono
and friends (including Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno) recorded
the music for the film in Dublin. "We set up the movie and
played live to what we saw on screen."
If some
of the lyrics sound on the literary side, that's because
they were written by Salman Rushdie (for "The Ground
Beneath Her Fee", his novel about an imaginary rock
band). "They were perfect for the end of the film according
to Wim," said Bono.
Geoffrey
Macnab
