The German director, in Cannes with The End of Violence, discusses its themes with Nick Roddick
Wim Wenders and the room seem to have opposite tendencies. The director - whose new film, The End of Violence, will be the culmination of tonight's multi-million-franc, Cartier-sponsored spectacle - used to have a vaguely ochre appearance with red-framed spectacles, russet-coloured clothes, reddish hair and the complexion to go with it.
Now he's gone 100% monochrome: he has cropped grey hair, rimless spectacles, an ashen complexion (perhaps born out of not getting a print of his new film until last Thursday), a tasteful charcoal suit and an off-white shirt. The only colour is - slightly disconcertingly - in his lips.
The room, on the other hand, is going bananas. Protected from the rest of the Ondine beach by a temporary wall, it features garish, broad-striped, multi-coloured wallpaper (Regency meets acid house), plus a lampshade which looks like a psychedelic oil-based lightshow that has been freeze-framed at just the wrong moment.
Wenders is unfazed. Having spent large parts of his life as a cultural chameleon, he slips into this habitat with neither more nor less apparent reaction than if he was entering a Berlin editing suite or a Taco Bell.
Nor, it turns out, is the completion schedule of The End of Violence all that unusual. "With Paris, Texas," he says, the ghost of a reminiscent grin cracking the monochrome, "we started the mix the day that the Cannes opening-night ceremony was shown on television. We did it in six days, and the print was still wet when we got here."
For The End of Violence, the whole process was a tad more leisurely, though Wenders bristles at published reports that the shoot took 28 days. "I wish," he says. "It was 27. I badly needed that 28th day."
The film grew out of all the hanging around waiting to make The Million Dollar Hotel, the film he has been developing with U2's Bono and which is now called The Billion Dollar Hotel.
"Inflation is everywhere," he says, signalling the joke with the slightest sideways movement of the head. "Also, it has turned into a science-fiction story, which it wasn't before."
This triggers a 10-minute conversational detour to discuss digital effects, a few of which appear in The End of Violence, "But never," insists Wenders, "to enhance any action scenes with people in them."
Digital technology, he claims, is the most far-reaching change in the language of cinema since the advent of sound - and, in the short-term, is likely to have as retrogressive an effect on the art of film.
But this is not what The End of Violence is about. The new film - as its title implies - comes from a concern shared between its director, Bono and Nicholas Klein (who wrote the script and is writing that of The Billion Dollar Hotel) about the effect that the representation of violence has in our society.
This is not, he insists, something about which he feels the need to take a moral position. "I really try to avoid that. But violence is a fact of life and will be as long as people live on this planet," he says. "It has also been a part of film storytelling since the very early days of the movies.
"I realise that all the films I love, like Taxi Driver (which I resaw recently and which I think would still qualify as an extremely violent film), Sam Fuller and all of Kurosawa - they're all violent, but their depiction of violence is always justified. You always see where it comes from. It's never there just for show."
And in more recent films?
"I think that is not the case," he says.
So is he not worried that, by making this movie and by putting the word
'violence' in the title, that his film will be caught up in the whole violence-as-spectacle debate?
"That's the intention," he says. "We wanted to bring out the subject, but we wanted it to be the subject, not the material or the ingredient of the film."
Wenders' second entirely English-language film (after Palme d'Or-winner Paris, Texas) and his first in 'scope (shot by first-time feature cinematographer Pascal Rabaud) is about a director of violent movies (Gabriel Byrne) who has to cope with the eruption of the real thing into the hypercivilised life he leads. It was shot fast and furiously, on a $5-million budget (not bad when you consider that Bill Pullman and Andie MacDowell are in the cast along with Byrne) made possible by the fact that the shoot was so short.
"I believe there is a momentum in making films that begins with the writing of the script," he says. "If you have to sit through 10 story conferences and all the changes that that entails, then you lose the momentum.
"That's not a method of film-making I much enjoy," he continues. "I was incredibly lucky: when I was a young film-maker, I was able to make a film a year for 10 years. If you're a young filmmaker starting out today and you've just made your first film, you have to wait two to three years to make your second."
But Wenders, of course, is no longer a young filmmaker, and The End of Violence is in some ways his antidote to ageing. "As you grow older, you can never deny that you gain experience," he says. "Sometimes experience is great, and sometimes it's a burden. I think I made this film to escape the burden.
"Sometimes lack of money is very good," he adds, "because you have to replace what isn't in the budget with your fantasy and your imagination."
I wonder if Cartier will be approaching tonight's gala show along the same lines?
