Smash hit

Wenders spent half a day in the crater. “It was amazing, Hell on Earth, horrific, horrifying,” he recalls. “The fire officers and police did their work in total silence as they looked for remnants of bodies. It was so dark in that hellhole, then an unbelievable thing happened. The early morning sun reflected off the side of an adjacent skyscraper and the entire place was filled with the most incredible light. It seemed to me a message of healing: that this was a horrifying wound in the body of the Earth but one that time would heal. Of course, history didn’t really go this way.” Taking pictures at the site did exorcise the bad dreams, though, he adds.

Does his directing inform his photography or vice versa? “The moving image reduces the image to a movement; the photograph opens it up to time, eternity even, the past as well as present.” In Jerusalem he visited “the field of blood” that was said to have been bought with the 30 silver coins that Judas Iscariot returned to priests after betraying Jesus. “There weren’t even birds there. It was eerie,” he says.

In the past he combined photography and film-making but he does one or the other now. “Photography is such a private thing, something I do on my own, whereas with films you arrive somewhere with 100 people, trucks, you manipulate things in a certain way. When you take a picture there’s none of that.”

There are many film directors and actors who take pictures (Mike Figgis, Abbas Kiarostami and Jeff Bridges among them) and Wenders rates the work of Bridges. Alongside them, Wenders, who even takes his own stills, has remained a maverick long after one might have expected him to have disappeared into the Hollywood maw.

“I worked as a studio director between 1978 and 1982. It wasn’t for me [as his cynical movie The State of Things made clear]. I’m independent and don’t do what the market expects. I’m able to choose my own projects, which is a luxury. Being labelled a ‘cult director’ comes from that. I do what I want to do.”

That’s all very brave, but has he lost it, as the critics charge? He sighs but doesn’t sound too despairing. “The Anglo-Saxon press hated Wings of Desire. The press I got for Don’t Come Knocking was the worst I ever received. People really didn’t understand what this film was about. It was like we were on different planets. I can’t be influenced by good or bad press. If you believe one you think you’re a genius, or if it’s the other, that you’re a total a**hole. I’m a very hard critic on myself, so is my wife [Donata]. I don’t know why these films haven’t connected, just as I don’t know why Buena Vista Social Club did connect. It would be awful if there was a recipe to follow. I just carry on with my craft and yes, I am very pleased with my work.”

Was turning 60 significant? “In one way,” he says and he laughs. For years his passport read Ernst Wilhelm Wenders. Ernst was his grandfather’s name and the German official who registered his passport as a boy thought “Wim” was too Dutch a middle name (his mother was Dutch). The most similar-sounding German name was Wilhelm. “I would refuse to be called Wilhelm as I grew up,” says Wenders, “and finally last year I wrote a letter to the passport office and told them my parents had wanted to call me Wim and they agreed to change it. Now I am very proud.”

Despite his reputation for intense seriousness, Wenders insists he is optimistic, “sometimes foolishly so”. He is fascinated by the idea that his photographs will survive him though he doesn’t dwell on mortality. A long-distance runner (“though with my joints I have to run on soft surfaces now not asphalt”), he earned the nickname Photojarra from the Aboriginal guide who took him to remote locations in the Australian outback. “It means ‘the idiot with the camera’,” Wenders explains. “He couldn’t understand why I was carrying around such a heavy thing.”

One wonders how uncluttered Wenders’s forthcoming year off will actually be. He plans “a year of photography” and is scouting locations for his first German-language film for 14 years. “I’ve lived in LA for ten years and in that time Germany, especially the east, has changed drastically. I want to look at the consequences of reunification.” As he keeps saying, Wenders is an “obsessive”: a workaholic, a journey-oholic. “I just love travelling, the open road,” he says emphatically. Would he ever stop? “I might be forced to one day,” he admits. “But I love looking at maps and atlases and learning the names of rivers and mountains. It gives me an incredible kick.”

The next day he is off to another city and a new set of stories waiting to reveal themselves. His adventurous zeal is insatiable. You can call Wenders many things but lazy isn’t one of them.

Wim Wenders: Images from Planet Earth is at the Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome (0039-06 696270; scuderiequirinale.it), until August 27