Wim Wenders Biography

The name “Wim” is rather of Dutch origin and had occurred on Wim’s mother’s side of the family. The name had been decided upon by his parents, but was refused by the authorities on grounds that it was not “a proper German name”. The most similar-sounding name was Wilhelm and so his birth certificate and his passport state his full name as Ernst Wilhelm Wenders, Ernst being his godfather’s name.

After he graduated from the “Gymnasium” (high school) in Oberhausen, an industrial city in the Ruhr district, Wim began his studies in medicine (1963-64) and philosophy (1964-65) in Freiburg and Düsseldorf. However, he interrupted his academic education and decided to become a painter. He moved to Paris in October of 1966, where he failed his entry test at the Art Academy. Instead he worked as an engraver in the atelier of the American artist Johnny Friedlander in Montparnasse. During that time he also became a regular visitor of the Cinemathèque Francaise, saw up to 5 movies a day and more than a thousand films altogether and got hooked on cinema.

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Wim returned to Germany in 1967, worked briefly in the Düsseldorf office of United Artists and that autumn entered the "Hochschule für Fernsehen and Film" (Graduate School of Film and Television), which had just been founded in Munich. (Rainer Werner Fassbinder was one of the rejects, and was so pissed off that he immediately started to make movies to show them...)

Between 1967 and 1970, parallel to his 3 years at the HFF, Wim also worked as a film critic and contributed to the film review "FilmKritik", to the Munich daily newspaper "Süddeutsche Zeitung.", to the magazine TWEN and DER SPIEGEL.

During the same period he finished several short films and in the hot summer of 1968 was arrested during a demonstration protesting against the assault on Rudi Dutschke. He was given a six and a half month suspended sentence for resisting arrest.

Wim Wenders graduated from the Hochschule with a feature-length film "Summer in the City", shot on 16mm and black and white for the budget of the half-hour 35mm film he was expected to deliver. But he really began his professional career in 1971 with his next film, "The Goalkeepers Fear of the Penalty Kick", based on the novel of the same name by his friend Peter Handke.

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In 1971, together with fourteen other German filmmakers, he started a production and distribution cooperative called "Filmverlag der Autoren". That company became the nucleus of the “New German Cinema”. In 1974, he also founded Wim Wenders Produktion (which was founded in Munich and relocated to Berlin in 1978). Filmverlag produced and distributed, after “The Goalie’s anxiety” Wim’s next features, “Scarlet Letter”, “Alice in the Cities”, “Wrong Move” and “Kings of the Road”.

In 1976, he started "Road Movies Filmproduktion Inc" in Berlin, which produced over the years not only Wenders’ films, but was involved in more than a hundred productions and coproductions up to 2003. For a number years in the early 80s, Wim also had a production company in New York together with Chris Sievernich, Gray City Inc.

While producing and directing through these various companies, Wim Wenders would become one of the major figures to emerge from the New German Cinema.

In 1977, he finished "The American Friend", his first international co-production which brought him to the attention of Francis Ford Coppola. In 1978, upon invitation of Coppola, he went to the United States to shoot “Hammett” for Zoetrope Productions, which occupied him, among other works, until 1982. During the forced interruptions in the shooting of the film, Wenders made "Lightning over Water" (together with his friend, director Nicholas Ray) and then "The State of Things", which won him the Golden Lion at the Venice Festival of 1982, the first in a series of prestigious international acknowledgments.

In the summer of 1982, after his difficult experiences in the United States, he directed his first (and only) play, "Über die Dörfer" by Peter Handke for the “Salzburger Festpiele”.

Moving from Los Angeles to New York that year, Wim had started working on a script together with Sam Shepard whom he had first met in 1978, when he had wanted to cast him as Hammett. (The studio had refused Wenders’ choice at the time.) Wim had written a first script based on Shepard’s “Motel Chronicles”, but the two then decided to start from scratch. The film was then shot in the summer of 1983 and was eventually titled “Paris, Texas”. It won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival in 1984. With that, Wim had become one of the cult directors of the '80s, while his films were becoming ever more successful with the public.

In 1984 he also became a member of the "Akademie der Künste" in Berlin.

In 1987, besides the release of his film "Der Himmel über Berlin", (“Wings of desire” in English) winner of the prize for Best Director at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, he also published his first photo book, "Written in the West", which reflected his fascination with the American West. This collection of photographs would be followed by many other books, collections of essays and reflections on filmmaking. He also published a number of books that accompanied his films. (“Kings of the Road” was the first of those, followed by “Paris, Texas”, “Tokyo-Ga”, “Wings of Desire” and others)

In 1989 Wim Wenders received an honorary doctor title from the Sorbonne University in Paris.

In 1991 he completed his long-time science-fiction project, "Until the End of the World". Unhappy with the abbreviated version he was forced to release, he continued editing afzer the release of the film and produced a 5-hour director’s cut that was going to be released only 12 years later. In the same year he received the prestigious Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Award in Bielefeld.

After “Tokyo-Ga”, a film on his favorite director, the great Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu, he made another documentary film a couple of years later on fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto. “Notebook on Cities and Clothes", his fourth cinematographic diary, was followed by a collaboration with Michelangelo Antonioni "Beyond the Clouds". Other projects in the early and mid-nineties included "Far Away, So Close", the follow up to “Wings of Desire”, as well as "Lisbon Story" and "A Trick of the Light"

From 1991 to 1996 he was the appointed Chairman of the European Film Academy and was subsequently elected as the Academy’s President, a function he still fills out today. Between 1993 and 1999 he has been teaching at the HFF in Munich, the film school he attended himself. Since 2003, he is teaching as a professor at the Hamburg Academy of Arts, the HfbK.

In 1995 he received another honorary doctorat (in divinity) this time from the theological faculty of the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.

Since then he has filmed his movies mainly in the US and in English. Most notably "The End of Violence", the award winning music documentary "Buena Vista Social Club" and "The Million Dollar Hotel" which won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2000. He collaborated on “Ten Minutes Older” together with fellow directors Jim Jarmush, Spike Lee, Chen Kaige, Werner Herzog, Aki Kaurismaki and Victor Erice. He shot another fewature-length music documentary in Germany, “Ode to Cologne” with his friends from BAP, a Cologne based Rock’n Roll band who sing in their local language that needs subtitling in the rest of Germany.

Between 2001 and 2003 he also worked on “Soul of a Man”, his contribution to the 7-part BLUES series that was executive-produced and initiated by Martin Scorsese.

Wim’s second photo exhibition after “Written in the West”, entitled “Pictures From the Surface of the Earth”, went from the Hamburger Bahnhof museum in Berlin to the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao and is touring since then through museums in Asia, Australia and Europe.

In 2004 Wim released “Land of Plenty” in Europe, a film dealing with poverty and paranoia in America. The film still waits for its US-distribution. That movie concluded his “LA trilogy”, together with “End of Violence” and “The Million Dollar Hotel”.

In the summer of 2004 Wim finally shot “Don’t Come Knocking”, his second collaboration with Sam Shepard, a road movie/post-Western/family story/tragicomedy. The two of them had been working on the script together for 3 years. The film stars Shepard in the lead. The cast includes Jessica Lange, Tim Roth, Gabriel Mann, Sarah Polley, Fairuza Balk, Eva Marie Saint and George Kennedy. The release is planned for late 2005.

Wim Wenders currently lives in Los Angeles and Berlin, together with his wife, photographer Donata Wenders.

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