Biography for
Wim Wenders Plus avec IMDbPro »

Date de naissance

14 August 1945, Düsseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

Nom de naissance

Ernst Wilhelm Wenders

Surnom

Wim

Taille

1,91 m

Marié(e) à

Donata Wenders	(1993 - present)
Isabelle Weingarten	(1981 - 1982)
Ronee Blakley	(1979 - 1981)
Lisa Kreuzer	(1974 - 1978)
Edda Köchl	(1968 - 1974)

Anecdotes

President of the European Film Academy

Donated his $5,000 Cannes prize for "Wings of Desire" (Der Himmel über Berlin (1987)) to Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan.

President of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1989

He worked with all of his wives on at least one movie: With Edda Köchl: Alice in den Städten (1974), Summer in the City (1970) and Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (1972); with Lisa Kreuzer: Alice in den Städten (1974), Der amerikanische Freund (1977), Falsche Bewegung (1975) and Im Lauf der Zeit (1976); with Isabelle Weingarten: Der Stand der Dinge (1982); with Ronee Blakley: Docu Drama (1984), Docu Drama (1984) and Lightning Over Water (1980) and with Donata Wenders: Al di là delle nuvole (1995), Arisha, der Bär und der steinerne Ring (1992), Buena Vista Social Club (1999), The End of Violence (1997), Lisbon Story (1994), Land of Plenty (2004) and The Million Dollar Hotel (2000).

After studying medicine and philosophy in Munich, Freiburg and Düsseldorf, he joined the Munich Academy for Television and Film in 1968.

Considers Yasujiro Ozu his all time grandmaster.

Many of his films are indebted to Nicholas Ray, which is proved by the expressionistic use of color in Der amerikanische Freund (1977) or the title of Bis ans Ende der Welt (1991) (Until The End of The World), the last spoken words in Ray's King of Kings (1961). Im Lauf der Zeit (1976) also lovingly lifts a scene from Ray's The Lusty Men (1952). His movie Lightning Over Water (1980) is a documentary about Nicholas Ray's last days.

He is infertile since an illness in childhood

He closed Belgrade Film Festival - FEST 2006.

President of the Jury at the Venice Film Festival in 2008. He openly argued with the festival's artistic director over the rules for the final verdict and disliked the experience so much, he vowed never to be part of a film festival jury again.

Uncle of Hella Wenders.

Citations personnelles

"Sex and violence was never really my cup of tea; I was always more into sax and violins."

"Hollywood filmmaking has become more and more about power and control. It's really not about telling stories. That's just a pretense. But ironically, the fundamental difference between making films in Europe versus America is in how the screenplay is dealt with. From my experiences in Germany and France, the script is something that is constantly scrutinized by the film made from it. Americans are far more practical. For them, the screenplay is a blueprint and it must be adhered to rigidly in fear of the whole house falling down. In a sense, all of the creative energy goes into the screenplay so one could say that the film already exists before the film even begins shooting. You lose spontaneity. But in Germany and France, I think that filmmaking is regarded as an adventure in itself."

"Originality now is rare in the cinema and it isn't worth striving for because most work that does this is egocentric and pretentious. What is most enjoyable about the cinema is simply working with a language that is classical in the sense that the image is understood by everyone. I'm not at all interested in innovating film language, making it more aesthetic. I love film history, and you're better off learning from those who proceeded you."

"I will always produce my own films and avoid finding myself at the distributor's mercy. You must become a producer if you want any control over the fate of your work. Otherwise, it becomes another person's film and he does with it what he pleases. I only had one experience like that and I will never repeat it."

I've turned from an imagemaker into a storyteller. Only a story can give meaning and a moral to an image.

In the beginning I just wanted to make movies, but with the passage of time the journey itself was no longer the goal, but what you find at the end. Now, I make films to discover something I didn't know, very much like a detective.

It is very hard to stay inside the boundaries of a genre film; I admire people that are able to do that. I just don't have the discipline. What I like about genres is that you can play with expectations and that there are certain rules that you can either obey or work against. But genres are a funny thing. They're heaven and they're hell. They help you to channel your ideas and they are helpful to guide the audience, but they don't help you in what you want to transport other than the genre itself. Genres get angry if you want to tell other stories -- because they are sort of self-sufficient. They like to be the foreground.

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