Wim Wenders, Thierry Frémaux Signal Support For Actors Strike As It Hits 100 Days Mark: “The Universal Dimension Of This Strike Is Underestimated” – Lumière Film Festival

Melanie Goodfellow
·6 min read
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Wim Wenders and Thierry Frémaux signalled their support on Saturday for the Hollywood actors strike as the industrial action hits its 100th day.

“I understand the actors who all want to profit a little more… rather than there being just a dozen big names who have high salaries… while all the others earn nothing or very little,” Wenders told a press conference at the Lumière Film Festival.

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The German director is guest of honor at the 15th edition of the festival, spearheaded by double-hatted Cannes Delegate General Frémaux in his role of director of the Institut Lumière in Lyon, preserving the legacy of cinema pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière.

Frémaux seconded Wenders’s words.

“The universal dimension of this strike is perhaps a bit underestimated… France, which has a reputation for struggle and putting up a fight, can also look with admiration at what is happening in Hollywood for something that touches us all,” he said.

Wenders lived in the U.S. for just over a decade from the mid-1970s onwards, making films such as Hammett, part of The State Of Things and his 1984 Cannes Palme d’Or breakthrough picture Paris, Texas.

The director elaborated on his thoughts around moves by the U.S. studios to reduce risk by relying on sequels and franchise spin-offs, as well as costs via technological developments such as artificial intelligence.

“This belief at the big studios that we can reduce risk by re-using ideas that already worked… it’s complete “b*llshit… it empties out the enormous creative potential that exists in Hollywood,” he said.

“If I realize that a film has as its reality another film, I leave because I’m wasting my time. I think a film has to find its own story and not a story already told by someone else because it worked,” he continued.

“There are big screenwriters who are very, very frustrated because the opportunities to get an original screenplay into a big studio are very limited… the director has become a person who executes a plan that has already been put in place.”

Referring to his 1982 film Chambre 666, in which he interviewed 15 internationally renowned directors on the future of cinema in the same hotel room in Cannes, Wenders recalled a comment by Jean-Luc Godard.

“He developed the theory that American studios were going to make less and less films, and that in the end they were going to all make just one film together, a film that everybody would go to see,” said Wenders. “That would be the end game of a development that he was already seeing in that films were being repeated… We’re now at Fast and Furious 12.“

Wenders talked about his own contemporary thoughts on the development.

“It kills the imagination… when films are so formulated it kills the idea of a cinema that talks about something instead of repeating what another film has already said,” he added.

Touching on the rise of artificial intelligence, Wenders said its use in the development of screenplays would kill off the screenwriting profession, while avatars would also have implications for actors.

Wenders also alluded to James Cameron’s criticism of the studios’ cost-cutting move to 3D post-production conversions, which took the 3D filmmaking process out of the hands of the director.

“He says its bullsh**t. It gives you a headache when you watch those films… and that it is better to make these films using two eyes, which is more human… that’s how I learned to shoot in 3D [on Pina] with Alain Derobe, a great European master who built the first 3D camera in Europe.”

Lumière’s celebration of Wenders has included a grandstanding awards ceremony on Friday evening attended by more than 3,000 people; retrospective screenings as well as previews of his new films Anselm and Perfect Days; photo exhibitions, and a carte blanche sidebar for which the director chose Barbara Loden’s Wanda, Claire Denis’s Beau Travail and Gaspar Noé’s Into The Void.

Wenders also touched on issues closer to home in Saturday’s news conference, and his fears over growing nationalism in Europe and the threat this poses to European unity and the peace it has brought with it.

The director, who was born just months after the May 1945 surrender of Nazi Germany in World War Two and is a child of his country’s reconstruction, has long been an advocate for a united Europe.

He recalled the opening scenes of his 1994 film Lisbon story in which the protagonist drives through Germany, France, Spain, and into Portugal in a celebration of the early days of border free travel in Europe, a journey that he took himself as part of pre-production.

“The whole of Europe was a bit excited at the time because the borders were more and more open. We were making progress,” he said. “Today, 30 years later, there’s no longer progress, we’re going backwards.”

Wenders suggested that the European Union bloc – which unites 448.4 million people across 27 member states – had lost sight of its original raison d’être.

“The idea of Europe is more and more reduced,” he said. “It’s more and more about bureaucratic ideas of a financial and economic nature, the idea of a Europe of hearts still hasn’t been achieved.”

“Europe for many people has become an enemy… in many countries, part of the population thinks Europe is something to fight against,” he continued.

The director noted one bright spot in the result of Poland’s general election last weekend in which the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party was removed from power by opposition parties, topped by Donald Tusk’s pro-European centrist party Civic Coalition with 30.7%.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes when I got up in the morning. They had won, the pro-European group. It was the end of the nightmare. I have lots of Polish friends who were desperate about living in a country ruled by reactionaries,” he said. “Nationalist beliefs have caused hundreds of wars in Europe, and who knows how many wars between Germany and France.”

The director hinted that he was mulling a future project imbibed with the current atmosphere in Europe in a similar vein to Lisbon Story back in 1994, but did not want to give more details.

“Anselm talks a bit about it and what happens if we forget history. My next film will certainly make this effort but I don’t want to talk about it because I’m superstitious… In German we have a saying, ‘Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.’”

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