Cinema! (and more)

DoubleTake Twenty-Five, Summer 2001

A Conversation with Wim Wenders by Michael Coles

Michael Coles: You seem to evoke Edward Hopper in some of your films. How has Hopper influenced your work?

Wim Wenders: I encountered Hopper on my first trip to America, in 1972. I was in New York and spent quite some time at the Whitney Museum. And I had known Hopper a little before, but he hadn't made much of an impact on me until I actually saw the paintings. He became very popular all over the world during the 1970s, with calendars and books and postcards everywhere. But at the time I saw him in the Whitney, he wasn't yet the postcard artist of the twentieth century. The first film of mine that was influenced by Edward Hopper's paintings was The American Friend, which I shot in 1976. More than anything else I liked his sense of framing. It was very cinematic and reminded me a lot of classic American movies, of Anthony Mann or John Ford. I especially liked the city paintings and his hotel windows. Hopper's influence showed most in The Million Dollar Hotel (2000). The entire film was shot in a brownstone building that could have served as Hopper's studio. Of course, later I learned how much Hopper himself had been influenced by movies, and how often he had gone to see them whenever he suffered from "painter's block."