Wim Wen­ders: ​‘With restora­tion, there’s a dan­ger you can fal­si­fy the film’

Wim Wen­ders is in Lon­don accom­pa­ny­ing new restora­tions of a num­ber of his clas­sic movies, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Cur­zon for a sea­son called Kino Dreams. Although he still keeps his hand in as a direc­tor, pho­tog­ra­ph­er and painter, the Ger­man mae­stro who coined the mod­ern con­cep­tion of the ​“road movie” is spend­ing a lot of time of late get­ting his hands dirty with the job of restor­ing his films to a set of var­i­ous spe­cif­ic specifications.

In this con­ver­sa­tion, we dis­cuss his attempts to make Wings of Desire look like it did on the. gor­geous orig­i­nal cam­era neg­a­tive, secur­ing music rights for The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penal­ty Kick, and colour-cor­rect­ing Paris, Texas – one of the great­est colour films ever made.

LWLies: We’re here to dis­cuss this ret­ro­spec­tive of your work in Lon­don. A lot of your films have been restored recent­ly, and I’m inter­est­ed to talk to you about that process. Wings of Desire in 4K is play­ing as part of the sea­son, but Mil­lion Dol­lar Hotel is the most recent restora­tion, right?

Wen­ders: Mil­lion Dol­lar Hotel is new­er. Wings of Desire we did five years ago. We’ve already been at it for 10 years now. All my films are now prop­er­ty of the Wim Wen­ders Foun­da­tion – they no longer belong to me. They belong to them­selves. It was my desire that the films would no longer have some­body who owns them. Why is that? Because it sucks. Com­mer­cial ​‘own­er­ship’ of film sucks. Most own­ers of films want a prof­it. And some of these films are still show­ing – they have their own rev­enues. As with any­thing on cel­lu­loid, it fades, it dete­ri­o­rates, and it needs to be trans­ferred to dig­i­tal, oth­er­wise it’s dead and gone. And not only trans­ferred, but actu­al­ly restored with the view to replac­ing the orig­i­nal film neg­a­tive, because in a few years, nobody’s going to be able to make a print from it any more. So if you digi­tise a film today, you cre­ate a new neg­a­tive. A more per­ma­nent one.

And by that you mean a dig­i­tal neg­a­tive, rather than a new cel­lu­loid one?

A non-cel­lu­loid dig­i­tal neg­a­tive, so to speak. You cre­ate a new mas­ter. You can do dam­age to it. You can make the film look as good as it was on its first print; some­times you can even make it look a lit­tle bet­ter. Digi­tis­ing is a very respon­si­ble act.

Do you per­son­al­ly receive rev­enues from your films?

Not any more. The films cre­ate their rev­enues, and the rev­enues go back into the next restoration.

So it’s a kind of film cooperative?

The films are their own mas­ters. And now we’ve enable 20 of them for their future. And we will do anoth­er ten or 20 as long as I’m alive, I hope. And then they belong to them­selves and their fate is no longer con­nect­ed to any one per­son. It’s a shame – any­thing that is on cel­lu­loid that has not been prop­er­ly trans­ferred to dig­i­tal is more or less invis­i­ble. That’s one rea­son we cre­at­ed this foun­da­tion. Cur­zon are show­ing nine out of these in their season.

Where is the orig­i­nal neg­a­tive of Wings of Desire right now?

It is still being stored in a cold and dry loca­tion made for pre­serv­ing neg­a­tives. Because that neg­a­tive is still a very wor­thy doc­u­ment. We keep the neg­a­tive – the many neg­a­tives in this case. Wings of Desire was our most demand­ing restora­tion. Most of the film was shot on black-and-white neg­a­tive by the mas­ter of black-and-white pho­tog­ra­phy, Hen­ri Alekan, who shot Jean Cocteau’s Beau­ty and the Beast and all that. I worked with him because of his mas­tery of black-and-white. But there were also colour ele­ments in the film. In order to pro­duce a print at the time, when the film came out in ​’87, you could tech­ni­cal­ly not pro­duce a print with mixed black-and-white neg­a­tive and colour neg­a­tives. So the entire print in the end had to be on a colour negative.

Were you hap­py with the results? 

No, because on a colour neg­a­tive, you can­not have real black-and-white. I mean, you can have some­thing close to black-and-white, but it will also have a lit­tle red tint or sepia or what­ev­er. It’s nev­er true black-and-white. As I remem­ber, the black-and-white rush­es we saw looked gor­geous. And these rush­es were first gen­er­a­tion. Actu­al­ly let’s say the cam­era neg­a­tive is the first gen­er­a­tion and the rush­es are already the sec­ond gen­er­a­tion. In order to do the film at the time – tech­ni­cal­ly a film made from both colour and black-and-white neg­a­tives with spe­cial effects and god knows what else – we end­ed up with all prints shown in the­atres – not only at the pre­mière, but from then on – that were the sev­enth gen­er­a­tion. In between, there were six steps in order to get all the mate­r­i­al togeth­er. And the sev­enth gen­er­a­tion los­es a lot of def­i­n­i­tion. And the black-and-white is no longer what the DoP intend­ed it to be.

Restor­ing Wings of Desire led us back to the orig­i­nal cam­era neg­a­tives – both the black-and-white as the colour ones. So the film now looks as good as it nev­er did. Because even if peo­ple didn’t know, the final film was a com­pro­mise. Hen­ri Alekan, who did the colour cor­rec­tion him­self, cursed every day that his beau­ti­ful black-and-white was gone and it was sepia or blue. We try to make the best of it, and when peo­ple saw the film they thought it was inten­tion­al – that it had these tint­ed ele­ments. That was not inten­tion­al, just nec­es­sary. And now we have restored it from the orig­i­nal neg­a­tive so it looks crisp and sharp and beau­ti­ful. And the black-and-white is as con­trast­ed and as mul­ti­fac­eted and with a thou­sand shades between the white and black, as it was always intended.

Is it a fal­la­cy, then, to say that dig­i­tal can­not prop­er­ly process the colour black?

It all depends how well you scan your neg­a­tive. If you scan it at the high­est pos­si­ble res­o­lu­tion, you can iso­late and see every grain of the data. You see your film image even bet­ter than a print because you see it in the first gen­er­a­tion, because the digi­tis­ing of the neg­a­tive is 100 per cent the image of the neg­a­tive. Actu­al­ly, it’d be hard to find a more beau­ti­ful black-and-white than the one that you can pro­duce dig­i­tal­ly today. Some cam­era man­u­fac­tur­ers, like Array or Leica, have pro­duced cam­eras that only record in black-and-white and use the entire opti­cal sen­sor to col­lect only black-and-white infor­ma­tion. And there you have the rich­est black-and-white that no film could ever cap­ture except if you have huge neg­a­tives. What arrives on an uncal­i­brat­ed mon­i­tor or com­put­er screen is anoth­er sto­ry. But the­atres should be able to present great black-and-white.

Do you play a per­son­al role in the restora­tion process? Are you quite hands on with things?

I’ve been involved with each and every step. The most deci­sive step is colour cor­rec­tion. If you do a film on a neg­a­tive, you go with your DoP into the lab. So you have the first attempt and that’s no good because the colours are all over the place. And then you try to make adjust­ments between every cut. Nor­mal­ly you do five, six, sev­en, maybe some­times even eight prints until the DoP is hap­py with it. When you scan the orig­i­nal neg­a­tive it is un-colour cor­rect­ed. So you have to start the process that you once did with your DoP from scratch. And I think it’s real­ly only an advan­tage that, as a direc­tor, you know the inten­tion with which the film was made, and you remem­ber your first colour cor­rec­tion, so I was super­vis­ing all of it. At the same time, we also restored the sound. Some of the films were still done on opti­cal tracks, but we found and kept the orig­i­nal mag­net­ic tracks. So we restored the sound, took off the noise and rum­ble – what­ev­er they had picked up over the years, with­out ever inter­fer­ing with the orig­i­nal mix. You try to stay true to the original.

When you restored The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penal­ty Kick, I under­stand that secur­ing the music rights for that film was very tricky and expensive. 

That movie was shot in 1970-’71. I was very young, quite naïve, and wasn’t aware of that fact that the film wasn’t just com­ing out in cin­e­mas in Ger­many. So I cleared music rights for Ger­man the­atri­cal use for two or three years. We bought the rights for Elvis Pres­ley, Van Mor­ri­son, Roy Orbi­son, Cree­dence Clear­wa­ter Revival, you name it. But the film would have a life in for­eign coun­tries. What did I know? I was hap­py to be able to make a movie with my favourite music. But the film end­ed up hav­ing a life in for­eign coun­tries. Which meant it real­ly dis­ap­peared after a num­ber of years because it was too expen­sive to clear the music rights for all ter­ri­to­ries. It would have cost more than the film itself. So, the Foun­da­tion faced that prob­lem too, as the film couldn’t real­ly be re-released. There was music in it that cost more than the entire restora­tion bud­get. So we boiled it down. We tried to buy some of the orig­i­nal music there was in it. We suc­ceed­ed with some. We had great help and ​‘the luck of the Irish’. Van Morrison’s ​‘Glo­ria’ is in it. It was his biggest song. And we thought we could nev­er pay for ​‘Glo­ria’.

And that track is vital as it’s a call-back to dia­logue at the begin­ning of the film.

I final­ly got in touch with Van Mor­ri­son him­self. And he said, ​‘You can have it – I give it to you. As long as your foun­da­tion pays what­ev­er it costs for the lawyers to do the paper­work,’ which was not much. He prac­ti­cal­ly gave it to me for free. But Elvis wasn’t alive to give me the rights, so Elvis was dif­fi­cult. A lot of the music was too expen­sive. And they’re rep­re­sent­ed by agents who don’t give a shit if it’s a foun­da­tion or what­ev­er. And they said, ​‘No, you pay $20,000 or we don’t even pick up the phone.‘ In the end, for the music that could not be replaced, we didn’t have the means. And as we only had the mixed track where every­thing was mixed togeth­er – dia­logue, music, atmos­pheres – we didn’t have any of the sin­gle tracks, we were in trouble.

So it was prac­ti­cal­ly a lost cause because we couldn’t take the music out. And then we found some­body who said we can elim­i­nate the music dig­i­tal­ly, but it’s a long process, we have to take every tiny lit­tle bit of the sound­track and ​‘pain the music out,’ lit­er­al­ly. But still there would be a dis­tant rum­ble of it remain­ing, the rhythm of it could still be felt. So we had to recom­pose ​‘sounda­likes’ that had the same beat to the microsec­ond. We found com­posers and bands to actu­al­ly take those tim­ings and com­pose music and sing to it. We replaced four songs this way. Oth­er­wise the film would have been dead.

With Paris, Texas, it must have been an extreme­ly dif­fi­cult film to colour cor­rect. How did you man­age to cap­ture all those flu­o­res­cents and the low-light sequences?

It was the big chal­lenge. The chal­lenge of Paris, Texas was to find that Kodachrome feel again. It all goes back to the light of the Amer­i­can west, the bright­est, most pri­ma­ry-coloured skies on Earth. So Rob­by Müller, the DoP at the time, did amaz­ing work to remain true to that light, con­trast­ing it with some dawn or dusk light, and using flu­o­res­cents that had this kind of poi­so­nous green/​yellow touch to it… He loved that combination.

Those bits of the image where the flu­o­res­cent greens fade into the black of night look par­tic­u­lar­ly amazing.

It was very pre­cious. In the his­to­ry of cin­e­ma, when­ev­er you use neon or flu­o­res­cent light, it tends to be cor­rect­ed out because it was con­sid­ered a flaw. And at the time, when we colour cor­rect­ed it on film, we kept that green­ish flu­o­res­cent light in, even when the colourist said, ​‘You’re crazy, guys, we have to take out that green – it’s horrifying.’

What do you mean by ​“take out”?

Fil­ter­ing it out. But we kept it in. Part of the look of Paris, Texas was that Rob­by dared to keep this flu­o­res­cent light – with all its poi­so­nous impact – in the shots. In the West, there’s a lot of neon, and that neon set against the open skies is real­ly mind-blow­ing. And it’s hard to cap­ture it on film. And hard to print it too. On the dig­i­tal restora­tion, we want­ed to get back to Robby’s orig­i­nal colours. And when Rob­by saw the film – because he was very sick at the time we com­plet­ed it – he had tears in his eyes. So we realised it was good. He couldn’t real­ly speak any­more. And again, it was all done from the orig­i­nal neg­a­tive that ran through the cam­era, because there were lots of prints done so more of the prints were from dupli­cate neg­a­tives. And not many prints were done from the orig­i­nal neg­a­tive except for the fes­ti­val prints. So we went back to the orig­i­nal neg­a­tive that ran through the cam­era and scanned that and it real­ly paid off. We found the orig­i­nal colours again.

Wong Kar-wai had his films restored recent­ly. And he changed the colours and added colours that weren’t there orig­i­nal­ly. And he talked about how this is actu­al­ly how he want­ed it to be orig­i­nal­ly but couldn’t achieve it. What do you feel about that?

I think it’s total­ly fair if the orig­i­nal cre­ator does it. And if he tried to achieve some­thing at the time that tech­ni­cal­ly wasn’t pos­si­ble. I think Wong Kar-wai has all the right in the world to cre­ate the film that he would have liked to do at that time. And it could very well have been that the labs in Chi­na in the ​’90s couldn’t achieve what he want­ed. But then again, there is a dan­ger that you can do too much and that you can fal­si­fy the film. In the case of Wings of Desire, I felt I had the lib­er­ty because I know how unhap­py Hen­ri was with the fact that he had to work from the sev­enth gen­er­a­tion print and how hap­py he was when he saw his orig­i­nal rush­es. You have a cer­tain lib­er­ty if you can go back to the orig­i­nal inten­tion. But the temp­ta­tion, dig­i­tal­ly, is that you can over­do it and you stray into eth­i­cal­ly dan­ger­ous territory.

Are you com­fort­able with oth­er peo­ple restor­ing your work?

I know a lot of pro­fes­sion­als and cura­tors who would do a very good job with a clas­sic for which DoP or direc­tor are no longer avail­able. I’m more com­fort­able with doing it myself. I know that the dig­i­tal mas­ter will be good enough for a long, long time. And it will be the source for what­ev­er is invent­ed in the future to show movies with. Already with stream­ing, it ends up in people’s homes, and who knows what’s com­ing out of uncal­i­brat­ed mon­i­tors or beam­ers. The qual­i­ty that the stream­ers give is rel­a­tive to that. They can guar­an­tee the sig­nal, but they can­not guar­an­tee what peo­ple are actu­al­ly see­ing. In a cin­e­ma, it’s unfor­tu­nate­ly not much better…

How so?

I trav­el for a while with all my movies when they came out, and in every the­atre – even with dig­i­tal pro­jec­tion – it’s dif­fer­ent. I remem­ber we showed Pina, and that was the first of my films that was dis­trib­uted in dig­i­tal 3D, and I saw it in about 50 cin­e­mas, and none of them was alike.

Was any one right?

You’d think there was a code or a norm. No. There’s not. They’re all dif­fer­ent. Dif­fer­ent tech­ni­cal sys­tems when it comes to pro­ject­ing 3D. In the end, I lost all belief that dig­i­tal was some­thing that was in any way less sta­ble than ana­logue. We found out that most cin­e­mas do not run their pro­jec­tors at 100 per cent light capac­i­ty. And some not even 80 per cent. And it goes as low as 50 per cent. And this relates to the light they could throw on the screen. The more light, the more beau­ti­ful the projection.

But this all relates to how long the lamps in the pro­jec­tors last. They’d rather have their lamps last five years more than show­ing films at 100 per cent. Unfor­tu­nate­ly. I’ve seen Pina in a cin­e­ma where the whole film looked like it was shot day for night. That said, it was the same before with ana­logue. Light sources var­ied. Now there are laser pro­jec­tors, and you can’t fuck with those. The nature of the laser light has a cer­tain con­di­tion. If you ever notice a cin­e­ma has laser pro­jec­tors, go and see the movie there.

Find more details on Curzon’s Wim Wen­ders: Kino Dreams sea­son at cur​zon​.com 

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