INTERVIEW

WiIM AND VIGOR: Wenders frames a shot.

Wenders says he had wanted Shepard to play Harry Dean Stanton's role in Paris, Texas, but the young playwright said no. "This time," Wenders smiles, "I had learned from my mistake: I didn't ask him. We had written quite a lot of the screenplay already. I mentioned that I was going to give it to Jack Nicholson, and that I thought he would like it. Sam didn't say much at first, but he made it clear that the only direction I should think was toward him."

Despite the 22 years that have passed since their first collaboration, Wenders says they share a similar approach to writing. For Don't Come Knocking, Wenders recalls, he had a vague theme of "absent fathers," which he "wrapped into a 20-page treatment, little more than an excuse to go see Sam. The inevitable thing happened: He didn't like my story." Wenders smiles: Their working relationship is perfect, challenging and provocative.

Shepard, he says, begins with a sense of character, and Wenders with a "sense of place." After Shepard writes a first scene, "We don't allow ourselves to think much ahead. He writes a scene, we read it together, we correct it and then the inevitable question comes up: What's next? And what's next is not what is going to happen in the next half-hour of the film, but strictly what is the very next scene? We discover this, we almost live the story."

When Shepard said he wanted to make Howard a movie star, "I was appalled," says Wenders, "because I didn't want to make a movie about movies." But the first scene, in which Howard, "in full cowboy attire, runs off the set," convinced the director. "He's fleeing the movies, so that was OK with me. I liked that his life was obsolete." Wenders wanted to shoot in Butte, Mont., he says, because it has a "lostness of space and time. I realized the story of the lost father had to take place here."

When this father discovers "a life he never lived," embodied in Earl (Gabriel Mann), the son Howard doesn't know exists, he reunites with the boy's mother, Doreen (Jessica Lange), with whom Howard spent a few hours 20 years before. "Howard's whole life was a mistake," says Wenders. "When we conceived of him, we realized that we were not going to identify with him at all. This guy was not our point of view through the film." Instead, he says, the women around him "push the story forward. Doreen, his mother [Eva Marie Saint], and his daughter Sky [Sarah Polley] have their two feet on the ground, and know one thing Howard does not—they know how to face the truth."

Howard's journey involved specific "performances" as well, as Wenders sees him seeking forms of communication that match his movie life. "They were in this city that seemed almost completely unpopulated, like they're always on a big set," says Wenders. When Howard suggests that Doreen come back to him, the scene takes place in front of a small gym window, with two people inside working out. "They're acting in front of this audience and this audience doesn't care," Wenders notes. "It was like a little theater, that little eruption has something theatrical about it … in Howard's movies, the movies that he believed in, they would have come back together, but not in the movie of his life."

Such screens—formed by windows, reflections and frames—suggest repeatedly that Howard's life is a movie. This begins with the very first image, Wenders asserts, a rock formation that looks like "the mask of Zorro." "Usually people ride through the Western landscape and we see it with their eyes. This was the opposite, like the landscape was watching Howard."

Wenders observes that this perspective is new for him. "My previous films had a strong sense of identification; the point of view was anchored in the characters. But here the point of view is floating, shifting slowly away from Howard and toward the kids. In the end, it's almost like he's a ghost who appears." He sighs, gracefully: "We're all trained to identify with characters and as a filmmaker, I feel I was trained to do it. It was some sort of great relief to see we could make it without anchoring it in a character."

Don't Come Knocking is now playing at Ritz Bourse.