An image of America beckoned. It looked like the twilight-hour paintings of Edward Hopper, with lonely figures waiting in hotel rooms and desolate service stations and empty diners. It promised open roads and freedom, like those pursued by the disaffected outlaws in Dennis Hopper’s classic 1969 road movie Easy Rider. It sounded like rock and roll. In 1977, Wenders moved to the US and spent nearly a decade there, trying to make his great American movie. In 1984, he released Paris, Texas.

But “traveling on my own, that started in the ’60s,” says Wenders. In 1966, Wenders set off on his first adventure—to Paris—to study painting. “My first journeys consisted of standing by the jukebox and hoping that somebody would push the right numbers for my favorite songs,” he says. He wrote rock criticism and film reviews, and spent the rest of his free time in the city’s Cinémathèque Française. “I had no idea if I was going to be able to make movies,” he recalls.

A few years later, however, he enrolled at film school in Munich and became “the only one of the 20 guys and girls who graduated who made a film in the first year after film school.” Summer in the City, which was released in 1970, was the start of a long collaboration with the late Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller, who died in 2018. Müller went on to become one of Wenders’ most trusted comrades. “We were like twin brothers,” he remembers. They made 12 films together and “taught each other everything.”

Wenders says he thought calling himself a director seemed “very pretentious” and that a career as a filmmaker “was an idea just as likely as wanting to be an astronaut.” His early films saw him modeling himself after the directors he admired—the loose, freewheeling spirit of Cassavetes (Summer in the City, 1970) and Hitchcock’s taut, elastic band–snap of suspense (The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, 1972). He tried his hand at a costume drama (The Scarlet Letter, 1973), but, by his own admission, failed. (“I had to realize, painfully, that I was not gifted to shoot a period film.”)

“If I understand the place, I know where to put my camera, and I know my characters and my story belong there.”

Wenders was fully prepared to return to writing criticism or painting. Then, in 1974, he made Alice in the Cities, a low-budget road movie about a journalist who finds himself looking after a bright nine-year-old girl. “I found my own voice,” he says. “It was a great relief.” The film brought Wenders new, critical success. “If you are searching for a fine, tightly controlled, intelligent and ultimately touching film, one will be shown tonight as part of the 12th New York Film Festival,” wrote The New York Times. It was proof, Wenders says, that he could make a film “that owed nothing to anybody else.”

In Alice in the Cities—the first in Wenders’ “Road Movie” trilogy—a German journalist travels from New York to Munich, via Amsterdam and Wuppertal, Germany. Wenders’ stories frequently unfold from the vantage point of outsiders; his characters are often “passing through” or else looking from a specific perspective. “I always thought that being a stranger was a privilege,” Wenders says. “You see things differently, and you’re paying more attention than locals, to all sorts of things.” Another of Wenders’ most romantic—and celebrated—films, Wings of Desire (1987), is a love letter to Berlin, as seen by two angels who eavesdrop on the city below.3 He made the film after spending eight years living away, as a means of rediscovering the city where he has lived—on and off—since the mid-1970s.

The director usually begins his projects with a location that interests him. “Only then do I try to find the story that belongs there,” he says, explaining that he is “not at all interested in stories that can take place anywhere.” It’s a mindset that crystallized through his love of traveling, which has taught him to trust his instinct for “real” places rather than attractions aimed at foreign visitors. “In order to discover a city or a landscape I don’t know yet, I avoid asking locals to show me ‘interesting places,’” he says. “That’s never what I’m after. They tell me to turn left, I turn right.”

One of Wenders’ recent films, Perfect Days (2023), follows a monastic bathroom attendant in Tokyo as he spends his free time in pursuit of modest, everyday pleasures. It’s a different Tokyo from the chaotic, bustling metropolis usually depicted on screen: Instead of neon shopping malls and packed crosswalks, the film unfolds in a noodle shop, a secondhand bookstore and a public bathhouse. “Very ordinary, sometimes forgotten places can reveal a lot, if you’re willing to notice the traces that history left behind,” says Wenders.

Wenders has previously explored Tokyo in documentaries Tokyo-Ga, about filmmaking legend Yasujiro Ozu, and Notebook on Cities and Clothes, a profile of fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto. Perfect Days was supposed to be a documentary too, about the Tokyo Toilet, an art project in the district of Shibuya, but when Wenders landed in Tokyo after the pandemic, he was moved by how the city had put itself back together. The film’s fictional protagonist, Hirayama (played by actor Koji Yakusho), would tell that story instead. “If I understand the place, I know where to put my camera, and I know my characters and my story belong there.”

Though Wenders has worked extensively across both fiction and documentary, as he gets older, he has found “these divisions don’t mean much to me anymore, and in my last two films [Perfect Days and Anselm] I pretty much discarded them.” Over time, Wenders realized that in his fiction movies, he “had always tried to insert as much reality as possible, and that in my documentaries I had been keen to introduce fictional elements.” Anselm, for example, is “a storytelling effort” about the painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer in which sculptures of dresses whisper as though they have been inhabited by ghosts. And in Wenders’ Oscar-nominated documentary Pina, the audience comes to know pioneering choreographer Pina Bausch through filmed performances of her neo-expressionist “dance theater” rendered in immersive 3D.4 “Why did I find myself weeping watching her plays? Why could she show me more about the relation of men and women than in any movie ever before? I could only find out by making a film,” he says. “Films are great ways to explore!”

Filmmakers, designers, dancers, painters and photographers: Many of Wenders’ documentaries focus on singular creative figures. He explains that “they are all adventurers” and that “these films are more adventure stories.” Wenders says the protagonists of his documentaries, like Ozu, Yamamoto, Bausch, Kiefer and Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado (The Salt of the Earth, 2014) “have all explored the human mind and the human condition, but instead of roaming the surface of planet Earth, they entered into our souls and discovered uncharted territories.”