Wim Wenders loves to write on long-haul flights. “I never watch movies on planes,” says the 79-year-old director of Wings of Desire, Perfect Days and Paris, Texas. On the few occasions that he has made use of the in-flight entertainment, he found himself “liking films that later on embarrassed me—I think they put something into the air.”

Wenders is, appropriately enough, sharing all this in a long email, written en route to Mumbai. He’s visiting the city for the first time: Over the next few weeks, he’s presenting 18 of the more than 50 films he has made in five Indian cities. It’s one of several major retrospectives celebrating the prolific career of an artist who says he sees himself, first and foremost, as a traveler.

“Usually, I am not good at home, sitting at my desk,” he writes. For Wenders, creativity flows more freely when he is in motion, whether that’s on a train (“my best ‘setting’”) or traveling via plane—“A journey really sets me free.” Music, he says, is indispensable to his process: “I put on my headphones and I look out of the window. And then I start writing.”1

This August, to celebrate his 80th birthday, the Bundeskunsthalle museum in Bonn is honoring Wenders’ career with an immersive, large-scale exhibition, showcasing his photography as well as his films. But while the world might be looking back at a half century of his films, documentaries, photographs and writing, the artist himself is still working, still writing, and very much still dreaming of the future—specifically a science-fiction film that he is determined won’t be dystopian. “I find that we have gotten used to accepting so many unbearable things, like wars and violence and dictatorship and severe poverty and inequality,” he says. “Only a film, in which all this is gone, could open our minds.”

Wenders is an eternal optimist, a German romantic who, many years ago, set out in search of the American dream. It started as a childhood thing. “My hometown of Düsseldorf was bombed severely at the end of World War II and largely destroyed,” he says. Wenders was born in 1945, the year the war ended, and for as long as he can remember has yearned to travel. “I grew up in a city of ruins. As a kid you take it for granted that the world looks like that.”2

Leafing through his grandfather’s old encyclopedias, he was surprised to learn that “the rest of the world looked much more beautiful.” He dragged his parents into museums and, in newspapers, he discovered skyscrapers and American cities, with shiny cars and wide, spacious avenues. His grandmother helped him decipher the names of the places he encountered studying atlases and maps. “I was longing to discover the world—as soon as possible.”

WALK! TAKE YOUR TIME! LOOK PEOPLE IN THE EYE WHEN YOU TALK TO THEM.

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.”)