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Wim Wenders and Thierry Frémaux signalled their support on Saturday for the Hollywood actors strike as the industrial action hits its 100th day.
“I understand the actors who all want to profit a little more… rather than there being just a dozen big names who have high salaries… while all the others earn nothing or very little,” Wenders told a press conference at the Lumière Film Festival.
The German director is guest of honor at the 15th edition of the festival spearheaded by double-hatted Cannes Delegate General Frémaux in his role of director of the Institut Lumière in Lyon, preserving the legacy of cinema pioneers Auguste Louis Lumière.
Frémaux seconded Wenders’s words.
“The dimension universal of this strike is perhaps underestimated… France, which has a reputation of putting up a fight, can also look with admiration at what is happening in Hollywood for something touches all us.”
Wenders lived in the U.S. for just over a decade from the mid-1970s onwards, making films such as Hammett, part of The State Of Things and his 1984 Cannes Palme d’Or breakthrough picture Paris, Texas.
The director elaborated on his thoughts around moves by the studios to reduce risk by relying on sequels and franchise spin-offs, as well as costs via technological developments such as artificial intelligence.
“This belief at the big studios that we can reduce risk by re-using ideas that already worked… it’s complete “b*llshit… it empties out the enormous creative potential that exists in Hollywood,” he said.
“If I realize that a film has as its reality another film, I leave because I’m wasting my time. I think a film has to find its own story and not a story already told by someone else because it worked,” he continued.
“There are big screenwriters who are all very, very frustrated because the opportunities to get an original screenplay into a big studio are very limited… Most the productions are already in place… it’s question of simply producing them and director is the person who executes a plan which is already in place.”
Referring to his 1982 film Chambre 666, in which he interviewed 15 internationally renowned directors on the future of cinema in the same hotel room in Cannes, Wenders recalled a comment by Jean Luc Godard.
“He developed the theory that American studios were going to make less and less films, and that in the end they were going to all make just one film together, a film that everybody would go to see,” said Wenders. “That would be the end game of a development that he was already seeing in that films were being repeated… We’re now at Fast and Furious 12.
Talking about his own present day thoughts, he added.
“It kills the imagination… when films are so formulated it kills the idea of a cinema that talks about something instead of repeating what another film has already said,” he said. “If I realize that a film has as its reality another film, I leave because I’m wasting my time. I think a film has to find its own story and not a story already told by someone else because it worked.”
“This belief at the big studios that we can reduce the risk by re-using ideas that already worked… it’s complete “b**lshit… it empties out the enormous creative potential that exists in Hollywood,” he continued.
“There are big screenwriters who are all very, very frustrated because the opportunities to get an original screenplay past a big studio are very limited… Most the productions are already in place… it’s question of simply producing them and director is simply the person who executes a plan which is already in place.”
Wenders also alluded to James Cameron’s criticism of the studios’ cost-cutting move to 3D post-production conversions, which took the 3D filmmaking process out of the hands of the director.
“He says its bullsh**t. It gives you a headache when you watch those films… and that is better to makes these films using two eyes, which is more human… that’s how I learned to shoot in 3D [on Pina] with Alain Derobe, a great European master who built the first 3D camera in Europe.
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