Wenders not ready to give up on 3D
Wim Wenders is a filmmaker in love with 3D. In 2011 he made Pina, a tribute to the late German choreographer Pina Bausch, filming performances of her work out of doors and in three dimensions. The startling effect helped earn the film an Oscar nomination for best documentary.
He followed that up with 2015’s Every Thing Will Be Fine, a restrained drama starring James Franco, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Rachel McAdams, also shot in 3D.
So when his newest, Submergence, arrived at the Toronto International Film Festival in plain old 2D, I had to ask: Why the step back?
The 72-year-old director looks sad. “You want to have the dirty truth?” he asks. “I wanted to do this one in 3D, but I couldn’t convince the producers and the distributors. 3D has such a bad renown that the distributors said from the beginning, ‘This is serious material. Our audience does not want serious material in 3D.’ “
He adds that some of the scenes in this romantic drama were made for 3D, including underwater shots — Alicia Vikander plays a bio-mathematician/oceanographer — and stark desert locales; James McAvoy is an MI6 agent on a mission in East Africa. “But 3D has such a bad name now outside its application in animation and action hero movies; it’s a grand shame.”
Wenders is determined he will try again. In the meantime, his next film, a 2D documentary, will have its world première at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Its title: Pope Francis: A Man of His Word.
Wenders says he was approached by the Vatican about making the movie, which will be more of a journey with the pontiff than a biography of him. “They were commissioning a film with the pope — not on the pope, with the pope,” he says.
Wenders was raised Catholic and converted to Protestantism, but also holds an honorary degree in theology from a Catholic university, after some monks took a shine to his 1987 film Wings of Desire, about an angel who wants to be mortal. “I’m neither Catholic nor Protestant,” he says of his religion today. “I’m Christian.”
Submergence is based on a 2011 novel by J.M. Ledgard in which the two characters meet, fall in love, and are then separated by vast distances as she takes to the ocean and he to the desert.
“Separation is a big issue,” Wenders says, “and love that survives the separation, and the insecurity that goes along with that. Separation is a hard crisis for any love.”
But how did he know McAvoy and Vikander would have the chemistry necessary to portray such love? “You do not know that,” he says bluntly. “You can have a gut feeling and hope for it but you only know on the first day of shooting. Once you cast you have to be lucky. I’ve also been on films where chemistry between leading actors just wasn’t there.”
But luck was with him this time. “The boring story is I didn’t ask anybody else. I met them. Each of these meetings ended with a handshake. It was the shortest possible casting process ever.”