‘All my films deal with how to live’: Wim Wenders on Herzog, spirituality and shooting a movie in 16 days
In early 2022, “totally out of the blue”, Wim Wenders received an invitation to visit Tokyo and look at some public toilets. It came from from the Tokyo Toilet art project, which had commissioned several high-profile architects and designers to create 17 aesthetically beautiful public toilets in various locations in the Shibuya district of the city. “They basically contacted me and said: ‘We know you like Japan and we know you like architecture,’” he recalls, smiling. “‘So we would like you to come and see our beautiful toilets and, if you like them, maybe you could make a series of short documentary films about them.’”
The invitation arrived at an opportune time for Wenders, who, as he puts it, was “feeling very homesick for Tokyo”, a city he had visited often since since making a film about the fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto in 1989. “It seemed,” he tells me, “like a dream come true.”
He travelled to the city soon afterwards, during a short break from shooting the final scenes for his epic documentary Anselm, about the German artist Anselm Kiefer. What he saw there convinced him that the “beauty and calmness of these amazing little places” would be better evoked in a fictional feature film, which he assured his hosts he could make on a small budget and in the same 16-day shooting schedule. To his surprise, they agreed almost immediately. “It all happened so fast,” he says now, “but fast is beautiful. Fast is a gift. Fast is unleashed creativity.”
The end result, though, is a masterclass in slow cinema. Perfect Days is a film in which not much happens, but the little that does is oddly transfixing. Co-scripted with Japanese writer Takuma Takasaki, it comprises a series of small variations on a single theme: the daily work routine of Hirayama, a solitary but contented individual whose job it is to clean and maintain the Shibuya toilets. “It is a small film, yes,” Wenders agrees. “But it was also the first film I made after the pandemic. I saw it as a new beginning for me so I really wanted it to matter.”
In an era of audaciously big and epically long movies such as Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon, Wenders’s restrained meditation on the simple life seems to have struck a chord with critics and the public alike. Last May, Kōji Yakusho, who plays Hirayama, won the best actor award at Cannes. “His character is the film,” Wenders said recently.
Where, I ask, did the idea for such an ascetic lead character come from? “I drummed him up in my imagination and we cast him in two weeks. We knew from the start we needed someone who was attentive to everything around him, who could show what he lives in his eyes. You need a big actor to convey small gestures, to open a door in the morning, look up at the sky, and make it meaningful. I only knew one who could live up to this role and that was Kōji.”
The film is also in contention for the best international feature film at the Oscars, the first time that Japan has selected a non-Japanese director. “Wim’s understanding of Japanese culture is amazing,” says Takasaki. “There was a sense of wonder in working with him. We had a perfect relationship, and through his eyes and mind, I rediscovered my country, culture and values.”
I meet Wenders in the expansive headquarters of his production company, Road Movies, in the Mitte district of Berlin. We chat across a long table in a back room in which a tall, elaborate African carving stands sentinel by the door. One of Wenders’s large-format landscape photographs of the American west stretches across the back wall. At 78, the director exudes a relaxed calmness, his answers considered and often very detailed. “Films are a product these days,” he says ruefully at one point. “The beauty of Perfect Days is that I had nobody looking over my shoulder. I could do what I wanted. Takuma was a great help, but there was no control. They let the two of us just run free. There was only a little money but complete freedom.”
Perfect Days is his 23rd feature film, and has been greeted by critics as a return to form for a director who, of late, has been lauded more for his documentaries. They include 2011’s Pina,a portrait of the austere and influential dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch, and 2018’s Pope Francis: A Man ofHis Word,in which he gained unprecedented access to the current pontiff. Neither quite prepared me for last year’s Anselm,which, I tell him, is the most conceptually ambitious and illuminating study of compulsive artistic genius I have ever seen.
“Well, it was a challenging film to make, so that is gratifying,” he says. “We made it all through the pandemic, following all the rules about testing and everything else. It occupied me for three years in all – seven shoots in different locations and editing in between for a few months. I never had so much time to make one movie, but I don’t know what I would have done otherwise. I needed it to slowly understand and represent the vastness of this man’s work.”
I watched Anselm and Perfect Daysin quick succession and was struck by how dramatically different they were in terms of subject matter and ambition. “Oh, for sure,” he says, laughing. “They are almost the total opposite of each other. For a start, I have never met anyone who works as hard as Anselm Kiefer. He is relentless. Perfect Days, on the other hand, is about a man who leads a very simple, pareddown life. So, one is about abundance, the other is about reduction.”
In Yakusho’s pitch-perfect performance, Hirayama, the toilet cleaner, comes across as a man out of time, someone who has walked away from another, more privileged life for reasons that are never explained. He lives in a small, spartan apartment in a working-class neighbourhood, reads literary novels he buys in secondhand bookshops, listens to the same few cassettes – the Kinks, Nina Simone, the Velvet Underground – in his van as he travels to and from work. In his lunch break, he sits quietly on a park bench, absorbing the ordinary world around him and sometimes taking photos of the surrounding trees. In the evenings, he eats in the same cafe and visits the same bar.
His interactions with passing characters, including his feckless workmate, his adoring niece and a stranger who is terminally ill, are fleeting but meaningful. The arrival of his estranged sister in a chauffeur-driven car, her obvious wealth a signifier of his previous life, briefly unsettles his equilibrium, but throughout he remains a man apart, someone who has found a profound inner peace through the simplicity of his routine life. “I think of him as a kind of secular monk,” says Wenders.
Hirayama is a stark contrast to the restless characters that appear in the director’s early films, whether Philip Winter, the enigmatic German writer adrift in the vastness of America in 1974’s Alice in the Cities,or the haunted Travis Henderson walking through the endless desert landscape in 1984’s Paris, Texas.He nods in agreement.“Those movies are about searchers, characters who are seeking, but they don’t find it. Hirayama is not searching.” He pauses for a long moment, lost in thought. “All of my films are dealing with that question of how to live, even though for a long