Trivia
There was essentially no script for Kings of the Road. Except for the first scene after the opening credits when the two protagonists meet each other, everything was improvised.
Rüdiger Vogler, who played a character named Philip Winter in Alice in the Cities, also played a detective of the same name in Until the End of the World.
On the set of The American Friend, actors Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz did not initially get along, getting into a fistfight on set. After a night of drinking, the two returned to the set with their differences settled.
Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain claimed Paris, Texas was his favorite movie of all time.
In Wings of Desire, all of the black-and-white sequences were shot through a one-of-a-kind filter made from a stocking that belonged to cinematographer Henri Alekan’s grandmother.
To create the soundtrack for Until the End of the World, Wenders asked eighteen bands to consider the proposition of writing songs that could represent their music ten years into the future. He got sixteen tracks. The soundtrack wound up being more financially successful than the film.
The original ending of Until the End of the World called for the finale to be shot in Congo among the Pygmy people there, who were to chant the dream music heard on the soundtrack. Ultimately, the financing fell through and made that infeasible. Wenders also couldn’t get clearance to film in China, so he sent his star Solveig Dommartin into China with a handheld digital camera. That footage is in the film as a “video fax” that Claire sends her estranged lover Gene.
The Buena Vista Social Club album was put together by guitarist Ry Cooder in 1997 as a means of recapturing the lost music of prerevolutionary Havana. That story is the basis for Wenders’s film.
Wenders has said that he actively resisted going to see Pina Bausch’s Café Müller in 1985. He claims he had no interest in dance whatsoever and was dragged to the production by Dommartin, who was then his companion. Once he had begun to watch, however, he found himself so moved by the performance that he wept.
