1. Wim Wenders has received a BAFTA Award and been nominated for four Academy Awards and a Grammy Award.
41 Facts About Wim Wenders
1. 2.
Wim Wenders earned critical acclaim for directing the films Alice in the Cities, The Wrong Move, and Kings of the Road, later known as the Road Movie trilogy.
3.
Wim Wenders won the BAFTA Award for Best Direction and the Palme d'Or for Paris, Texas and the Cannes Film Festival Best Director Award for Wings of Desire.
4.
Wim Wenders has received three nominations for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature: for Buena Vista Social Club, Pina, and The Salt of the Earth.
5.
Wim Wenders received a nomination for the Grammy Award for Best Long Form Music Video for Willie Nelson at the Teatro.
6.
Wim Wenders is known for directing the documentaries Tokyo-Ga, The Soul of a Man, Pope Francis: A Man of His Word, and Anselm.
7.
Wim Wenders is an active photographer, emphasizing images of desolate landscapes.
8.
Wim Wenders was born in Dusseldorf into a traditionally Catholic family.
9.
The Dutch name "Wim Wenders" is a shortened version of the baptismal name "Wilhelm".
10.
Wim Wenders graduated from high school in Oberhausen in the Ruhr area.
11.
Wim Wenders then studied medicine at the University of Freiburg and philosophy at the University of Dusseldorf, but dropped out and moved to Paris in October 1966 in order to become a painter.
12.
Wim Wenders failed his entry test at France's national film school, IDHEC, and instead became an engraver at Johnny Friedlaender's studio in Montparnasse.
13.
Wim Wenders completed several short films before graduating from the Hochschule with a 16mm black-and-white film, Summer in the City, his feature directorial debut.
14.
Wim Wenders's career began in the late 1960s, the New German Cinema era.
15.
Wim Wenders made his directorial film debut with Summer in the City, his graduation project at the University of Television and Film Munich, which he attended from 1967 to 1970.
16.
Wim Wenders then directed The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty, titled The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick in the United States.
17.
Wim Wenders then directed the period drama The Scarlet Letter, adapted from Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel of the same name.
18.
In 1977 Wim Wenders gained prominence for directing the neo-noir The American Friend, starring Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz.
19.
Wim Wenders earned critical acclaim for his road drama Paris, Texas, starring Harry Dean Stanton, Nastassja Kinski and Dean Stockwell.
20.
Wim Wenders then directed the romance fantasy Wings of Desire, starring Bruno Ganz and Peter Falk.
21.
In 1991 Wim Wenders directed the science fiction adventure drama Until the End of the World, starring William Hurt, Solveig Dommartin, Max Von Sydow and Jeanne Moreau.
22.
In 1997, Wim Wenders directed the American drama film The End of Violence, starring Bill Pullman, Andie MacDowell, and Gabriel Byrne.
23.
Wim Wenders has directed several highly acclaimed documentaries, including Willie Nelson at the Teatro, a documentary about the recording sessions of Teatro.
24.
Wim Wenders has directed music videos for groups such as U2 and Talking Heads, including "Stay " and "Sax and Violins".
25.
Wim Wenders directed a documentary-style film on the Skladanowsky brothers, known in English as A Trick of the Light.
26.
In 2011, Wim Wenders was selected to stage the 2013 cycle of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Bayreuth Festival.
27.
In 2012, while promoting his 3-D dance film Pina, Wim Wenders told the Documentary channel blog that he had begun work on a new 3-D documentary about architecture.
28.
Wim Wenders said he would only work in 3-D from then on.
29.
Wim Wenders had admired the dance choreographer Pina Bausch since 1985, but only with the advent of digital 3-D cinema did he decide that he could sufficiently capture her work on screen.
30.
Wim Wenders is a member of the advisory board of World Cinema Foundation.
31.
In June 2017, Wim Wenders stage-directed Georges Bizet's opera Les Pecheurs de perles, starring Olga Peretyatko and Francesco Demuro and conducted by Daniel Barenboim at the Berlin State Opera.
32.
Wim Wenders said that, though raised Catholic, he had converted to Protestantism years earlier.
33.
In 2019 Wim Wenders acted as executive producer for his former assistant director Luca Lucchesi's documentary A Black Jesus, which has similar themes to Pope Francis: A Man of His Word.
34.
Lucchesi noted that Wim Wenders pushed the film to be more symbolic and philosophical, saying that Wim Wenders wanted the film to have a "universal fairy-tale aspect" and to represent "Europe in a nutshell".
35.
Wim Wenders has worked with photographic images of desolate landscapes and themes of memory, time, loss, nostalgia and movement.
36.
Wim Wenders began his long-running project "Pictures from the Surface of the Earth" in the early 1980s and pursued it for 20 years.
37.
The initial photographic series was titled "Written in the West" and was produced while Wim Wenders criss-crossed the American West in preparation for his film Paris, Texas.
38.
Wim Wenders is an ecumenical Christian; as a teenager he wished to become a Catholic priest.
39.
From 1979 to 1981, Wim Wenders was married to the American actress and singer-songwriter Ronee Blakley.
40.
Wim Wenders has been awarded honorary doctorates by the Sorbonne in Paris in 1989, the University of Fribourg in 1995, and the Universite Catholique de Louvain, Belgium, in 2005.
41.
The Wim Wenders Foundation was established in Dusseldorf in 2012.