I wanted to be a priest.
Helping people seemed like a positive thing to me. People need spiritual help.
How did it end up in the movies?
After knowing that I would neither be a priest, nor a doctor like my father, nor an architect, I wanted to be a painter.
He is going to study painting in Paris.
He was poor, he needed a warm place and the film library offered a film for one franc. I ended up watching more than a thousand films in a year and a half and that convinced me that cinema was better than painting.
What did you want to explain?
Everything is under the influence of my childhood. I grew up in a city, Düsseldorf, that was completely destroyed. I knew another world existed. Traveling was my driving force. I’m primarily a traveler, and you can make great movies while traveling. In my first ten years it was all road movies.
Are you a searcher?
Always. My films are about the possibility of changing life, my intention is for people to realize that they can change things.
Yesterday I spent the day reading about you.
I’m sorry. I’m probably not that person you’ve read about.
Tell me who you are.
My life and my work are the same, that’s why some people think I’m a workaholic, but what I am is a life addict.
He landed in Hollywood invited by Coppola, what happened between you?
A misunderstanding On my part, I believed that he could make an American film, and on Francis’ part, he believed that he could become a great producer. We are still good friends but we had a big conflict.
What did you learn from it?
That I would never work as a contract director and started producing my own films. And I love making small films more than big productions.
He is going to film the agony of Nicholas Ray.
He asked me. The team always wanted to stop, but he didn’t, and the doctors said: “If you don’t continue, he will die tomorrow”. Nicholas had fallen out of favor in Hollywood due to alcohol scandals and wanted to rectify his image.
I flash on the water, very hard.
Every day we had nightmares. Filming someone dying is a heavy burden on your soul that I still carry.
You almost died too.
Yes, a sad chapter in my life. I’m a cookie freak and at a party I found a bowl with twenty cookies. I ate them all without knowing they were hash. The host called the ambulance immediately, I had a pulse of 240 and I had a heart attack. I was 22 years old.
And did he go through the tunnel and see the light?
Yes, I had a near death experience. I saw a huge light and walked towards it without fear. I just thought I would have liked to tell my parents not to be sorry and I woke up disappointed in the hospital.
Did that experience change him?
I entered a phase of enormous anxiety. I was very afraid and began a seven-year Freudian psychoanalysis that made me a different person. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. I didn’t want to medicate, I just wanted to find myself.
What did he discover?
That the anxiety came from a long time ago, it was deep. I reconciled with myself and with my parents… I was a radical left-wing student and my father was a conservative, we had a big conflict. I became a much wiser person.
But what did he understand?
I accepted my mortality and my spirituality: I could defend my leftist principles and believe in God.
So his conflict was between reason and feeling.
And I saw that it was possible to unite them. I work a lot from instinct. I’m not an intellectual, but I can combine my ideas and my emotions much better now than before.
What has driven you in life?
I have realized that nothing you do without love and care will be good and valuable. Only what is done with a loving heart can touch other people. I don’t think intellectual work transforms anyone, it can make you think but not feel.
We have lived through a very turbulent time.
I thought the pandemic could lead us to something good, but the opposite has happened. The feeling of the common good has dissipated, it is no longer the driving force of any society, it is a lost cause.
And what is his consolation?
Music, I can’t live without it, and trees, my other great love. They can save us if we let them. And I am convinced that the solution to get out of the hole is to take power away from men, whose morals are in decline, and pass it on to women, with a much greater awareness.
