The means of Violence

Wim Wenders does not believe that life imitates art, but what happened to him when he brought The End of Violence to Cannes gave him pause. The film is about a Hollywood producer who is carjacked by two thugs. While at Cannes, Wenders, his wife, and his producer and his producer's wife were similarly victimized.

"Yes, that's true," says Wenders. "After living and shooting peacefully in Los Angeles for nine months, we got mugged our second day in France.

"It was the middle of the day and we were driving back to the house. We stopped in front of the garage door and waited for it to open when these two guys on a motorcycle stopped behind the car. It all happened quickly very fast. One stayed on the motorbike, the other one opened the back door and yelled into the car. The strategy, I guess, is to scare the people and grab their handbags and leave, but there weren't any handbags. So he ran and opened the trunk of the car. I did the one thing that was totally wrong -- I jumped out of the car and went after him, which he didn't expect. And it was stupid because I don't know what I would have done if he had expected it. He hesitated for a second and jumped on the motorbike and left. I almost reached him, but he sped off and gave me the finger . . . which pissed me off the most of all."

After being mugged by criminals, Wenders then had to endure a mugging from audiences and critics when his film was shown.

"Yeah, I was unhappy. Truth is, we had to rush the film to have it ready for Cannes. And the screening was the evening of the Cannes 50th-birthday event. Everyone from the jury and every director, actor, and producer in the book was sitting in the audience -- it was like two thousand people, all members of the profession. I was sitting there showing what I then considered a rough cut. I just wanted to go back and do it right. Immediately afterward I came back and spent another four weeks. And now I'm very happy."

Some Cannes viewers felt this early version of the film was a simplistic, moralistic homily against the exploitation of violence by Hollywood. Wenders insists his point of view on the subject is far from black and white.

"I think movie violence does influence behavior, maybe not directly. Regardless, I think we're living at a time when control of movie violence is out of the question. The only control is the control of the marketplace, because since violence is a consumer product, you have to speak of the market for it. On the one hand, that's a scary notion; on the other hand, it offers hope, because the market is always saturated, and once people become sick and tired of seeing the same thing, the market will regulate itself automatically.

"Some of the greatest movies are extremely violent, but by not showing it explicitly; films are powerful by not showing something. And we've seen too many movies where story and emotion are just a function of other things. People like to be moved in different ways. So I think there is hope for other kinds of movies, and I think this current wave of ultra-violent and ultra-explicit movies will necessarily run itself out."

-- Peter Keough