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Wim Wenders' 14-Year Journey with Peter Zumthor Premieres at Venice Film Festival
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In Short: Wim Wenders has been building portraits of artists for much of his career, from musicians to painters, and now he turns his lens to Zumthor.
In 2012, British architect David Chipperfield asked Wenders to make a short film on Zumthor for the Venice architecture Biennale, leading to a 14-year collaboration.
The documentary, 'From Inside Out,' premieres at the Venice Film Festival and explores Zumthor's work from his earliest projects to his latest, including the David Geffen Galleries at LACMA.
Wenders discusses his kinship with Zumthor, the importance of 3D in capturing the architect's work, and how Zumthor's serene spaces can change our idea of the world.
The film reveals Zumthor's buildings in surprising ways, with Wenders' camera moving in tandem with the architect's abstract notions of design.
Zumthor's words become inseparable from each room the camera explores, and each building that feels at one with its surroundings, making the documentary a unique blend of architecture and film.
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- Peter Zumthor is asking for exactly that freedom that I also fight for with every film: invent and improve the film – or the building – as you are making it.
- Cinema has been incredibly inventive in this make-believe and has invented many tools to convince the audience that the story they were watching was taking place inside space, even if the movies were always a medium restricted to the flat screen.
- Wim Wenders has spent much of the past three decades building portraits of other artists — the Cuban musicians of Buena Vista Social Club (1999), the choreographer Pina Bausch in Pina (2011), the photographer Sebastião Salgado in The Salt of the Earth (2014), the German painter-sculptor Anselm Kiefer in Anslem (2023).
- “At the end, we shook hands on ‘doing something real together,'” Wenders says.
- “Little did we know that the journey would last 14 years…” The result, premiering in Venice, and being sold worldwide by HanWay Films, is a two-hour immersion that wanders from some of Zumthor’s earliest works, including the St.
- Benedict’s chapel, completed in 1988, to a memorial for burned witches above the Arctic Circle, to the newly opened $724 million David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the architect’s largest building, commissioned nearly two decades ago.
- [Brad Pitt, a fan of Zumthor, who supported his LACMA bid, has joined From Inside Out as an executive producer.
- ] Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the premiere, Wenders discussed his kinship with Zumthor, why he needed 3D to shoot architecture, what a craftsman’s hands can teach the age of AI, and how he answers the charge that Zumthor’s serene spaces are a luxury in a world of flattened cities.