Wim of desire
He's on his third cup of coffee for the morning, but Wim Wenders speaks more like he's been mainlining mogadon. In town to promote his latest project, The Million Dollar Hotel, the German filmmaker is laid back to the point of being comatose.
Perhaps it's a show for the throng of hacks, corralled in the faux-Roccoco lobby of the Great Eagle Hotel by a posse of PR types - each awaiting their allotted audience with the art-house avatar. Or for real, a hangover from celebrating the enthusiastic reception of his new work, which opened the Hong Kong Film Festival the evening before. Perhaps he is still in a kind of slack-jawed shock at a recent merger of his struggling independent film production company, Road Movies, with massive digital post-production house Das Werk, which has enriched him to the tune of some US$30 million (HK$233 million).
Or maybe it's just that the imposing auteur, with his Buddy Holly glasses and nose like a ski-jump, prefers to conserve his energy for his films, like; Wings Of Desire, Paris, Texas, and the recent Oscar-nominated documentary Buena Vista Social Club about Cuba's long-forgotten, near-extinct but supremely talented musicians, Buena Vista Social Club.
The Million Dollar Hotel is Wenders 20th film in a 30-year career - a romantic thriller with an all-star cast (Mel Gibson, Jeremy Davies, Milla Jovovich, Jimmy Smits, Julian Sands and, fleetingly, Tim Roth), set amidst the real-life sanctuary for oddballs, eccentrics and society's cast-offs in downtown Los Angeles from which the title derives.
U2 frontman Bono came up with the idea for the film during a video shoot near the hotel in the early 1990s, and worked on the script with another long-time Wenders collaborator, Nicholas Klein.
Bono also masterminded the soundtrack - released, unusually, before the film - which plumbs depths of silliness (a Spanish-language version of the Sex Pistols' Anarchy In The UK ) before soaring to transcendent heights (the achingly beautiful closing track, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the title of Salman Rushdie's 1999 novel, a poem from which Bono set to music).