Cinematical

In 1982, Wim Wenders made a documentary called Chambre 666, in which he asked a handful of top world film directors to comment upon the future of cinema. Last week, Mr. Wenders was in San Francisco to talk about his latest film, Don't Come Knocking (now playing), and I asked him the same thing. Here's what he had to say:

"I think there's a lot of hope. Consider where we were in the 90s, it looked like the future of movies was blockbusters and nothing but. And then today, there are documentaries again in a big way. A lot of people, that's the favorite thing for them to see. And that for me is very promising. The comeback of documentaries is strictly linked to the arrival of digital technology. We only see the tip of the iceberg. The whole the notion of distribution will be changed in the next decade."

Have any recent movies or filmmakers captured Wenders' attention? "I saw one of the greatest films of my life not so long ago, and I've now seen it four times. For me it's one of those movies above everything in the Oscars, and there were some great movies, but it was in a class by itself, way above all of it, and that was The New World, Terrence Malick's movie. That was one monster movie, and it was so good that nobody could even grasp it. It got nominated just for Best Cinematography and it should have won that by a landslide. I don't know why it completely disappeared. In ten years it will be a classic and everybody will say, 'That was the movie that mattered in 2005. ...'"