Who is popular today?

The veteran auteur on how film-making has shaped him, the brutal lesson he learned from teacher Werner Herzog, and why his Oscar-nominated Perfect Days will make you yearn for a simpler lifeIn early 2022, “totally out of the blue”, Wim Wenders received an invitation to visit Tokyo and look at some public toilets. It came from from the Tokyo Toilet art project, which had commissioned several high-profile architects and designers to create 17 aesthetically beautiful public toilets in various locations in the Shibuya district of the city. “They basically contacted me and said: ‘We know you like Japan and we know you like architecture,’” he recalls, smiling. “‘So we would like you to come and see our beautiful toilets and, if you like them, maybe you could make a series of short documentary films about them.’”The invitation arrived at an opportune time for Wenders, who, as he puts it, was “feeling very homesick for Tokyo”, a city he had visited often since since making a film about the fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto in 1989. “It seemed,” he tells me, “like a dream come true.” Continue reading...