The latest film of leading West German director Wim Wenders, Lightning Over Water deals with the death of Nicholas Ray, and is both a tribute to a great filmmaker and a film about filmmaking. First shown at the Cannes Film Festival last May, the film, which is in English, has since been radically re-edited.
When Ray and Wenders decided to make a film together, Ray had already undergone surgery for cancer. He had made his last feature film in 1962 after a brilliant career that began in 1947 with They Live By Night. It was only after shooting began that the two directors fixed on the idea of taking their real-life situation as the film's fiction: Wenders and Ray deciding to make a film with and about each other. Then, as Ray's strength failed, it became, in his words, “a film about a man who wants to bring himself all together before he dies, a regaining of self-esteem.” Through his work with Wenders and the film crew, Ray transformed his dying into an act of collaboration. The result is an experimental film that contains visual resonances of both Ray's and Wenders' other work.
Wim Wenders is currently completing Hammett for Zoetrope Studios.
(Our credits, based on the Cannes showing, are possibly inexact, due to changes made in the re-editing.)