‘Hammett’: The “failure” that convinced Wim Wenders he’d never be a Hollywood director
It’s often the case that when a European movie director experiences success on their native continent, the alluring bright lights of Hollywood come calling. Over the years, the likes of Lars von Trier, Michael Haneke, Werner Herzog and Yorgos Lanthimos have all tried their hand in the American film world, and even Wim Wenders has given it a go.
However, while certain filmmakers are capable of emulating their European success in Hollywood—certainly von Trier, Lanthimos, and even Ruben Östlund—others find the transition somewhat more difficult, and this was something that Wenders personally admitted regarding his 1982 neo-noir mystery film Hammett.
Naturally, Wenders first handful of movies, including his debut Summer in the City, The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty and the ‘Road Movie trilogy’, were in the German language, but eventually, he was afforded the chance to try his hand in English, beginning with 1977’s The American Friend, although the Tom Ripley-based film itself is set in Germany.
That first taste of American cinema led to Wenders taking on Hammett, produced by Francis Ford Coppola, based on the novel of the same name by Joe Gores. The film sees Frederic Forrest play the detective story writer Dashiell Hammett, who becomes caught up in a mysterious case bearing a striking resemblance to one of his fictional creations.
Sadly, though, Wenders himself considers the film to be a “failure”, although perhaps there was the upshot that it showed him the kind of director he ought to be, as well as the kind he never could. Speaking with i, the German director noted, “I started to fancy myself as an American director and realised with the failure of Hammett that I was always going to stay a German romantic. I could make a film in America but I couldn’t make an American film.”
Still, even though Wenders realised that he would never be a Hollywood director per se, that didn’t dissuade him from remaining in America to continue making movies. Following Hammett, Wenders delivered one of his best-ever films, Paris, Texas, although he admitted that it was certainly a work with a German state of mind. “It was the film of a foreigner,” he said. “The reviews at the time were almost hostile: we don’t need a European to tell us how we live.”
Throughout the following decades, Wenders would return to America to make movies such as The End of Violence, The Million Dollar Hotel and Don’t Come Knocking, although judging by such films, it’s clear to see that Wenders was indeed destined to never be a proper Hollywood director. In fact, his best movies since Paris, Texas have either been made in his native Germany or in other parts of the world.
Discussing the emotions of making his 1987 masterpiece Wings of Desire, Wenders said: “This was a homecoming movie. It was in America that I came to terms with my being German. I realised I couldn’t run away from it. I discovered so much of the German past and, for the first time, accepted it.”
Wenders set out for America with the hopes of conquering it, but the truth was that Hollywood was never really made for an auteur director like the German icon, and he was better off making independent movies in the desert, stunning films in Berlin and touching moments of cinema in Japan.
