Wim Wenders on Why He Turned to 3D for His Documentary ‘Anselm’: “It’s a Great Medium”

German filmmaker Wim Wenders still remembers the epiphany he had when viewing the experimental concert film U2 3D at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. It was one of the earliest live-action digital 3D productions — Avatar was still two years away from its defining 2009 release — but at that screening he saw 3D’s potential to convey space and depth, so he used it for his next project, a documentary about dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch. “3D is about perception of space, and that’s what I needed most in order to be in Pina’s kingdom,” says the director. With stunning re-creations of her choreography, Pina was released in 2011 and became the first digital 3D feature documentary to earn an Oscar nomination.

More than a decade later, stereoscopic 3D has had its ups and downs in terms of public perception, but Wenders continues to believe that this format delivers an important dimension to his art form. “You are more involved as a spectator,” says the director of films such as Buena Vista Social Club and Paris, Texas. “You’re more involved emotionally.

“It’s a great medium for documentaries,” adds Wenders, whose latest doc is the 3D production Anselm, which allows audiences to experience the works of German painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer. “Mostly what you do in a documentary is try to take your audience to a certain place or have them follow a character and you enter somebody else’s world. There’s nothing better for that than 3D.”

He certainly found that to be true when it came to exposing audiences to his friend Kiefer’s path from his native Germany to his current home in France and, in doing so, giving the audience a way to experience his textured works. “Anselm has a body of work that has no comparison to anything else,” says Wenders, remembering the first time he saw Kiefer’s studio. “On my own, walking around it, there was so much there and it was so overwhelming. [With 3D], I could take people into his universe and turn his art into an experience.”

The medium also allowed Wenders to display the textures and layers of Kiefer’s work. “Some of his paintings have a crust of 10 inches, and wood or all sorts of things protruding,” he explains. 

Production technology has evolved over the past decade, and this time around, Wenders and DP Franz Lustig filmed the movie in native 3D and at 6K resolution using a rig with Sony’s Venice cameras and its lightweight Rialto extension system, which effectively detaches the sensor from the camera body, enabling filmmakers to be more nimble. (Those cameras also were used on Avatar: The Way of Water.)

Remembering the first time he showed the finished doc to Kiefer, Wenders admits he was a little nervous. “Surprising him was the only thing he demanded [of] me. He never saw a script, never came to visit me in the editing room,” the director recalls. “He did say, ‘You surprised me.’ ” 

This story first appeared in a January standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.