He wanted to be a priest.
Helping people seemed like something positive to me. People need a lot of spiritual help.
What made you fall in love with cinema?
After learning that I was not going to be a priest, or a doctor like my father, or an architect, I wanted to be a painter.
He studied painting in Paris.
He was poor, he needed to be in a warm place and the film library offered a film for one franc. I ended up seeing more than a thousand movies in a year and a half and that convinced me that cinema was better than painting.
What did you want to tell?
Everything is under the influence of my childhood. I grew up in a city, Dusseldorf, totally destroyed. I knew there was another world. Traveling was the engine of my life. I'm mostly a traveler, and you can make great movies on the go. For my first ten years it was all road movies.
Are you a seeker?
Always. My films are about the possibility of changing one's life, my intention is for people to realize that they can change things.
Yesterday I spent the day reading about you.
I'm sorry. I'm probably not that person you've read about.
Tell me who you are.
My life and my work are the same, that's why some people think that I am a workaholic, but what I am is a life addict.
He landed in Hollywood invited by Coppola, what happened between you?
A misunderstanding. For my part, he believed that he could make an American film and, for Francis, he believed that he could become a great producer. We were still good friends but we had a big conflict.
What did he learn?
That I would never work as a contract director and started producing my own movies. And I prefer to make small films than big productions.
He filmed the death throes of Nicholas Ray.
Nicholas asked me. The team, six people, always wanted to stop, but Nicholas didn't, and the doctors told us: "If you don't continue, he will die tomorrow." Nicholas had fallen out of favor in Hollywood over alcohol scandals and wanted to rectify his image.
Lightning over water, very hard.
Every day we had nightmares. Filming someone dying is a great burden on your soul that I still carry.
You almost died too.
Yes, a sad chapter of my life. I am the cookie monster and at a party I found a bowl with 20 cookies. I ate them all without knowing that they were hashish. The host called the ambulance immediately, I had a pulse of 240 and had a heart attack. He was 22 years old.
And he went through the tunnel and saw the light?
Yes, I had a near death experience. I saw a huge light and I walked towards it without fear. I just thought I would have liked to tell my parents not to be sorry and woke up disappointed in the hospital.
Did that experience change you?
I entered a phase of enormous anxiety. I was filled with fear and began a seven year Freudian psychoanalysis that made me a different person. It's the best thing I've ever done in my life. I didn't want to medicate, I just wanted to find myself.
What did you discover?
That my anxiety came from a long time ago, it was very deep. I reconciled with myself and with my parents… I was a radical left-wing student and my father was a conservative, we had a great conflict. I became a much wiser person.
But what did he understand?
I accepted my mortality and my spirituality: I could defend my left-wing principles and believe in God. I became a Protestant.
So his conflict was between reason and feeling.
True, and I saw that it was possible to unite them. I work a lot from instinct. I am not an intellectual, but I can combine my ideas and my emotions much better now than before.
What has driven you in life?
I have realized that nothing you do without love and care will be good and worthwhile. Only what is done with a loving heart can touch other people. I don't think intellectual work transforms anyone, it can make you think but not feel.
We have lived through a very turbulent time.
I thought that the pandemic could lead us to something good, but the opposite has happened. The feeling of the common good has dissipated, it is no longer the driving force of any society, it is a lost cause.
And what is your consolation?
Music, I can't live without it, and trees, my other great love. They can save us if we let them. And I am convinced that the solution to get out of the hole is to take power away from men, whose morale is in decline, and pass it on to women, with a much greater conscience.
