Melinda on set with Wim Wenders and Kit Carson

"Most movies about men and women describe relationships as a total disaster, or they describe them, in the wrong way, as a beautiful and doable, as if love can overcome anything. So I felt that this film, Paris, Texas, should make an effort to show, not a solution, not a way out, nor a Utopia, but just show some sort of transcendence like a man jumping over his own shadow or some sort of reverse order of thigs, where everything would be doable again.

"So that's what we're trying to do, and it took us a long time to get to the point where I was ready, or where the movie or the people were ready, to transcend this theme that the movie is about. We are all working on it and it very much about what men expect from women, and also very much about America, things in America that I'm preoccupied with, and maybe both are the same after all. So - so what did I start off with?" asked Wim Wenders, the young German director who is now shooting his eleventh feature film, Paris, Texas, in and around Houston and Los Angeles.

The screenplay (conceived by Wenders and Sam Shepard) was still undergoing changes when I arrived on the set; and Wenders was allowing the natural character development of Travis (Harry Dean Stanton), Jane (Nastassja Kinski), and their child (Hunter Carson) to determine his rewrite. Sam Shepard was on the telephone from Iowa (where he is starring in a film, Country), monitoring the changes that Kit Carson, author of the film Breathless, was dictating on location.

Mr. Carson is the actual father of the child actor, Hunter Carson, and he said that the story of Paris, Texas, mirrored his own in many ways: that of a father who leaves his child and wife and returns in order to bring about some new relationship or family bond. How the father creates this new bond, and the way he transcends his own confusion and disintegration, is the basis of this ever-changing screenplay. But Wenders stressed that he was not just interested in the lonesome self-discovery of Travis. For the first time in his career, he was attempting to explore a women's development.

Read the full interview with Wim Wenders and Kit Carson from the set of Paris, Texas here.

MelindaCamberPorter.com