Wim Wenders on His Oscar Nominated Film for Best International Feature Perfect Days, a Movie About Living in the Present

As a young person first getting into cinema, I was a religious viewer of Siskel & Ebert’s weekly syndicated show, At The Movies. Through them, I discovered art house cinema–films that never came to my small town. One of those films was Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas. Who was this man, I thought? This director who created this vast emotional world with so little dialogue and exposition? What else has he done? I soon learned that he was of German descent, and one of the great filmmakers of the German “new wave” (along with Fassbinder and Herzog, among others). My in-town video store had none of his films, but there was this unique little video store just over the Michigan/Indiana border called Morris Classic Video. They specialized in art house and foreign films.

Suddenly, all of Wenders’ catalog was available to me: Alice in the Cities, The Wrong Move, Kings of the Road, The American Friend, and, of course, Wings of Desire. I sped through these films over a weekend. I felt transported by them. Wenders had opened my mind not only to foreign films, but to a new cinematic language. One that leaves open spaces for the viewer to enter and reach their own conclusions about a character’s motivations, and to take in the importance of silence, and the significance of the visual as opposed to the expository. 

When offered the chance to speak with Wenders about his wonderful film Perfect Days (an Oscar nominee for Best Best International Feature Film, I leapt at the opportunity. Perfect Days is, well, a perfect fit for Wenders’ oeuvre. It’s a deceptively simple story about a man who cleans toilets for a living. Not just any toilets, but toilets created by the Tokyo Toilet company, an actual corporation in the city that post-pandemic designed their wash rooms as art installations as well as functional places to relieve one’s self.

Shooting on an incredibly tight schedule with the great Japanese actor Koji Yakusho, Wenders has delivered a beautifully observed film about a man who has chosen simplicity, professionalism, and consistency for his life, doing a job that others look down upon. Perfect Days is a portrait of the unseen and perhaps disregarded members of our society who make our day-to-day lives more efficient and comfortable. It is an uncommon film delivered by an uncommon director with the perfect leading actor.

To discuss this beautiful film with Wenders is one of the highlights of my life.

Awards Daily: The backstory on Perfect Days, as I understand it, is you were invited by Tokyo Toilet to review their post-pandemic vision for public toilets. They had hoped that you would make a short film and instead you expanded this to a two hour long film about this particular character. 

Wim Wenders: It is basically correct. It was a very open invitation. I didn’t have to commit to anything. They asked me if I would do a series of short films on several of the architects and their creations. And that was the idea, as the Tokyo Toilet was sort of both an art project and a social project. I think they thought of me because they knew that I liked Tokyo and architecture–this is a good bundle. So, I came to be inspired and see what I could do with the architects. Some of these architects I know really well and they’re good friends—Tadao Ando is a very old friend of mine. They are like nothing I’d ever seen. They are more beautiful than other toilets. Even in Tokyo, not all toilets are that great, except this project really promotes the idea that toilets could be something else in our society. But I felt there is something bigger going on here and, behind the beauty of these toilets, I thought there was a bigger story to be told. In the end, I didn’t really know how to do these short films. I was a little at a loss. What could I do with it and who was going to see it? I realized I would be better for something else. When I was there in May ‘22, I witnessed the return of the Tokyo people after the longest pandemic in history.

That was when I came back, and what I saw was such a display of a sense of the common good and of civic sense and of respect and of carefulness with public places. I had lived through the opposite in Europe. After the pandemic, people behaved like there was no tomorrow. It was reckless the way they treated parks, at least in my own country, in Germany, in Berlin. I was mesmerized, and I thought of everything I liked so much about Japan and realized what would be so much more fun than doing four short films on architects and their creations, would be to make a full-length dramatization about a Tokyo Toilet worker. I told them my inspiration and thought I’d just talked myself out of a nice job. (Laughs). Instead, they said, do you think that can be done? We had planned for four days for four short documentaries. Do you think with these 16 days you can make a feature film? I said yes, you give me these 16 days and all we need is a good script. We can do that. And a great actor, and that’s up to you if you can get Koji Yakusho or not. The next day they said he will do it, he is in. So there I was. I could actually write the script with Koji in mind and that was decisive. 

Awards Daily: Speaking of Koji, the central performance is always important to any film. In this film, it is almost completely reliant on what he delivers. If his performance doesn’t work, the film can’t hold together. Was the working experience with him what you would have expected? 

Wim Wenders: It exceeded my highest hopes, especially his preparation that I was not aware of. He went with the guys who clean the toilets, with the crew, and for days studied how they do it and got into all the little details. In that job, it’s the details that count. He didn’t need any coaching, didn’t need to know anything, he knew it all. I said I need to have one of the professional cleaners around so I could ask him questions. I was the only one who was asking questions. Koji didn’t have any questions, and Koji could answer all the questions I had on his own, because he already knew. So that was off my shoulders. Of course, part of the character was cleaning toilets, but the other part was how he’s leading his life and what he likes and how he looks at the world. In any movie, if you have a leading actor, the audience slowly sees the world through the eyes of that character, even if it’s a bad guy. The very fact that you have this close up, and then you cut to what he sees, creates an identification with the audience. They see the world with his mindset. And the mindset of Hirayama (Koji’s character) is such a generous and kind way to look at the world.

What I liked so much about Koji in all the films that I’ve seen, starting with Shall We Dance, was his eyes. He has the most powerful eyes and the most powerful way of looking because he puts so much into his eyes. So it was totally necessary that we follow how these eyes see and how the world appears to them. And he did this in more beautiful ways than I could have dreamt of. Sometimes I just told him something and then what he did was more than I could have imagined. Even the last scene of the film in the script is just a two liner. He goes to work again and puts in a cassette, and this time it’s Nina Simone “Feeling Good”. From the beginning, the lyrics to “Feeling Good” were the frontispiece of our script. They were the first page. With these lyrics, I tried to say as much about Hirayama as I could, about his sense of living in the moment. So, these lyrics were very important to me, and Koji knew that. I asked him if he understood the song–each and every line, and he said yes. Then I said (for the scene) remember the meeting with the guy from the previous night, the guy who’s bound to die, and then remember meeting your sister the night before. With all that in mind, you start the new day and maybe question whether you did the right thing. Maybe you think of those two last encounters.

Then we went into a real car, in his car, and it’s not a car-shot like in Los Angeles where you put the car on a trailer. He was driving in real traffic and he had four people in his car: me, a sound engineer, and my DOP who was sitting on the seat next to him. So he had precious people in his car and the responsibility of driving in Tokyo traffic. He put in the cassette and then sort of played out the words of Nina Simone. We didn’t rehearse this. We wanted to shoot this immediately, because I thought I might regret it if I didn’t shoot the rehearsal. I looked at my little monitor, sitting cramped in the back of the car, and I couldn’t believe what he was doing with my few indications, and how much every word of Nina Simone was on his face and his entire past was an open book. I couldn’t believe it. I looked at my DOP and saw that Franz was still holding the camera, but wasn’t looking at the viewfinder. He was weeping. He was weeping, tears streaming down his face. And I realized what my actor was doing was to blow our minds with that scene. I didn’t even know it was possible to drive a car and laugh and cry and have your whole life pass in front of you at the same time. This is how majestic of an actor he is. 

Awards Daily: This is a culmination of the feelings that he has gone through in the most recent days of his life. He bounces back and forth between joy and sorrow. We learn just enough about his family situation and his past to have some sense that it’s had an impact upon him that has led him to this life of solitude and to this moment where, when his family returns to him, it throws off his axis a little bit. It was a remarkable thing to see that he was able to go in between those two spaces and phase in and out of these complex emotions, just by his facial expressions. 

Wim Wenders: When his sister comes, they have some dialogue and they talk mainly about her daughter, his niece who pays him a surprise visit, and then when they’re alone, she comes a little closer and in a low voice, she says “Is it true? Are you really cleaning toilets?” That next moment was another one of these moments where Koji surpassed all my highest dreams, because I told him you cannot explain this with words. Somehow, with your face, you have to explain to her that, yes, you do clean toilets, and yes, I like it, and I don’t want to live any other life. How do you do this without words? And he said I’ll figure it out. His reaction to that question, are you really cleaning toilets, for me, is also the entire film.

That is also the entire character. The absence of cynicism he has in himself, and the sincerity and honesty to each and every person and the truthfulness of this character is just astounding. I think that’s what people see in the film. The film is doing so well in Europe and the numbers are so high, because so many people come a second and third time. I never had that happen to me, that people just want to see the movie over and over. It is that honesty of the man and that option that he gives them to consider a different way to live your life. That is what people just need to slowly grasp. If you see the film a second time, you see other details. Normally, you come and you understand towards the end that, okay, he’s living a sort of monk-like life. You’re slowly getting it. But if you see it again, you realize from the first shot who he is, you know it already. So I owe very much to Koji. When I first said we need a script and then we need Koji Yakusho, I knew what I was talking about. Any other actor could have sunk the movie.

Awards Daily: The film relies so little on dialogue. When I watched it the second time, I noticed that I was 11 minutes into the film before anyone speaks. You made a choice to really show and not tell in this film. What was your desire there, removing so much exposition, not explaining his backstory in full, just thinking that he could present it?

Wim Wenders: He does present it at the end and over the entire film, but it’s also that I realized there is such a longing in us. We all had the same feeling when we went through the pandemic, that maybe there was a different way to approach life afterwards. And maybe our societies were able to do something different, but it didn’t happen. We lived as recklessly or worse than before, and it all went downhill. But I still think there is this deep longing. I did meet amazing people. I met a number of young people in New York and London mainly, but also in my own country, right after the pandemic. They are almost a movement. They were into reduction. They were into minimalism. If you couldn’t put everything you owned into one suitcase, you were not part of the club.

I spoke to some of them and had a long dialogue with them, because I was looking for my next movie after the pandemic, and they seemed to be onto something. These young people were all very clear in their eyes, and they were all quite content. They didn’t have much, but they had all they needed. That was, for me, quite a revelation. I think I put that into Hirayama when we wrote the script. I wanted to show an alternative. I had seen it in some young people who had drawn consequences, and Hirayama also drew consequences. He made a choice for this life. He did have another life, that’s for sure. 

Awards Daily: I’ve always found that it’s a common theme in your films that music crosses boundaries. The one indulgence that Hirayama has is his cassettes. And his choice of music—The Animals, Lou Reed, Otis Redding, Patti Smith, Nina Simone—speaks to a certain era of his life that he is very connected to. Did that come also from your own taste? There’s something about the time period of the music that he listens to that seems very integral to his character. 

Wim Wenders: Well, Hirayama did have another life and in this other life, he might have had a great stereo system. What do we know? But when he decided to reduce and live with less and become a gardener–in my own biography for him, he first was a gardener–and then because he was working in these parks when these toilets appeared, he became the caretaker of these toilets. Getting together the essentials for his life and throwing everything else away, he kept the old camera. Maybe he even forgot he had it, but then he remembered it. He remembered that taking pictures with it was so much more interesting than taking pictures with fancy smartphones. And maybe he remembered that the only time in his life that music really mattered for him and expressed who he was and expressed for him what life was all about, was in his youth in the ‘70s.

He remembered he still had that old Boombox up in the attic, so he got it and this is one of the few items that survived and it’s not exactly hi-fi, but it has something better. It has soul. I brought up the cassettes in the first place, simply because I knew he was going to drive this crummy old van so, in there, he could only play cassettes. It was Takuma, my co-author, who said, let me give you a piece of research here. Cassettes are having a huge comeback in Tokyo. And now we have, in all these youth areas, shops selling Walkmans and cassette recorders and blank tapes so people can do compilation tapes. This is the hottest shit now: not to give each other a playlist, which any algorithm can do, but to produce compilation tapes, and for that you need a cassette recorder. These tapes tell a story. They are personal. There’s a beginning and an end. And it’s such a different approach to music. There’s a whole generation who is discovering the value of what we lost through that analog age and we thought for a long time was lost for good and nobody would want it back. Now there’s a whole generation who likes the feeling of it and who want it back and realize you can do so much more with a compilation tape than with a playlist. So we had these young people who didn’t even know about cassettes and now started to like the sound of it and were moved by it in a different way. So somehow Hirayama is also a cool cat now.