Wim Wenders

At the time Wim Wenders was shooting The State of Things his own American film sat suspended. In 1981, with a ten-month gap opening up in Hammett's production, he went to Europe and found a coastal hotel in Portugal that a storm had damaged two years before, then flew to New York and wrote a three-page outline. He describes the film as a metaphor for that Portuguese visit and for his experience of the Los Angeles entertainment business. He had heard of the screenwriter Joshua Wallace through the director Roger Corman, telephoned him from his house in Paris to hire him, and asked him for a screenplay about artistic ruin and competition; Wallace later sued him for breach of contract. Hammett itself was painful: production stopped because Wenders and Francis Ford Coppola disliked the ending, Coppola found the film unreleasable, and seventy-five per cent of it was reshot in the end. The Million Dollar Hotel took the Jury Prize Silver Bear at the 2000 Berlinale, and the same festival marked his career with an honorary Golden Bear in 2015.