Wim Wenders has spent much of the past three decades building portraits of other artists — the Cuban musicians of Buena Vista Social Club (1999), the choreographer Pina Bausch in Pina (2011), the photographer Sebastião Salgado in The Salt of the Earth (2014), the German painter-sculptor Anselm Kiefer in Anslem (2023). The first three were Oscar-nominated. All were critically acclaimed.

But none has taken him as long as From Inside Out: The Architecture of Peter Zumthor, the German auteur’s 3D documentary on the Pritzker Prize-winning Swiss architect, has been 14 years in the making.

It started small. David Chipperfield, curating the 2012 Venice architecture Biennale, asked Wenders to make a short film on Zumthor. That became a two-day shoot in the architect’s modest office in Haldenstein, high in the Swiss mountains, and the 2012 short Notes on a Day in the Life of an Architect — along with the nagging sense that he had barely scratched the surface. “At the end, we shook hands on ‘doing something real together,’” Wenders says. “Little did we know that the journey would last 14 years…”

The result, premiering in Venice, and being sold worldwide by HanWay Films, is a two-hour immersion that wanders from some of Zumthor’s earliest works, including the St. Benedict’s chapel, completed in 1988, to a memorial for burned witches above the Arctic Circle, to the newly opened $724 million David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the architect’s largest building, commissioned nearly two decades ago. [Brad Pitt, a fan of Zumthor, who supported his LACMA bid, has joined From Inside Out as an executive producer.]

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the premiere, Wenders discussed his kinship with Zumthor, why he needed 3D to shoot architecture, what a craftsman’s hands can teach the age of AI, and how he answers the charge that Zumthor’s serene spaces are a luxury in a world of flattened cities.

“Buildings cannot repair the world,” he says. “But they can change our idea of what the world could be.”

How did you first come to know Peter Zumthor? How did the idea for this film come about? 

I was invited to make a short film on Peter Zumthor for the architectural Biennale in Venice in 2012, by none other than British architect David Chipperfield, who was the curator of the show that year. I knew some of Zumthor’s buildings, and I was intrigued by the idea. It became a 2-day shoot in his office in Haldenstein, way up in the Swiss mountains, and resulted in Notes on a Day in the Life of an Architect, but also in the realization that this short study just scratched the surface of Zumthor’s work, his philosophy and his approach. At the end, we shook hands on ‘doing something real together’, and that was clearly going to be a long-term observation. Little did we know that the journey would last 14 years…

What is it about his work that is distinctive and particularly compelling for you? 

Peter Zumthor had a relatively small office, and he did not want to change that. He wanted to be able to keep accepting only work that he was absolutely convinced of, of its purpose, of its necessity, of its usefulness and its site. He doesn’t want to be just a hired architect. He wants to be thoroughly involved and make the best possible building for that particular use and at that particular place. And for that, he knows he needs more time than is usually given to develop a building. But most of all: he wants the client to understand that once he proposes a design, he is not going to step away from the project.

Like a painter, he knows that his painting will only emerge in the act of painting it. A songwriter or a poet works the same way: the song and the poem are only finished after the last act of correction. And that is exactly the freedom that architects are usually not given in the building process. A construction company takes over. The architect cannot intervene anymore, at least not with important changes.

That understanding of the creative process is what I can deeply identify with. He is convinced that a work is not finished when it is planned, but that it continues to take shape in the making. I feel exactly the same way about filmmaking. For me, too, a film is not basically done with the script. I want to be able to change that script, as I go along. I even want to be able to contradict it. THAT is the act of creation: having the liberty to continue learning about how your story will turn out best. That is the very nature of storytelling: finding out the truth of your story as you’re telling it. Peter Zumthor is asking for exactly that freedom that I also fight for with every film: invent and improve the film – or the building – as you are making it.

Why did you want to film this in 3D? 

When I made my first film in 3D, Pina, on the art of choreographer Pina Bausch, 3D was the saving grace of that project. I would not have made it if the new medium hadn’t allowed me to work in the same realm as Pina and her dancers. And that was SPACE. A screen is a two-dimensional thing, any effort to represent space on it is make-believe. Cinema has been incredibly inventive in this make-believe and has invented many tools to convince the audience that the story they were watching was taking place inside space, even if the movies were always a medium restricted to the flat screen.

Only the invention of digital 3D, native 3D, has made the screen go away and become a window, open to infinity and also to things taking place in front of the window. From Inside Out is my tenth film in 3D, short ones and installations included. But it was never more necessary (after Pina) than now. A ‘room’ and a ‘house’ belong to our earliest human experiences and they mean ‘shelter’, ‘protection’ and ‘security’. These are not abstract ideas at first, they are spatial experiences, utterly existential. We experience space before we learn about its abstraction, the two-dimensional representation of it, in photos, in drawings, in paintings, on TV or in the cinema.

Architecture is the one art, together with dance and theatre, that is unthinkable without space. So if I wanted an audience to experience the world of an architect, I felt I needed space itself at my disposal, not just as a technology, but as a cinematic language.

Parts of the film have the feel of an art or museum installation. Do you envision the project living on in those spaces? 

No. I make it for movie theatres. But I take your question as a compliment. You certainly have different experiences in museums than in movies. I feel it is time to expand the limits of what we can experience in movie theatres.

You take different approaches in depicting Zumthor’s work — interviews with the family for the Luzi house, with voice-over commentary from other artists, as a stage for dance or musical performance — what was behind this and, in the case of collaborations with other artists — Aoi Yamada, Siri Hustvedt, Sophie Hunger, etc. — how did those come about? 

I didn’t want to make a ‘talking heads’ film. I didn’t want to make a didactic film, period. I wanted the audience to experience architecture without having to verbalize the issues all the time, like a TV documentary. Houses give us an immense freedom to explore them: we can walk around in them, sit down and look out of a window, work or sleep or dream in them. They get under our skin. We find out how we live in them, think in them, ARE in them. Some chapters in From Inside Out are strictly based on the audience sharing the experience of some of my protagonists in being in the buildings of Peter Zumthor.

Siri Hustvedt, for instance, had written about the women who were burned as witches in that part of Norway, far above the Arctic Circle. But she had never seen the place Zumthor built in memory of these women. Her experience of encountering that building becomes the film in that chapter. Who can travel so far north – further north than any city in the US or Canada – to visit this one-of-a-kind place and this absolutely unique building that is like nothing that was ever built before? Well, not many. But you can almost physically enter the building in the film…

What was behind your musical choices for each building – both the live performances and the accompanying score?

The score is made almost equally by two very different voices: one is Peter Zumthor’s son Peter Conradin Zumthor as percussionist together with his partner, pianist Vera Kappeler. The other is my long-trusted composer friend Laurent Petitgand with whom I made more than a dozen films in the past.
These two ‘voices’ serve two very different aspects of Zumthor’s world. The percussion as well as the piano, I felt, both have a great affinity to more structural aspects of space and time, while the more symphonic music has a great affinity to the emotional aspects of the work.

The two live performances come from an altogether different thinking. The amazing St. Benedict’s chapel that Zumthor built as a young architect reminded me very much of a musical instrument. Visiting it, I felt I was entering the body of a cello or a bigger string instrument. So in order to explore it, I invited a double bass player, Anna Trauffer, to join us and play in the chapel. And as she also sings and plays musical glasses, we could also hear a beautiful human voice inside this ‘instrument’ called ‘a chapel’ as well as her glass harp.

For Zumthor’s latest building, the extension of the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, now called the Wyss Building, I had the idea of inviting the great Sophie Hunger, one of my favorite contemporary singer-songwriters, to visit the new (and yet not quite finished) building and walk the path that Peter Zumthor invented for this building, from one outlook into the surrounding landscape to another. I admit, that was just a vague idea, at first, also the fact that she might invent a song for this ‘walk with a guitar’ that could somehow condense or tie together some of Peter Zumthor’s ‘philosophy’ or ‘approach’. Little did I know how masterful she would combine these two tasks and come up with her song From Inside to Outside, that in the end even reflects the film’s title. Both musical performances, I felt, were gifts to our film.

What connections do you see between the work of the architect and that of the filmmaker?

I could talk about that issue for an entire hour or more. But just let me say this: as a filmmaker, I construct a movie from pieces of time. Every shot is such a ‘brick of time’. Every scene is a ‘room’ or a ‘space’ made from such tiny elements of time. And the entire film, in the end, is a huge building or ‘space’ constructed from many such bricks of time. Editing a film is a building process. In the end, the film invites people to live in its space, at least for a couple of hours. I better stop here, before I get carried away…

Are you spiritual kin to Peter Zumthor, do you see yourself as struggling with similar questions and themes, and pursuing similar aims? 

There is one thing we definitely share, as a passion, or as an approach, or an aim. (And yes, we might “struggle” with lots of questions and problems while making a movie or conceiving a building. But I don’t make films to have anybody watch me ‘struggle’, let alone my actors. People want to see Odysseus struggle, not Matt Damon, nor Christopher Nolan. And I assume Peter doesn’t want his buildings to show any traces of him having ‘struggled’ with them before, either…)

Let’s say we know and love the processes that go with our professions, but we are both particularly fond of the fact that our work is concerned with PLACES. For Zumthor, every building is planted onto a particular site which has its history, its surroundings, its nature, its weather, its neighbors, in short: its geographic conditions. He wants to do justice to them. More so: he wants his new building to belong there, “as if it had always been there.” (to quote him.) He wants the building to live in peace with its neighbors and its nature. So he has to find out a lot about the place, before he could even consider designing something for it. He first has to read the place, understand it and grasp what the place needs as an addition, as a new neighbor, possibly a new center of attention. And he has to fully transcend the purpose of the building to make it go in unison with the place, not against it.

So, what is really demanded from an architect is A SENSE OF PLACE. It’s one of our original human senses, even if most of us don’t use it much anymore. We have delegated it to our navigation systems.
As a filmmaker, I equally depend on my sense of place. Most of my films, if not all, don’t start with ‘story’, but with a place, a place that I encounter and respond to emotionally. I then want to find a story that could happen here, more so: that could only play here, in that place. My films are all ‘taking place’ on these crossroads of a place and a story that belong together.

What does Peter Zumthor and the method of his art have to teach our modern age, the age of AI? 

His buildings are deeply human, the result of a long dialogue between the site (its surrounding nature or city landscape) and the purpose of the new building. Zumthor thinks it from the inside first, the new space he’s about to conceive, then considers it from outside, which might lead to corrections, then sees what this does to the perspective from inside, then returns to seeing it from the outside. That dialogue does take time and includes his collaborators, the client and endless sessions in his office. In that process, countless models are being built and rebuilt and discarded and started from scratch again. The buildings that are thus given time to grow and develop, find their affinity to the site in that long dialogue, find their materiality and also sometimes redefine their purpose.

It’s like a gardening process, I sometimes felt when I returned to Peter and the building I saw months before now had not only ‘grown’, but assumed more character, as if it had ascertained its identity. That’s why they are so totally unique. About some of them, like the Witches Memorial way up North in the Arctic or the David Geffen Galleries of the LACMA in California, one can safely say there is no other building on the planet like it.

All of Zumthor’s buildings can open our eyes to what architecture can be and what it can do to expand our understanding of spaces and places. I’m not sure how many years we are away from AI learning to design buildings. Let alone replace the touch of human hands involved in the building process. Zumthor’s big message in the film is: learn to see the beauty of things made by hand, by craftspeople! We must not lose that! (laughs) At this moment, I’m sure AI can only learn from our man. (Or other architects and artists. Asked if AI can write a good song, Nick Cave answered: “I don’t think so. AI can’t suffer.”)

There are a couple of moments in the film where Zumthor connects his work with his personal experience of wanting to create homes, a secure space to compensate for not feeling safe as a child. But you avoid going very deep into a psychological exploration of him or his biography. Why that choice? 

You’re right: it was a choice. I did not want to shoot a biopic on an architect. This film is not about how Peter Zumthor became who he is. It is not about his life, but how his ideas took shape and how they’re connecting to the feelings or to the curiosity the audience might have about architecture. We all live and work and die in houses, we grow up and get old in schools, offices, museums, churches or whatever buildings we visit. But doing so, we mostly take architecture for granted. From Inside Out wants to expand that horizon without being educational. (Or ‘edifying’…) Peter Zumthor is an ideal guide to start thinking from scratch about what houses do to us, how they influence and form us.

Zumthor’s discussion of creating inner security and safety for me immediately evokes for me the specter of its opposite, the unsafe spaces, the spaces of destruction, the homes flattened in Ukraine, Yemen, Lebanon and Gaza. How would you respond to the critique that Zumthor’s serene spaces of peace and contemplation are also an expression of extreme privilege, and a way of avoiding the ugliness and darkness in the world? 

The question of privilege is a legitimate one. Who has access to safety, to shelter, to places of peace and contemplation – and who doesn’t? When we look at the destruction of homes and living spaces caused by wars – in Ukraine, Yemen, Lebanon, Gaza and elsewhere – we are not only looking at the destruction of buildings. We are looking at the destruction of places: places where people lived, where families and communities came together, places of memory, of belonging and of everyday life. The loss of safety, home and community is devastating for civilians wherever it happens. And perhaps that is precisely why the question of what a human space can be is not less relevant in such a world, but even more urgent! What interests me in Zumthor’s architecture is not simply beauty or contemplation. His buildings ask what spaces can do for human beings – how they can offer shelter and protection, but also create a sense of belonging, encounter and community.

Of course, as a European filmmaker I am speaking from a privileged position. And I would never pretend that art or architecture can undo the destruction of people’s homes or repair the suffering caused by war. But they can be a response to it – a gesture that opposes destruction and cynicism with another idea of how we might live together.

Zumthor’s buildings, in my book, speak the language of believing in a better version of humanity. The best critique of existing “ugliness and darkness” can also be to present “beauty and light” as alternatives. That is my firm conviction as a filmmaker. Take Zumthor’s Kolumba Museum in Cologne. If you walk in with the blues, disenchanted, hopeless or even in despair, you might find yourself walking out restored. Yes, I believe a building can do that.

Architecture can remind us of the version of humanity we are aspiring to. The new David Geffen Galleries at LACMA offer another example: a museum without the usual hierarchies, conceived in the congenial collaboration between its director, Michael Govan, and its architect, Peter Zumthor. Now, on one floor, you can cross the planet and its art without one culture being privileged over another. ONE PLACE for all – like our world should be. Buildings cannot repair the world. But they can change our idea of what the world could be.

What do you hope an audience takes away from this film? 

I hope… that they gain hope. A lot of things on this planet can or should get better. Especially our respect for nature, for the other, and for our sense of kindness and decency. In a shitty world, a visit to a good place can do wonders. The film – I hope – can instigate an appreciation for architecture that lets us see the difference between ‘more of the same’ and ‘something that makes a difference’. All of us can make a difference. All of us can care. Here, an architect tries to do that. That is encouraging.