Land of Plenty

After years of living abroad with her American missionary father, Lana (Michelle Williams) returns to the United States to begin her studies. But instead of focusing on her education, Lana sets out to find her only other living relative - her uncle Paul, her deceased mother’s brother. A Vietnam veteran, Paul is a reclusive vagabond with deep emotional war wounds. A tragic event witnessed by the two unites them in a common goal to rectify a wrong, and takes them on a journey of healing, discovery, and kinship.urney of healing, discovery, and kinship. A film by Wim Wenders

Cast:
Michelle Williams as Lana
John Diehl as Paull
Shaun Toub as Hassan
Wendell Pierce as Henry
Richard Edson as Jimmy
Burt Young as Sherman

Credits:
Directed": by Wim Wenders
Producers: In-Ah Lee , Samson Mücke, Gary Winick,Jake Abraham
Executive Producers: Peter Schwartzkopff, Jonathan Sehring, Caroline Kaplan and John Sloss
Story By: Wim Wenders and Scott Derrickson
Written By: Michael Meredith and Wim Wenders

Synopsis:
Using the streets of Downtown Los Angeles as a backdrop, Wim Wenders's
LAND OF PLENTY is a darkly humorous and poignant essay on contemporary
America, shown from two very different perspectives: Through the eyes of a
patriotic and troubled Vietnam veteran on one hand, and from the point of view
of an idealistic young woman on the other.

A retired Green Beret, Paul is obsessed with protecting the Land of the Free and
with doing his part in the ongoing “War Against Terror”. He was shot down in
combat near Long Thanh at the age of eighteen, and is now experiencing the
increasing psychological effects of dioxin poisoning, the result of being exposed
to Agent Pink exfoliate more than thirty years ago. The events of 9/11
retriggered his trauma of war and made the ghosts of his past return. But fear is
the last thing Paul could admit to himself.

Lana has lived in Africa and Europe for the last ten years and is returning to her
home country after a long absence. She intends to go to college, but quickly
finds herself involved with a Downtown Mission that is serving the huge
homeless community of America’s “Hunger Capital”. She’s an idealist, still
trying to define her place in the world, but finds her Christian faith in striking
opposition to positions taken by the present administration.

Paul has no friends and has cut all ties with his family. His reclusive existence as a self-declared homeland security officer collapses when Lana enters into it. She is his long forgotten niece, and her uncle is her only connection she has to hermother’s family. Paul grudgingly accepts her presence. When they witness the apparently random shooting of a homeless Middle Eastern man, they decide to investigate the incident together, even if for very different reasons. On this quest for the truth, their different views of the world collide radically.

Interview wtih Win Wenders:

Q: How did you develop Land of Plenty?

Wim Wenders: The movie came about in a matter of days. My film with Sam Shepard,DON’T COME KNOCKING, had to be postponed, for financing reasons, andall of a sudden I had a whole summer at hand, several months in which I coulddo whatever I wanted. Like making another movie. I have done some of my bestwork in such a situation: Just go ahead and do it! Tell what’s most important toyou at that moment. I didn’t hesitate (once I had overcome the first
disappointment of not being able to do DON’T COME KNOCKING then) and
wrote down an outline of a story in 2 weeks. It dealt with everything that
concerned me about America at the time. Poverty, paranoia, patriotism. My
friend Scott Derrickson helped me with that treatment. It contained the two maincharacters, Paul and Lana, and the basic outline of their story. Then I needed tofind somebody who could actually write it, fast and furious. I found that personin Michael Meredith, whose first film THREE DAYS OF RAIN had impressedme a lot. He had written it himself, based on a handful of Chekov short stories,and I thought he had written great dialogue for it. Well, it took Michael 4 weeksto write the first draft. In the meantime, Peter Schwartzkopff and I financed the film with our production company Reverse Angle, in coproduction with InDiGent in New York and IFC Films, I cast it and found the locations, and
when the script was ready, we were basically ready to shoot. Of course, such
freedom comes only with a small budget. You can’t expect to make a multimilliondollar movie that way.

Q:The shooting schedule was incredibly short, how did you finish filming in this
timeframe?

WW: Our entire shooting schedule consisted of 16 days. Plus the road trip in the
van across America, which we did with a mini-team of 5 people, me included.
That took another week. But 16 days to make an entire movie is nothing. A shortthree weeks! That’s like a warm-up period for other movies. It meant we alwayshad to finish scenes in one day, and we could never come back to a scene andembellish it or add anything. It meant 2 or 3 takes as an average, short rehearsalperiods and quick decisions. We shot an average of 42 set-ups a day, more thanon most TV shows. On film, this would have been impossible. The digitaltechnology and the DV cameras we were using really made this movie possible. Franz did 90% of the shots hand-held. Still, he was lighting most of the time like for a regular film shoot. Even for daylight exteriors we used lights andreflectors. The key to all that was a tireless crew. We worked an average of 14 to16 hours a day. But never any complaints. On the contrary, I have rarely done anentire film with such a good-spirited and inspired crew. Our “InDigEnt”
production model was probably a reason for that. Everybody on the set got paid
the same--$100 a day--and everybody has a piece of the gross profit of the film.
40% of the film’s revenue go to cast and crew, right off the start, from the first
income. So everybody was a co-producer, so to speak.

Q:Why did you pick a young director of photography, Franz Lustig, who had onlyshot commercials and videos before? Can you tell us about the lighting and theparticular choice of colors you made with the DP?

WW: I had worked with Franz on a couple of music videos and commercials, so
I knew he was highly gifted, as a lighting cameraman as well as an operator. We
shot LAND OF PLENTY entirely hand-held, which I wouldn’t have dared with
anybody else. Franz just has a miraculous touch. Due to our budget restrictions,
the film was shot on DV, but on a new generation of cameras that shoot full
frames. We used a Panasonic … and shot in the 25p mode. The gain of quality
that progressive scan brought, allowed us to blow up the digital master to
Cinemascope, and the result was astonishing. When we saw the first tests,
nobody believed they came from these tiny DV cameras. Of course the quality
of the image still depends a lot on the lighting. We rarely shot with available
light only, and even in daylight situations Franz used a lot of reflectors. Some of
our interior sets or night shots were lit as elaborately as you would do for a
regular 35mm feature. Still, the DV cameras and the hand-held style allowed us
to proceed so much faster. In our whirlwind 16-day shooting schedule we shot
an average of 42 set-ups a day, the record being a 65 set-up day. Those were real
set-ups, not just lens changes. But the full potential of a digital shoot lies really
in the color correction and the amount of work you can get done on your image,
its contrast, its density, its colors etc in post. Franz and I spent ten days colortimingour master, with the invaluable help of Peter Deinas who had alreadyworked with me on the remastering of all my older films.

Q:What advantages are there to shooting digitally?

WW: With the hand-held digital cameras we were indeed always in the middle
of the action, sometimes very close to the actors. But without the intimidating
equipment overload that comes with most film shoots. In intimate scenes, for
instance when Lana wakes up at night and prays, there were just Franz and
myself in the room with the actress. You can feel that in her performance. As a
director, you can really concentrate on the actor’s face and the voice, “the
image” is somehow of less importance than in a film shoot. Here it’s all about
immediacy and realism and truth. Aesthetic considerations are still there, but
they are clearly less important. It’s totally performance-driven. And the actors
have more freedom. They can easily start over and interrupt in the middle of the scene: “Oh, let me do that again!” and here you go, without a new slate. You caneasily shoot the rehearsals, too. Focus pulling is less of a hassle, as the focal
range and depth of focus are less critical with these cameras than with 35mm
equipment. So actors don’t have to be all that weary about hitting their marks
perfectly. Franz with his hand-held camera could easily compensate for that.
The disadvantages? Well, on screen you have less definition and less “beauty”
than if you had shot on film. But considering that this adventure would never
have materialized if we had contemplated doing it on film, there is no complaint. When we blew up our digital master to Cinemascope for the first time, wethought the look was absolutely mind-blowing. There was a lot of “productionvalue” on the screen, except that we only paid a fraction of what it would havenormally cost, and that we never had to make any compromise in terms of whatthe film was about. In this low-budget production, our content was theparamount issue. The film says everything it meant to say. With big budgets andall the means in the world, that is rarely the case.

Q:“Angst and Alienation in America” was the film’s working title. Why did you
change it to “Land of Plenty”?

WW: I never intended ANGST AND ALIENATION IN AMERICA to be the
real title of the film. It would have scared everybody away. But it was a fun
working title. When you’re shooting, you’re asked for the title of the movie all
the time, by bystanders, policemen, officials, service companies etc. And when
you say: “We’re working on ‘Angst and alienation in America,’” I can assure
you: You get some great reactions. Anyway, I needed a working title quickly,
and couldn’t come up with one, and then I remembered that in the beginning,
when my first films were reviewed in the US, American critics across the board
agreed that this German fellow made movies about angst, alienation and
America. At the time, I had jokingly called them my “Triple-A-movies”. So now
I thought I could, for once, use the critics’ inspiration and named this film
project respectively. The company that we formed to produce LAND OF
PLENTY was in fact called “Triple-A-Productions”. The drawback was only
that we always got these calls from people who had car trouble. (They thought
we were the American Automobile Association.)

Q:The construction of the film echoes PARIS, TEXAS, which begins as a roadmoviebut then comes to a halt, while LAND OF PLENTY begins in Los Angelesand then evolves into a road-movie in the last part of the film.

WW: When Paul and Lana get in the van and drive from Los Angeles to Trona
in the Mojave desert and subsequently across the United States to New York, the
film becomes a road movie, indeed, and so might evoke PARIS, TEXAS. I can’t
hide, I guess, that shooting on the road is something I really take pleasure in.
Would you comment on your interest in the American landscape....is it a
character in the film? What was the reason for returning to the area of Los
Angeles where MILLION DOLLAR HOTEL is set and the location for Trona?
WW: The body of the film takes place in downtown Los Angeles, an area I had
“discovered” during the shooting of MILLION DOLLAR HOTEL. But in that
film we really moved strictly in the parameters of one street block. “The hunger
capital of America” remained very much in the background. I felt at the time
that I would have liked to give it more importance, but our story didn’t allow forthat. Since then, things have not gotten better down there, on the contrary. The area is still a giant disaster zone, largely, and the proximity of total luxury andutter deprivation very shocking.

This time, we could give the description of Downtown LA much more space, with our main location, the fictional “Bread ofLife Mission” right in the middle of it. We dressed that old fire station ourselves,which was by far our biggest production effort. (I had shot in there already forHAMMETT, 25 years ago, and used it as the set of a Chinese gambling hall…)This is as “American” a cityscape as they come, a true melting pot, with all styles of buildings mixed with each other, and people of all races doing businessthere. The “Garment District”, the “Toy District”, the “Fashion District” and the“Art District” flow seamlessly into each other. And all over, in the middle of it,the population of homeless people that take over the streets at night. For a youngperson, like Lana, to return to her home country from spending the last ten years in Africa, this place was quite a shock. The least she expected to return to when she arrived in LA was another third World place, so to speak.

TRONA in the Mojave Desert was a stark contrast to that. I had discovered that
little industrial city when I was looking for locations for TEN MINUTES
OLDER. Again, I felt I hadn’t been able to give it the space it would have
needed. In that short section (my film, like everybody else’s was just ten
minutes long) I could only show a tiny piece of Trona in the opening sequence,
afterwards the film continued in the desert. In LAND OF PLENTY, Trona has a
huge importance in the story. For Paul, it is the obvious “sleeper” hideout for
terrorist cells, while it turns out to just be a little town in deep depression. The
common theme for both places was poverty, that unknown category when you
think of America, the richest nation in the world. Poverty is the real subtext of
the film, even if we didn’t make it the explicit subject of our interest.

And then, finally, there was this trip across the United States in the van, only thetiny last chapter of the film, just 5 minutes long, but with the opportunity to
condense “the American landscape” into the length of one song, Leonard
Cohen’s magnificent LAND OF PLENTY, our title song. The three “places” of
the film, Downtown LA, Trona, the open road, really complement each other
and together form a sort of “other America”, a less-known one, for sure, but
representing a poignant reality of deprivation, socially as well as culturally, thatstands in stark contrast to the image of the military superpower with its
exhilarating expenses made abroad, resources that are badly missing at home.

Q: Let’s talk about the score. Leonard Cohen is central to the film score. Why did
you pick Cohen? How much do you relate to his work? The last title we hear
over the end credits is called The Letters. Is it an original song?

WW: I was listening a lot to Cohen’s “Ten New Songs” last year. It’s a brilliant
album, sharp and accurate and utterly contemporary, yet not polemic. And not
cynical at all. That alone has become such a rare quality! My favorite song was
“Land of Plenty”, and I played it a lot when I was driving to the shoot or
returning home. Until it hit me that it was the perfect title for the film I was
doing, indeed the perfect title song. I had never met Leonard, but friends helped
me to get together with him. He turned out to be the most gentle person on this
planet. He read my script and then he was not opposed to the idea of letting me
use his song. And later on, when I already had a rough cut, he played me some
new songs he was working on, among them “The Letters”. He couldn’t have
written it more fittingly for the ending of my film. It will be on his next album.
And it is playing over our end credits.

Q: How did your collaboration with Thom come about for the score?

WW: I happened to hear Thom’s first album, “Gods and Monsters” while I was
editing. Actually, a friend urged me to listen to it. I was blown away by all
aspects of it, Thom’s vocals, the quality of the lyrics, the arrangements. I was
looking for a composer, or a band who would put their mark on the film. Thom
seemed just like God-sent. That was the kind of music I had in mind.
Contemporary, melodic, innovative, without being too imposing. Their was a
touch of Radiohead in Thom’s voice, but there were also reminiscences of the
Beatles and the Sixties. Altogether very complex and moody. And then I met
Thom, together with PC, his collaborator and musical co-genius, and the two of
them were in no way intimidated by the prospect of writing and recording our
score in a couple of weeks. I went to their recording sessions every night, and
slowly saw and heard the score emerge. I’m very happy with it--it’s very
coherent and fits the film like a glove. Plus we used some of Thom’s songs from
his album. Thom’s voice appears almost like a Greek choir every now and then,
with the lyrics strangely commenting on the action.

Q: How did you cast the two main actors?

WW: I had met Michelle Williams in the process of casting DON’T COME
KNOCKING. She came in one day to read for the part of Sky. I had never heard
of her, and I had never seen “Dawson’s Creek”. But Michelle impressed me a
lot, and I was disappointed that she was really too young for the part in that film.Shortly afterwards, the financing fell apart and we had to postpone the movie.When I wrote the outline for what was going to become LAND OF PLENTY, Idid it with Michelle in mind. So the part of Lana was made to measure, so to speak.

With Paul, it was more complicated. When I wrote him as a Vietnam
veteran, I had no particular actor in mind, and only when Michael Meredith
made him much more concrete in the script (drawing a lot on his own uncle) I
got a feeling for the part. And that’s when I remembered John Diehl, who had
played a supporting role in END OF VIOLENCE. We had remained in touch,
and I had always wanted to do something else with him. And very quickly John
filled that part so well that it felt like nobody else could have done it.
Both protagonists are true believers of sorts—Paul believes in his country while
Lana believes in God.

Q: Do you regard these characters as “missionaries”?

WW: Paul more so, he is indeed on a mission. He is a Vietnam veteran, and a
self-declared Homeland Security officer. He acts without any orders other than
his own, though, and his commitment to his country is indeed of religious
dimensions. The 20-year-old Lana on the other hand, with her firm Christian
belief, does not act like a “missionary” at all. In fact, with her background of a
childhood in Africa and the last couple years in Palestine, she sees religion and
politics with a very different perspective. Her best friend Yael is Jewish and
together they root for pro-Palestinian issues. Politically, there is a wide gap
between “Uncle Paul” with his right-wing positions and his niece Lana with her
liberal upbringing. I wanted the two to clash, but I also wanted them to keep a
respect for each other. Lana doesn’t try to convince her uncle he’s wrong. She
just shows him with her life and her attitude what she stands for. And she does
reach Paul this way, more than with any argument.

Q: Which character do you feel closer to?

WW: When I was writing the story, I felt much closer to Lana. But in the
course of the shoot, Paul got under my skin, and in the end I felt deeply for both
of them. But I guess that’s just the way I work. I cannot conceive of characters
that I don’t like and that I wouldn’t identify with.

Q: Although Paul is a strongly disturbed, paranoid character, there’s a compassion for him in the film.

WW: Oh yes. You cannot despise such a broken and abused character for what
he has become, or for what “the system,” so to speak, has made of him. Lok at
his life! Look at his sacrifices! You can only respect his honest and well-meant
efforts, hoping that he still has it in him to realize that he has been betrayed and that he has therefore made some wrong choices.

Q: The presence of the American flag seems to cut through the film. Why?

WW: The American flag is a striking visual signal. And it can clearly go both
ways, indicating the best and the worst of America, depending on the context it
appears in. At one moment you couldn’t open your eyes anywhere in the countrywithout seeing a flag. I was shooting SOUL OF A MAN a couple of years ago,and in the poorest part of the country, in Mississippi, there was not one car, not one house without a flag. Actually, the poorer the neighborhood, the more
patriotic it got. Where America had failed its people the most, it seemed the
most revered. That always was difficult to grasp for me. It was shocking to learn
in FAHRENHEIT 9/11 how this comes full circle, and how the military is
recruited largely from the poorest of the poor. The rich kids and the privileged
don’t go to war. As much as I have a problem with the Hummers and the
Cadillacs and the limousines and the big SUVs carrying their American flags, I
respect it where it stands in some crummy front yard, because at least here it is
coming from the heart, not from some business interest. I know I’m simplifying
the issue, but if you drive through Dallas, and the hugest flags wave over every
gas station or on the immaculate green lawn of every big corporation, you mightfeel nauseated, and you can’t help seeing the arrogance of it. But you see it withdifferent eyes if it is a rumpled torn flag waving on a trailer home in an Indianreservation. Or on a WWII cemetery. That flag incorporates the entire dilemmaof American history, from being the solid base of defense for freedom andhuman rights to a cynical empire of business interests that are governed by theright of the strongest.Immediately after 9/11 I’d say the American flag wasrespected all over the world as a symbol of defiance, of a suffering from ahorrible injustice and injury, of a hope for a better world. Only a couple of yearslater, that same flag seems to have lost almost all of that credit.

Q: Despite the occasional sermon in the shelter, neither religion nor politics are overtly discussed, but are still very present in the film.

WW: I wanted to make a contemporary film inside America, and let it touch on
all the subjects that concerned me, as a European living and working in
America, and certainly as somebody who never concealed how much affection I
had for this country, and the ideas it represented. I chose not to make a
documentary, although I did consider that for a moment. I felt I could handle my concerns better in a fictional story, and I could express my mixed feelings better via two very opposed characters. Telling a story meant refraining from all overt political or religious “statements”. I’m not good at polemics. I preferred to have all the topics that the film touches appear in the emotional context in which my two “heroes” experience and live them. So don’t expect any explicit message from my film, but be assured that it’ll make its point of view very clear. For instance on the issue of religion. With a government representing very openly “Christian” positions, mixing religious and political matters across the board, instead of separating them as cleanly as possible, like we do in Europe, it was important to me to put the most simple Christian values into a perspective, opposing them to the fundamentalist ideas that govern the present
administration.

About the Filmmakers and Cast:

Wim Wenders, Director-
Wim Wenders was born on August 14, 1945 in Düsseldorf. Although he started
out studying medicine and philosophy, he ended up attending the Academy of
Film and Television in Munich from 1967 to 1970, and also worked as a film
critic for "Filmkritik" and "Süddeutsche Zeitung" from 1968 to 1972. Wenders
was a founding member of the production group Filmverlag der Autoren, and in
1975 founded the production company Road Movies. He became a member of
the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 1984 and five years later a doctor h.c. of
the Sorbonne University in Paris. In 1991 he received the prestigious Friedrich
Wilhelm Murnau Award. Wenders was Chairman of the European Film
Academy from 1991 to 1996. Since 1993 he has taught as an honorary professorat the HFF (Academy of Film and Television) in Munich, and was made adoctor h.c. of the theological faculty of the University Freiburg Switzerland in
1995. In 1995 he was elected President of the European Film Academy.
Selected Filmography
1970 Summer in the City (dedicated to the Kinks)
1971 The Goalkeeper’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick
1972 The Scarlet Letter
1973 Alice in the Cities
1975 The Wrong Move
1976 Kings of the Road
1977 The American Friend
1980 Nick’s Film – Lighting over Water
1982 Hammett
1982 The State of Things
1984 Paris, Texas
1985 Tokyo-Ga
1987 Wings of Desire
1989 Notebook on Cities and Clothes
1991 Until the End of the World
1993 Faraway, so Close!
1994 Lisbon Story
1995 Beyond the Clouds (with Michelangelo Antonioni)
1996 A Trick of the Light (with students of HFF Munich)
1997 The End of Violence
1998 The Buena Vista Social Club (Nominated for Academy Award)
2000 The Million Dollar Hotel
2002 Ode to Cologne
2003 The Blues Series: The Soul of a Man
2004 Land of Plenty
2005 Don’t Come Knocking

Michelle Williams (Lana)-
Michelle Williams first caught audiences attention as lead character on the
hit TV drama “Dawson’s Creek.” Her film work includes the Watergate satire
DICK, in which she starred opposite Kirsten Dunst; THE STATION AGENT,
which won the Audience Award at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival; Sandra
Goldbacher's ME WITHOUT YOU, the story of two best friends growing up in
the outskirts of London in the 1970s and 80s, for which she received rave
reviews; Dan Harris' IMAGINARY HEROES; and Michael Showalter’s
romantic comedy The BAXTER, currently in release. She will next be seen in
Ang Lee's highly anticipated drama BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, opposite
Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal.
On stage, Williams earned glowing reviews for her role as 'Melanie-Jane' in
Mike Leigh's play, SMELLING A RAT, at the Samuel Beckett Theater in New
York. She made her Off-Broadway debut in 1999 as Dottie in KILLER JOE.

John Diehl (Paul)-
John Diehl grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio and move to New York City at the age
of 19 years of age. He was 28 before he thought of being an actor.
He has built an impressive career in the theater, with stage credits including
"Joe" in Murray Mednick's JOE AND BETTY at the Kirk on Theater Row; the
premiere of a Denis Johnson play called PSYCHOS NEVER DREAM at San
Francisco's Campo Santo Intersection Company; the west coast premiere of Sam
Shepard’s A LIE OF THE MIND at the Mark Taper Forum with Holly Hunter
and James Gammon, directed by Robert Woodruff, and SIMPATICO at Florida
Shakespeare Theater in Miami, Florida, directed by Darrell Larson, and
Shepard's ACTION and KILLER'S HEAD for Signature Theater at the Public in
New York, plus many memorable summers at the Padua Hills Playwrights
Festival with Murray Mednick at the helm, bringing to life the work of many
talented playwrights including Maria Irene Fornes, Susan Mosakowski, Robert
Glaudini, Jon Robin Baitz, John Steppling, John O'Keefe, and Martin Epstein.
Diehl has worked in over 70 films for such directors as Stephen Frears, Joel
Schumacher, Ted Demme, Wayne Wang, Oliver Stone, Martha Coolidge, Wim
Wenders, Michael Tolkin, Joe Johnston, and Janusz Kaminski. Recent film
projects include Edward Norton's DOWN IN THE VALLEY directed by David
Jacobson.

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