Hi everyone and thank you for tuning in to the 506th episode of the Hollywood Reporters

Awards Chatter Podcast on the host Scott Feinberg and my guest today is one of the most

significant filmmakers of the last 50 years. His credits include classic narrative films

like 1984's Paris Texas which won the Cannes Film Festival's Pandora and brought him

a Best Director BAFTA Award and 1987's Wings of Desire, for which he won Cannes Best

Director Prize, as well as documentary films such as 1999's Wynnevis the Social Club,

2011's Pina, and 2014's Salt of the Earth, each of which brought him best documentary

feature Oscar nominations. And now, at the age of 78, he is out with two new films, one

in narrative, Neon's Perfect Days, the story of a Tokyo Toilet Cleaner, for which Koji

Yakuusha won the Best Actor Prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival, and the other a 3D

doc, Janice Films' Anselm, about the art of the German painter and sculptor, Anselm

Kiefer. The recipient of the Berlin International Film Festival's honorary golden bear in 2015

and the Telluride Film Festival's Silver Medallion Award this year, he has been described

by the Guardian as one of the key figures, along with fast-spender Herzog and Schlondorf,

of the new German cinema movement that reinvigorated West German film in the 70s, and gave the

country of Marlena Dietrich, Ufa, and F.W. Murnau a bonafide cinematic movement to rival

the new Val Vogue, by the New York Times as a film visionary and a great hero of art film

audiences everywhere, and by Turner Classic Movies as one of his generations most appreciated

independent filmmakers, them vendors. Over the course of our conversation at the Toronto

offices of Elevation Pictures, the Canadian Production and Distribution Company, the 78-year-old

and I discussed his circuitous path to filmmaking, and the challenges of forging a career as a filmmaker

in Germany back when he was starting out, what led him to America for a number of years,

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