The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

124 Austin Chick
Can you tell me about the first time you saw the film?
Chick: The first time I saw the film was in the early ’90s, about ’91 or ’92. I
had dropped out of college, and I originally went to school—well, through
high school I painted. I always thought I would do something in fine arts,
and then after two years I had run out of money and decided I didn’t want
to be a painter.
I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do, so I dropped out of college. I
had spent a year, maybe not quite a year yet, but I had spent a bunch of time
wandering around the country. I had hitchhiked back and forth across the
United States a few times, was in Hawaii, and I ended up sneaking onto a
military base and living there. I kind of needed to be a private in the Army
for a while. I had been wandering, inspired by this friend of mine, who had
spent a lot of time hitchhiking.
I ran into him in Berkeley, and he was a big Wenders fan. Kings of the
Road was playing there; there was a newly restored print, and the two of us
went to see it together. I definitely had seen Paris, Texas—that may have
been the only other Wenders film I had seen—Paris, Texas when it came out
in ’84. I was young. Probably more than anything else, it felt like it spoke to
me, in a way. I had a very personal experience with the film, partly because
I was in this phase of my life where I was aimlessly wandering.
So how exactly did it impact your life?
Chick: Well, having come from New Hampshire, filmmaking was not
something that I had ever really considered as a career. I never met a filmmaker.
I never thought about filmmaking as a viable career option. I grew
up in an artistic community, but none of the people were filmmakers. So it
never really occurred to me that it was something that I could do. But when
I left Sarah Lawrence I had become disillusioned by the New York art world.
It had caused me to abandon my ideas, abandon painting or fine art as a
career path.
It had a lot to do with the fact that at that point narrative and realism
were out of style, and the art world was dominated by a lot of conceptual
art, and it didn’t interest me. I was very much interested in some sort of
narrative structure. I felt like, when I was a painter, it was mostly realistic,
and that was not something that people were doing at that point. I liked the