The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

Kings of the Road
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silence, especially having spent a lot of time on the road. It somehow made
sense to me, at the time.
Wenders has this very interesting take on the male body. For example,
watch Bruno: The scene opens essentially with him naked getting out
of a truck. He later catches a projectionist masturbating, and then
famously he defecates on-screen. It’s misleading because he says, “I
have to go pee,” and then Wenders shows him squatting. It’s a slowmotion
car wreck, and you can’t look away.
Chick: He takes down his overalls, kind of in foreground, and he takes a
big black turd right onto the white sand, as I remember. I think the other
guy vomits in the next scene. In a public rest stop or a restroom. I remember
thinking like, “Wow, he just got every bodily function.”
I don’t remember seeing that in any film, and perhaps don’t need to
see it ever again. The character who does most of the duty is Rüdiger
Vogler, who is a longtime Wenders actor. Wenders talked about how
this role typecast Vogler as this isolationist. He has shown up in The
American Friend and a couple others.
Chick: He’s the star of Alice in the Cities?
Yeah. He’s also got a small part in Until the End of the World as well.
The German name of this film was In the Course of Time but, of course,
it was renamed Kings of the Road for American audiences. Let’s talk
about the music, though, because Kings of the Road is taken from the
song of the same name. There’s also a Johnny Cash song in there, and a
Pink Floyd–esque operatic soundtrack.
Chick: I remember there was a lot of what he’s done more and more
throughout his career: he throws in more and more of the rock ’n’ roll that’s
influencing him at the time. It’s got a lot of ’60s rock in it, right? It’s a big
influence on the character, but it doesn’t feel like it’s a far stretch back to
Wenders himself. The character’s interest in the music seems like it’s not
very clearly separated from Wenders’s own interest in that music.
Did this film have any direct influence on your films?