The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

Kings of the Road
129
in later. There’s no on-screen dialogue, but you hear these messages from
the guy who’s wandering around, killing time, trying to figure out what to
do with himself. He waits. It was a direct homage, but rip-off is probably
more appropriate.
It sounds like you re-created exactly what Wenders did around this
time. Wenders said he was just writing with the camera, letting the
camera discover the story. Is that what you were doing, or did you have
more structure?
Chick: That’s definitely what I was doing. I had some idea of what I wanted
to get, but most of the way that film was shot, which I think is often the
way Kings of the Road was shot, was me and the actor and one other person
driving around in a car until we saw something that inspired some sort of
visual idea. Like, “Let’s do a shot of you walking through this part of town
here,” and then we’d shoot it. We did the entire thing without permits. We
shot an entire afternoon in JFK with all this equipment without any permit.
We went to JFK and we went from one terminal to the next trying to get
past security, in times before 9/11. I had a big huge battery belt pack around
my waist. I didn’t get past security until we were in, I think it was the TWA
terminal, and then we were able to go in, look around, figure out the most
visually interesting part of the terminal—making it up as we went along.
I want to swing back around to some of the encounters in Kings of the
Road, because again it’s very episodic. Early on there’s an exchange
between Bruno and Robert in which Bruno says, “No need to tell me
your stories,” and Robert says, “Well, what do you want to hear?” Bruno
says, “Who you are,” and Robert says, “I am my stories.” Is that the core
of what we are? Are we just the sum of our stories?
Chick: I think that’s an interesting lifelong question because I’ve definitely
felt that. Wenders also talks about—and I don’t remember where I read
this—that there are stories where plotting it is the first step toward death.
Something like that. But I feel like Wenders is reluctant to apply a real classic
story with a beginning, middle, and end. He’s more interested in the inciting
incident—in that sort of open-ended question—than creating a story with
a clear conclusion.