Wim Wenders

German director of Paris Texas, Wings of Desire, and Until the End of the World.

Room 666 (1982) -- During the Cannes Film Festival, Wim Wenders rented out a hotel room (room 666, the only one available) and had over a dozen big-time directors (one by one, and alone) come in to be filmed (for up to eleven minutes) answering a question Wenders had typed up about the future of cinema. The results are really interesting, and Wenders trimmed the entire project down to 45 minutes so that it never becomes boring. Jean-Luc Godard says one brilliant thing about every ten seconds (his entire reel is kept intact), Paul Morrissey talks about how TV is better than movies because TV cares about characters, Werner Herzog takes off his shoes to talk, and Steven Spielberg talks about how big blockbusters (such as Jaws) have linked the movie industry even more to money and has caused more personal films to almost disappear simply through lack of financers. Most subjects are pessimistic about cinema's future, and even the most optimistic ones seem to be hoping against hope. (If you look back at 1982, there did seem to be somewhat of a dearth.) Almost all of these guys prove how smart they are, especially since their predictions about the future were eerily accurate--some of them describing what amounts to shooting in digital, the presence of the internet, the emergence of the indie scene, and more. Any movie fan will be glad to spend just under an hour watching this.