You get the feeling he's told this story far, far too many times, but sitting in his hotel suite in the same steel-rimmed specs and crumpled grey suit he wore the night before to the glitzy everyone-who's-anyone Paris premiere of Buena Vista Social Club, Wim Wenders is still far from weary of it. He speaks carefully and soberly, which somehow makes his enthusiasm the more infectious.
"This film's been an enormous privilege," he said, waving away the peroxided PR man but accepting a large bottle of mineral water. "People like this don't just happen, you know. There's nobody else like them. This movie will always be a big memory, a true lesson. It's difficult for me to convey how much an experience like this is really something to carry with you for life."
These days, of course, it's difficult to turn on the radio or walk into a bar without hearing the latest release from one best-selling septuagenarian or octogenarian Cuban artist or another. But when Wenders first heard the ballads, boleros and songs of the Buena Vista Social Club, on the rough demo cassette Ry Cooder had slipped him one afternoon in Los Angeles three years ago, he was knocked sideways.
He points out that music has always been important to him, since the nights he spent as a teenager at the Marquee in London in the 60s.
Looking back, his soundtracks have always had very good music, too: the Stones and the Kinks provided the score for a couple of his very early short films. For Wings of Desire, he used Laurie Anderson and Nick Cave, and for Until the End of the World, a roll-call of greats: Robbie Robertson, Elvis Costello, Patti Smith, T-Bone Burnett, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, Michael Stipe - and Ry Cooder, whose haunting bottleneck guitar made so much out of those vast, empty landscapes in Paris, Texas 12 years previously.
This was different. "Ry said to me, `Check this out, it's not bad'," he said. "I listened. It was extraordinary, completely contagious. I've never given the same piece of music to so many people in my life, and everyone who heard it called me back the next day to say wow. I don't know any other kind of music that fills you up like this, but without also emptying you out. It's like a form of nourishment."
Then Cooder told him the stories: of Ruben Gonzales, the legendary arthritic pianist who no longer even had a piano, of Ibrahim Ferrer, the mellow, toothless, flat-capped vocalist who was making ends meet by shining shoes in a Havana street, and of Compay Segundo, still going strong at past 90. "And I told him, when you go back to record those follow-up solo albums, I will come with you."
The time came two years later, when Cooder's first Buena Vista compilation album was on its way to becoming a Grammy award-winner. Wenders arrived in Havana for a three-week stay with a Steadicam operator, a soundman and only a very vague idea of what he wanted to shoot.
"Not only was this my first documentary," he said, "but also I had never done anything even remotely like it. On Paris, Texas, Ry found and uncovered and dug out the music that was in the film, picking away in front of the screen. But here we already had the music, and in a strange kind of way it was like having a script. The music gave us a tone, a rhythm, a lightness, a fluidity."
It was Wenders's gradual discovery of the vintage musicians themselves that shaped the film. "When I saw them for the first time, these amazingly natural, elegant, graceful, funny, modest people, with so much history and life and experience behind them, it dawned on me that this couldn't be the straightforward musical documentary I was planning," he said. "It was really more of a character piece than anything else. They became more and more like fictional characters. The dimensions of the story were far greater than I'd imagined - in the end it felt like making a movie with Mickey Rooney or Humphrey Bogart or some other older, bigger-than-life actor."
So where does a film like Buena Vista Social Club fit into Wenders's wider career? He says he is keen to repeat the documentary experience, although it would have to be as spontaneous as this one was. "We really winged it most of the time." But, mainly, he wants to travel again. The Billion Dollar Hotel, his long-cherished project with Bono, has now finished shooting in LA. He refuses to talk about it, beyond saying it's a love story set on skid row but in a once-great hotel.
Wenders also wants to get back to his roots. "I haven't made a road movie in a long time," he said. "Buena Vista, for all its magic, isn't one. In the '70s and early '80s I was very preoccupied with alienation, angst and anxiety, but I got out of it alive. Then there's been a chain of road movies and city movies: Tokyo, Berlin, and now Havana and LA. I'm still working toward a wiser age when I can make a comedy. But right now I'm eager to return to my initial purpose. I want to make another movie on the road. With great music, of course."
Buena Vista Social Club opens on October 8th at the IFC. The CD is available on World Circuit Records