09/08/2026
Wim Wenders, the Oscar-nominated director of 'Pina' and 'The Salt of the Earth' returns to 3D for 'From Inside Out: The Architecture of Peter Zumthor,' a portrait of the Pritzker-winning architect behind LACMA's $724 million David Geffen Galleries — and a defense of beauty in a world of flattened cities.
Why did you want to film this in 3D?
When I made my first film in 3D, Pina, on the art of choreographer Pina Bausch, 3D was the saving grace of that project. I would not have made it if the new medium hadn’t allowed me to work in the same realm as Pina and her dancers. And that was SPACE. A screen is a two-dimensional thing, any effort to represent space on it is make-believe. Cinema has been incredibly inventive in this make-believe and has invented many tools to convince the audience that the story they were watching was taking place inside space, even if the movies were always a medium restricted to the flat screen.
Only the invention of digital 3D, native 3D, has made the screen go away and become a window, open to infinity and also to things taking place in front of the window. "From Inside Out" is my tenth film in 3D, short ones and installations included. But it was never more necessary (after Pina) than now. A ‘room’ and a ‘house’ belong to our earliest human experiences and they mean ‘shelter’, ‘protection’ and ‘security’. These are not abstract ideas at first, they are spatial experiences, utterly existential. We experience space before we learn about its abstraction, the two-dimensional representation of it, in photos, in drawings, in paintings, on TV or in the cinema.
Architecture is the one art, together with dance and theatre, that is unthinkable without space. So if I wanted an audience to experience the world of an architect, I felt I needed space itself at my disposal, not just as a technology, but as a cinematic language.
