During the ’35th Cannes International Film Festival’ (14th-26th May 1982), German director Wim Wenders asked a sample of 15 other international film directors to get, each one at a time, into the same hotel room to answer in solitude the same question about the future of cinema, while they were filmed with a 16mm camera and recorded with a Nagra sound recorder. In social sciences the goal of standardization is that each person is exposed to the same question experience, and that the recording setting of answers is the same, too, so that any differences in the answers can be correctly interpreted as reflecting differences between persons rather than differences in the process that produced the answer. The wide sampling frame in “Room 666” included European ‘auteurs’ and Hollywood directors, narrative and experimental filmmakers, male and female professional film directors that presented their films or were simply present at the 35th Cannes Festival in May 1982. The directors came from France, Italy, Brazil, Lebanon, Germany, Turkey, the Philippines and the USA. This unique documentary shows the complete footage (or selected parts) of the 15 answers that resulted from this ‘standardized survey interviews’. The historical value of “Room 666” has increased over time: The 5 directors Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Yilmaz Güney, Maroun Bagdadi, Robert Kramer and Michelangelo Antonioni have died since then in this order. Fassbinder died only a few weeks later on June 10th 1982 and gave his last ‘interview’ in “Room 666”.

Playtime: 45 minutes
Production country / language: West Germany, France / English, French, German, Italian, Turkish, Portuguese
Production year: 1982
Director(s): Wim Wenders
Producer(s): Michel Boujut, Chris Sievernich, Claude Ventura
Genre: Documentary
Cast: Wim Wenders, Steven Spielberg, Susan Seidelman, Werner Herzog, Michelangelo Antonioni, Maroun Bagdadi