James Cameron, Wim Wenders Thanks You It would be hard to overstate the impact that Pina Bausch had on Wim Wenders. Mr. Wenders, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker ("Buena Vista Social Club"), met Ms. Bausch, the German choreographer, in 1985, when, almost against his will, his girlfriend took him to see her company, Tanztheater Wuppertal, perform. He was immediately smitten. "After that first night I went and saw every other piece in the retrospective," he said. I saw a whole week of her work. I started with a real overdose. And his next film, the influential "Wings of Desire" (1987), "was by far the most choreographic thing I ever did," he said. I don't think I would have conceived of the film or come up with it if I hadn't met Pina. Mr. Wenders continued following Tanztheater Wuppertal as the troupe performed around the world, getting to know Baush with the idea of doing a film about her. Though they were close, their interactions were mainly work-driven. "Pina was very disciplined, incredibly disciplined," he said. I'm a workaholic, but Pina went beyond that: she was completely relentless. When Bausch died unexpectedly in 2009, it threw Mr. Wenders's film project into disarray; he eventually decided to carry on, in a collaboration with her dancers. He moved in an even more unexpected direction by making his documentary in 3-D. But the film, "Pina," now an Oscar nominee for best documentary, still very much carries Bausch's vision - he even developed it according to her working methods, Mr. Wenders recently told the Bagger. He also talked about Bausch's difficulty expressing herself in language (and her unusual accent) and the difficulty and possibility inherent in 3-D. This film has earned a lot of accolades, including a nomination from the Writers Guild, even though of course the movie is mostly dance. Were you surprised by that one? I hadn't thought about it, but there's been a lot of writing involved for the film we wanted to make together, Pina and I. That would have been a film about Pina's eyes at work, because she had the most amazing eyes and the most amazing capacity to observe. She was able to transform what she saw into something truly amazing. So the interest of my film with Pina was to watch these eyes at work and I wrote a long concept and of course that concept was then completely obsolete when we decided to make a film between the dancers and myself. And then there was a lot of insecurity for a while. I had to interrupt a shoot after the first leg, because it wasn't obvious how we could make a film out of it. So we stopped for six months, and I did write a lot until I found a path how to continue the film. And that writing process was really a way to align the making of this film, without Pina, with Pina's own methods. And it was only when I realized I could only make a film with the dancers if I adopted, as much as possible, Pina's own way of working, that I then could develop a new concept for this film. And that was really the realization that Pina had used a very unique method of question and answer. She had asked her dancers countless questions in the preparation to a new piece around a subject that she had in mind for that piece. And the dancers were not allowed to answer with a single word, they had to find a way to answer it with gesture, with their bodies - with dance but also with gestures and movement. I started to write my own catalog of questions to the dancers and they answered it, like with Pina, with their bodies. Except that as I'm not a choreographer I couldn't deal with improvisation, because I wouldn't have the tools to judge it, so I asked them very specifically to only answer with something that Pina's eyes had been on. The script existed but not as a written script but as a body-language script. Then we started to realize that I wouldn't want to shoot this on the rehearsal stage, and for several months, I just drove around the area and tried to find one and only place for each and every one of these answers, and that slowly became the bulk of the film. One of the things I liked best about the movie is that the dancers all speak their own languages - German, Spanish, English. It really gives a sense of the international scope of her work. But it's all in voice-over. Why did you decide to do it that way? For the longest time, I thought I'd do a film without any words at all. We edited "Pina" for almost a year and a half, and for the longest time there was not words spoken, apart from the very few little lines that you hear Pina say herself, because I try to stick to the ground rules that Pina had established which was, a) no biography and b) no interviews. I had seen lots of interviews with her, and each time I'd see her suffer. Once she was talking she felt like she was betraying art, and she tried to get out of questions and gave half answers. So I had to agree without any hesitation that I would not interview her. And only toward the end of the editing process, I realized that this was a little cryptic. We had already shot these silent portraits where all the dancers eventually looked into the camera as if it was a friend. So I had this silent presence in the cut and only toward the end of the editing process, when I felt something was missing and I had made it too pure, so to speak, I remembered that in the process I had long sessions with everybody where we had just talked about when they had come into the company, how they understood Pina's method and how they coped with it and how that had developed. So I had these conversations on tape and I realized there was things in there that would really help people to understand the film. We then rerecorded them with a decent microphone so that I could use them as an interior voice, and then of course it had to be their own languages. What language did you and Pina speak? We spoke in German. Actually it's funny that you mention it, we were born 50 kilometers apart, and we both learned German like any kid, with a local accent and it is a funny accent in Germany - it's very good for cracking jokes and it's the worst accent you can have to express ideas. It's not a language to be philosophical. You would laugh about any philosopher who'd start developing an idea with this - it's impossible, it's not made for abstract thinking. And Pina never shook that accent. Pina suffered a little bit from it because already language wasn't her thing, but she also felt that her accent made it even worse. Was it difficult to get the funding to do this in 3-D? It was difficult in the beginning, mainly because people didn't believe in the future of the medium and there was no example. So the main question was, "Can we also see it normally?" I wrote lots of stuff about how 3-D and dance would just complement each other in an ideal way and they were made for each other but nobody really believed it. When "Avatar" came out, we were taken much more seriously. I'm eternally grateful to [James] Cameron for that. Did you hope that by making a dance movie in 3-D you would attract a dance audience and a 3-D audience, and they would sort of cross-pollinate? It's one of the reasons why it took so long to edit it, to find a way into this material, into this world, into dance, that would attract people who didn't know what they're watching. That was the main difficulty in editing the film, so that it could slowly take people in. Are you going to do more movies in 3-D? I'm working on a family story, very intimate story in 3-D. I think there is a whole new universe to be discovered.