FILM · 1991 · GERMANY
Bis ans Ende der Welt
28 archived facts 2 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
All facts (28)
- #001
Wim Wenders' original rough cut of the film ran twenty hours long.
- #002
Wenders admitted that when shooting ended, his producers literally had to pull the plug on him for his own good, because he wanted to bring the film to a conclusion in the Congo in Africa. There, the Pygmies' "dream music" would have closed the circle of his characters and themes. As it stands, the film hit every continent except Africa, South America and Antarctica.
- #003
The money ran out for shooting in China, so actress Solveig Dommartin and a cameraman secretly shot the film's China scenes (seen by Eugene at the VideoFax in Paris) entirely on their own.
- #004
It took Wim Wenders 14 years and 23 million dollars to bring his vision to the screen, shooting on four different continents, in seven different countries and 15 different cities.
- #005
Wenders called on his favorite musicians to compose original pieces for the film and received so much good music that he decided not to choose a winner but to use it all. Wenders later admitted, without any regret, that this was a decision that locked him into an epic length.
- #006
The 4-hour 47-minute Director's Cut was given a 4K restoration in 2014 by Arri Film & TV Services Berlin with the support of the French National Center for Cinema (CNC).
- #007
The footage in the sequences featuring recorded brain stimuli was captured with early high-definition video. Wim Wenders and technicians at NHK (at the time the only facility capable of playing HD video) worked on these sequences for six weeks and deliberately distorted the images to create strange visual effects, often recording a fast-forwarded version of the image and then playing it back at normal speed.
- #008
Wenders pitched the story idea to Australian writer Peter Carey, hoping Carey would write the screenplay. It took him six hours to tell Carey the story.
- #009
Wim Wenders initially wanted Robert Mitchum to play William Hurt's father. He also approached Richard Widmark and Gregory Peck.
- #010
Willem Dafoe was initially pursued for the role of William Hurt.
- #011
Wenders' original cut of the film ran eight hours.
- #012
The shoot was carried out with a core group of talent who gathered new crews and production staff from new locations as they traveled around the world.
- #013
Wim Wenders developed the idea for the film from his first visit to Australia in December 1977, thinking it would be a perfect setting for a science fiction film.
- #014
Wim Wenders told the Los Angeles Times during production: "This is not a science fiction film. It's a contemporary film that we set ten years in the future so we could take some liberties."
- #015
It was initially planned to be shot in 70 mm.
- #016
Wim Wenders often refers to the film as the "ultimate road movie."
- #017
Lois's outfit and seating arrangement in the Chile scene echo the famous painting Girl with a Pearl Earring.
- #018
Early in the film, just before setting off for Berlin, Claire can be seen reading a French edition of Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften ("Elective Affinities" or "Les Affinités électives"). Often described as Goethe's best and also most enigmatic novel, it combines elements of Weimar Classicism, such as the arrangement of its plot, with a tendency against Romanticism, as a scientific analogy. The term "elective affinities" was originally a scientific term from chemistry and was once widely used by scientists such as Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton and Antoine Lavoisier, first to describe exothermic chemical reactions and later to refer to chemical reactions in which one ion replaces another. Goethe applied this understanding taken from physical chemistry as a metaphor for human passions supposedly governed or regulated by the laws of chemical attraction, and examined whether the laws of chemistry somehow weaken or support the institution of marriage as well as people's other social relationships.
- #019
Wim Wenders began personally showing the roughly five-hour version in museums and one-off events as early as 1993. This version later had a theatrical release in 2015.
- #020
For the film's soundtrack, Wim Wenders approached his twenty favorite international musical artists, asking them to contribute a song they could imagine playing in 1999.
- #021
The film is part of the Criterion Collection, spine #1007.
- #022
It features a car equipped with a frighteningly prescient version of a satellite navigation system.
- #023
After his first visit to Australia in 1977, Wim Wenders was so taken with Aboriginal culture and the idea of dreams and songs that he began writing a science fiction film set in a remote part of the Australian desert, about the end of the world, where images of the world are saved. He later combined this concept with another, a retelling of the Odyssey in which Penelope, frustrated at waiting for Odysseus, sets out to find him.
- #024
In Japan, Claire and Sam board a random train and find themselves at a small, secluded inn in the woods, where they are looked after by an elderly man and woman played by Chishu Ryu and Kuniko Miyake, two of Yasujiro Ozu's most memorable performers.
- #025
The film is set in 1999.
- #026
It is Carmen Chaplin's debut.
- #027
It is Dolores Chaplin's debut.
- #028
At one point, Claire and Sam are handcuffed to each other, like the protagonists of Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps.
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