As a child, this SFist spent a portion of nearly every summer in our mother's hometown, Rock Springs, Wyoming. Perhaps because of this involuntary desert quality time, we've never really "gotten" Westerns -- to us, they seemed to have nothing in common with the quirky, arid, and occasionally desparing West we knew firsthand. However, Don't Come Knocking, director Wim Wenders' newest film (which opens today at the Embarcadero), freakin' NAILS the West, or at least our West.

Written by and starring Sam Shepard, Don't Come Knocking tells the story of fallen Western star "Howard Spence" (Shepard), who sort of blurilly bails on his current film in an effort to reconnect with estranged family members. Spence drifts through interactions first with his Elko, Nevada-based mother (Eva Marie Saint), then moves on to Butte, Montana, to approach the mother of his child, played by Shepard's real-life partner, Jessica Lange.

Slowly paced but never boring, the film vividly portrays disconnection of both geography and the spirit. Though this movie is filled with profoundly screwed-up people, there's a purity there that beautifully mirrors the ecologically decimated but still beautiful American West.

After the jump, we sit down with Wim Wenders to talk about the West, the movie, and, of course, San Francisco.

SFist: So, my boyfriend's dad, Fritz, is German, and I've always thought that it was funny how obsessed he is with Westerns...

Wim Wenders: We all are.

Yeah, what is with that? Speak for your people.

It's because we grew up with them like no other people in the world. And that goes back to four generations of Germans, now, boys who were fed intravenously the books of the Romantic 19th Century writer Karl May. He never left Germany, wrote many of the books from prison, actually, never left his own country, and we all know these noble Indians and we all know these gunfighters -- cowboys, and sheriffs, and trappers, and pioneers, and we know that they're not American. We know that Germans, Dutchman, Swedes, were the people there, we know that we explore it. And that's why now, as filmmakers, we shoot there whenever we can.

You said that you got into some of this through the whole Dashiell Hammett thing, too...

It all started here in San Francisco, when I was making the movie Hammett, and I thought "I want to get to know this man." I realized that he had written some Western stories, as well, and that they're just as potent as the groundbreaking books Hammett wrote that initiated the whole film noir genre. He too discovered the Western as a young man. He worked as a Pinkerton, and he was sent to Butte and experienced the most amazing events there. He realized that he'd been sent as a strike breaker -- but he experienced gangsters and bank robbers and lynchings and he wrote about it in a novel, Red Harvest, that turned me on to the city of Butte. My first thought when I read the book was the it must be fiction, because much of the book takes place in this city called "Poisonville", and I thought "this place cannot possibly exist." But then I read an interview with him and he said that it did indeed exist, it was Butte, Montana, and everything in the book was fact.

And that's when I drove from San Francisco to Butte, Montana. This was in early 1978, and immediately I knew I had discovered the most amazing city in the West, as far as I'm concerned. it took me a long time to finally get there to make the movie, but finally I got there. When I proposed this story to Sam, the story of a prodigal father, I knew that this was finally, finally the script I could go to Butte with.

I had a car break down in Butte

You're kidding.

Nope, and I was stuck there for about four days

How lucky can you get?

And I had nothing to do, so I would end up in these bars every night, with these guys -- not really cowboys, per se

The real McCoy. Now Howard Spence (Sam Shepard's character in the film) is a pretender, just an actor. But the guys in the bars, they're the real thing. And Butte is the real thing, the town where time stopped. You can still sense the 20s and 30s there. And time stopped in the 50s, when the bottom fell out, and the place was deserted. It's like a history book of America that's still there. To get to shoot there...it's like the entire place is some open air studio where Edward Hopper made his entire body of work. You just put up your camera, and you just can't escape the guy. And that's as good as it gets. I was really thrilled when I found out that they still hadn't made a movie there. Since I was there in '78, I came back again and again and took a lot of photographs there, to document its ongoing decline, and always hoped I'd be the first to make a film there. But I never had the right story, but no matter where I was, I knew I was born to shoot in Butte.

And I'm going to show the film in Butte in a week. I promised I'd do this whole PR tour, but then I wanted to show it to the people of Butte because I think that they should be proud of themselves. And they are! It's an amazing little town. There aren't a lot of people living there, but there's a great artists' community, there are a lot of painters there. If I were a painter, I'd live in Butte.

Butte: It's the new Marfa

Yeah, exactly, totally. I met a lot of the artists who live there, and they're trying to revive the town on a whole different level. It's amazing.

I saw in the press materials that Tim Roth describes Sam as this great pool player. I had no idea! Is Sam Shepard a pool shark?

No no no, Tim is the pool shark. When we shot in Elko and Butte, Tim always got into these games with the locals. He got into a lot of trouble, because if you beat them they're realy pissed off. He'd go to all these little places, where these city slickers would come and they'd beat them. But when Tim would beat them they'd get really pissed off. We had to get Tim out of jail twice.

In Elko? Oh my god!

He's the pool shark. If he accuses Sam of it, that's just a cover.

You mentioned last night that you were living on Lyon Street. How long were you living in San Francisco?

'78, '79, for those two years. Then Zoetrope moved to Los Angeles, and I moved along with them. We shot a lot of Hammett on location here, then we reshot most of it in a studio in Los Angeles. But I think that that was a great period to live in San Francisco. I loved it when I was here. I loved it so much that when I finally moved out, I bought myself a big reel-to-reel tape recorder and I made a 24-hour tape of the foghorns.

Oh, wow

Yeah, I wanted to be able to play that wherever I moved. I was just addicted. I could not consider falling asleep without hearing the foghorns. And where I lived, the sound was so perfect -- I was addicted. They've changed them, they don't sound the same now. They don't sound anymore like they sounded then, but I still have that tape. So I can still pretend I'm there.

Well, the publication I'm interviewing you for is a site about San Francisco, so can I ask you some totally indulgent questions about other things you love about San Francisco?

Of course, of course. Well, City Lights I love, and it's where I met Sam. My favorite bar in the whole, entire world is Tosca. I'm one of the few people actually allowed to shoot a movie in there, I think they don't let many people shoot in there, but, I don't know if you saw Until The End of the World?

That's my favorite movie of yours, one of my favorites ever. I have to confess that that movie's why I was so eager to interview you.

Well, thank you. Wait until you see the Director's Cut. it's in Europe now, it'll be here eventually.

Isn't it, like, five hours long?

About five hours. And it was a great joy to shoot here in San Francisco. We shot here for two weeks, and with this cut there's a lot of additional stuff from San Francisco. And I met Sam here, and we wrote Paris, Texas, basically, in the back room of Tosca, on the pool table, actually.

Why don't more people shoot in San Francisco? You yourself mention the reshoots in LA from Hammett. What's the story? Why aren't movies that are set here shot here?

I don't know. I think it's a strange development, and a lot of great movies get shot in Canada. I mean, look, at Capote, what a perfect little film that, you think it's in America, but it's not. It's in Manitoba. And I think that somehow, filmmakers need to find a way to shoot where they should be shooting. At one point we lost some of our money for this movie and it came up that we could make this movie for a lot less money in Canada. And I said that I am not going to make this movie anywhere but in Butte, Montana, and if I have to I'll shoot it on DV. I'd rather do that than do anything else. There you go.

Allright. Thank you so much.

Thank you. And please give my best to the Western fan, to Fritz.

I certainly will.