their friend and mentor. Initially, Wenders had intended the film to be entirely wordless, in keeping with the nature of Bausch’s dance, stationed firmly on the margins where language fails us.

There were two ground rules in the film – first, no biography, Pina wasn’t interested in exposing her life – and, the second one was no interviews, Pina hated to talk. When she was on tour, she did countless interviews and I saw them all afterwards, I really saw every piece of film that existed on Pina. And with each question, in every interview, you really felt that she was suffering, and you felt physically that she knew she was betraying her work by talking about it, and that the essence of the work was just that it was a different language – parallel to the language of words. So when I made the film I really intended to make it without a single word.
 
Only towards the end of the editing process I realized it was a little too cryptic, a little bit too insider-ish – without any words it felt that people who didn’t know anything about Pina Bausch would be lost, so I added a few things here and there, not as explanations, but to have the context. I thought it would be good to know a little bit about the work process and their relationships with Pina. So I started to introduce some of these thoughts of the dancers into the film. So we recorded their thoughts – not as interviews, more like interior voices, as if you could have the privilege of listening to their thoughts.