‘I got letters every day from people telling me how the film inspired them to do something about their lives’It was a Christmas vacation and we were travelling the desert on Route 66 with our kids.
We saw these strange lights in the sky, which came from, as we later discovered, a solar energy project.
We took photographs and fantasised about writing a story for the actor Marianne Sägebrecht, who we had had a success with in a film I’d directed called Sugar Baby.
We just improvised and started joking about our round German star meeting with Whoopi Goldberg, because we had just seen The Color Purple.
We saw the name Bagdad on a map, and we went there and there was nothing: just a few trees and a rundown gas station.
We brought the two together under those solar lights and created our own Bagdad.
Read full article