DIRECTORS STATEMENT:
I have known Klaus for six years now and during this time our friendship has grown into a very special one. Even though we live in two diametrically opposed worlds, there is a special connection between us. We both accept each other for who we are. Our age gap looses significance and becomes just a coordinate in our ID cards. Each time we are together it´s like being back in school-times, playing, making pranks and jokes. This atmosphere can however quickly change into one of thoughtfulness and reflection about our lives and pasts. There is something about our presence which triggers our creativity, allowing us to explore each other´s fantasies, games and desires. In our games everything is possible, fiction can become the most truthful reality. The original idea of the present film was to make a documentary about Klaus and include in it his dream of traveling as a lonely cowboy in the wilderness of the American West. In the end we decided to portray his life story as a road-movie and make a documentary about his dream. This would offer the protagonist the opportunity to experience, through the film process, some of the things he had been so long dreaming of. Together we wrote a screenplay in which Klaus finally makes his journey to reach America. The latter represents the ultimate dream of freedom and self achievement.One day before the shooting started, Klaus confessed in a very serious conversation, that he was seriously considering to travel to America and build a small wooden hut somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. Consequently I came to realize that being on the road for the shooting, became for Klaus a rehearsal of his dream-journey to America. Our tfiction had already begun to mould in the plans of an imminent reality. A Tin Bird’s song has not, however, been conceived to fulfil Klaus’ dream. The film is a tool aimed at actually giving him the chance to try his dream out. During the shooting I reserved the possibility to make changes to the script, leaving it open to influences and changes able to help us find the right path to our story. There are many ways to shoot a movie, we could have shot it in a more straightforward and faithful adaptation of the script. This would have however been in contradiction with a film about freedom. Being part of such a complex project, represented also a considerable challenge for me, in quality of both, the filmmaker in the film, as well as the filmmaker in real life. Therefore a process of introspection became of a twofold nature, both, for Klaus and myself. He had to be confronted with the fictional realization of his wished for reality, and I had to constantly interact with the “fake” and the “real” filmmaker of the story. We wanted ultimately our shooting to be an adventure, we wanted reality to penetrate in our fiction, in our real and fictional selves. I like the surprises and the changes that our project has undertaken, it’s a kind of confirmation that we’re working in the right way.