The first time I went, the Berlin Wall was still up, and I was a kid. My mom took me to Checkpoint Charlie, and we went to East Germany, and we went to the opera and to this beautiful, old, old, old coffeehouse, and then kind of toured around East Germany. At that time, there was no regular lighting. Everything was only lit by neon. There were no signs anywhere in Eastern Germany. So many of the places had been destroyed by the war, and they didn't really bother to fix them. It was just a completely different place. Then I came back as the wall was coming down, which was really exciting. All everybody wanted to talk about was politics, social issues, and moral ideas, and all that kind of stuff. Then I went just after the wall came down, and it was a city of, like, cherry pickers and cranes! When you looked through the Brandenburg Gate, where the wall used to be, it was just nothing but cranes and construction sites. The most amount of construction sites I have ever seen in one place.

Today, Checkpoint Charlie apparently is one of the most visited sites in the world. There's a tiny little white building that looks like an outhouse, and there is a Checkpoint Charlie Museum, where they have all the artifacts from the wall and some of the artifacts from Checkpoint Charlie, from people who tried to scale the wall, or tunnel, or tried to get in … Now, it's like the moneymaking thing there, where they have the T-shirts and the buttons and the "I went to Checkpoint Charlie!" mug. It's become like a souvenir shop.

What is your image of berlin from films?
Did you see Wings of Desire? That's my image of the Brandenburg Gate. Bruno Ganz and whoever the other angel is, in trench coats, standing on top of the Brandenburg Gate, the camera going around with the angels on top. Also, in Berlin Alexanderplatz, it's very lush and beautiful-looking. But the actual Alexanderplatz is probably the ugliest place in the world. Nobody knows why. But it's so ugly that I'd like to make a movie there. It's like our images of the Iron Curtain, visually oppressive Russia. In fact, now that's where they all shoot when they want to shoot Moscow at that time. They shoot it all right around where Alexanderplatz is.