And then the labour of it – going to the studio, being inside the studio dealing with the machines and the computers and all that stuff – it’s work. So I mainly did it because I wanted to go to Australia, sad to say.”Some of his favourite destinations are in America, and he keeps being drawn back to such mythic places as South Dakota’s Badlands. They call themselves ‘independent’, but who are they making the films for? They’re always making films for somebody else. Trying to please somebody else.” As for film-makers working inside the system, “they’re too worried about the studio, too worried about the money, too worried about pleasing other people. So are there no other independent film-makers he would like to collaborate with? Shepard laughs. “Independent film-makers? Where are they? I’d love to find them.

So it’s good to have someone to bounce off of.”Only Wenders will let him work this way, he insists. “The great thing with Wim is you can go down many different tracks with a screenplay and he will question it: ‘Why do we want to go there? Why do we want to do that?’ On my own I probably wouldn’t question it as deeply. He’s very open to trying things.” Shepard also gave Lange a great emotional outburst to essay, during which she goes through a whole range of different emotions.Shepard considers playwrighting to be a “particularly solo pursuit”, and says he prefers to work with Wenders on screenplays. Shepard, however, did not like the Howard-Hughes-type figure. “I said, ‘I don’t relate to the big business thing, the city thing”, and he said, ‘Well, what about this character seen in that light but a different person?’ So I suggested a different character, retaining the name Howard, because it’s sort of weak, and he went with it That’s the beautiful thing about him. In the case of Don’t Come Knocking, it was Wenders who originally came up with a character.

Rather than following a rigid plot, Shepard creates a character and then lets him go where he may. (He also has a son from his marriage to O-Lan Jones.)As for his creative partnership with Wenders, he says it works because the director understands and accommodates his writing process. His men characters are often lost and searching – for what is not always clear – or escaping. In his own life, though, he has found a kind of peace and stability with Lange, whom he met making the film Frances (1982), and with whom he has two children, Hanna and Walker. It doesn’t come from the clouds.”Shepard ran away from home and joined a theatre company. I’ve been doing it for, I don’t know, 40 years.” But why this particular theme? “It’s part of my life,” he says impatiently “It’s what I grew up with It’s my father in me It was part of my existence. “They say that writers are always turning over the same thing, and that’s the material of my life: the thing of the father, the family and the son.