[Cannes Dispatch by Eugene Hernandez]

In Wim Wenders and Sam Shepard's new collaboration, the Cannes competition entry "Don't Come Knocking", a hard living actor making a western disappears from the set and returns home to his mother in Montana where he discovers parts of a lost family. For Wenders (pictured left with Sam Shepard, center, and T Bone Burnett), this is a film about the disintegration of the family, as he explained this morning at a press conference following today's screening.

The film marks a return to Cannes for Wenders who won the Palme d'Or in 1984 for "Paris, Texas," also written by Shepard. Unable to convince Shepard to star in that film he said he was thrilled when Shepard told him that he wanted to play the lead in this new movie.

"He is just a man who has missed some of the center of his life," Wenders summed up, talking about Shepard's character.

Asked about his use of the landscape of the American West, Wenders said that making a movie in Montana was for him like returning home. "I feel that the subject of the film is looking for a home and finding out where you belong, that is the subject of every western I ever saw," Wenders explained. "Of course, I grew up in post-war Gernany, it did not look like the American West, it was its opposite -- The American West became in my mind the idea place on this planet. I felt more at home there that anywhere else."

"Next to the fact that the film started with characters, and that Sam and I were really concerned only with those characters," Wim Wenders continued, "We also from the beginning knew where the film was going to take place."

Asked later about this film perhaps being his most accessible, and potentially commercial, Wenders reacted, "I am very proud of this film and certainly is one of the best things I have done in my life."