Fran Healy shared his thoughts on The two met in the noughties after Travis’ Scottish boss moved to Berlin. Becker starred in and directed Travis’ funniest video, 2013’s “Another Guy.”
Travis – “Another Guy”:
Even after Healy moved to Los Angeles, they remained in close contact. Most recently, Healy delivered a “shoutout for Wolfgang” from the stage at his Berlin concert with Travis in September. Now Healy took to social media to say goodbye. In it he describes Becker as his best friend.
Fran Healy on X:
“I didn’t want to act rashly, but on Thursday Susanne, my best friend’s wife, called frantically at 3:52 p.m. Our beloved Wolfgang had left us. I had texted him just a few days before and he was in good spirits after filming his latest film and was looking forward to the editing.”
The smartest person I’ve ever met
“What a void he leaves behind. He made my time in Berlin so special. He cared so much about his friends and somehow, God knows why, he especially loved me. And I him. He called me a sun child. “Sun Child.” He was a punk and a gentle, thoughtful, sweet and complicated soul. The smartest person I have ever met and the greatest storyteller of all time. He was a chaos magnet.”
Healy also assesses Becker’s influence on German cinema:
“Not to mention that he single-handedly revived the German film industry in the early 1990s with his timeless masterpiece ‘Goodbye Lenin’. He will always be close to me…in fact, he sits right here next to me and tells me to mention the nights we had at the Philharmonic, or the time I took him to meet his hero Paul McCartney, or the night that he turned out to be a Paul Thomas Anderson fanboy in our kitchen.
For anyone interested, he directed one of my favorite Travis videos of all time, shot on a crappy VHS camera by the also legendary cinematographer Jürgen Jürges (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Michael Haneke) and by the great and also late Peter R. Adam was cut. I told him not to smile when the camera is rolling. He didn’t disappoint me. I’ll leave it at that.”