Though Schroeter had originally set out to make a film about Marilyn Monroe, Willow Springs was shot in the Californian desert, while Schroeter, and regulars Ila von Hasperg, Christine Kaufmann and Magdalena Montezuma were staying ten kilometres from the titular town (“a godforsaken hole”), all in a bad way, in various ways. Playing like a scorched fairytale, the film depicts three women entwined in a state of suffering that links them, unfolding like melodrama in the emptiness. In an interview with Michel Foucault, Schroeter said the film “is based on the idea of an obsession of dependence linking four characters, with none of them knowing the exact reason for the dependence.”