Lightning Over Water is a collaboration between Wenders and Ray to document Ray's last days due to terminal cancer in 1979. The film is partially an homage to Ray, who had a strong influence on Wenders' work, and partially an investigation on life and death. Ray's influence on Wenders includes Ray's "love on the run" subgenre as well as his film noir photography.
Excerpts from Ray's The Lusty Men (1952) and his unfinished final work We Can't Go Home Again are featured. The sequence with the former excerpt was shot at Vassar College, at which Ray presented the film and then gave a lecture, which itself is excerpted.
The crew is extensively seen onscreen. Jim Jarmusch, Ray's personal assistant at the time — and later a notable filmmaker in his own right — can be briefly glimpsed sitting at an editing console.
When Wenders goes to Vassar to attend a lecture, a brief one-man performance is seen onstage, Franz Kafka's "A Report for an Academy", about an ape who becomes a man.
The American independent film director Jon Jost has come out against Wenders' status as the sole co-director, saying that Wenders "used his celebrity" to push Jost and Raúl Ruiz out of the project of which they had created.[citation needed]
