Literally. I just listened to the dvd commentary and learned that 9-year-old "Alice" (Yella Rottländer) wrote or improvised most of her lines because she didn't like memorizing scripts.

Wim Wenders is probably the only Cannes acclaimed director who would let an actor completely rewrite the entire part (as he famously let Dennis Hopper do in The American Friend) and here it comes off brilliantly. The result is by far the best performance by a child actor I've ever seen; she's not acting lines, she's really feeling every word as a 9 year old would.

And it's funny how her most symbolic & philosophical monologues came straight out of her head. When she talks about her dream of being tied to a chair and forced to watch a horror movie (a great metaphor for the film's recurring theme of the commercialization of American TV) was all hers. Wim and crew just rolled the cameras not having any clue what she was going to say.

Another masterpiece moment is them in the bathroom talking about the heady concept of "fear of fear" which was Wim's subject but Alice was the one who comically punctuated it with lighting a match "so it doesn't stink".

Tons of other brilliant bits of dialogue, expressions, actions & gestures were all her. Leave it to a 9 year old to write one of the greatest existential journeys ever put to film.