The trick was to just keep on working. I had started writing THE PRINCESS AND THE WARRIOR before RUN LOLA RUN was released, when I still had no idea what would happen to the film. It meant I had something to hold onto, something which had nothing to do with the fact that I had a massive success. So I made this film in the same way I always make films: Personal, individual films for a big audience.
After the lightening liberation pace of RUN LOLA RUN, you went back to a calmer, more concentrated rhythm.
WINTER SLEEPERS was one side of our generation, the massive apathy, if you like. But I'm in no way a phlegmatic person. I wanted RUN LOLA RUN to crush the idea that we have no strength. It might be a bit undirected, but it is there. Being able to express this energy freed up my head to be able to return, in a more relaxed way to the subjects which interest me, and which were present in RUN LOLA RUN in a different way.
Your stories always start with an image, what was it in THE PRINCESS AND THE WARRIOR?
It was under the truck, the moment when you don't know what led to a woman lying under a truck talking to herself. I had read something somewhere about tracheotomy, the windpipe incision, and I had repeatedly had people explain to me how to do it. You really can't do anything wrong: where it is hard, there is air beneath it. It has a spectacularly bitter taste to it, but in essence it is really very simple. I liked the basic constellation of having two people get closer than they might ever come to anyone else in their whole lives, before they have even got to know each other. The meeting under the truck is an incredibly physical and in a strange way, sensual scene.
Is that the reason why they barely touch in the film, and never kiss one another?
Yes. Because there was so much closeness, the conquest has to happen in a different way. For me, a very important premise of the film was to have one person who doesn't actually know much about love, meet someone else who doesn't want anything more to do with love. Experience meets inexperience. And that also made the tension between the two of them less physical, and meant that they have to try and understand each other first.
