Interview with Tom Tykwer
I always come at things from a visual standpoint. There's an image in my head that I want to bring to life, to build a story around it and make a film out of it. With RUN LOLA RUN, it was a woman running, the side-on medium shot of a woman running. I think the idea of making a dynamic film is a basic desire among filmmakers. That's why we like to watch action films, because film can transport speed. Film has to do with dynamics, with explosiveness. A running human brings everything together: explosive dynamics and emotions, because in this movement, the human is highly expressive - whether it is desperation, joy or whatever. There is something fundamentally cinematic about the dynamic - like a laterna magica. There is also an element of childish enthusiasm for this most simple of all cinema images: a person in motion. WINTER SLEEPERS was a film with epic breath and heaviness. Run Lola Run was an act of liberation. It was a contrary model, not in terms of the content, but formally. Viewers travel with RUN LOLA RUN, are shaken about on its roller coaster ride. I wanted naked, pulsating pleasure, which despite its complexity was not like Winter Sleepers in any way. A wild chase with effect.
For all its dynamic, RUN LOLA RUN deals with philosophical questions - where do we come from, where are we going to - and at the same time, it's a portrait of a generation. Is our age living through a crisis of the senses?
If you give coincidence big chances, it shows that ideologies have no strength. Our age is not ruled by ideals. We look at what is going on today, and don't give much thought to what will happen tomorrow. There are no plans, which means that the moment becomes all the more important. The age of the economic miracle was characterised by reconstruction, by looking ahead. These days, we live in a more situational way.
How did you put the cast together?
Franka Potente was there from the beginning, although no-one could really imagine that because after 'It's a Jungle Out There' she had more of a girl next-door image. Franka can genuinely transport an element of normal middle-class life, which Lola has too - after all, her father is a bank director. But Lola's vibrating energy was already visible in Franka in 'It's a Jungle Out There'. It was a strength I wanted to see unfold. I wanted real characters who were immediately likeable and whose love was believable. With Franka and Moritz Bleibtreu you wish from the very beginning that they are a couple and that they stay a couple. They are made for one another. Moritz has an unbelievable presence and is immediately loveable - and he just can't be allowed to die! He doesn't pose, he is believable, chaotic and loveable.
Almost the entire who's who of the German cinema fraternity pops up in supporting roles: Heino Ferch, Joachim Król, Nina Petri, Herbert Knaup…
I enjoy working with actors and actresses I like. They're a part of my creative family. I enjoy having the same actors appear over and over in my films - sometimes in the lead role, sometimes in a supporting role. But there is a much more important reason: From the very beginning, RUN LOLA RUN emphasises that it is coincidental that Lola's story is being told. It is picked out of a crowd of people - and we could have told someone else's story, that of Mr Smith, Mrs Jones, Mr Walker…and we tell them too in little fragments. It was important to create a feeling for these people. Behind every character is not only their dramatic function, but a huge cosmos. Supporting characters are inherently restricted by the purpose they serve the lead role, but all the characters in RUN LOLA RUN were equally important to me - they were potential lead characters. I wanted to cast them like lead roles, even though roles such as that of Heino Ferch, were tiny.
You once said there are 'loved' and 'unloved' children. What is Lola?
Lola doesn't feel as though her parents love her, which is why Manni is her anchor, her love, her life. Her parents are locked in their own worlds, and there is no contact between Lola and them, just deep reserve. It's almost normal these days. My generation and the one before have huge parental problems, which is vastly different to the generation problem of the 68ers movement, mostly because they are emotional and less ideological. There is no intensity between the generations.
Deadly Maria, Winter Sleepers, and now RUN LOLA RUN. What place does RUN LOLA RUN take in your work?
Each of my three films are totally different, but I recognise myself in them over and again. Certain elements which interest me reappear repeatedly. Time, for example, and the manipulation of time. One of the most interesting things about film for me, is the principle of creating time. You can set a film over twenty minutes or twenty years. The best films have a personality without being private. Films have to have their own signature, and that is visible in all of my films. RUN LOLA RUN is a continual journey for me, and the most important thing is that the audience feels that Lola has really experienced the different possibilities that we show in the film. Not only the last twenty minutes. And that the audience goes with the emotion of the film and grows into the film feeling with Lola and wanting that at the end, she is rewarded for everything she has had to go through - Manni's death, her own death.
Is the screaming in the casino which shatters the glasses a conscious quote from Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum?
I neither thought about as I was writing nor shooting the film. Of course some people will make such connections, even though they were not intended as a conscious quote on my part. It is a minute irritation, and I don't think there is any monopoly on scenes like that. Although Oskar Matzerath from the Tin Drum is also a very wistful character, the statement is quite different. Nonetheless the character possesses immense strength which could create a connection to Lola. Lola's scream is a crazy, wild, hysterical expression of desperation and an attempt, to stand up to what seems like the greatest hopelessness and panic and to get things moving. An expression of strong will and yearning - which is why the title song is called 'I wish I was'.
How did the visual concept for RUN LOLA RUN look like?
There was a very exact storyboard for the film because there were so many tiny details to consider, such as where which characters should stand in which scenes, or how to make sure the camera only shot the really important things. In addition, we were telling a story which took place within a specific period of time all on one and the same day. That meant the weather and the light had to be identical. One mad factor was the clocks which appeared in all over the place. We spent hours discussing whether it should be six or seven minutes to 12 in scene X. Or even five to twelve? The continuity aspect certainly cost us overtime! The visual concept was of great importance during the preparatory phase already, and the script was written in a very technical way. Technology is a fundamental part of the film, but becomes organically integrated and invisible. The aim was that the whole structure would be forgotten, taken over by the driving wish to see Lola save Manni's life.
The music played a large part in RUN LOLA RUN. You created it with two other musicians…
Just as with Winter Sleepers, I worked with Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil on the film music. The idea that anyone but myself should compose the music for one of my films, is a nightmare. It's definitely possible to ruin a film with the wrong music. Music can turn a good film into a really good film and can make a not so good film into a bad one. Music strengthens everything. Try and imagine "Once upon a Time in the West" without music! Music and image - that is film. I think, write and edit in a very musical way, so it is only natural that I should take care of the soundtrack.
And apart from all that, it is fun, and not easy to find the "right" film composer, a composer who shares the director's vision. I had piano lessons until I was 18 years old, so I pre-compose melodies on the piano, then Johnny Klimek, Reinhold Heil and I have a basis session. Klimek has more of a techno background, Heil was a keyboard player and one of the main composers with Spliff. That means we have a mix of jazz, current music, 80s pop music, and my classical and film music it's an interesting fusion. I didn't want to set the film to standard techno music. I made my first pop record, a real dance record in the soundtrack to RUN LOLA RUN.
What was the greatest challenge in this precisely constructed film?
In the edit, the timing was crucial, because the film is very fast and you need time and have to give the viewers time to organise what they see in their heads. In terms of creativity the greatest challenge was to prevent the time leaps from seeming like breaks, but making them flow seamlessly into one another thus keeping a constant level of emotion among the viewers. The space-time continuum is turned upside down without anyone really noticing it. But to achieve this, it was important that the driving, breathtaking element didn't get lost or become an end to itself. So, visually speaking, we followed a logical path, and gave each level its own look. The sequences with Lola and Manni are shot on 35mm, and the others, where Lola and Manni are not on location were shot on video, in an almost synthetic, artificial world. It turns Manni and Lola into the centre of their world, in which cinematic miracles are possible. The cinema image is true, the others are almost untrue. When Lola runs through a video image, it becomes film.
Is RUN LOLA RUN a Berlin film?
Yes, of course, but unlike 'Life is All You Get', the script to which I also worked on, it showed a realistic, dying Berlin in the throes of change, still in the wake of the fall of the wall. RUN LOLA RUN shows a different Berlin, a Berlin which doesn't isolate the Gedächtniskirche and throw Alexanderplatz in for good measure, but a city in an exciting synthetic state between the modern and the demolished. No city is as synthetic and lively as Berlin with its huge, grey streets, ghostly, almost studio like atmosphere void of greenery and people. Here you can simultaneously feel emptiness and a sense of being surrounded by a huge metropolis. RUN LOLA RUN works to the Pippi Longstocking motive "I make my world, the way I like it." The pavements are empty, the streets are emptied for Lola, for what is important in her life at that moment.
What is the meaning of the animation sequences?
When we were thinking about how to make a film about the possibilities of life, it was quite clear to me that it would also have to be a film about the possibilities of cinema. That's why there is black and white, colour, video, slow motion, time lapse and animation. It is also about the freedom of the medium. These days, filmmakers can juggle with every mediums because nothing is isolated anymore. The times in which you could only listen to music on a record player, could only watch the news on television, borrow a book from the library or see a film in the cinema, are over. Through interactive media and the Internet, everything can now happen on a monitor, and it makes us experience the world in another way, and that can be shown in film. The animation is a maximised way of showing that anything goes. It is only the imagination which sets the boundaries. Structurally speaking, the animation in the film is always the starting point for all domino principle type of changes in the causal chain.
So is RUN LOLA RUN a very new film?
Only from the outside. The means don't change the way of telling the story. It continues to work according to the structural principles, which were the mainstay of classicists. RUN LOLA RUN is no different. We have passionate love, we have a clear action principle, we have a task which runs throughout the film. RUN LOLA RUN works in the same way as the search for the Holy Grail. Only in this case, the grail is worth 100,000 Marks.
