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Portrait of Tom Tykwer
 "I Sold My Soul To The Cinema"

Tom Tykwer was born in Wuppertal in 1965 and began making films in 1976. He worked on various productions as production assistant, script reader, and assistant director. In 1994, his feature debut Deadly Maria (Die tdliche Maria, 1993) was named the Best Film by the German Film Critics Association, and Tykwer won the Eastman Support Award at the Hof Film Days and the Bavarian Film Award for Best Newcomer Direction. He was also co-author on Wolfgang Becker's 1997 Berlinale competition entry Life Is All You Get (Das Leben ist eine Baustelle). Tykwer has directed Friday Afternoon (Super 8, 1986), Because (medium-length feature, 1990), Epilog (short, 1992), Wintersleepers (Winterschlfer, 1997) and Run Lola Run (Lola rennt, 1998), which won several German Film Awards and was Germany's entry for the 1998 Best Foreign Language Academy Award. He is currently working on the postproduction of his latest feature The Princess and the Warrior (Der Krieger und die Kaiserin).

When talking about the exciting new generation of filmmakers coming out of Germany, there is inevitably one name that always crops up in conversation as one of the directors who has helped return German cinema to the international arena after it had spent so many years in the doldrums.

That person is Berlin-based filmmaker Tom Tykwer who was already a "person to watch" even before the excitement erupted two years ago over Run Lola Run.

After spending his childhood in the Ruhr industrial town of Wuppertal, Tykwer moved to Berlin soon after finishing school, and he has stayed here ever since. His love affair with cinema began at the tender age of 11 when he shot his first Super 8 films and, in common with Germany's other great film export Rainer Werner Fassbinder, failed to get a place at one of the country's film schools.

But, no matter, at the age of 23, Tykwer became manager and projectionist of Berlin's legendary Moviemento cinema and laid the foundation for his extensive knowledge of cinema and unquenchable thirst for new film experiences.

"I have a long tradition of spending my time in the cinema", Tykwer declares, "not for theoretical reasons, but just for some simple longing to be in a darkened room and experience other worlds - I sold my soul to the cinema! I have always had the feeling that someone is sending me on a journey with them. In my favourite films, the film had something to do with the filmmaker's subjectivity, with their personality".

Does he see a common thread running through his own films?

"Each film at the beginning has something of its own to say", Tykwer explains, "but then, later on, I see that some elements crop up again and again even though I hadn't planned it that way. I don't have a list of things that I tick off. In my case, I have some images that I absolutely want to see in the cinema, images where I feel I haven't seen them before. In Lola, of course, it was the girl running. That is more important to me than starting out with a story idea".

"Thematically, my films look at what the power of love is able to achieve; romantic, broken elements play a role here. There is always a longing for a love that is supposed to save something, he adds, pointing out that his credo is "to make a very personal and emotional cinema and combine this with entertainment value".

His approach to filmmaking is very much in the tradition of the film auteur with his finger in many pies: Tykwer is not only credited as director on his films, he also pens the screenplay (with or without co-writers), composes the film's music with friends and also has a very much hands-on approach during the editing of the film.

Tykwer agrees that his work is made easier by the fact that he has built up a "family" around him to make his films. First and foremost are producer Stefan Arndt, who produced his feature debut Deadly Maria in 1993 and with whom he founded the production company X-Filme Creative Pool with fellow filmmakers Wolfgang Becker and Dani Levy in 1994, and X-Filme's second producer Maria Köpf.

In addition, he always works with the same director of photography Frank Griebe and is now in the editing suite for The Princess and the Warrior with Mathilde Bonnefoy who won the German Film Award last year for her editing of Run Lola Run.

"This family character of our productions means that when you start a new project, you can start exactly at the point where you left off. It's all about intuition because often one doesn't have to exchange words. We have experienced so much together that one get's a feel for what the other person is thinking".

Tom Tykwer spoke with Martin Blaney

Article from: http://www.german-cinema.de/magazine/2000/01/germdirect/tykwer.html

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