Perhaps the worldwide success of "Run Lola Run" was also a bit of a misunderstanding. The film is incredibly fast, a visual adventure. As a love story, it falls somewhat short of the director's passion for technical ideas and their brilliant execution. How Berlin becomes the main character, in the year nine after the wall came down, is impressive. How biographies, episodes, and marginal phenomena are picked up during the breathless run through the big city and timed in seconds is nothing short of sensational. But this is not typical for Tom Tykwer. "Run Lola Run" was an experiment that – similar to Godard's "Breathless" – became a mass success and a testament to German cinema creativity.
Tykwer, born in 1965 in Wuppertal, worked as a projectionist in his youth. Later, he ran a cinema in Berlin, where he lives today. Tom Tykwer has fallen in love with cinema and, as a cinephile, is a careful storyteller. The melodrama is his form of expression, a genre that typically cannot handle haste and constant tension. But the astonishing element is common to all his films: as dramatic twists, as camera shots, through physical naturalness or emotional solemnity. After two short films, Tykwer directed his feature film debut "Deadly Maria" in 1993, followed by "Winter Sleepers" three years later. In between, he founded the production company "X Filme Creative Pool" with Stefan Arndt, Wolfgang Becker ("Life is a Construction Site"), and Dani Levy ("Everything on Sugar"), which has become one of Germany's most successful production addresses.
Tykwer's originality was evident from the very beginning, also because he initially drew heavily on the citation machine of cinema. Themes and motives were immediately established: sky-high yearning (as in his enchantingly beautiful film "Heaven"); obsession (as in his adaptation of Patrick Süskind's "Perfume"), and love as a life-saving measure and redemptive force (as in his darkly romantic, dream story "The Warrior and the Empress" that brings Wuppertal to light, starring Franka Potente and Benno Fürmann). Ten years later, in 2010, he made another German film based on his own screenplay: "Three", a Berlin love story in a triangle of two men and one woman, as a tragicomic chronicle of the state of affairs in the new millennium.
The two-time German Film Award winner Tom Tykwer has what it takes to be a Hollywood director, as he has already become with the worldwide agent-thriller "The International" and "A Hologram for the King" with Tom Hanks. This connects him with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, with whom he also shares a taste for grand, intelligent emotional cinema. The late producer Bernd Eichinger, for whom Tykwer adapted "Perfume", saw in him an "extremely innovative director" who builds on "a classic film language". With the television production "Babylon Berlin" (since 2017), he is conquering the new series format while also connecting to film history, from Fritz Lang and Doctor Mabuse to Sally Bowles, the Kit Kat Club, and the dance on the volcano.
Tykwer, who is also a film composer and an excellent writer, once spoke in a lecture about his favorite films that provided a glimpse behind the mirror. Films that promote self- and reality reflection: "I call them the films of the analytical dreamers".
