Whatever Lola Wants
A restored digital edition of Run Lola Run is in theaters; I spoke to Tom Tykwer before its 1998 release.
A twenty-fifth anniversary 4K digital restoration of Tom Tykwer’s third feature races into theaters as the fourth season of his titanic “Babylon Berlin” series arrives for American streaming.
Run Lola Run set the German filmmaker’s international career in motion in 1998; I interviewed the writer-director-composer for a Filmmaker magazine cover story.
Of his film’s insistent, propulsive musical pulse: “We had Underworld laying under some sequences when we were editing. We decided on some beats-per-minute. Most of the film is done in 120 beats per minute, but some of it is at 140 bpm. We just tried to find music with that speed. Underworld has this nice idea of writing the bpm on the records! So I took Underworld just because I knew how it went. That was so important, for the music to provide the basic level for the editing but not to have editing always on the beat. That is always terrible because it usually makes for stiff editing, it doesn’t give a fluid impression. We did a first edit, went into the music studio, did the first layout of the music, went back into the editing room, then left more or less half of the beats, made it more overlapping and crossing–only for really decisive situations does it make sense to be on the beat. It was as back-and-forth from editing to music studio. I wanted it to feel like a completely one-unit experience. It’s all intertwined, the music, sound, visuals, like opera. One opera piece is in three acts. That’s why it’s three acts.”
Tykwer on simplifying: “With any kind of art, you always start from a very complicated idea—’Oh my God, it’s so complicated to tell what I want to tell. It’s so incredibly interesting that I will never succeed to bring it all to the film’—but the longer you work on it, the more you find that the best way to express all this complicated stuff is to get simpler. Which is the same with sculpture and painting. It’s very often that you come to very simple things that are still so complex and fascinating. I feel that this is the most complex film I’ve done, the densest. In my movie Wintersleepers, in the very beginning you immediately know there are lots of levels but you also immediately know this is not going to be easy. With Lola, you are invited to join something that seems easy to join, it’s like playing a game.:
Whenever I’ve run into Tykwer since that first encounter, he was kind enough to point out that it was his first English-language cover story! The complete interview, edited by Scott Macaulay, is linked here.