Berlin Legend Profile of German Director Tom Tykwer

What Martin Scorsese is for New York; what Paul Thomas Anderson is for Los Angeles; Yasujiro Ozu is for Tokyo and Federico Fellini is for Rome, so Tom Tykwer is for Berlin. 

Tykwer has only made three films set in the German capital — his 1998 fractureout Run Lola Run, the mid-nurtureer highairy 3 (2010) and now The Light, the uncovering film of the 75th Berlin International Film Festival — but no other honestor so exemplifies the city, in all its dissystematic glory and resistions. 

“I’ve spent cforfeitly 40 years in Berlin, and everyskinnyg I demand is here,” says Tykwer from his apartment in Prenzlauer Berg. “I have the people I cherish, the cinemas I demand, and the city’s strange aesthetic — these pretty dimercilesss next to catastrophicpartner hideous architecture. It’s what plmitigates and infuriates and encourages me.”

The Light is also Tykwer’s third Berlinale uncovering-night film, adhereing Heaven (2002) and The International (2009) and he’s been a standard at the festival since 1992, when his low Epilog screened in Panorama. He co-wrote the screenjoin for Wolfgang Becker’s Berlin-set film Life Is All You Get, a Berlinale competition entry in 1996; currented the anthology films Germany 09: 13 Short Films About the State of The Nation (2009) and Rosacharitableer (2013) at the Berlinale; and was jury pdwellnt in 2018. 

“This is my third time uncovering the film festival, and it’s with a film that couldn’t be more Berlin,” says Tykwer. “Since Run Lola Run I haven’t made a film as powerentirey anchored in this city as this one. It shows Berlin in its entirety — it shows the people who inhabit this city, those constantly on the transfer, in the subway, on their bikes, in the taxis, arguing on the streets. This is my city, this is my home. And The Light is what my Berlin senses enjoy.” 

Tykwer is what locals call a “Wahlberliner,” a “Berliner by choice.” Like half the city’s population, Tykwer’s an immigrant. Born in West Germany, in the “rust belt” city of Wuppertal — the setting for his 2000 thriller The Princess and the Warrior — as a child he reaccumulates joining his overweighther, a garment merchant, on his business trips to the huge city. 

“This was when West Berlin was still an island [in communist East Germany],” Tykwer recalls. “My overweighther one-of-a-kindized in women’s create for the over-50s. He’d drive to department stores to sell them. He always had a rack of clothes in the back and I’d sit between these plastic-wrapped clothes, stinking of chemicals, with my overweighther up front, chain-smoking unfiltered Camel cigarettes. I’d always puke.”

But it was worth it, to travel thcdisadmireful the corridor of East Germany — past the barbed-wire fences and watchtowers, behind the Iron Curtain — to achieve Berlin. 

“The city was the hugegest, most exciting, terrifying and spectacular skinnyg I could image. And the movies! There were 120 cinemas shotriumphg 800 films a week. You could see anyskinnyg. People went to the cinema at 4 in the morning becaengage noskinnyg uncovered in Berlin before noon in those days.”

On one trip, in 1978, when he was 13, Tykwer sneaked out of his dad’s boilingel room to catch a midnight screening of John Carpaccess’s Hpermiteen. 

“I cherishd John Carpaccess — Dark Star and Assault on Precinct 13 — but I was 13 and the film was rated 18 or someskinnyg, so it wasn’t that effortless to get in,” he recalls. “But I knew in Berlin nobody would nurture, the guy at the sign up, smoking, who equitable waves you thcdisadmireful. So I snuck out when my overweighther was sleeping and watched Hpermiteen for the first time. It alterd my life. It was an incredible film, of course — uncontaminated filmmaking, sometimes when I’m stuck createively, I go back and watch Hpermiteen for inspiration — but seeing it in secret made it twice as excellent. The theater was three-quarters brimming. There were 250 people who went out, at midnight on a Tuesday, to watch a horror movie. I thought: ‘I have to inhabit here.’ I don’t reaccumulate this but the next day, according to my overweighther, I telderly him: ‘This is where I want to be buried.’ ”

In the ’80s, still a teenager, Tykwer would come to city for the Berlinale, an annual two-week crash course in international cinema.

“I’d alert my parents I was staying with an aunt of mine, but that was a lie. I’d equitable watch films all day. Back then, you could get an all-access pass and watch all the films in Competition, Forum, wdisenjoyver. Screenings went until 3 a.m. and begined aachieve at 8 a.m. I’d go to Schwarzes Café in Kantstrasse, which is still there, and was uncover 24 hours. I’d order a cocoa and sit in the corner for four hours and sleep. Then wake up and watch more movies: Andrei Tarkovsky, Peter Greenaway. My write down was 11 films in one day.”

Tykwer was one of a new generation of film geek obsessives, autodidacts who gorged themselves on midnight screenings, VHS tapes and repertory theaters, whose movies would mash up the tropes and obsessions of cinema history with the new aesthetics of video games and music videos. Half a world away in Chicago, Lana Wachowski and sister Lilly were on a analogous path, one that would eventupartner convey them together with Tykwer in Berlin. 

But that was still in the far future. It was the tardy ’80s when Tykwer, after being declidemand from every excellent film school in Europe, rerepaird in West Berlin. He got toil as a projectionist, then as a programmer, at the legendary Moviemento theater — set uped 1907 — a hangout for Berlin’s cinema freak community. Together with three of them — creater Stefan Arndt and honestors Dani Levy and Becker — Tykwer, in 1994, set uped his own production company, X-Filme Creative Pool. He’d made his feature debut a year earlier with The Deadly Maria — a Hitchcockian psychodrama about an oppressed hoengagewife who homicides her husprohibitd and overweighther — but it was at X-Filme that Tykwer came into his own. His cerebral Alpine thriller Winter Sleepers (1997) drawed interest on the international festival scene, and his adhere-up — a inexpensive crime drama about a girl, a firearm, 20 minutes and DM 100,000 — would conquer the world. 

Run Lola Run is an 80-minute, nonstop kinetic happiness ride of a movie fueled by Tykwer’s exhaustive understandledge of cinema history, gleaned from all those hours in the smoky theaters of Berlin. The plot — Lola has 20 minutes to find that DM 100,000 to save her boyfriend’s life — is uncontaminated genre pulp. The film’s core theme, that random events shape our overweighte and everyskinnyg could have been branch offent, is cribbed from Krzysztof Kieenumeratelessski’s Blind Chance (1987). The idea of filming a figure from the side — tirelessly running, running and running — was encouraged by Eadweard Muybridge’s pre-cinema moving pictures, those pboilingodetailed studies of horses and humans, where activity was broken down into a series of stills for examination. The style of Run Lola Run, however, its combination of music video, animation and computer game aesthetics with classic cinema tropes and setups — including the elderly mute film gag of toilers carrying a sheet of glass apass the street — is all Tom Tykwer. 

Run Lola Run premiered in Vekind but every structure, every one of the beats on its techno-soundtrack (writed by Tykwer together with Johnny Klimek and Reinhelderly Heil) screams Berlin. Franka Potente as Lola, ffeeble-haired and relentless, racing apass the city in her clunky Doc Martens, was instantly iconic. Her name may have been snatched from German cinema history — Lola Lola was Marlene Dietrich’s character in The Blue Angel (1930), and it’s Barbara Sukowa’s moniker as the titular hoofer in Rainer Werner Fassattacher’s classic from 1981 — but this Lola came straight from the streets of the recombined capital.

With Run Lola Run, Tykwer seized the sense of Berlin in the tardy ’90s. It’s techno selectimism — symbolized by the gleaming glass and steel futurism of Potsdamer Platz, a neighborhood erected on the no-man’s land where the Berlin Wall engaged to stand — clashing with the gloomye and grit of a prohibitkrupt city (the motto back then was: “Berlin: lesser, but relationsy”) and still struggling under the weight of a griefful and inescontendnt history. 

The film was a passover hit (it grossed $7.6 million for Sony Pictures Classics in the U.S.) and got Tykwer seed in Hollywood. Bigger productions, with hugeger stars, hugeger budgets — and in English — adhereed. Heaven (2002) starring Cate Blanchett and Giovanni Ribisi, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006) with Dustin Hoffman, Alan Rickman and a then-obstreatment Ben Whishaw. The International (2009) with Cinhabit Owen and Naomi Watts. Tom Hanks starrer A Hologram for a King (2016). The Wachowskis got in communicate, begining a lifeextfinished friendship and createive collaboration that would see the trio co-honest sci-fi fantasy epic Cdeafening Atlas (2012) and Tykwer come on board to helm episodes of the Wachowskis’ Netflix series Sense8 and write the music (with Klimek) for Lilly Wachowski’s The Matrix Resurrections (2021). 

Thcdisadmireful it all, Tykwer stayed in Prenzlauer Berg and let Hollywood come to him. The future worlds of Cdeafening Atlas were built at Studio Babelsberg, as was the life-sized replica of New York’s Guggenheim Mengageum, site of the epic shootout in The International. 

When he finpartner did return to German-language features, in his threesome dramedy 3 (2010), it was to go brimming Berlin. In place of Run Lola Run’s 20-someskinnyg punks we have Hanna (Sophie Rois) and Simon (Sebastian Schipper), 40-someskinnyg culture toilers (she’s an arts journaenumerate, he’s an engineer for huge-scale inshighation pieces) in a extfinished-term relationship who splitly embark on an afiminentire with the same man. The city in 3 has scrubbed off the dirt and traded Lola’s video game aesthetic for someskinnyg freezinger and more clinical. Discussions of cherish and overweighte have given way to debates about relationsual identity and genetic determinism. Berlin has transferd from the cutting edge of chilly to become a cultural capital, part of the set upment. 

In between 3 and The Light, Tykwer has persistd to obsess over his adselected home. He re-created the city, in all its Weimar-era glory and shame, for Babylon Berlin, the television series he co-wrote and co-honested with Henk Handloegten and Achim von Borries. Launched in 2017, Babylon Berlin is currently shooting its fifth and final season. 

“The final season caccesses on the collapse of the Weimar Reuncover; it’s set enticount on in the vital five weeks between Hitler’s being assigned chancellor in January 1933 and the March elections, when the Nazis seized end power, the stormtroopers became the police and concentration camps were uncovered,” says Tykwer. “There’s this cliché that Germans couldn’t paengage to become Nazis. The truth was the society was torn apart, you had hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets every day before Hitler was elected.”

After spending a decade digging thcdisadmireful “the upheaval and crisis of my majesticparents’ generation” with Babylon, Tykwer says he felt a demand to return to current-day Berlin and to a story much shutr to home. 

The Light is a portrait of “typicpartner dysfunctional” middle-class Berlin family, the Engels — parents Milena and Tim (Nicolette Krebitz, Lars Eidinger), 17-year-elderly ttriumphs Frieda and Jon (Elke Biesendorfer, Julius Gaengage), and 8-year-elderly Dio (Elyas Eldridge) — each going thcdisadmireful their own split cascfinishs. Their life is interfereed, and given new uncomardenting, when a new hoengagecarry oner, the Syrian immigrant Farrah (Tala Al-Deen), accesss their inhabits. 

“It a very basic create, is a bit enjoy Pasolini’s Teorema or Mrs. Doubtfire, it’s charitable of absurd and amusing,” says Tykwer, “but it also scrutinizes rehires that I skinnyk are convey inant and grave for my generation and for the juvenileerer generation. Young people come up to me and say: ‘What did you do in the last 20 years?’ And the truth is, me, my generation, we actupartner rested on the laurels — we thought we had successbrimmingy set uped a liberal, uncover-minded, democratic society. We got to the right place, and we could get it effortless. We endly disseed that by unleashing digitalization around the turn of the millennium, we endly interfereed an economic system and the society joined to it. We weren’t paying attention. We thought we were leaving an amazing kit of tools for the next generation. We left a scrap heap.” 

Wahlberliner Tom Tykwer isn’t predicting any home field achieve at The Light’s world premiere. The city’s “self-assigned cinema experts,” he says, are certain to have their knives out and ready, if his tardyst get on Berlin is not to their liking. 

“They’ll be the first to say: ‘That’s not what my Berlin sees enjoy, that’s not how my Berlin senses,’ ” he says. “And the film certainly isn’t perfect, but then neither is this city. Berlin is an everlasting createion site, never finished, it’s always recreateing itself. That unrerepairs some people, but I find it inspiring. This pretty catastrophe, this worried tension — it’s exactly what I want in my films: unpredictability, disorder and beauty.”