TYKWER'S RUN By Tom Mes and Joep Vermaat Part 1, 2, 3 JV: That seems to be a theme in your films. It's all about perception of the way time evolves. Is that something you consciously put in? TT: Yes, it seems so. The other film which was also released here, Die Tödliche Maria, also deals with this subject of time ruling not only our perception, but really our daily life. Film of course is very much centered on the idea of time generally, because film itself is a way to... what's the word - die Zeit anhalten, die Zeit festhalten - you put it in a box and it stays still. We can still see Clark Gable, although he's already a rotting pile of ashes, you know (laughs). But we can look at him and he looks great. For us, that is one of the most fascinating things about why we go to see films. Because it seems like you've frozen time, you keep the beauty of people for example, they don't age. On the other hand, I believe that time itself can be ruled in films generally. You can just do everything you like. You can stretch time. Usually what film does is to tell a whole life in ninety minutes, or one week in ninety minutes. Events that take a much longer time you squeeze into ninety minutes. So I thought it would be interesting, especially in Lola, to stretch time out and tell twenty minutes in one and a half hours and see what happens then. You stretch it out and suddenly you see all these little spaces in between, you can look into small channels in this stretched time period. Which allowed me to follow different lines of the story, to say "What's this person doing by the way?" or "What's happening to that one?". And then you just follow this life for a moment. I love the contradiction. You're only able to do this in movies because in real life it always has the same rhythm, a second stays a second, a minute stays a minute. We can't help it, we can't go back in time, unless we have the machine that Michael J. Fox has (laughs). And that's amazing. We can't do it, but in film we can do it just like that, because editing allows us to. So we can decide to tell twenty minutes in one and a half hours but a whole life in three seconds. I really wanted to take this idea to the absolute max. Lola is also very much a film about the possibilities of time manipulations and speed changes in film generally. I think you can't tell a life faster than we did. That's even faster than any Hong Kong film (laughs). JV: And you take it in so fast too, because in five seconds you know about this person's whole life. TT: Of course we had to think about it a lot, how we were going to tell this. The images had to be very clear, you cannot use abstract images. You have to be really clear, like if somebody dies you just show the cross on the grave. Then you really understand he's dead (laughs). Or if you have an accident, you really show the blood, or with an operation, you really show the operation up close. It has to be explicit. That's obvious, but it was still a big task. In the editing I loved it, to find out how fast you can go and how short can you make it and still have people follow it. That's also an experience that I realised. Everybody told me if this had been done in the sixties, nobody would have followed. It just has to do with the fact that our experience and the we way take in images is much faster. Due to Hong Kong films, due to MTV of course. But the speed of films generally, the editing is speeded up incredibly. Sometimes in a very interesting way, sometimes in a very stupid way, I feel. My favourite anti-example is Armageddon. The film is completely destroyed by editing. They always cut, all the time. People are just talking like we are and still it's cut, cut, cut. And you think "Why the editing, they're just talking? Why can't I see a face just for a while?". It's horrible. They just feel that it's modern, but they don't understand what the idea behind editing is. You can focus on things, but they don't focus. They just adapt this idea of MTV, of these video clips. There are good videos and bad videos and the good videos really care for the song they are about and they really try to find the right images and the right expression of the song. They go to create a small piece of art for themselves. Then the bad ones, and there are of course much more of them, they're just commercials to make the viewer buy the record. They could just show a sign saying "Buy the record" all the time, because the idea is just to keep your eyes' attention there, so they just show exploding bombs, bananas, tits, everything behind each other. In a very fast sequence so you can't move your eyes away from it. That's why you stick to the music and then the next day you hear it in the record store and you say "Oh, somehow I'm supposed to buy this". I hate that because there is no inspiring interaction between me and the product, it's just intelligent commercial work. I think Armageddon and films like that just adapt this attitude and do not understand that we don't really care for seeing this kind of stuff. We go to see it again because it has this event structure, this rollercoaster feeling. I love rollercoaster movies, but for me that's the difference between people who go for it really out of passion, like Jackie Chan is doing - with Jackie Chan you always feel the passion in the films, that's making them so sympathetic, that's why you like watching it - and these technical, incredible films where you don't feel any joy behind it. Where you just feel they had the money and just wanted to blow your mind and afterwards you feel exhausted, you feel empty. When I see Jackie Chan, I feel really delighted, because I feel this kind of energy, this kind of positive energy. It says yes to very positive elements in life, although it's very violent. He's not into killing people. There's never any blood in it. That's the difference between these rollercoaster movies of today and the good films from Spielberg for instance. You go to see the good Spielberg action films, he's done better and worse, but in the good action films you can see he really likes them himself and he really goes for his personal anxieties and fears and that's why they're really suspenseful. He's afraid of what he's showing himself. You always realise whether the maker behind a film is involved in this kind of manner or not. Or whether someone is just going through the recipe of "Oh, the kids like this" or "The kids will be afraid of it". You can feel that they're lying. Of course in Armageddon you get to see some amazing effects and so on, but imagine seeing Armageddon every week, you'd get really frustrated. Still, it frustrated me that it went so well, that it was such a big success. I understand why it did so well, it had an all-star cast, the effects were really amazing. Like with Independence Day, it was amazing how it looked although it was really stupid. You didn't care, it was so amazing so you go to see it. I really don't know anyone who saw Independence Day for example and thought it was really a good film. Everybody said it was crazy or exciting and nobody really talked about it. Everybody just went to see it. JV: Are those the kind of movies that are remembered in two years time? TT: I don't think so. Maybe the very big ones. Independence Day left some kind of impact, just because of the size of the spaceships. You'd never seen those kinds of big spaceships before. Twelve year old kids are going to see this now, for them it's the first time seeing films like that on a big screen, because they only saw Star Wars on video. For me, I was never so infected by Star Wars. When it came out I was twelve. I went there and I remember I saw it once and two months later Close Encounters came out - which I personally think is a much better film - and I saw that one about fifteen times in that period when it came out. Of course it was great because it has interesting characters, Richard Dreyfuss' character is so amazing, but I remember I was very impressed by this big ship which comes from behind the mountain and the size. Size mattered at that moment (laughs). I was really impressed. It was the same effect with Independence Day. Kids, twelve year olds, will remember it as being very important to them in their youth because it was so enormously big. JV: But Star Wars had some big ships. TT: Yes, but you didn't see them in comparison to anything. They were only in space. You knew it was big, but it didn't feel so big. Just the idea of a ship as big as Los Angeles, that's very frightening. I don't know why we're talking about American films. (everyone laughs) We're in Europe, we're in Rotterdam, we're having a talk about a European film, a German movie (laughs). JV: But you use special effects in your films. TT: I like special effects. JV: In Winterschläfer the end shot of the guy falling down, that was pretty amazing. TT: What special effect do you mean? JV: That you are flying over with a plane while the guy is falling down and down. TT: That was no special effect. That was real, the guy was jumping. Lots of people thought it was done with blue screen or some type of trick. It was real. And he had to jump thirteen times, the poor guy. It's really a difficult thing he did. It's amazing to do, fun to do. JV: It seems like you had a pretty big budget to do that movie. TT: Action is not that expensive, really, unless you do big explosions or something. Because you have a small unit usually, a second unit that goes without sound, you have no expensive actors, you just go with stunt people and some technicians. It's a really nice way of working, because you're a really concentrated, small crew. So it's not so expensive doing action. It's much more expensive to do big shots with actors and lots of extras and everything like that. Wintersleepers was much more expensive than Lola was. Lola was like three million marks, which is about three million guilders. Wintersleepers was more like five million, 4.8 or something. Because it was shot in snow. It was horrible to shoot. Being on a mountain with sixty people waiting for you to say something and you don't even know where the wind is blowing. JV: But it looks very beautiful because of the snow. TT: Of course, but it was horrible to shoot. The snow is never where you want it to be. It's always like - you want to shoot in that direction, but it's all green there and the snow is behind you. And then you say "Let's put the snow from there to there" and you take one hundred trucks, take the snow, put it over there (laughs). That's really true, you can go crazy about it. And then when you really need some bad weather, you just have bright sun. When you really need the sun, you have snowstorms. We even had a production manager being hit by lightning. But he survived. The shoot was more exhausting than Lola, although Lola really looked much more exhausting to shoot. The main technical problem with Lola was how to keep up with her running. Because she was so fast and it's really not easy to run after a person who is really running, to keep up with the camera. You have to have all this technical stuff and sometimes even light and put it on a small vehicle that's really fast. If you want to stay close with the character, stay in focus and keep up with the camera. The main thing you have to solve is to get the characters across. Once the character is established and you really believe it and you follow her and you like her and you identify with her as a person, then the technical stuff is minor. Because if you don't care for her, all the technical stuff doesn't matter. Nobody will be interested in her. The reason why the film works is only due to the acting of the two persons in the beginning. That phone conversation works so well. For an actor, that's pretty hard because they have so little time to establish their character, to get emotionalised about them, because you just have one phone call and then it goes off, and you have no time to lose. Other films take half an hour to establish characters and everything, so I wanted them to be really strong in this scene. So what we did was we shot a whole day only on her on the telephone and a whole day only on him. We really took time for it, rehearsed it a lot. We also had the other actor actually on the phone. We didn't just have somebody read out the lines, it was really the actors, acting, on the phone. JV: The guy looks like he's really panicking. TT: Yeah. He was, he's a good actor (laughs). Go to part 3