Run Lola Run

Germany
Directed by Tom Twyker
Written by Tom Twyker

CAST.....

Franka Potente..... Lola
Moritz Bleibtreu..... Manni
Herbert Knaup..... Lola's Father
Joachim Krol..... Tramp

If a butterfly flaps its wings in China, I think the saying goes, there's a tidal wave in the Pacific. That's nonsense -- the free will action of a creature cannot cause a natural scientific event. But the point is a good one -- small, seemingly insignificant actions can have immeasurable consequences. One possible situation: A builder standing on a roof crouches down to get his cigarettes, moving out of the way of the sunlight from the vantage point of a guy on the street. Dazzled, the guy spins round, noticing a beautiful woman resembling an ex-girlfriend. Walking away, he begins to think about how long it's been since he got laid. That night, he determines to remedy the situation, rushes into a foolish one night stand and contracts HIV.
Hey, it seems farfetched, but it's possible. I used to consider things like this a lot when I was a kid, and now, in "Run Lola Run", I've seen a movie obsessed with the same principle. It doesn't contain my ingenious builder example, but examines three wildly different directions for its initial set-up to go in, as the eponymous Lola (Franke Potente) is telephoned at 11:40am and told to find 100, 000 Deutsche Marks in 20 minutes.
The caller is her boyfriend Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), a small-time crook who has screwed up a cash delivery to one of the big boys, letting his package fall into the hands of a subway tramp. If help doesn't arrive by the midday deadline, Manni, who is armed with an automatic pistol, will hold up the supermarket across the street from the telephone booth.
The sexy Lola, who has fiery red hair, green pants and a wonderfully tight grey top, runs through the streets of Berlin looking like Lara Croft, in an attempt to get money from her father (Herbert Knaup) and find her beloved on time. Brilliantly edited little asides show us the mood the sight of her leaves on people, and the chain of events this leads to in their lives. We're shown alternatives, too, presumably the result of something else affecting the people in question after they see Lola.
One comic subplot involves an extra-marital affair Lola's father has entered into, and how differently it could turn out, depending on how honest the bank manager and his mistress are with each other. We also see three resolutions to the main plot -- tragic consequences for Lola, tragic consequences for Manni and finally, of course, a miraculous happy ending. It all ends with a cleverly simple sound effect that poses the question of what will happen next to all the people we've seen. What other little things could affect their lives?
That's how "Run Lola Run" works -- it doesn't have answers, it is simply amused by questions and possibilities. It can't get enough of this fascinating idea that great tangents in life can be caused or avoided if we bat our eyelids, or walk a little slower or faster, or get up a little earlier, or go back to the corner shop for some more chewing gum. To mirror the way the mind processes such ideas, the movie travels at the same pace as Lola's frantic running, displaying enough energy to make "Election" seem like German expressionism. It's a hypnotic package: Director Tom Twyker darts from furiously-cut straight action to animation, slow-motion, black-and-white, split-screen, montage and video -- as Roger Ebert notes, he throws every trick in the book at us, then the book, then himself.
"Run Lola Run" is a great film, exciting to watch and fun to consider. Critics lamenting how we never get to know much about the personalities of the characters are missing the point. No, we don't discover what Lola and Manni are like, but the film is about how things could be. Their personalities could have been formed, or could be changed, by something as small as a butterfly flapping its wings. Or a builder crouching down for his cigarettes.

COPYRIGHT© 1999 Ian Waldron-Mantgani

Tom Tykwer
(Writer/Director)

Director's Statement
Tom Tykwer

I always start with the image. I get an image in my head and I start wanting to get it moving, to build a story around it and then make a film out of it. In Run Lola Run it was a woman running. I think the idea of making a dynamic film is a primal urge for filmmakers. That's why action films are so popular: because film can get across the sense of speed. There's something dynamic, something explosive about film. Film can also transport emotions. A running person brings it all together, explosive dynamics and emotion, because it's when people move that express things: despair, happiness, or whatever. I wanted Run Lola Run to grab the viewers and drag them along, to give them a roller-coaster ride. I wanted the sheer, unadorned pleasure of speed. A wild chase with consequences.

In looking at Run Lola Run, my previous films (Deadly Maria, Winter Sleeper), are totally different, but I keep recognizing myself in all of them. Certain elements that interest me keep resurfacing. Time, for instance, and the way time gets manipulated. The dramatic principle of creating time is, I feel, one of the most interesting aspects of filmmaking. You can relate what happens in twenty minutes or in twenty years.

Run Lola Run is for me a continuous journey -- whereby the most important thing is that the viewer feels that Lola really has lived through the various possibilities we show in the film. And not only the last twenty minutes. That the audience transcends the timespan emotionally and really starts sympathizing with Lola as the film progresses -- and ends up wanting her to be finally rewarded for everything she has to go through -- Manni's death, as well as her own.

The film was storyboarded very precisely because so many details were involved. Where exactly was each person standing in each scene? How does the camera only show what's important and nothing else? On top of that, of course, we're also telling a story that is played out during a particular interval of time on the same day. That means that the weather and the light both have to be identical. One really crazy aspect was all the clocks that keep coming into shots everywhere -- we spent hours discussing wether it was seven minutes or six in some scenes. The continuity people really worked overtime on this one.

The music for Run Lola Run was also very important to me. I think, write and cut in a very musical way -- so it was obvious that I'd want to take care of the soundtrack, too. I worked on the music with Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil. The very idea of anyone else composing music for any film of mine is like a nightmare to me. The wrong music can screw up a film completely. In a film, music intensifies everything. I mean, just imagine Once Upon a Time in the West without the music! Music plus images equals film. I also didn't want any standard techno music through the film. With the soundtrack to Run Lola Run, I think we've made a pop album for the first time, a real dance record.

During editing the important thing for me was timing, because the film is really fast-moving and you have to have time, and also allow the audience time to make sense of what they've seen. Creatively speaking, the biggest challenge was not making the leaps ahead in time appear like breaks in the action, but to make all the transitions flow into each other so that the viewers would move from scene to scene with their emotional commitment unimpaired. The time-space continuum gets taken right off its hinges without anyone really noticing -- but at the same time it was important not to lose the breathless, driving edge to everything or to allow it to appear as an end in and of itself.

To accomplish this we followed a consistent pattern: each level has its own "look." The sequences with Lola and Manni are shot on 35mm. The others, where Lola and Manni are not involved, were shot on video -- in kind of a synthetic, artificial world. That places Lola and Manni at the center of their world, in which miracles can happen just like in the movies. The film image is true, and the others are untrue, as it were. So when Lola runs through a video image, it becomes film.

It's a new kind of film, I think, but only externally. The means don't change the way in which a story is told. It still functions according to the structural principles used back in classical drama. We have a great and passionate love, we have a clear action principle, and we have a mission that goes right through the film. The story of Run Lola Run is pretty simple: you have twenty minutes to come up with 100,000 marks and run through the city to rescue your true love. The starter message for a film doesn't get much clearer than that.

What happens is absolutely universal as far as both theme and content are concerned. It is this woman's passion alone that brings down the rigid rules and regulations of the world surrounding her. Love can move mountains, and does. Over and above all the action, the central driving force of this film is romance. The film could be just as easily be set in Peking, Helsinki or New York, the only thing that would change is the scenery, not the emotional dimension. I think everyone, truly everyone, can identify with Lola.

What is ordained is master of the gods and thee.

Euripides

Once upon a time, it is said, there lived in Isfahan a young man who spent his days as servant to a wealthy merchant. On a fine morning the young man rode to market, carefree and with his purse jingling with coins from the merchant's coffers to buy meat and fruit and wine; and there in the market-place he saw Death, who beckoned to him as though about to speak.
In terror the young man turned his horse about and fled, taking the road that led to Samara. By nightfall, filthy and exhausted, he had reached an inn there, and with the merchant's money procured a room, and collapsed upon the bed with mingled fatigue and relief, for it seemed he had outwitted' Death.
But in the middle of the night there came a knock at the chamber door, and in the doorway stood Death, smiling affably. 'How come you to be here?' demanded the young man, white-faced and trembling; 'I saw you only this morning in the market-place in Isfahan.'
And Death replied: 'Why, I have come to collect you, as it is written. For when I saw you this morning in the market-place in Isfahan, I tried to say that you and I had an appointment tonight in Samara. But you would not let me speak, and only ran away.'

This is a short, sweet folktale, and one might read many themes into it. But among its deceptively simple lines is surely embedded a comment about fate: its irrevocability and yet, paradoxically, its dependence upon the will of man for its fruition.
Such a tale, because it is paradoxical, invites all manner of philosophical and metaphysical speculation, of the sort with which sensible people do not occupy themselves.

For example: If the servant had stayed and spoken with Death, would he have still had to die in Samara?
What if he had taken another road?
Could he have taken another road?
If not, then what power, inner or outer, directed him to the appointed place?
What if, like the knight in Bergmann's The Seventh Seal, he had challenged Death?
Or, in short, that queer connudrum which the East has always treated with such subtlety, yet which the West has persisted in reducing to an either or black and white choice : are we fated or are we free?