interview page 1 | e-mail Chris Neumer
TOM TYKWER: You should have included Rachel Hurd-Wood in this article on rising actresses.
CHRIS NEUMER: Had I seen the movie earlier, she would have been a good fit.
TOM TYKWER: I was kidding.
CHRIS NEUMER: Wait, kidding? She would have fit in well, wouldn’t she?
TOM TYKWER: (clears his throat) Hmmm… Did you like that film, 11:14?
CHRIS NEUMER: I did.
TOM TYKWER: A little show off-y for me.
CHRIS NEUMER: Good, I can jump in on that note. Like most Americans, I first learned about you with Run Lola Run. A lot of people see flashy, stylish action on screen and assume that the project and director don’t have substance. You have somehow managed to avoid this label, despite the fact that you are one of the best flashy directors around. Do you make a conscience effort not to be too gimmicky or to avoid certain styles so as not to go completely over the top?
TOM TYKWER: It’s a constant choice not to be gimmicky. I think really, usually, it’s about how seriously you are connected with your material. If you believe in it and you can relate it to your own subjective vision of the film that helps. It also helps when it can be driven by the characters. I think that’s the main thing is to find a film that is driven by the characters. If it is, nothing can ever make that gimmicky. Every important aesthetic decision you make has to be related to the protagonist and as long as that is working, it rarely feels gimmicky. Films become gimmicky when you feel that the filmmaker loves a particular idea so much that it’s pushed into the movie even though it doesn’t represent anybody’s perception or emotion and only the filmmaker thinks it’s a good idea.
CHRIS NEUMER: During the late 90s and early 2000s, Bruckheimer would take a lot of first time video directors and put them to work on his films. There’d be a lot of cutting, helicopter shots, crane shots–
TOM TYKWER: Not so much my cup of tea.
CHRIS NEUMER: Granted. Rightfully so, but with the emphasis on that, it sort of initiated people into thinking directors who use a lot of cuts and speed ramps choose flash over quality. Since your films are flashy, but they also have substance, how have you avoided all the negative comments and perceptions?
TOM TYKWER: I think it’s really trying not to use effects for their own sake but to get to ideas about the characters through how people in the movie perceive the situation. Run Lola Run is frenetic and hysterical and manic and passionate. All the ideas had to do with fantasy and speed. They all had to do with the girl. She is under extreme pressure and her mind is racing. Because we try to slip into her mind, the film is racing and the film’s imagery is racing.
CHRIS NEUMER: So if you were stuck with the script for something like Con Air, it might be a little tougher for you?
TOM TYKWER: There’s no way I could have done that. I would have been a really bad director. I would have totally messed it up. I respect [that style] as a way of filmmaking… It’s a certain way to approach the craft, but I don’t care for it much.
CHRIS NEUMER: Very well tiptoed around. I talked to Fernando Meirelles (read the Fernando Meirelles article), he did The Constant Gardner--
TOM TYKWER: Oh yeah. He is a good example. He goes along with a lot of effects. He works with a lot of effective aesthetic choices, but they’re always super close to the people living in the world of his film, the drama of the world. It’s all so strongly related to the story, I think he’s a genius. The Constant Gardener was an amazing masterpiece. Particularly concerning this: the inner life of the characters through visuals.
CHRIS NEUMER: What I had posed to him was the concept of taking the most formulaic studio comedy–I think I used the example of Reese Witherspoon’s Sweet Home Alabama–and I said, as a fan of filmmaking, that I would have loved to have seen what he would have done with that.
TOM TYKWER: He and his editor might have even taken the material that was there and done something with it that was fun.
CHRIS NEUMER: Almost like a remix, except for film.
TOM TYKWER: Sweet Home Alabama, in itself, is a sweet movie and a good concept for a film.
CHRIS NEUMER: Sure.
TOM TYKWER: If you take the project seriously and you want to explore something about those characters more deeply, it’s a good position to take off from. It always depends on where you try to position your voice and where you position the voice of the characters… and not make them too flat.
CHRIS NEUMER: Or formulaic.
TOM TYKWER: That’s what I meant by flat. One-dimensional. The three dimensions come in from that approach.
CHRIS NEUMER: Perfume doesn’t have that trouble. I enjoyed it. I sat up about half way in and thought, "What the hell is going on? Am I liking this? Where is this going? And what is Dustin Hoffman doing there?" I love that feeling. Not only had I never read the book, but I didn’t even know it was based upon a book, I only knew that it was a film by you and I really enjoyed the journey. When I learned that it was a book, it didn’t surprise me to read that a lot of people considered it unfilmable. My favorite story was the one where Kubrick called the book unfilmable. That’s saying something.
TOM TYKWER: Kubrick didn’t say that. It’s a myth. I don’t know where it comes from.
CHRIS NEUMER: It comes from imdb. That’s where it comes from.
TOM TYKWER: Hmm. I spoke to his producer the other day and he said, "No, he just read the novel. He didn’t want to do it. That’s the whole story." Of all people, Kubrick’s wouldn’t have said so. He’s the one who said, "If it can be thought of, it can be filmed." He did 2001. (laughs) If there’s anything that’s unfilmable, it’s 2001. Perfume is a fantastic film concept. The novel itself is everything that you dream of when you make a film.
CHRIS NEUMER: Now when you say that, I have to ask, what qualities do you dream of?
TOM TYKWER: It’s, of course, a challenge in terms of translating the material into visuals and translating it into cinematic language. You have a fantastic plot, a great story, a story of a quest. Somebody is trying to reach out to create something like a piece of art. At least for him, the art is the perfect smell. You have an incredible resolution, conclusion of the story. Really, it’s the most unexpected and, at the same time, the most climactic idea that you can come up to.
CHRIS NEUMER: Where he’s being torn apart or the execution?
TOM TYKWER: Both. The whole ending. More the execution sequence. Very many stories do not have a great ending; they have great premises, but then they go down hill. It’s like, how can we get out of this really good idea? Let say it was… Aliens! In so many scripts that I’ve read, there’s something really mysterious happening and you get really excited about what’s behind it and then it turns out there’s nothing behind it. There is no real solution. It’s from outer space. This is completely intrinsic to the story/ It’s completely in the story, it comes from the character. It’s his development, his fanaticism, it’s his loss of a relationship to reality. We’re not just witnessing this, we’re partnering with him in this. I found this so amazing: you have a hero, a protagonist who is so controversial and so ambivalent and that makes you feel so strangely uneasy, but you can’t let him go because he is the hero! I loved all these things. And then you have a setting that you’ve never seen before, or hardly ever have. 18th century France! Not the aristocratic world of the upper class. It’s the street life. The reality of how stinky and filthy and nightmarish it was in France is unbelievable. So many things that films haven’t picked up on before. So much to discover.
CHRIS NEUMER: You bring up the concept of an unusual protagonist and I’d recently seen that Derek Luke/Tim Robbins film Catch a Fire–
TOM TYKWER: How is it?
CHRIS NEUMER: It’s okay. But the interesting nature of it–it’s set in South Africa during the time of apartheid–is that the audience is supposed to be cheering for Derek Luke’s character to blow up one of the state run oil facilities to stick it to the man. Tim Robbins is the bad guy because he’s trying to stop Derek Luke. If you twist this around just a little bit and put it in America right now, we’d be all over the lead, we’d call him a terrorist and he’d probably be in Guantanomo right now. Tim Robbins would be the good guy.
TOM TYKWER: Does it make a point about this?
CHRIS NEUMER: Not really. It’s sort of just there. It doesn’t really comment on it.
TOM TYKWER: So it’s not really meant to be provocative on that level.
CHRIS NEUMER: I would argue that it's hard not to be. Especially with the way it mirrors certain things that are going on in America today, I don’t see how you can avoid commenting on it… which is why the film’s only okay. But the hero concept in that–and I know you’ve mentioned Taxi Driver in this context–
TOM TYKWER: When did I do this?
CHRIS NEUMER: In some interview you did with the BBC. You said that he was a fascist who drew the audience along.
TOM TYKWER: Interesting, where did you see that?
CHRIS NEUMER: Online. It was for your Princess and the Warrior tour.
TOM TYKWER: Ah, good, good. Not this one. But Taxi Driver, yes.
CHRIS NEUMER: But it got me thinking what a challenge it must have been for you as the director and co-writer. I mean, how do you take a character who, on paper, is this horribly broken, psychological impaired, awful person who's also a serial killer and make him into someone that the audience can identify with? I was sitting there going, "I don’t want him to be executed."
TOM TYKWER: It worked?
CHRIS NEUMER: It did.
TOM TYKWER: That’s what I was interested in in the movie! You can only make that work if you really care for [the character] as a filmmaker yourself. If you only do it as a funny experiment, it will always stay technical and never work. I really care for the guy and I find his whole struggle very moving. Very touching.
CHRIS NEUMER: Like you might look at Frankenstein and hope he gets the girl?
TOM TYKWER: Uh huh. And with Frankenstein the monster, you have a different perspective: he’s something of a victim. He’s not able to cope with society, he’s the victim of an experiment, he’s something of an outsider who just wants to be accepted. It’s the same here. Grenouille is a nobody who longs to be a somebody. He dies to get some recognition. Being one of those people…
CHRIS NEUMER: Or kills!
TOM TYKWER: But to get it. The more lonely the more desperate we get about it. The more desperate we get, the more we lose the balance of our moral compass.
CHRIS NEUMER: But shifting it back to you, did you sit down with Ben and were talking about going about crafting the character? I’m fascinated by actors who say that they like the subtext of a role or the desperation that the character had. Part of what makes them professional actors is that they can translate that onto film, but part of the thing that makes you a good director is that you’re able to show these things on film. It’s like this is what we’re going to do on set, this is what we’re going to do in post to get this effect. So what I’m asking is, how did you go about doing that? Were there instances you can remember of doing small physical things to bring that sense of desperation along?
TOM TYKWER: I think the biggest thing is to find the right guy. To do the casting right. Cast as long as you can until you’ve got the one person who is able to convey all the ambivalent energy you’re looking for. I was looking for someone who was as innocent and boyish as he comes across dangerous and scary. I was looking for both sides in one physical presence. There’s something feral about Ben.
CHRIS NEUMER: That’s a good way to put it.
TOM TYKWER: You can’t point at it, but it’s there. That’s something I wanted to explore. I also worked with him to find the right animal that he could relate to. We worked with night animals because they walk slowly. Something like a loris, a night monkey, we were watching particular animals to figure out what kind of a presence his character would have. And, of course, there’s the filmmaking and editing and how you make it work. You take over the character’s perspective on the world–it’s a perspective that doesn’t have to do with seeing things at all, he smells them. He goes into rooms and spaces and he keeps his eyes closed. We tried to take it from there and say, "Okay, do it like he does, do it to the camera like he does with the nose. He picks objects and collects them, like a dramatic collector of items and he uses them as if they were notes and then they slowly form a chord and those chords form a composition and you finally get into the wide shots. So we started with the close-ups and details and go to wider shots. The establishing shot that usually comes at the beginning ended up near the end of the scene because that’s the way he was; he got the details first and then got the wider image.
CHRIS NEUMER: Shifting gears, almost completely, that you hadn’t gotten accepted to a lot of filmmaking schools and that the reason for that was because you were young, you were emulating the works of other filmmakers as opposed to using your own vision. You’ve said that when a filmmaker realizes the gap between others’ vision and your own it helped you move along creatively. Now that you’ve progressed along in your career, you’re certainly in a different place than you were even for Run Lola Run, are there other more recent epiphanies that you’ve had about filmmaking?
TOM TYKWER: No, but the thing that has stayed with me as the major aspect of being able to attach myself to material, or write it, is that I have a really substantial subjective force that I identify with. It’s not something that I’m just fascinated by the framing or the surface, the general appeal of something. Perfume, for example, is a period film and I never really considered myself a period filmmaker. I found something in that novel that I’d forgotten about when I read it the first time: there is a character in it who I really cared for and I really like and I know about his trouble. I could really tell the story from his perspective. Then suddenly, the period doesn’t count because it’s not the period that the film is about; it’s about this guy who happens to live in this period. So the period could be used as something that, of course, was interesting to explain why he is what he is, but not so much to present a period. I think a large number of historical dramas, because it’s such an effort to create it, they end up showing off a little bit to show all their effort and all the detail. I said, "We have to have all the meticulous detail, but we have to show it with a throwaway attitude." We really went into deep research about everything. It’s all there, as if you were walking around in the 18th century.
CHRIS NEUMER: But that’s not the focus.
TOM TYKWER: No. That’s not the focus at all and I hope it doesn’t feel like that. It’s just there. It’s just the 18th century, just like it could be anywhere. I wanted the film to feel as modern as possible. I just wanted to shoot it as the portrayal of this character. He just happens to be there.
