Reinventing the World in Art: ‘Run Lola Run’ Creator Tom Tykwer Reflects on the Quirky Action Classic

Twenty-five years ago, a young woman with hair dyed like flames sprinted across American movie screens, racing against time and fate. The unconventional action film Run Lola Run (Lola rennt) is back in theaters this weekend with a 4K restoration, reintroducing its propulsive protagonist, playful philosophical riffs, and inventive filmmaking.

Its setup is deceptively simple: Lola (Franka Potente) must come up with 100,000 Deutschmarks in twenty minutes to save her boyfriend, Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), an aspiring hoodlum who phones her after he lost the cash a crime boss trusted him to deliver. Yet once Lola races out the door, the eighty-minute film circles through three variations, blending Hitchcockian allusions and animation, flash-forward montages, and meditations on free will and destiny.

The third feature for writer-director Tom Tykwer, who also co-wrote the heartbeat-like techno soundtrack, Run Lola Run became a surprise hit. It won an Audience Award at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival, netted a 93% “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and grossed more than $22 million worldwide (about 13 times its production budget). Empire magazine has named it one of its 100 Best Films of World Cinema.

Since then, Potente has starred in 2002’s The Bourne Identity and more recently TV’s Titans while Bleibtreu (Woman in Gold) recently appeared in TV’s Transatlantic. Tykwer went on to helm The Princess and the Warrior (starring Potente), Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, The International, Cloud Atlas, and the TV series Sense8 and Babylon Berlin.

Ahead of the rerelease, Tykwer said that he thinks everyone can identify with Lola. “It is this woman’s passion alone that brings down the rigid rules and regulations of the world surrounding her,” he said in a statement. “Love can move mountains, and does.”

In conversation, Tykwer is as fast on his feet as his fleet-footed creation. The filmmaker took a short break in Berlin from editing his latest project, The Light, to share what inspires him and why a fun premise can be a sly way to present complex yet universal ideas. 

This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

What inspired this story? I read that you had seen a woman running down the street one day …?

TYKWER: Anything I might translate from this is my own self-created legend about it, because I have absolutely no clue. But my “legendary” self says, I was just excited to make a movie that was firstly based on an image that represents emotion, dynamics, intensity, speed, and excitement. Because for me, that’s basically what cinema is. And then you add music to it, of course. [laughs]

So that image was, I think, maybe even given to me by looking at Eadweard Muybridge photography [an early pioneer in motion-picture projection in the late 1800s], this idea of why we are so fascinated with movement. We love watching people run. We go to stadiums to see them run and run. There’s a beauty in it that is completely from somewhere in our DNA from thousands of years ago. … And it’s nice to create a movie around a visual idea, and then maybe just some little snippets of ideas that have been sticking with you for a while. Then you stitch it together, and then you try to create a patchwork around an idea that is not yet even remotely similar to what we used to call plot. Plot came second, or even third. Construction and emotion was first.

I wanted to create something around an emotional situation. And time pressure. Slowly, the construction of the story came around it, but it was a lot of aesthetic and structural devices that I was in love with before I actually had found the actual story of the film.

Did your directing style influence the story at all? [The film uses split screen shots to parallel Lola’s and Manni’s actions, and as she encounters different people, it flashes through photography-style montages to show their lives afterward.] Did you plot that out in a draft, or did you storyboard?

Everything you see on screen was actually pretty much written in the script in terms of the way it’s shot. It was part of the writing for me. Writing is, of course, constructing the fabric of the tale but also constructing the fabric of the aesthetics of the tale. I wanted it to be as spelled out as possible, and on the page, so a reader could really see the film … and that you felt like you can even see, you can even maybe even feel, the way it’s cut, feel the vibe of the music that’s going to be there. And so, it was really much more [on the page] than on any other movie I’ve made. It was interlinked, or it was linked to each other, you know, the execution and content. Sometimes where the story would go was inspired by a visual idea as much as visual ideas were inspired by plot twists and turns of events.

There are a couple of things that I’ve always really liked about this movie. That feeling of kinetic energy. How Lola grows. She and Manni think of somebody else by the end of the film instead of just themselves. How she screams and changes fate. But I also like how you orient people in this whole world, how when you see the bicyclist, you know she’s near the bank.

The beautiful thing about it is that when you construct it, because it’s a movie, you wildly construct it according to your story, your imagination, and the internal logics of the movie. In fact, the route that Lola is taking across the city in the actual locations is completely absurd. She’s jumping from district to district; she’s crossing miles and miles in one second [laughs], just because I liked that connection to this location from that location much better than the real one. 

Of course, everybody who’s lived in Berlin for a long time always said like, 'What is this? The geography of this movie is ridiculous!' And I’ve always said, 'Well, is this how you watch movies? I mean, do you check facts? Or do you let yourself be drawn into a tale of fantasy and imagination?'… That’s the beauty of editing. Editing can just do miracles and recreate cities and restructure them according to the art. We’re reinventing the world in art. That’s the idea of art. If you don’t do that in art, you’re in “things” and reality’s chains.

That’s beautiful. The film has that T. S. Eliot quote: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started…” Did you find that while you were writing? How did that come to be in there?

No, actually, I read some Eliot in my younger years, and then I rediscovered it elsewhere. … It’s stuck with me because it’s such a good line. And when I was developing the script, I realized, he’s my spiritual mentor, Eliot. His way of fractured writing and making sense without making sense and, you know, kind of cracking up language and showing us where language can go, being inventive with language. That’s what I want to do with cinematic language. I wanted to say, 'Look at all these beautiful tools we have. Let’s shake them up a bit and see how the puzzle can be reconstructed differently.' And then he had this line, which of course is sort of the synopsis of the movie. So I was really happy about it.

How do you feel reflecting on that quote now that it’s been a quarter of a century since you made this film? In a way, you’re back where you started.

[laughs] Regarding Lola, it’s obviously inherent to the movie. And now it’s even inherent to my own life. Because here I am, back where I was twenty-five years ago, releasing the movie together, actually, with Franka—we were doing interviews together like we did then. And we’re having the same joy. We watched the movie again. We loved it again. We really enjoyed it. … Now, of course, I’m an easy audience. Nothing can be lost anymore. The movie has already had a beautiful career. Now I’m looking at it with no expectation, and I saw this beautifully innocent work of young and energetic and completely open-hearted and open-minded people. We were just such a fun bunch that wanted to do something exceptional. And you can feel that in the film. … It has this vibrant energy in itself.

Before you go, there was an interview when the movie first came out where you talked about how sometimes you start from such a complicated idea, but you can do it if you just get simpler. If you were to talk to writers who have a project that plays with time or different timelines, what would you tell them?

I think people love it when constructions are super elaborate, but the art is to wrap it in something that’s just joyful and easy. You only find, let’s say, the complex heart that beats inside, along the way while you’re being carried by something really fun, emotional, or sad, or just exciting and something kinetically appealing. You know, these movies come along all the time. 

The last one, I guess, that people were really loving was Everything Everywhere All at Once [2022]. That movie also is so wild, you sometimes get lost in its wildness, and then when you talk about it, you discover how crazily meticulous it is constructed and manufactured. It’s a really smart movie where the filmmakers gave so much thought to so many details of the twists of the plot and the characters. It’s a movie full of love for thought and for philosophical perspective, and yet it’s sheer hilarious fun at the same time. And it’s even a socially relevant movie.

It’s always great to have something substantial that you really want to explore. And then once you feel like you’re safe with your exploration, find something that makes it super easy to approach, that looks like it’s an easy catch. You’ll get super excited when the fish is surprisingly big.

Catch Run Lola Run back in theaters for a limited time!