How Berlin Made 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 breakout Run Lola Run, the mid-career highlight 3 (2010) and now The Light, the opening film of the 75th Berlin International Film Festival — but no other director so exemplifies the city, in all its messy glory and contradictions. 

“I’ve spent nearly 40 years in Berlin, and everything I need is here,” says Tykwer from his apartment in Prenzlauer Berg. “I have the people I love, the cinemas I need, and the city’s strange aesthetic — these beautiful districts next to catastrophically ugly architecture. It’s what delights and infuriates and inspires me.”

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

“This is my third time opening 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 strongly 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 move, 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 feels like.” 

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 remembers accompanying his father, a garment merchant, on his business trips to the big city. 

“This was when West Berlin was still an island [in communist East Germany],” Tykwer recalls. “My father specialized in women’s fashion 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 father up front, chain-smoking unfiltered Camel cigarettes. I’d always puke.”

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

“The city was the biggest, most exciting, scary and spectacular thing I could image. And the movies! There were 120 cinemas showing 800 films a week. You could see anything. People went to the cinema at 4 in the morning because nothing opened in Berlin before noon in those days.”

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

“I loved John Carpenter — Dark Star and Assault on Precinct 13 — but I was 13 and the film was rated 18 or something, so it wasn’t that easy to get in,” he recalls. “But I knew in Berlin nobody would care, the guy at the register, smoking, who just waves you through. So I snuck out when my father was sleeping and watched Halloween for the first time. It changed my life. It was an incredible film, of course — pure filmmaking, sometimes when I’m stuck creatively, I go back and watch Halloween for inspiration — but seeing it in secret made it twice as good. The theater was three-quarters full. There were 250 people who went out, at midnight on a Tuesday, to watch a horror movie. I thought: ‘I have to live here.’ I don’t remember this but the next day, according to my father, I told 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 tell my parents I was staying with an aunt of mine, but that was a lie. I’d just watch films all day. Back then, you could get an all-access pass and watch all the films in Competition, Forum, whatever. Screenings went until 3 a.m. and started again at 8 a.m. I’d go to Schwarzes Café in Kantstrasse, which is still there, and was open 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 record 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 fresh aesthetics of video games and music videos. Half a world away in Chicago, Lana Wachowski and sister Lilly were on a similar path, one that would eventually bring them together with Tykwer in Berlin. 

But that was still in the distant future. It was the late ’80s when Tykwer, after being rejected from every good film school in Europe, settled in West Berlin. He got work as a projectionist, then as a programmer, at the legendary Moviemento theater — founded 1907 — a hangout for Berlin’s cinema freak community. Together with three of them — producer Stefan Arndt and directors Dani Levy and Becker — Tykwer, in 1994, founded 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 housewife who murders her husband and father — but it was at X-Filme that Tykwer came into his own. His cerebral Alpine thriller Winter Sleepers (1997) attracted interest on the international festival scene, and his follow-up — a cheap crime drama about a girl, a gun, 20 minutes and DM 100,000 — would conquer the world. 

Run Lola Run is an 80-minute, nonstop kinetic joy ride of a movie fueled by Tykwer’s exhaustive knowledge 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 pure genre pulp. The film’s core theme, that random events shape our fate and everything could have been different, is cribbed from Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blind Chance (1987). The idea of filming a figure from the side — tirelessly running, running and running — was inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s pre-cinema moving pictures, those photographic 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 old silent film gag of workers carrying a sheet of glass across the street — is all Tom Tykwer. 

Run Lola Run premiered in Venice but every frame, every one of the beats on its techno-soundtrack (composed by Tykwer together with Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil) screams Berlin. Franka Potente as Lola, flame-haired and relentless, racing across 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 Fassbinder’s classic from 1981 — but this Lola came straight from the streets of the reunited capital.

With Run Lola Run, Tykwer captured the feel of Berlin in the late ’90s. It’s techno optimism — symbolized by the gleaming glass and steel futurism of Potsdamer Platz, a neighborhood erected on the no-man’s land where the Berlin Wall used to stand — clashing with the grime and grit of a bankrupt city (the motto back then was: “Berlin: poor, but sexy”) and still struggling under the weight of a dark and inescapable history. 

The film was a crossover hit (it grossed $7.6 million for Sony Pictures Classics in the U.S.) and got Tykwer noticed in Hollywood. Bigger productions, with bigger stars, bigger budgets — and in English — followed. Heaven (2002) starring Cate Blanchett and Giovanni Ribisi, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006) with Dustin Hoffman, Alan Rickman and a then-unknown Ben Whishaw. The International (2009) with Clive Owen and Naomi Watts. Tom Hanks starrer A Hologram for a King (2016). The Wachowskis got in contact, starting a lifelong friendship and creative collaboration that would see the trio co-direct sci-fi fantasy epic Cloud Atlas (2012) and Tykwer come on board to helm episodes of the Wachowskis’ Netflix series Sense8 and compose the music (with Klimek) for Lilly Wachowski’s The Matrix Resurrections (2021). 

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

When he finally did return to German-language features, in his threesome dramedy 3 (2010), it was to go full Berlin. In place of Run Lola Run’s 20-something punks we have Hanna (Sophie Rois) and Simon (Sebastian Schipper), 40-something culture workers (she’s an arts journalist, he’s an engineer for large-scale installation pieces) in a long-term relationship who separately embark on an affair with the same man. The city in 3 has scrubbed off the dirt and exchanged Lola’s video game aesthetic for something colder and more clinical. Discussions of love and fate have given way to debates about sexual identity and genetic determinism. Berlin has moved from the cutting edge of cool to become a cultural capital, part of the establishment. 

In between 3 and The Light, Tykwer has continued to obsess over his adopted 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-directed with Henk Handloegten and Achim von Borries. Launched in 2017, Babylon Berlin is currently shooting its fifth and final season. 

“The final season focuses on the collapse of the Weimar Republic; it’s set entirely in the crucial five weeks between Hitler’s being appointed chancellor in January 1933 and the March elections, when the Nazis seized complete power, the stormtroopers became the police and concentration camps were opened,” says Tykwer. “There’s this cliché that Germans couldn’t wait to become Nazis. The reality 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 through “the upheaval and crisis of my grandparents’ generation” with Babylon, Tykwer says he felt a need to return to present-day Berlin and to a story much closer to home. 

The Light is a portrait of “typically dysfunctional” middle-class Berlin family, the Engels — parents Milena and Tim (Nicolette Krebitz, Lars Eidinger), 17-year-old twins Frieda and Jon (Elke Biesendorfer, Julius Gause), and 8-year-old Dio (Elyas Eldridge) — each going through their own separate crises. Their life is disrupted, and given new meaning, when a new housekeeper, the Syrian immigrant Farrah (Tala Al-Deen), enters their lives. 

“It a very simple construct, is a bit like Pasolini’s Teorema or Mrs. Doubtfire, it’s kind of absurd and funny,” says Tykwer, “but it also explores issues that I think are important and serious for my generation and for the younger 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 actually rested on the laurels — we thought we had successfully established a liberal, open-minded, democratic society. We got to the right place, and we could take it easy. We completely ignored that by unleashing digitalization around the turn of the millennium, we completely disrupted an economic system and the society connected 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 expecting any home field advantage at The Light’s world premiere. The city’s “self-appointed cinema experts,” he says, are sure to have their knives out and ready, if his latest take on Berlin is not to their liking. 

“They’ll be the first to say: ‘That’s not what my Berlin looks like, that’s not how my Berlin feels,’ ” he says. “And the film certainly isn’t perfect, but then neither is this city. Berlin is an eternal construction site, never finished, it’s always reinventing itself. That unsettles some people, but I find it inspiring. This beautiful catastrophe, this nervous tension — it’s exactly what I want in my films: unpredictability, chaos and beauty.”