Tom Twyker Interview, The International

In 1998, Tom Tykwer directed “Run, Lola, Run,” the film that gave his production company, X Filme, their first international hit. In spite of, or perhaps because of, its unusual narrative structure, the film went on to become the most successful German film of that year. It was won over 30 prizes and awards around the world.

In 2002, Tykwer made the short film “True” with Natalie Portman and Melchior Besion for “Paris, je t’aime,” a compilation film project in which very different international directors were asked to film a short love story set in one of Paris’ 20 arrondissements.

After almost four years of work, Tykwer’s most elaborate film to date, “Perfume,” was released in cinemas in September 2006. The film version of Patrick Susskind’s bestseller, produced by Bernd Eichinger and starring Ben Whishaw, Dustin Hoffman, Alan Rickman and Rachel Hurd-Wood in the leads, gave Tykwer his biggest box office success to date. The film remained in the international cinema charts for several weeks, achieving blockbuster success particularly in Europe, Asia and South America.

Recently, MoviesOnline sat down with Tykwer to talk about his new movie, “The International,” a gripping thriller directed by him from an original screenplay written by Eric Singer and shot on location in Germany and throughout Europe.

In “The International,” Interpol Agent Louis Salinger (Owen) and Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts) are determined to bring to justice one of the world’s most powerful banks. Uncovering myriad and reprehensible illegal activities, Salinger and Whitman follow the money from Berlin to Milan to New York to Istanbul. Finding themselves in a high-stakes chase across the globe, their relentless tenacity puts their own lives at risk as their targets will stop at nothing – even murder – to continue financing terror and war.

“I think Tom is a real visionary,” Owen says of the director. “He has a fantastic sense of film style and a humanity that informs all his work. “Perfume,” “Run, Lola, Run,” “Heaven,” they’re all stylistically very interesting, modernist, and diverse, with strong characters. But, in addition, his sense of compassion and understanding of the human condition is an important dimension to his work.”

Tom Tykwer is a fabulous guy and we really appreciated his time. Here’s what he had to tell us about his latest film, “The International”:

Q: So what did Frank Lloyd Wright ever do to you that made you decide to shoot that amazing sequence at the Guggenheim Museum?

TOM TYKWER: (laughs) The Guggenheim survives the sequence. What’s your problem? It’s just the art that gets destroyed.

Q: That’s what should happen to modern art.

TOM TYKWER: (laughs) Oh, I disagree. I really loved the art that we had in the Guggenheim. It’s probably the biggest fun part of being a filmmaker is that you can always do all these other jobs. You can be an architect, you can be a painter, you can be a composer, and you can be a curator of the Guggenheim and come up with your favorite exhibition in there. I actually loved the art that was in there. It’s a German video artist whose name is Julian Rosenfeldt who I quite admire. And shooting it to pieces was, of course, not the idea. We are doing it because we feel like it should be done but, of course, it’s happening because the bad guys are in there and they’re destroying it and it’s not a good thing because they’re destructive.

Q: Even though you’re not shooting up the real Guggenheim, do you have to meet with Guggenheim representatives to let them know what you’re planning to do to their museum in order to use the real name?

TOM TYKWER: Yes, you’d better talk to them in advance. The way the sequence was designed was we had a couple days of shooting at the real museum, exterior and interior, for some of the wide shots and connections with the outside and exterior, and then we went for quite a few weeks to sets that were built of the entire interior which was more or less a one to one rebuild of the building, and of course, we spoke to the people from the museum extensively about this whole film project, about our plans for what to do with it. They read the screenplay and luckily they seemed to be fans of what I’ve done before so they trusted us not to make it a film that invited people to go and have a shoot out at the Guggenheim.

Q: I think you showed remarkable restraint by not cramming a love story into the middle of all this espionage. Was there ever a temptation to put in a romantic scene between Eleanor and Louis?

TOM TYKWER: As you can imagine, there was a big discussion. I mean, they were never together on screen, Clive and Naomi, two of the greatest and most attractive actors ever, and you don’t have a big romantic scene or let’s say a love scene with them. We went back and forth with it, but I was so driven by this idea and I so much loved the idea. We all agreed that it’s a film not so much about these kind of 20-somethings who always meet in these movies and are both available, they’re super goodlooking, and they’re ready to go for it and get married tomorrow. Instead, it’s a film about people in their late 30s, early 40s, grown up people who have already had some substantial life. It’s not like the reality of a person like me who meets somebody who is very interesting and attractive to me that I can say, “Oh great, let’s get together,” because either me or that person or both of us are connected with somebody else. We have a life already that we can’t just leave behind.

I find that a very real and modern description of characters nowadays. It’s just our reality that’s part of this film. For instance, Naomi’s character in this film is described as somebody who has a family and she’s got a husband and he’s obviously also a nice guy and there’s a beautiful child and why would she run away from them? Why would she do this? Even though it seems like of course in another life and in another world those two might have been a great couple. I liked the melancholy about it and I find it quite romantic nevertheless and I love that I’ve got two actors who can implement it into more or less every scene they have together. There is this kind of energy of something underlying that will never really be able to be explored.

Q: Is that why it was important to puncture that balloon like when Salinger has that one line…

TOM TYKWER: …when she says “When was the last time you got laid?” and he says, “Why? Are you offering?” Yeah, that’s the way they are with each other. They even make fun about it because they know it’s there. They know it’s present but at the same time, of course, their main purpose is this investigation and for them it’s really important and they’re morally and internally driven by this and that’s what binds them or gets them to be so close to each other. There is a feeling that they might get along beyond that very well. It’s something that just comes through in those moments.

Q: Can you talk about Relativity Media and how their involvement affected the script?

TOM TYKWER: Never ever. No, it hasn’t been an issue at all. I mean, this script was developed over the course of six years and the only constant partner in the development on a producorial [level] or let’s say financial terms was Sony and Chuck Roven and Richard Suckle, the producers, [they] were the ones that were developing with me and Eric Singer on the screenplay. This was a group that worked kind of remotely, quite long and extensively, to make it both a genre thriller that holds up nowadays in terms of plotting and then at the same time that is as relevant as possible because we wanted to of course be related to thrillers of that genre in a particular light, those paranoia thrillers from the 70s where you feel like it is a genre film but at the same time the undercurrent is about something that is really relevant to us and that is unsettling to us and that is an important subject to discuss.

Q: Can you talk about the locations and the modern architecture of some of the places you chose to use? Were you familiar with them or did you location scout to find them?

TOM TYKWER: Well, you know, I live in Berlin. When I started to work on this project, the first thing I said was it’s really important that we find representations of very recent architecture for this film to represent this system that it is investigating. You know, the system that it is investigating is the latest, modern state of global economy of these corporational banks that have found their own palaces. The way they represent themselves is in a way very interesting because the most recent material that has been used in most of their buildings is glass and steel and things that are either very transparent or reflective. It feels like there’s a certain sense of see-through quality which gives us the impression, “Oh, you can see what we’re doing. It’s very transparent. We’re completely open in our activities.” The reality is we don’t understand a thing. We’re not really getting what’s happening there and they’re basically running our lives without us participating at all. We have never elected these people. We’ve never voted for them. So, this architecture has this strange, paradox quality. It is quite impressive, it is strangely beautiful, but it’s also a trap. The idea was to have Clive’s character, Salinger, be this kind of fly that’s caught in this perfect spider web of a system that seemingly is very accurate and clear, but in fact is absolutely non-transparent and secretive.

Q: Why do you think this type of movie, which mirrors many of the movies from the 70s like “The Conversation” and “The Parallax View,” doesn’t get made any more? I think people relate to that feeling of paranoia and of being watched and it’s very relevant today – even more so today than in the 70s.

TOM TYKWER: Well, I don’t know. It’s hard to tell sometimes why genres and certain incarnations of genres have a good era or a complicated era. I mean, we’ve had some interesting films recently, we must admit. There are films like “Syriana” or let’s say “Traffic.” There always are films that try to combine the two but most of these films are less relating to certain genre necessities and I so much love this whole idea that you go to the movies and you get full delivery on this expectation that you have towards a genre film, when you say, “Okay, I’m going to see a thriller now and a thriller with action.” That means you want the really suspenseful plot development. And in our case, we said, okay, we have an introduction into a complex subject but after a half an hour we start to really give the audience the payoff. And the payoff builds up because ultimately the second half of the movie is a chase movie, I think. The first half is an investigation and the second half is a real chase movie. And it has somehow turned out to be more fashionable nowadays to have chase movies from start to end where there’s not much time to work on content which I miss. I miss that. It’s not that I don’t like these films but they don’t feel very connected to life generally. They seem to be connected to individual states of mind maybe, but not so much to the consensus of how we experience society nowadays. That was the big thing about those thrillers in the 70s. They seemed to be relevant also on a political level.

Q: Do you think today’s filmmakers underestimate the audience’s attention span and ability to stick with these characters so that’s why they go to the chase right away?

TOM TYKWER: Well there is something like a dogma that has roots I think in recent action films, [and] that is, emotional connection by physical activity. I mean, you have to get emotionally connected by someone who is physically threatened which of course works if somebody good looking is threatened by ugly looking people and has to run because of that and then jumps from a rooftop, you’re with him. And I enjoy that. It’s not that…I don’t look down on this but the problem for me is quite visible. For instance, if you look at a movie that I pretty much liked, the last Bond film (“Quantum of Solace”). I really liked it because it was devoting itself to energy. It was an energetic film that wanted to be in movement. It wanted to be very physical and I thought it was very successful on that level. But still, the difference we were interested in making was that Bond, who used to be kind of the world saver, you know, somebody who was protecting the world from major villains, now is working on a much more personal level. He’s having a kind of private revenge act to complete and that is the driving force of the film. And this sort of privacy element about it, for me, is something that made it somehow in its content feel smaller. I think as an action film it’s one of the best in a long time. What I loved about the content of “The International” is that you have a guy who is driven by a problem that is not his personal, private problem but that is a problem that is universally relevant. He is really upset about something that we are all upset about and that is meaningful to all of us. That somehow gave the whole urge of his activities more gravitas.

Q: Could you have imagined in the years that you were putting together this film how relevant it would be?

TOM TYKWER: I think nobody would have doubted its relevance five years ago. It was just the problem about the implications and the consequences of later development of global economy is that it’s difficult to make it front page news because, if you want to make it a front page story, it will still occupy three pages to really explain it to a degree that you understand it. That’s why it never made it to the front page and that’s why we still feel underexposed or underinformed about what’s really going on. Now, with the so-called crash, which you might not call a crash but a serious crisis of the entire financial system, we’ve been kind of forced – which is probably the only upside of the whole crisis because everything else about it is of course horrific – everybody’s been forced to get more information or we’re not being forced, now we’re buried under information and we feel like why didn’t we have this information 10 years ago where it would have probably even influenced our political decisions and our daily life decisions in a different way. I find that very important and so that we are coming in with this movie at this particular point of time is sheer, bizarre coincidence and totally unexpected by me. At the same time, it is just giving proof that we were onto something that obviously is very, very important nowadays.

Q: I thought I saw Ben Wishaw do a cameo in this film. How did that come about?

TOM TYKWER: Oh, I don’t know. It’s just a family thing. I really love working with people that I had a great time with. Just like with the cinematographer or the editor or with the production designer or with the composers and even the first AD, there’s a family that grows and some people come to it and some people don’t have a part for every actor for every movie that is big enough but at least we wanted him to say “Hello.”

Q: Could you tell us a little bit about your film, “Deutschland 09”?

TOM TYKWER: That is another movie that I’m involved in that is a compilation of 13 short films that are reflecting the state of the nation of Germany in the year 2009. It’s a bit like “Paris, je t’aime” but it’s more political.

Q: What other directors are involved?

TOM TYKWER: Thirteen German directors, all Germans.

Q: Are the stories interconnected?

TOM TYKWER: No, not really. But it’s kind of giving its own narrative through the combination of the stories. It’s a quite interesting experiment, the film. They weren’t collected from different spots. They were made for this project, those 13 films, and because they come from the same source of discussion, I think they share a certain spirit that is interesting.

Q: Was it influenced at all by the current economic crisis around the world or was this made before all that?

TOM TYKWER: It happened during the crisis so yes, there’s stuff that relates to it. My movie relates to it.

“The International” opens in theaters on February 13th.