Acclaimed director, writer and producer Tom Tykwer speaks to NBN’s Lauren Hock about Perfume: The Story of a Muderer
NBN: Do you have any questions for me before we get started?
Tykwer: I might have, but I don’t know yet. I’m sometimes confused these days when I meet people that seem to be so distanced from you, so you don’t get any sense of what they actually think about the work. In a way, you come to meet people and to meet writers to get some kind of exchange, some sense of what your work is doing and what it is leaving behind. Of course, I know I have to get some information across and stuff but in fact I’m looking forward to conversations rather than having someone completely stoned-faced sitting in front of you going “Mhhhmmm, and then why did you choose to do music? Mhhhmmm…” And then I give like a five minute answer and then they just go “Mhhmmm…OK next question.” And so I feel like, God, that wasn’t really necessary to me, you know? I could have written you an e-mail. So it’s always about something individual that I want to have from meetings. Of course you can’t ask for that all the time.
NBN: I often have that same problem with the people that I interview, but isn’t it easier speaking to us students?
Tykwer: It’s funny because very often the students are the most complicated ones. I was expecting the opposite, but they are. I mean, it’s lovely to hear you’re a projectionist because really many younger writers don’t seem to have an idea of film history before 1995. It’s a new phenomenon. Maybe they’ve seen The Godfather and that’s the one movie they have seen from the 70’s, and maybe Alien and Star Wars and that’s it. But then when you say The Parallax View or The Conversation, you get “Mmmmm…yeah I’ve heard of that.” You are in America, you are a U.S. film student – you need to see The Conversation! But I mean that’s stupid, because at the same time if you are 21 or 22 there’s still so much time to watch all these films and it’s actually fine.
But it’s just that so much of my communication goes through movies. I’m a person that needs to get the sense that people’s interest in the world is also fueled through an interest in films because that’s how I encounter life. My films are filled with film history and at the same time are hopefully as uniquely new and unexpected as possible, you know? That’s what I’m trying to achieve – making films that are touching both familiar and unfamiliar grounds.
NBN: Since many people define you with Run Lola Run, did you feel that you had to break away from that film with Perfume?
Tykwer: You don’t think about it when you do it. You just take on the subject that you like in a story and then you realize it offers a lot of potential for this specific language that you have developed over the years and that there is an attraction you have towards a material. It offers you the chance to explore your own approach to cinema and it gives you the feeling that there is new territory to explore in your film language.
Even though you always turn towards different subjects, even periods, in some peculiar way you’re always making the same film over and over again because you just stay the same person. And that’s what’s good about it because that’s maybe why we love some that are so dear to us. Even when you watch Scorsese you always feel that there is something fresh about his material and at the same time something extremely familiar about, which has to do with the fact that he of course can’t help himself being who he is. As much as he is trying to reinvent himself as a filmmaker, he is showing his personality and his individual film language and that’s what we love.
I want to relate to films as if they were someone because that way you grow up with them and grow older with them and revisit them. It’s like meeting a good, old friend and he still has something to say to you, and sometimes something new even, that you didn’t see when you were younger. Or, some friends you lose contact with and then you see them again and you feel like you don’t have anything to say to each other anymore. This can happen to films too. There are so many films you see when you’re younger and you love them and then when you see them now it’s so disappointing. And it’s just because you’ve changed.
NBN: Do you own a lot of DVDs?
Tykwer: [laughs] Yeah, that’s the one thing I quite compulsively do.
NBN: I own only maybe 20 or so DVDs total, but I guess there is something about watching a movie in a theater that I just miss when I’m at home. Do you still shoot with 35mm [film] or have you been using digital?
Tykwer: No. No digital equipment. It’s not there yet, but it will be and then I will use it. We have to admit that it’s not quite making that much of a difference anymore. For me, it’s not really important that there is celluloid running through the camera.
Although, having been a projectionist for like 15 years of my life, I have a very sensual, tactile relationship to the way film goes through a projector and all that, and I love the smell of it, of the lamp and the “BZZZZZ” when I put it on. Of course, I worked for a long time in a theater where you have to do reel by reel cross fades. And that’s an art.
I was very ambitious in making the change over totally seamless and of course sometimes it doesn’t work and then you’re like “ARRRRRR.” You get to know the films and the specific transitions. And when they in between the cut of the two reels you’re like “Why did they put the cut there?” because you always mess up the moment in some way. And then suddenly there’s a little bit of black in between “ARRRR” because you’re too late.
NBN: Where did you work as a projectionist?
Tykwer: I used to work in a theater in Berlin, which I was also programming then and that was my favorite job, of course, because it was an art house and we showed 100 films a month.
NBN: A 100 films a month? How did you manage that?
Tykwer: We had three small cinemas and we’re talking late 80s, early 90s when you could do retrospectives of Cassavetes or Polanski, and you would do a triple feature at midnight on a Monday night and it would be sold out.
Berlin was crazy then, people were complete night owls, they were just always up. Sometimes I tested it. We did Repulsion and The Tenant at midnight, plus Rosemary’s Baby. Sold out on a Monday!
I had a very close relationship with the actually materialism of it. But at the same time what really counts is having good, quality projection in a nice cozy place. And if it’s digital, fine, as long as we have a nice screen. We have to admit that you won’t have the strips and you won’t have missing images at the end of the reel, the jumps, no crossing, no changeover circles.
NBN: Have you always used Dolby when you shoot?
Tykwer: No, I couldn’t afford it. My first film, Deadly Maria, was mono because I couldn’t afford Dolby. It was an analog mixing station, so if you wanted to repair something you had to do the entire thing over again. You mixed it live and then you couldn’t change anything and you’re screaming and sweating because it’s so stressful! Now of course with digital you can always just go back and repair this one channel.
NBN: On the Run Lola Run website, you mention that before you start filming you have an image in your mind that sparks the entire film – did you have that same experience with Perfume?
Tykwer: I do remember that I loved the whole idea of the film being really dark. Not only dark in subject, but also in tonality itself. I’m inspired by paintings that I very much admire from the 16th and 17th centuries. One painter that I particularly love is Rembrandt, and there’s one painting from another English painter from the 18th century who was called Joseph Wright of Derby.
NBN: I’ve never heard of him before.
Tykwer: Ah, he’s a lovely painter and he did one picture where there’s people sitting around a lamp. And it’s one of those paintings from those times when they focused, which is something that Rembrandt very much picked up on, they focused on one light source in the picture and then everything goes black on black on black. The corners are completely dark and you still sense the detail of it, this idea where you look at something black but the painting is so three dimensional that you project depth into the blackness of it. And that painting actually was what sparked my imagination for this film. So I can only relate to this image and that’s why we probably started the film in total blackness with just one tiny thing in the middle – the main character’s nose.
NBN: Which turns out to be a very important part of the story.
Tykwer: Right, which focuses on what it’s really about, but there are lots of scenes where there is only one light source and there is something glowing around the characters in the center and then everything else falls into pitch blackness. I was quite obsessed with that and I think one of the first ideas that I had about this imagery was that the workshop that Dustin Hoffman’s character has in his cellar under the perfumery, that it should have a little bit of a feel one of one of my favorite films from Polanski, Dance of the Vampires (The Fearless Vampire Killers). I think it has two titles over here, you should see it it’s great.
But that’s just atmosphere. I think most films that we revisit isn’t because we want to hear that story again. I think it’s really much more about the atmosphere that we so admire about them. We want to be brought back into this kind of sphere, and space, and we enjoy being in this state. So that’s what I was really focusing on that for Perfume – how to create a very specific and unique atmosphere about this film.
Visit the official site for Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.
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