Not since the heyday of that infernal beeping roadrunner has a character spent as much time running across a cinema screen as Lola. While drawing inspiration for acceleration from a Warner Bros cartoon, Lola also looks to have taken advice on coiffure from the Trolls, those rubber toys with the funny faces and shocks of hair rising upwards in primary colours so bright a goalkeeper might think twice about wearing them.
And, finally, as if all that were not enough to make Lola stand out from the average screen character, there is her tendency – when things go wrong in her life – to press the rewind button, go back to the beginning of the film and start all over again.
In an industry fuelled by hype, Run Lola Run is a genuine phenomenon: a hip German movie – a phrase that is almost a contradiction in terms since the heydays of Fassbinder and Herzog in the Seventies. Run Lola Run is to Germany what Trainspotting was to Britain. It has tapped into the zeitgeist and provided another unlikely role model in a country with a history of unlikely role models.
When it came out in the summer of 1998 the streets of Berlin were suddenly crowded with young women with bright red hair. And it was not just young females who wanted to look like Lola. The mayor of Berlin appeared in a poster mimicking that of the film. “He puts himself in a position of being dynamic and young,” writer-director Tom Tykwer told Premiere magazine. “But he is really the most fucking stupid, boring, old-fashioned, conservative super-idiot, the last person we want to be identified with.” The mayor had to take his posters down.
In the United States, Run Lola Run is the highest-grossing German film since Das Boot almost 20 years ago. Das Boot in Wolfgang Petersen’s film was a submarine, das Boot in Run Lola Run comes courtesy of Doc Marten. Lola is young. She is female. She breaks rules.
Lola has 20 minutes to find 100 000 marks (R325 000) and deliver it to her hapless boyfriend, Manni, a drugs courier, to replace money he has lost. If she cannot come up with the money, Manni’s bosses will kill him. Lola is out of the blocks like a sprinter, hurtling down the street, swerving to avoid cars and pedestrians, running for dear life as the clock ticks down.
And when she gets there, the story starts all over again, just like in a computer game. The least little incident, such as a trip or collision, may alter her timetable by only a second or two, but it dramatically affects not only her fate and Manni’s, but the future of those with whom she comes in contact. The stories of these incidental characters are told in still photographs in fast flash-forwards. The film also uses video, monochrome and a cartoon depiction of Lola. But the one element it exploits most audaciously is speed, leaving the audience as breathless as Lola.
“In the beginning there was a three-page synopsis,” says Tykwer, “and everybody was like: ‘What do you mean it starts again, it ends again? This seems like an art channel TV movie for late-night audiences.’ And I always kept saying: ‘It’s an experimental movie for a mass audience.’ ” Despite those initial reservations, he found it easy to raise the R10-million budget and within nine months of conception, Run Lola Run was shooting in the streets of Berlin.
Franka Potente is pretty, with blonde hair, dark eyes and a wide sensuous mouth, and she’s dressed in a shiny black leather jacket, jumper and slacks. No one looks up as she crosses the hotel lobby – she is not running today. With the change of hair, wardrobe and manner, she is unrecognisable as the star of the film. The 25-year-old actress, who trained at drama school in Munich and the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in New York, shares the film’s belief in the power and vagaries of fate – of being in the right place at the right time.
“My career started out like that,” she says. “I was discovered, while I was still in acting school, in a bar – a casting agent follows me to the toilet and invites me to a casting [session]. The thing she cast me for never happened. But the videotape [of Potente’s screen test] – by fate, coincidence, accident – months later gets into the hands of a friend of hers, who is the young director who is looking for the lead for his very first film. This is how I got my first part and this was actually the film that Tom saw.”
Tykwer wrote Run Lola Run with Potente in mind. She worked up to 18 hours a day, covering countless miles of Berlin pavements as his camera whirled around and above her, capturing her from every possible angle. “I love it when, after a day of shooting, I’m so exhausted that my bones hurt.”
She did little in the way of preparation, except jogging, because she did not want to develop an athlete’s physique or stamina. For seven weeks, she became Lola. “While I shoot, that’s all I do, besides sleeping and eating.”
Potente and Tykwer came up with the distinctive look between them – the red hair, suggesting passion and rebellion; the singlet, leaving skin, muscle, bra and tattooed navel exposed; and the DMs. “They’re really heavy and they’re even slippy on some ground,” she says. “I hated them. But Nikes would have been against the character.”
Tykwer had previously made two feature films, the expressionist thriller Deadly Maria and Wintersleepers, a drama about a car accident in an Alpine holiday resort. It was made by X-Filme, the company Tykwer set up with other emerging German film-makers. The 34-year-old director is now the figurehead of a resurgent German film industry.
He is addicted to films: when he is not making them he is more than likely to be watching or talking about them. As a child he was a fan of action and science-fiction. When he was 11 years old, he remade Godzilla – long before Hollywood did. But his perception went unrewarded when he was turned down by film schools in Germany and abroad. He does not blame them, admitting that his early work lacked originality. “When I was 16 I did a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I had much-too-young people with guns looking ridiculous in old-fashioned gangster clothes … It’s a normal thing that you have to get rid of – this idea that anybody would be interested in you redoing a good film in a bad way.”
It is a phase film-makers are still going through in Hollywood, though, and already there have been approaches to remake Run Lola Run in English. Tykwer is prepared to sanction it, but does not want to direct it. But it would be disingenuous to suggest he has turned his back completely on the concept of the remake, because, like Groundhog Day, Run Lola Run contains its own remakes.
Despite his failure to get into film school, he has worked in the film business all his adult life. His first job was selling tickets. He graduated to projectionist and then manager of the Moviemento rep cinema in Berlin. “What was nice about it was that I could show all my favourite films: we showed more than 100 films a month.” (It comes as no surprise that his favourite is Godard’s Breathless.)
Tykwer denies that he was consciously influenced by video games, but admits they were another big childhood passion. “My favourite game was the first Star Wars video game. In Wuppertal, which is my home town, we set up a world record on that machine. We were there for 16 1/2 hours playing one game, me and my friend.”
Run Lola Run stemmed from an interest in fate and coincidence, “how time rules our lives” and “the big problems of love”, he says. Tykwer and Potente are heavy on philosophical musings – with Tykwer suggesting Lola represents Berlin, caught between the past and the future – though on screen the film’s exploration of its themes is light and playful and never gets in Lola’s way as she pounds the pavements.
Tykwer and Potente continued these explorations of fate, time and love offscreen too. Romance blossomed between them six months after the film wrapped. They now live together in Berlin and have made a second film together, The Princess and the Warrior, a love story that was filmed mainly in Wuppertal. It looks as though Potente’s career is going to run and run.