Dreamers and Destiny

What if you were to suffer a sudden, traumatic accident? One minute you are walking across the street and the next you are lying flat beneath a heavy metal machine gasping for air. What thoughts run through your mind as you lie dying?

Do you panic? Are you calm? Are you scared? Do you find a previously unknown desire to live?

Out of those mental fragments, some coming from dreams, others rising out of random thoughts or inspired by scientific research, director Tom Tykwer came up with what eventually became his latest film, “The Princess and the Warrior,” which opens Friday in Los Angeles.

“Princess,” set in Tykwer’s hometown of Wuppertal, Germany, centers on Sissi, a strangely childlike psychiatric nurse who suffers a terrible accident but is saved by an unlikely hero. The film plays with fate and destiny, themes also prevalent in the 36-year-old director’s frenetic cult hit from 1998, “Run Lola Run.” Just as in “Lola,” the star of “Princess” is Franka Potente, the 27-year-old actress whose flaming red hair and powerful stride helped make the movie so memorable.

Destiny and changing one’s fortune are concepts that consume Tykwer, at least on a subliminal level, he says.

“In both [films], it is about characters saying they are not going to accept this as their fate,” he said. “They force fate to open a new door. It just creeps into it [the writing]. It seems to be a structural element of how I construct stories.”

But though “Lola” and “Princess” share some characteristics, the films are vastly different. “Lola” was paced like an MTV video, and “Princess” is pensive, almost dreamlike, with the characters methodically finding their ways through life as the film progresses.

“Even though it is a fast-paced film, we wanted the experience to be like a slow-motion roller coaster,” said Tykwer.

Tykwer begins his filmmaking process with a simple thought. With “Lola,” he liked the idea of a woman running through the streets of Berlin. With “Princess” it was the idea of the implications of a tragic accident. He developed that into a full-fledged film after spending four weeks vacationing on a remote island off the coast of West Africa with Potente, his girlfriend.

“I think this movie was very strongly influenced by dreams,” said Tykwer, on a recent visit to Los Angeles with Potente. “The film is constantly walking through this dream and reality and this fairytale feeling and a hell-like reality.”

‘I’d Rather Not Work ... Than Do a Bad Film’

The pair worked systematically on Potente’s character, beginning with her shoes. No detail was too small for Potente, who studied acting in Munich and New York.

Her performance in “Lola” was lauded worldwide and brought her to the attention of Hollywood. Earlier this year she appeared in the film “Blow” with Johnny Depp, and she just wrapped “The Bourne Identity” opposite Matt Damon. But she says she has no illusions of stardom.

“I don’t line up projects,” she said. “I’ve made movies where I was not happy, and I’d rather not work for a year than do a bad film. It takes a long time for me to recuperate when I do that.”

She also likes to be hands-on in the exploration of her characters. She began imagining Sissi with big shoes so as to keep her “feet on the ground,” Potente explains. Sissi was unaware of her sexuality, wearing baggy nurse’s outfits, never feeling herself a sexually available woman. And unlike the flashy Lola, Sissi had light blond hair and wore white clothing to convey an angel-like sense.

Although Potente spent a few weeks undercover working in a psychiatric hospital, she says she didn’t glean much from the experience. Sissi had to be different from the nurses she met. In Potente’s mind, Sissi was a blank canvas, a woman without preconceived ideas or judgments about her patients or herself.

“Together with Tom, we started to get to know her,” said Potente in flawless English tinged by a British accent. “She was like a toddler almost: insecure but brave. I wanted to find something that was driving her: weaknesses, something vulnerable .... A lot of it is by intuition, but I need guidance. I need a good director.”

That guide is Tykwer, of course. They met before filming “Lola,” and they have been romantically and professionally linked ever since. They are playful in their dealings together. Sitting on a sofa during the interview, Tykwer would often reach over and touch her hand or her foot and playfully undo her shoelaces.

They are a striking couple, both thin with sharply defined features. She had shaved her head a few months before and then had dyed her short, spiked hair a pinkish color to complement her fuchsia-colored T-shirt with sparkled writing on it. Tykwer’s enthusiasm for life give his light-blue eyes a shining energy.

Tykwer is a self-educated filmmaker. He was rejected by all the film schools he applied to and learned to make movies by watching hundreds of films. Among the influences he cites are Alfred Hitchcock, Vittorio de Sica, the French New Wave directors of the ‘60s, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.

Because Tykwer began writing “Princess” before “Lola” hit theaters, he says he never felt pressure to outdo his previous film. “Lola” was the highest-grossing German film in the U.S. since “Das Boot” in 1981, grossing $7.4 million domestically. It also touched off a controversy for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1998, when it failed to be nominated for a foreign-language Oscar. The academy was accused of being out of touch with modern filmmaking.

But none of this seems to have fazed Tykwer, at least on the surface.

“Stories should have no relationship to your career plan,” he said. “They should be genuinely about what you feel and what you want to say. It seemed very much a point in my life where I wanted to do a film like this. ‘Lola’ was significantly nervous and frenetic as a person and as a film. Sissi and Bodo [the male character in “Princess” played by German actor Benno Frmann] are more tranquil or even melancholy; she is like a sleepwalker. And so this sleepwalking attitude should influence the film.”

Potente had to learn to keep her emotions from showing on her face. Sissi had shed all expectations or ability to feel desires for herself until the accident. Tykwer knew he had to insert a hero into the story, a flawed hero who nonetheless had not lost his sense of right and wrong.

Envisioning Heroes With Human Flaws

Sissi too, in her quiet vulnerable way, is a heroine. But neither Tykwer nor Potente wanted the heroes to be Hollywood creations of perfection.

“That is why we called it ‘The Princess and the Warrior,”’ said Tykwer. “The title makes you think of these bigger-than-life characters like Ben Hur and Spartacus ... and then you end up in this medium-sized German village with this strange nurse and the frustrated ex-soldier. We take them as much as heroes with this mythical potential as all those historical figures. In the end, to me, they have the same effect.”

Added Potente: “In most movies, they show you somebody who is perfect looks-wise, and skills-wise, and the movie doesn’t give you a choice .... What really makes a hero a hero is if you take that person’s hand and you walk with that person and they have a lot of weaknesses but in the end they overcome all of their obstacles.”

Though Tykwer has an artistic creative passion for film and writing, he is also honing his business skills. In 1994, he founded X-Filme Creative Pool with a couple of other young German directors to have more control over their films. The company has produced nine films, including “Lola” and “Princess.” The company also aligned itself with Miramax for Tykwer’s next project, “Heaven,” starring Cate Blanchett and adapted from a story by the late Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski.

The X-Filme directors have found a way to tell very specific German stories that have universal appeal.

“I’ve seen pictures from all over the world and they have all influenced me to the same extent,” said Tykwer. “I am influenced by all the media that surrounds us. If you just look at the basic visual experience, it is much more common with the Internet; you have language inside the visual content. I’m interested in making films that transport visually; not that dialogue is not important, but I like to see the visual.”