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Film Info

Germany 1998 | 81 min. Director: Tom Tykwer
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Run Lola Run

Synopsis

Berlin. Now. One summer day on which 20 minutes decide about love, life and death. Lola and Manni are in their early twenties and they are in love. Manni works as a money runner for a shady car dealer. But today something goes wrong: as he runs into ticket inspectors on the tube, he loses the bag with DM 100.000. In 20 minutes his boss will come to pick up the money.What to do? If he can't find the money he will be dead.

Lola racks her brain: 20 minutes to get DM 100,000. 20 minutes to save Manni's life. Lola gets an idea. She rushes out of the house and starts to run through the streets of Berlin.

Lola runs... for her life, for Manni's life, for her love — and to find money somehow, somewhere

While Lola tries to get the money from her father, the director of a bank, Manni has nearly cracked up. In his despair the robbery of a supermarket seems the only solution. When Lola finally reaches Manni, the supermarket is surrounded by police marksmen. And then there are shots...

... AND WITH THE APPARENT ENDING, THE REAL ADVENTURE BEGINS. THE FILM EXPLODES INTO A PASSIONATE, FASCINATING UNPREDICTABLE STORY ABOUT LOVE AND THE UNICWE MOMENTS WH ICH CAN CHANGE LIFE FOREVER. SOMETIMES ONLY 20 MINUTES CAN MAKE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH.

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"LOLA RENNT (Run, Lola, Run) is 34-year-old Tom Tykwer's fourth feature and it made a major impact when unveiled internationally at Venice earlier this year. Equally importantly, it proved extremely successful when it opened in Germany a couple of weeks before its Venice premiere, confirming Tykwer as one of that rare breed of German film-makers capable of achieving both critical and commercial success.
The basic premise of the movie is that Lola (Franka Potente) has just 20 minutes to save her lover, would-be criminal Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), from being shot by his boss, Ronnie (Tykwer regular Heino Ferch).
His crime is that he left a bag with 100,000 deutsche marks on the subway because he was trying to dodge the ticket inspector and save a couple of marks on the fare.
Lola sets off to save Manni. What makes the telling of the story - which is in 35mm when Lola and Manni are on screen, and in video at all other times - especially distinctive is the fact that Lola's quest becomes a kind of Sliding Doors-style exercise in alternative solutions: Manni holds up a supermarket; Lola steals the money from her dad; Manni finds the bag with the cash; Lola wins it back at roulette..."



Cast & Crew

Director's comment

How did you get the original idea for doing RUN LOLA RUN?

I always start with the image. I get an image in my head and I start wanting to get it moving, to build a story around it and then make a film out of it. In RUN LOLA RUN it was a woman running, seen from the side in medium close-up. I think the idea of making a dynamic film is a primal arge with filmmakers That's why action films are so poptilar: because film can get across the sense of speed.There's something dynamic, something explosive about film. But film cm also transport emotions. A running person brings it all together, explosive dynamics and emotion, because it's when people move that they express things: despair, happiness, or whatever. I wanted RUN LOLA RUN to grab the viewers and drag them along, to give them a roller-coaster ride. I wanted die sheer, unadorned pleasure of speed. A wild chase with consequences.

DEADLY MARIA, WINTERSLEEPERS - and now RUN LOLA RUN. How does RUN LOLA RUN relate to your other work?

My three films are totally different, but I keep on recognising myself in them. Certain elements that interest me keep on resurfacing. Time, for instance, and die way time gets manipulated.The dramatic principle of creating time is, I feel, one of the most interesting aspects of filmmaking.You can relate what happens in 20 minutes or in 20 years. RUN LOLA RUN for me is a continuous journey - whereby the most important thing is that the viewer feels that Lola really has lived through die various possibilities we show in the film. And not only the last 20 minutes.That the audience transcends the timespan emotionally and starts really sympathising with Lola as the film progresses - and ends up wanting her to be finally rewarded for everything she's had to go through - Manni's death, and her own dying.

How was RUN LOLA RUN conceived visually?

The film was storyboarded very precisely indeed, because so many details were involved.Where exactly was which person standing in which scene? How does the camera only show what's important and nothing else? On top of that of course we're also telling a story that is played out during a particular interval of time on the säme day.That means that the weather and the light both have to be identical. One really crazy aspect was all the clocks that keep coming into shot everywhere - we spend hours discussing whether it was seven minutes or six minutes to twelve in some scenes. Or maybe even five to twelve?? The continuity people definitely worked overtime, anyhow! The visual concept was already extremely important during the preparatory phase, which is also why the screenplay has so many technical details.

Music plays a very large part in RUN LOLA RUN. lt resulted from a cooperation between two muslcians and yourself...

As with "Winter Sleepers", I worked an the film music for RUN LOLA RUN with Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil. The very idea of anyone else composing music for any film of raine is like a nightmare for me. The wrong music can screw up a film completely. Music can make a good film into a great one, and a reasonably good one into a bad one. Because music intensifies everything. I mean, just imagine "Once Upon a Time in the West" without the music! Music plus images equals film. I think, write and cut in a very musical way - so it was obvious that I'd want to take care of the soundtrack, too.l didn't want any standard techno music through the film.With the soundtrack for RUN LOLA RUN I've made a pop record for the first time, a real dance record.

Biography

Born in Wuppertal in 1965, a Berliner by choice, self-taught Tom Tykwer is a passionate movie-goer. He shot his first Super-8 films at the age of eleven. In 1988, he took over the management of the Berlin "Moviemento" cinema.Tom worked as a script supervisor and provided several film portraits of his favourite directors for television (including Aki Kaurismäki,Wim Wenders, Peter Greenaway and Lars von Trier).

In 1993 Tom Tykwer directed his first movie, DEADLY MARIA. Together with Wolfgang Becker he wrote the screenplay for LIFE IS ALL YOU GET which received several federal film prizes.That was followed by the romantic thriller WINTER SLEEPERS (1997) which also received euphoric acclaim from the international press.

Cast & Crew

Tom Tykwer
 Stefan Arndt
 Tom Tykwer
 Frank Griebe
 Franka Potente (Lola), Moritz Bleibtreu (Manni), Herbert Knaup (Lola's father), Armin Rohde (Mr. Schuster), Joachim Król (Norbert von Au (tramp)), Nina Petri (Mrs. Hansen)
 Mathilde Bonnefoy
 Alexander Manasse
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