Dynamic Duo

Run Lola Run’s super-couple talks about their offbeat chemistry.

by Cindy Fuchs



Street release: Potente in The Princess and the Warrior.

The coolest couple in movies, Tom Tykwer and Franka Potente, have ordered iced coffees from room service. After talking to interviewers all day, they need a boost. When the drinks arrive in tall glasses, topped with whipped cream, we ooh and ahh on cue. They take delight in small pleasures.

Both filmmaker and actress grew up in small German towns, the 36-year-old Tykwer in Wuppertal, the 27-year-old Potente in Dülmen (so small that there were no movie theaters). At 17 she studied in the U.S. as a foreign-exchange student; later she attended New York’s Lee Strasberg Theater Institute. She became a professional actress in 1996, made 13 German films and TV movies, and then Run Lola Run changed her life. Recently, she appeared in Blow as Johnny Depp’s girlfriend, and she will soon be seen in The Bourne Identity with Matt Damon.

It’s clear why she’s not interested in moving wholly into the Hollywood mainstream, as she shares with Tykwer a vibrant closeness and passion for their own offbeat, challenging projects. They met in 1998, while making Lola. They worked together on the script for their new film, The Princess and the Warrior, developing a balance of "subjectivities" for two protagonists, a psychiatric nurse, Sissi (Potente), and an emotionally damaged ex-soldier named Bodo (Benno Fürmann). Tykwer says that they conceived the characters not with dialogue or plot, but with their "extraordinary body language — it screams the contradictions and different energies they represent, how difficult it will be for them to get together, but also how great it will be if they do." He recalls, "As I was typing, Franka was walking up and down, saying, ‘You think this way?’" Potente smiles: "It works in this absurd way. If somebody watched all of us on set, they wouldn’t [understand]. As Tom says, it’s not outspoken, it’s more about suggesting."

But even as she helped to create Sissi, Potente says that the role was demanding, unlike any other she has done before. "Once the train was set on the rails, there was no way back. Once we established that it was going to be intense, honest and real, and therefore painful, then I had to stretch for every scene." She’s glad to have participated in the creation. "Usually I’m just the actress. I don’t think of myself with being a writer; I’m so concerned with my own shit, concerning my job. Why would I want to take on somebody else’s? But this [process] turned out to be luxurious, and really important for Sissi. She’s the hardest character to get to know, of all the characters I’ve played so far. I needed that extra time to get into her shoes."

Tykwer parallels Sissi’s internal voyage to the film’s demands of its viewers and notes that he took his own journey, back in time: They shot in his hometown. When the crew first arrived, he remembers, they said, "What? We’re going to stay 16 weeks here!? Hell!" But by working on the film, "They slowly started to be taken into Sissi’s perspective, naïve, where there’s no pre-judgment about anything, transforming the town into something more magical and beautiful." For Tykwer himself, this magic began on "those stupid streets you walked on your way to school, when you were 7 or 8 or 12; as you walk, half-asleep, the trees can turn into a wonderful forest, where dangers are waiting for you."

In part, Tykwer located this metaphorical "forest" in the asylum. "My impression was that so few films represent the normality of that [life]," he explains. "People live there, and like any family, they have rituals. Most of the time during the day, not very much happens, but there is a potential that everybody carries around inside of themselves, a potential that anything can happen. You have no idea what’s going to happen next."

"You can’t prepare for anything," Potente adds. She spent a couple weeks at one such hospital, passing as a nurse, "with glasses and a new name." She recalls especially the intensity and immediacy of the experience, as she interacted with patients: "It was constant, all these reflexes: Get up now. Turn around now. Don’t say anything now. I was so exhausted."

Most importantly, Tykwer and Potente wanted to explore Sissi and Bodo in depth. He says he wanted "to take time to get to know somebody, and not make them be shiny superheroes on first sight. It’s wonderful to enjoy someone that you’ve had time to get to know. You know, because in the regular drama, you have to love somebody before you know him: ‘This is the hero, so shut the fuck up and love him! Care for her!’" Potente adds, "Because of a certain outfit, or hair color." Tykwer laughs, "Exactly. So we didn’t do that with the makeup and the hair. It wasn’t washed very often."

See Cindy Fuchs’ review of The Princess and the Warrior in Movie Shorts.