Tom Tykwer Talks Kaleidoscopic, Politically Charged Berlin Film Festival Opener ‘The Light’: “The Crisis Has Been Showing Its Face For A Decade & We’re Waking Up Now”
Tom Tykwer opens the Berlin Film Festival for a third time on Thursday with his dazzling snapshot of life in contemporary Berlin, taking stock of German society as the first quarter of the 21st century draws to a close.
It is his first feature-length film since 2016’s Saudi Arabia-set drama A Hologram for the King starring Tom Hanks.
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Tykwer, who has spent the past decade immersed in the final years of Germany’s 1918-1933 Weimer Republic with hit series Babylon Berlin, has returned to the present with gusto.
He plunges his protagonists into a reality marked by digitization, globalization, climate change, job insecurity, global migration, conflict-driven displacement and rising political extremism, and watches them navigate this age of disruption.
Lars Eidinger and Nicolette Krebitz play chaotic, comfortably-off, late 40s couple Tim and Milena Engels, who are parents to 17-year-twins Frieda (Elke Biesendorfer) and John (Julius Gause), and 8-year-old Dio (Elyas Eldridge).
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Milena travels back and forth to Kenya, where she is battling to get a German government-funded community arts center project off the ground, while Tim is a creative guru at a funky advertising agency.
They are disconnected from one another and their children. Frieda’s opening sequence follows her on a 48-hour, drug-fueled club bender, while John lives vicariously through the headset of his VR multiplayer game, rarely venturing out of his room.
The arrival of enigmatic Syrian refugee Farrah (Tala Al-Deen) as a housekeeper brings fresh purpose and connection to each of the family members. Farrah’s past is a mystery, as are her motives for taking the job given she was a medic back home, but she seems strangely drawn to the dysfunctional family unit.
Deadline talked with Tykwer about his new film on the eve of its world premiere in Berlin.
DEADLINE: What was the starting point for this film? It feels very organic and personal…
TOM TYKWER: I’m at the end of my 50s and I feel like a representative of a generation that is facing the consequences of a time that we did not experience as inactive or passive, but during which, it seems we missed certain opportunities and did not foresee changes that are now blowing in our face.
Our kids are looking at us and saying, “What did you do? Where were you?” They’re trying to understand how we managed to let things fall apart that much without jumping up and trying to stop this.
We don’t feel like we were lazy, but I think objectively, we probably were. It stresses me and creeps me out because I was imagining myself differently. The film isn’t really blaming anybody. Life develops in a way that you can only do so much. Things were so complicated to handle in the beginning of the century, the millennium, when markets were liberalized, and digitalization took over our economic system and our social systems.
The crisis has been showing its face for at least a decade, maybe longer and we’re waking up now because our children are becoming grown-ups and saying, “Guys, this is a real mess. You thought it would be an interesting construction site that we can continue building, but it’s disastrous. We will still jump on it, but please let’s join forces.”
That’s what the movie is saying. We need to join forces and look at each other with love and empathy. “Each other” means all of us, all the people that now live together in communities and societies.
DEADLINE: The film also feels like a love letter to Berlin, its diverse population and complexities.
TYKWER: I hope it’s a beautiful mess. The family is a beautiful mess. The situation they’re in, the life that surrounds them, the politics around them, that’s a mess, and Berlin is a mess. The beauty of Berlin is that it’s a beautiful mess. It’s always been that way. It’s a never-ending story of an unfinished city never finished. There are construction sites all over the place. They’re always saying, “Ok, we’re going to rebuild it, and then it will be beautiful,” and there are more construction sites than ever in the history of the city.
There have been so many crimes committed in architectural terms. Its ugliness is unpaired next to its beauty, within 10 minutes’ walk, you can see the most depressing architectural crimes and then enter the most beautiful district and it’s one of the greenest capitalist cities in the world.
It offers such a variety of experience, and that’s why it’s also so cinematic. It offers every kind of atmosphere you’re looking for in a movie. I was trying to investigate this, yet at the same time, condense it in a certain way, by drowning it in rain. The rain became a powerful tool for the story to bring people’s attention to the intimacy of the characters and have us live inside of their perspective … the rain also supported this idea of people in their bubbles and in their closed realms. And of course, water is such a big symbol in the entire movie, especially in the end, where it takes on a different meaning.
DEADLINE: You’ve described the film as a companion piece to your 1998 breakout Run Lola Run, which shot in Berlin at the end of the last century and less than a decade after its reunification when it was a very different city…
TYKWER: Yeah, but to me Berlin is still that same unfinished symphony… The most inspiring part about it is the transitionary energy in the air here. There’s always something else coming up, new clubs, pop-up restaurants and places where things happen, just for a while, and then you move on; districts that are in and then they’re out, as the crowd moves from here to there. There’s so much movement in the city, still, that can be translated into a film. The big difference is that Lola runs in the summer, and we were shooting in late fall in the rain, that was a different choice. I would say this film is the older, bigger sister of Lola.
DEADLINE: There are a number of elaborate singing and dance scenes in the movie, intercut with the more traditional narrative drama. What was the thinking behind that. Is it a throwback to your work on Babylon Berlin?
TYKWER: Maybe, I really enjoyed directing these musical pieces in Babylon Berlin. I was also making a movie for the cinema theater, and when you go to the theater, you want to be surprised.
We also want to understand and connect with these people who are strange yet familiar. What many movies do when they want to reach out to the deeper secrets of their characters, is tell a story from the past, linked to their psychology, or reveal a secret that they share with someone. It’s a dialogue in a bar with a glass of whiskey and all that stuff.
I was asking is that really the choice we want to take on this film? We figured out, it would be much nicer do this through a song, even without lines, to have the people be connected with music, to express something complicated in a much less complicated way. Music has this crazy power to take a lot of subjects and filter them in a melody and harmonies, and suddenly they feel connected. That’s a miracle.
One of the key songs in the film is “Bohemian Rhapsody” from Queen. It’s always been a song that I’ve admired for its audacity, its braveness. It says, “I can be opera. I can be hard rock, I can be a ballad, I can be singer-songwriter, or even an intimate prayer.” “Bohemian Rhapsody” is everything, everywhere, all at once in a song. The light is a reflection of a variety of subjects and emotional issues that are also connected because it’s one family, because it’s one soul, and it’s sort of one voice, not only mine, but of all the people who made the film. I was asking can we try to make it one, like Freddie Mercury did in this song, which is also very intimate and personal … as well as confessionary. I wanted the movie to feel a little bit like “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
DEADLINE: While the film explores the big challenges of the age, it doesn’t directly allude to the rise of political extremes and the rise of the far-right in Germany, which is clearly a growing issue of the times. Was that a deliberate decision, especially after having been immersed in late 1920s, early 1930s German politics through Babylon Berlin?
TYKWER: Obviously, I’ve been talking about the rise of it non-stop in the TV show. It’s been the subject of my work over this past decade, and as we head into the fifth season and the 1933 election year, it’s crazy how it coincides again and runs parallel to today.
While I was working in Babylon Berlin, the alignment of the historical events and today’s developments became more and more apparent and creepy at the same time. It was completely unpredictable. We did not expect this to happen. We started writing in 2013, before Brexit, before Trump, before the European destabilization. Everything was still seemingly functioning nicely. Along the way, it turned into this situation that we’re living in now, which is so insecure and destabilized.
As we were looking at the historical developments and changes [in Babylon Berlin] through the eyes of my grandparents’ generation, it dawned on me how important it would be to also say, “Yes, there are similarities politically, but we are very different people now, different animals. The generation that is now confronted with this has gone through a lot of progressive, energetic rethinking, so we will handle it differently.”
I wanted us to be heroes of our story again. I wanted my generation and our children, these two generations, to be confronted with all these subjects in a film. That doesn’t mean you have to show political realities in parliaments. … I’m more interested in how these issues play out and are reflected in our daily lives. Every major subject that is important for political discussions today is mirrored in the film.
DEADLINE: But given what’s going on in Germany with the rise of the far right and the street demonstrations, the politics is spilling into everyday lives…
TYKWER: Seen from outside, you must be asking, “What are they doing there?’ But believe me, here we’re really aware of this new situation in our reshaping parliament. But we’re also quite convinced that there is this rise of a certain energy in Europe or even maybe worldwide. It’s just that the right and the far-right has a lot of back wind at the moment. It has a momentum. But when you look at the consequences in the longer run, the bigger picture, people are looking for connection, for more open-mindedness, they’re not going to enjoy authoritarian leadership. We have moved so far that we can’t go that far back. Even if we end up dipping our toes in it, we’ll soon realize that the water is much too cold for our whole body. Many of the dramatic, big-time leaders that represent this movement are very old white males. They’ll be gone.
DEADLINE: How do you feel about how the alignment of the subject of the film and current events and the fact that the film will open the Berlinale in this very particular period in Germany history?
TYKWER: It’s crazy. I started to work on this film three years ago or more and now it couldn’t be a more challenging and fitting moment to have this movie open, both in general, and in particular the Berlinale, and with Tricia Tuttle in charge, who so far is doing an incredible job in communicating a new festival idea. Her attitude, her cinematic knowledge and experience and her spirit is just so wonderful, I’m already in love with her at the festival before it has even started. To have a movie, in this super tense time period, so close to elections, that with a lot of passion, energy and love investigates most of the subjects that people are battling about now, I couldn’t be happier to crash into this moment with this thing that I’ve done.
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