Somewhere out there you can find love: Der Krieger und die Kaiserin (PRINCESS AND THE WARRIOR, the (2000) is a story about two people who have to save each other's lives before they can share each other's love.

Like all Tom Tykwer's films, Der Krieger und die Kaiserin (PRINCESS AND THE WARRIOR, the (2000)) is a refined play on the elements of genre cinema, in which a love story and crime merge together. With a hitherto unequalled virtuosity, Tykwer makes a success of the difficult balance between formal intensity and human warmth, between hypnotic pictures and moving feelings.

And he comes up with something that has never been seen before - a love scene, which is also a medical operation.

Extracts From The Shooting Script

Sissi: "I can't sleep properly any more, because of you. And when I do eventually fall asleep, then I dream about you, I dream about the smell of you, the way you talk, the way you breathe, the way you cry."

Bodo:" Are you crazy? You don't know me at all!"

Sissi: "I've got to know whether it means anything, you being under the lorry that day. Or if it was just chance. I've got to know if my life is going to have to change, and if you're the reason for it."

The Power Of Love

"If anything at all is capable of healing our inner wounds, then it is love. Love enables us to overcome obstacles in life. Its potency is just amazing. In my experience, even people who like Bodo have lost all belief in love because they have been disappointed or betrayed, get that belief back if they have the chance. Disillusionment in a job, a career or in social matters is sometimes difficult to conquer. But I have time and again seen people still falling in love at 60, and the effect is the same as if it were the first time. Suddenly all the doors are open again, although they seemed shut before. "
Tom Tykwer

As much as he loves the romantic, Tom Tykwer hates sentimentality. So with him, love always also deals with the difficulties it must overcome. Once more it is the triumph of love over the adversities of life. After the external resistances of Lola Rennt (run lola Run (1998)), we now have the internal resistance, in the wounded hearts of the hero and heroine. Once more what is at stake is coming out of stagnation into movement.

A Modern Cinderella Story

Of course, it is very much in keeping with the times; it is not the prince who must go on a quest, but the princess - no, the empress who conquers her warrior. Instead of fitting into a glass slipper, she has to find the jacket with the missing button, that little pledge of love that she managed to grasp in the casualty department when his hand slipped away from hers.

"My experience shows that the least one can say is that the capacity to love is not specifically masculine. That men struggle ten times harder with all the questions of the struggle between the sexes, and usually act so as not to surrender to their feelings. And that's when they hold up banks. .. "
Tom Tykwer

Jigsaw Pieces For The Picture Of A Generation

After Tödliche Maria, Die (DEADLY MARIA (1994)), after Winterschläfer (WINTERSLEEPERS (1997)), and the great delirium of Lola Rennt (RUN LOLA RUN (1998)), in his fourth feature film Tom Tykwer shows more facets of his generation's feeling for life. While Bodo physically struggles and fights against his feelings, Sissi absorbs them in her concentrated trancelike appearance. Both are without parents and adjusted to a variety of replacement families.

"My generation is very strongly marked by complicated family relationships. On the one hand there is greater tolerance, on the other side total lack of understanding. This lack of understanding between the generations is always an important theme for me. "Tom Tykwer

Chance Or Fate

"In the cinema people are always being thrown into decisive situations. I like the thought of saying over and over: what else could have happened to my life? What else could have happened to your life? What could have happened to us? I think it is wonderful that in the cinema you can set this speculation machine in motion. You can so, now we shall get to know these people and then simply go on weaving, without being exposed to reality, whilst in life plays its own game. " Tom Tykwer

If Sissi had crossed the road a few seconds later, she would not have been run over by the lorry.

If fleeing Bodo had simply carried on running instead of jumping on the lorry, then the driver would not have been distracted.

If the accident had not happened, then Bodo and Sissi would never have met.

If Otto were not blind, then two months later he would not have remembered the footsteps, and Sissi might never have found Bodo again.

If the bank hold-up had not gone wrong, the Bodo and Sissi might never have met again.

And: If Sissi had not almost died, she might never have learned to live and love.

Again and again it is a matter of seconds that throw the points of life on to a new track. Seconds, which decide about death, life and love. What if. .. Again and again. Always new.

At the end all the loose threads of fate combine to make a thickly woven net. Flashbacks. Memories, photos. Each individual picture fits into the great jigsaw of life.

Women As Cinema Heroines

"At one time I was carried away to the point where I said that they were the more interesting heroes. Perhaps it is because the most intense relationships in my life have been with women, and I therefore have the feeling that I can say more about it. I have never got to know a man as well as I have known certain women. That also has something to do with the principle of friendship between men, where part of the ritual is not to get too close." Tom Tykwer

Franka Potente plays a persevering woman. She stubbornly and unshakably pursues the man to whom she feels bound. She finds the way to his heart through natural forces and crime scenes, and as in LOLA RENNT (RUN LOLA RUN (1998)) the dreamlike intensity of her feelings overlays the whole film.

Krieger und die Kaiserin, Der (PRINCESS AND THE WARRIOR, the (2000))

"In my view it is a very descriptive title, since the film gives these special, strange figures the same dimension as is usually reserved only for historical heroes. I think it is wonderful if they are suddenly allowed to set the tone of an epic film. They both grow beyond their own limits, and that is why they deserve a description like this, which is not 'The frustrated soldier and the cranky nurs', although the film could well have been called that.

The name of Sissi consolidates the impression, but in what way she is the princess only becomes apparent as the film progresses. She is the secret ruler in this psychiatric establishment. In the same way Bodo's battle is not a soldierly battle, but more a battle against himself and his feelings.

Although they are not fanciful characters, they can lay claim to this dimension. In Tödliche Maria, Die (DEADLY MARIA (1994)) I already liked the way the pair received this giant kiss. People usually assume that inhibited people also kiss inhibitedly, which of course is total rubbish. " Tom Tykwer

The Music - The Soundtrack

"Every film begins with an image. Music is in fact my inspiration for this very first image. "
Tom Tykwer, June 2000

As a lover of minimal sounds, like those of Arvo Pärt, Philipp Glass and the Penguin Café Orchestra, it was especially these sounds that inspired and accompanied the scriptwriter and director Tom Tykwer during the creative phase of Krieger und die Kaiserin, Der (PRINCESS AND THE WARRIOR, the (2000)).

After the first shared experiences with WINTERSCHLÄFER (WINTERSLEEPERS (1997)), and the worldwide success of his last film (and its soundtrack CD!) LOLA RENNT (RUN LOLA RUN (1998)), it was very soon obvious that for this film too,

Tykwer would again work with his partners Reinhold Heil (Splitt, Nina Hagen Band, Babyloon etc. ) and Johnny Klimak (producer of e. g. Dr. Motte, Paul Van Dyk). "We three understand one another implicitly. I know that if I send a script or even fragments to Johnny and Reinhold, they will straight away start trains of thought which will help the film and its atmosphere. "

While Tykwer started filming, the German Heil in Santa Barbara and the Australian Klimek in Berlin started looking for ideas and sounds for the later score. Heil says: "Tom's script was so intense and plastic that I started to get spontaneous ideas right from the first reading. For instance, I very soon started tinkering with a sound for the clinic, even if we didn't use it at all later. .. "

The final addition of the soundtrack to the film material also happened very spontaneously. The former Split musician remembers: "We met together every evening, after Tom had spent the day with the editing for the final cut. He presented a finished scene to us, and we started work on it immediately. An amazingly spontaneous and - perhaps for that reason - very fruitful process. "

Tykwer goes on to explain: "The music of this film was quite a job to do. It had to underline the development and the path of the two main characters. By comparison with LOLA RENNT (RUN LOLA RUN (1998)), emotional ups and downs and dreams play a much more important part. But by doing it this way we were always completely familiar with the current mood situation of the characters. "

Equally unusual - and perhaps unique - is the resulting soundtrack CD that is waiting to be published by Motor Music. This does contain music from the film, but not just a score. "Somewhere along the line it occurred to us that there was no reason we could not arrange the accompanying music into real songs" is how Heil describes the way the three tinkerers set about it; they now call themselves Pale 3 and on the basis of the intense creative work do not exclude the possibility of future musical projects outside the processing of motion pictures. "Since the driving force in the film is Sissi, we all found it completely normal, as we were drawing up our list of preferred candidates for the vocals, to fall back almost exclusively on female interpreters," and Tykwer adds: "In the film the vocal pieces would not have worked nearly so well. But with texts tailored to individual scenes and the very expressive singing, the listener can recreate in his mind the feelings and motives of the plot markedly better, when he hears the CD later without the film. "

For the single YOU CAN'T FIND PEACE, Pale 3 could win a real world star. Skin, the singer and charismatic front woman of the alternative rock giants Skunk Anansie, was very high on the shopping list of all three musicians. Skin met Tykwer in the course of this year's Cannes film festival, made it clear she was as big fan of LOLA RENNT (RUN LOLA RUN (1998)), and after she had seen a rough cut of the film and the song sketches which already existed, accepted the invitation without hesitation.

Skin put together her own text and made a full contribution to the sessions. The director raves about the first meeting and the joint work that grew out of it. "We were on the same wavelength immediately. In the studio Skin was an amazingly skilled, painstaking and yet creative partner. Absolutely wonderful. "