‘Run Lola Run’: The ‘90s Movie That Took Over the World

How Tom Tykwer’s groundbreaking film reflected its time—and changed the future.

Feb 2, 2017 · 8 min read

It came out of nowhere, kind of like its flame-haired heroine hurtling through the streets of Berlin: Run Lola Run appeared in 1998, fully formed and unlike anything movie audiences had seen before.

Mixing dazzling editing, techno music and a film school’s worth of cinematic techniques — ironic for a filmmaker who was rejected from film school for being too traditional — director Tom Tykwer’s tight, time-twisting action-comedy-thriller energized the German movie industry, broke out as an international hit and seemed to embody the antic spirit of ’90s independent film.

It also captured the imagination of fellow filmmakers, many of whom cite Run Lola Run as a major influence.

Tykwer’s film may have seemed sui generis, but it reflected its time and cinematic influences to anyone who was paying attention.

Let’s take a look at its influences and what came after.

Tykwer frequently described Run Lola Run as “an experimental movie for a mass audience,” but he bristled at suggestions that it was simply an MTV-era confection meant for an attention-deficit audience.

“I always get confronted with these MTV questions,” Tykwer told IndieWire in 1999. “There’s nothing so special about MTV — people associate it with something very modern, and it’s an old thing. It’s like 14 years old. It’s not representative of the late ‘90s. I always feel like, what do you mean? It may be an influence, but computer games are also an influence, because we’ve been playing them for 20 years or longer.”

Rather, Tykwer said, Run Lola Run’s form reflects its story and characters, “a film about a person bursting with passionate energy, so it has to be a film that bursts out with passionate energy,” he told IndieWire. “I always try to translate the emotional state of people into film language. So the right translation for this character and this story was to make it a frenetic, energetic, fast film.”

Comparisons to MTV music videos missed the point, Tykwer said. “There are some really good music videos, but 90 percent don’t get rid of the problem that they are meant to be advertisements” he told Filmmaker magazine in 1999. “When some are really interesting, they still have some relationship to the song they are selling. Images pop up in front of you so fast so you don’t look away, and somehow then you might keep the song in your head and maybe buy the record. …

It is always frustrating to hear [critics say that] Lola is just a big video clip,” Tykwer added. “Just because it uses visual methods that are completely normal to us now and works in the present tense doesn’t mean that I’m just trying to imitate advertisement noises.”

Critics find lots of film history references in ‘Lola’

Tykwer knew film, essayist Peter Cowie observed. “That painting of a woman hanging in the casino where Lola wins a fortune is a riff on Kim Novak’s Carlotta Valdes portrait in Vertigo. The group of impassive gamblers at the close of that same sequence are straight out of Village of the Damned, and Lola’s dashes forward into the very lens of the camera recall Raiders of the Lost Ark. Her high-pitched scream shatters glass and glasses with a brio reminiscent of little Oskar in The Tin Drum.”

They even see influences when they weren’t there. Take that Tin Drum allusion. Here’s what Tykwer himself said about it:

“I neither thought about [it] as I was writing nor shooting the film,” Tykwer said in a Q&A on his official website. “Of course, some people will make such connections, even though they were not intended as a conscious quote on my part. It is a minute irritation, and I don’t think there is any monopoly on scenes like that. Although Oskar Matzerath from The Tin Drum is also a very wistful character, the statement is quite different. Nonetheless, the character possesses immense strength, which could create a connection to Lola. Lola’s scream is a crazy, wild, hysterical expression of desperation and an attempt to stand up to what seems like the greatest hopelessness and panic and to get things moving.”

But Tykwer cops to influences from his favorite filmmakers

Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo provided Lola’s recurring symbolism of spirals, in addition to the painting of Kim Novak.

But Lola also owes something to a surprising influence: David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Tykwer told The Telegraph in 2002:

“I saw it when it first came out in 1986, and it just blew me away. It was one of those experiences you never forget. Everything in this film was so totally unknown, and yet the surface seemed so familiar. I felt that I had encountered a dream — a dream of someone I’m really interested in.”

Tykwer added: “You cannot position [Blue Velvet] in time. It feels somehow like the 1950s — there are these old cars — but then the phones and other things are obviously from the 1980s. I do this in most of my films; I love getting lost in time. Run Lola Run is very much a film of the 1990s, but it seems as if Lola is running in a dream, a nightmarish circle. I hope if you see it in 20 years, it will still be approachable, because of this.”

And there’s a bit of Quentin Tarantino in Lola. Tykwer cited Pulp Fiction as an influence in a 1999 interview with the Chicago Tribune:

“You can say, ‘The truth is a matter of perspective,’ which is much more an element of Rashomon, but that’s not really the issue here. It’s more like, ‘What could your life become, and why does it go the way it goes?’ There’s a strong contradiction — a paradox — that I really like and wanted to keep in the movie. The reasons for Lola’s actions are so clear: If she doesn’t get the money in 20 minutes, someone dies. Everyone has been in situations where they have to say yes or no, and go for it.”

‘Run Lola Run’ became a meme before there were memes

Lola crossed the Atlantic and became a phenomenon in the United States, particularly among a generation of creatives in TV and film.

You could see its influence in subsequent years in everything from The X-Files (the episode “Monday” owes its time-looping narrative to Lola) to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the episode “Beneath You” begins with a Lola-like character in Germany) to Community (the episode “Remedial Chaos Theory” was built on a very Lola-like recurring narrative and even contained a direct visual quote).

“Run Lola Run experimented with a video-game formula of a woman trying to save her boyfriend’s life, but within the three sequences of the movie, something derails her and changes her outcomes. You could say a movie like Edge of Tomorrow would not have existed without Lola’s gumption,” Esquire noted in a 2014 story on the most influential films of 1999.

Remember, Lola crested a wave of groundbreaking 1990s films that included Doug Liman’s Go and the Wachowski siblings’ The Matrix.

A young Edgar Wright, who would go on to make the British TV series Spaced in 1999 and the beloved zombie-parody movie Shaun of the Dead in 2004, saw in Lola a seminal inspiration.

“Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run is the kind of movie I wish I’d directed,” Wright wrote in 2011. “There’s such a joyful explosion of ideas and techniques, such great momentum and perpetual motion. When I first saw this, it made me want to direct another movie more than ever, I remember dragging friends to see it, including [Spaced co-stars] Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes. Indeed, it had an influence on my favorite Spaced episode, ‘Gone (2.5)’.”

Liman was reportedly impressed enough with his contemporary’s film that he hired its star, Franka Potente, to appear in The Bourne Identity in 2002 and rewrote the character from an American to a German.

And then there were the Wachowskis. The Matrix came out at the same time as Lola, and the siblings were about the same age as Tykwer. They quickly took note of each other.

“And it’s also part of why we, I think, particularly came to each other’s attention,” Tykwer told The Hollywood Reporter. “Because those two movies were — I mean, at least the release in America was — kind of the same month and were kind of discussed in similar patterns in ways. It was a philosophical setting that’s driving them, in very different ways, obviously, but there’s, like, those ideas swirling around in a movie that is profoundly trying to be as entertaining as it can get with lots of fun ideas flying around.”

Tykwer—who is also a composer—contributed a song, “Hell Club,” in 2003 to the Matrix sequel Revolutions. And he wound up working closely with the Wachowskis on Cloud Atlas and the Netflix TV series Sense8.

So what should you take away from ‘Run Lola Run’ in 2017?

“The general idea, and very specifically, I am completely fascinated by this very banal thought: If you take life really so seriously, as I secretly do, you have to be aware of every, every, every moment,” Tykwer told Filmmaker magazine in 1999.

“You have this responsibility for every moment. What we are doing at this moment may mean you’re not hit by the shuttle bus outside. Everything I do from now on is strongly connected to our meeting. Forever. Until I die. Everything is influenced by the smallest situation. It’s a very controversial thought. If everything is important, nothing is important. But on the other hand, I don’t believe that. You have to challenge coincidence, and there is a path to take. All odds are against Lola, and at the end, it shows it’s not by chance that she changes fate, it’s really her passionate, possessive desire to change the system that she is stuck in. And the system is time.”

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