'Perfume' - Tom Tykwer Q&A

The German director discusses bringing 'Perfume - The Story of a Murderer' to the big screen.

Dec 21 2006

German director Tom Tykwer first came to international prominence with the fast-paced 1998 thriller 'Run Lola Run'. He has since directed 'The Princess + the Warrior' and 'Heaven', and returns to cinema screens this month with his remarkable adaptation of Patrick Süskind's hugely successful novel 'Perfume – The Story of a Murderer'.

How did you first come into contact with the book?

I read it when I was young. Because when it came out – that was actually 20 years ago – it was a super smash bestseller in Germany so you kind of had to read it at a certain point. And of course I was a bit reluctant, because, you know, if you think you're special you don't want to read the stuff everybody's reading (laughs). And I was a bit arrogant about it but then ultimately of course I gave in, and was really surprised – it is such a peculiar novel. And it wasn't like a typical bestseller, page-turning thing that you just consume and forget quite quickly, it stays with you.

Why do you think that is?

It's a very disturbing and darkly written romantic tale, and there is a very intimate point that it makes about a world that obviously had not been investigated – the world of smells. It was really profoundly researched in terms of how perfume is produced and how the smell system itself works and it was really beautiful in its depiction and in its describing detail about particular smells. And there was just something about it that gave the whole idea of perfume and smell such an importance that it somehow resonated with the importance that it actually has in our daily life. So I felt like, yeah, there is something truthful about this. Smells influence our decision system and even our mating attitudes and so I quite admired it then, but of course I didn't even know that I would become a filmmaker. I wanted to but I didn't know that it would work out and then years later – 15, 16 years later – I was approached to direct it and suddenly realised that I had never thought about being a period film director. I always felt like a contemporary filmmaker, but I realised that there is something about this book that I remembered to be very mysterious, seemingly very contemporary. So I re-read it and discovered many things in it that I found suddenly extremely interesting for me on a subjective level.

Such as?

You know, the whole idea of this guy being a loner, or a nobody, who was trying to be a somebody, and who tries to overcome his isolation by creating something exceptional for himself that makes people admire him. And this whole idea of a disguise that makes you attractive to other people is fascinating because it touches all these issues like celebrity manipulation and the media and everything that we are surrounded by. So there is something extremely contemporary hidden in this historical tale that I feel we can make a very modern film. A modern film in period clothes.

What was the scriptwriting process like?

We were lucky to have the writer Andrew Birkin who was the one who found a way into the language of the film and who could translate this weird mix of the darkness and irony of the novel into a script. Without him I don't think that we would ever have cracked that nut. So he was the key writer on this piece. But at the same the biggest struggle was constructing a film around a character that is so ambiguous and ambivalent. In literature there's a little bit more freedom and a bit more space to have a main character be that disturbing, as opposed to film conventions where we are so used to the fact that the hero needs to be doing things that are not totally against our moral rules. And in this case we have a character who absolutely breaks all the rules that are possible, and at the same time it forces us to stay with him. And making it work on cinematic terms was a really tough nut to crack.

How did you visually describe these odours?

In the writing we quite early on agreed that it would never become a film that uses a lot of visual gimmicky effects. I never thought that we should try and look for representations with visual effects in terms of green fogs coming through doors or digitally animated particles of scent atoms flying through the air and into the nose or something. I thought that would have been really ridiculous and made it kind of a cheap fantasy film. Because I think that the mesmerising part about the novel and about what we wanted to do with the film is to give it the most convincing and condensed amount of reality. And reality in terms of authenticity to the experience of the world of smells that much more relates to the physicality of the process itself. You know, to the way that Grenouille encounters the world not through the eyes, not through the ears, but through the nose. So we tried to be as subjective as possible through not Grenouille's eyes, but his nose.

I guess a very big part of the film coming together is finding an actor to play your lead character so how did you come across Ben Whishaw?

The decision was just to keep searching and searching until we stumbled upon the right person. And not to stop before. Not to even start preparing the movie seriously before we knew we had an actor that can really make all these contradictory energies work in one personality. And one day the two casting directors from London sent me to the Old Vic theatre to see the 'Hamlet' that was there and so I discovered the fabulous Ben Whishaw and was immediately intrigued. I then met him for an audition which was just so spectacular and already so close to what I had imagined about the character, because he was really able to explore all these different and seemingly disconnected energies like being dark and innocent at the same time, and being dangerous and boyish, you know, being someone that seems completely harmless and then at the same time, when you look at him properly, you know that he is able to commit all these crimes. I love the fact that he was delivering so much ambivalent energy and giving us a very intuitive portrayal of this character, but when you talk to him it was obvious that he very much analytically understood what it was all about. I was immediately sure that we had our man and I know without him the movie wouldn't work. I mean, I could have done anything as a director and if it wasn't for Ben the movie would have just sunk, unwatched.

What was it like working on a film of this scale?

It was partly nerve-wracking, and it was also sometimes mind-blowing in terms of the tasks that were piling up on one single day and the unanswered questions that were always lying around. The amount of unanswered questions were really sometimes giving me the chills. But at the same time I was determined to be ultra prepared for the shoot so we took a long time to prep the movie very, very profoundly. We went through all the research that had to be done. We all became experts in the 18th century. And especially about lower class life in the 18th century. We learned everything about costumes, everything about makeup, everything about the state of health people had, the way teeth looked, all of that stuff, so that at the end of the day, when you've rehearsed everything and tested everything, ultimately the shooting of it was a little bit of a relief. We had piled up so much knowledge that finally we could elevate it into the film.

Was it nerve-wracking knowing that 15 million people had read the material and have a very close connection to it?

Yeah that's true. The novel has a very particular standing among its huge fan base which has to do with the fact that there is something so intimate about it in terms of the subject matter being smell and the important role that smell plays in daily life and I think that everybody is really deeply connected to this idea. So it is not only a book that everybody has read, it has also become a favourite book of a lot of people, so I felt a strong responsibility not to disappoint all these people. And to deliver something that is equally faithful to the novel as it is a subjective and drastic and radical individual vision of it. And that balance was a major challenge.

The film also has a very beautiful, powerful score – how did that come together?

We started working on the score parallel to the writing. Really, from the beginning when we started writing the script we were beginning the composition process and for me its really helpful to do that because in the writing, what I understand mainly about the film is, motivations and construction and characterisations and the composition of the music is very much about the emotions and the atmosphere of the material. So when all that comes together that's when you really start to get the ideas for what kind of shots you want to do, what kind of style you want it to have and the set-ups and the production design and stuff like that. So it was a parallel process all the way through. It took nearly two and a half years to write and perform the score to the quality that it has now and that was one of the massive challenges of this film, because I had never done a score of that proportion, I mean with this kind of – you know, like 100 musicians. We even ended up with an amazing orchestra and Simon Rattle conducting. It was just amazing for me. A quite overwhelming experience. And beautiful of course. They lift the music that you've put on paper to some level that you didn't even know was there.

'Perfume – The Story of a Murderer' is released on December 26.

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