Potente: I don’t know that I really had that many expectations. I was also at the beginning of my career, so you gauge obstacles or challenges differently. I think that’s the beauty of youth and being new to something. There wasn’t this thing to me where I was like, ‘Oh my God, all this running…’ It sounds ridiculous, but there was a sense early on that there was nothing we could not do. That’s a very rare feeling.
Twyker: That’s what the movie is about. That’s the movie.
Tom, was there any aspect of making the film that seemed insurmountable?
Twyker: Limitations are part of creativity, especially in the movie industry, because it’s always absurd amounts of money, no matter how low-budget your film is. This one was only $2 million, but it was of course beyond belief for people like us, because I lived off something like 800 marks a month then [approximately $660 in US dollars today.] And it was fine. I had a nice life.
Where did the idea for the movie originate?
Twyker: I had founded this company called X Filme with a few director friends and a producer. We were, I think, a great creative bunch, but miserable business people. Ridiculously bad. After only three or four movies, we were already bankrupt. We had such bad debts for the last two firms, and we couldn’t pay all these bills. The only solution was to quickly make another movie— and get it funded and somehow financed—to pay the old bills with the money we were getting for the new film, and then take care of that problem once we had made it.
Potente: It’s a great concept.
Twyker: I wrote it faster than any other script that I’ve ever written. And the energy was in the script, so the right people could see it in there. Many said, ‘Oh, this doesn’t make sense…’ But some people felt it, and the people we needed did. Suddenly, we could make the movie, we could pay the bills from the other movies. We could not pay our bills for Lola, but you can always wait for a few months before you actually have trouble.
That’s like paying off one credit card with another credit card.
Potente: Totally.
Twyker: If the movie had not been a success, I would probably not have gone on as a filmmaker because we would’ve had to handle our bankruptcy. Then this movie changed everything.
Was Lola a metaphor for the story of this production company? You said you’d made two previous films, and you were in debt. Twice it doesn’t work out, and then there’s your third act, which is Lola, where you strike gold.
Twyker: It was a bit like that, three attempts. But it also became this strategy that I’m still struggling with and embracing at the same time because I’m still in this office that we have for 20 years, and this company still exists. It’s the same company, X Filme. The truth is, we’ve always been this kind of mess. We’ve always went full-on and tried to only make the movies we really love. You place your bets on the wrong one, the wrong one, the wrong one, and then … the right one again! Always when we were about to be bankrupt, we had a huge success. We were nearly bankrupt, then we had Good Bye, Lenin! [2003]. And then we were nearly bankrupt again, and we did The White Ribbon [2009]. And then we were really bankrupt, and we did Cloud Atlas [2012], which for us was a real success.