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At the Berlin International Film Festival's 'Talent Campus' event in 2003, both Tom Tykwer, director of Run Lola Run (1998) and Mathilde Bonnefoy, the film's editor, ran workshops. One insight they provided into their working processes was the screening of a 'teaser' trailer for Run Lola Run, shot and edited in the early stages of production. The trailer had to be created for early marketing purposes but both Tykwer and Bonnefoy came to view it as a pivotal resource in the ensuing stages of production. Realizing that it successfully captured the 'feel' they wanted, they could now use it as a reference point for those elements that may not necessarily be captured in a script - such as style, rhythm, and mood - and as a concrete example of the role post-production elements like music and editing could play in the film.
Features of the trailer were its escalating pace, use of music, rhythmic editing - and the overall sense of energy that characterizes Run Lola Run. According to Bonnefoy, what stood out was not that it was 'true to any particular scene or intention in the film', but that it was 'fast and associative, like the pure expression of a feeling'. The adoption of the teaser as a 'template' led the team to cut scenes from the original script that now went against the grain of the film's direction.
For Bonnefoy, this symbolized the transformation of the film from an 'intellectual' to an 'aesthetic' object. It is interesting that she never read Tykwer's script - instead she was given raw footage and worked only with this. Bonnefoy's attitude was that a script functions as a guide for the director - and for an editor, a collection of shots takes its place. For her, she said, shots were like words. Tykwer also pointed out that it was important for him to have his director of photography, editor and sound team involved from an early stage (with Lola, weeks before starting the film).1
These insights indicate the importance of more than just a script, or traditional elements of story like characters and events, in even the early development of Run Lola Run. They suggest that the form of Lola - how the story is communicated,...