Slant Magazine

Slant: 3 opens with a monologue about "harmony, friction, and symmetry." These themes/ideas represent the characters at various times. How did you conceive the three protagonists and their identities/relationships in this love triangle?

Tom Tykwer: Initially, the story was not a love triangle. In development, it was about a couple. For a long time it was a movie that should have been called 2. For me, what was interesting was not that Hanna and Simon met/fell in love. I made a film about the other end of the rope—what are relationships like when they are lasting very long and are not a mess. [laughs] When we hold on to each other and try to make it work, and all the difficulties of being together for 10-to-15 years. I collected scenes and ideas and snippets of experiences. But what among all those things is going to create the energy for a movie? The movie happened when the third person came into the "boxing ring." So the symmetry/harmony/friction idea is what keeps relationships alive. [Adam] provides diversions, distractions, and collisions. So there is a certain kind of balance. The friction is what drives the couple toward other people and other objects of desire. I explain how this relationship works. There's an idea that a couple that lives together for a long time become less like partners, and more like siblings. They can even look alike. They develop more similar interests, they are each others' major influences, so their object of desire could be the same person.

Slant: How do you relate to the characters? What elements in your life became part of their experiences?

TT: A lot of it is about the way people of my generation, who call themselves adults, middle-class Western adults today, are a funny species. The film is about anyone who knows about this crisis we run into because we feel life is static and we long for transition. Once we find something that we are happy with—a profession, a place, a relationship—even though it might be great, we look for reinvention; it's like a genetic thing—an urge. If people are too much the same, they become mundane and boring. Even as a filmmaker, you can't escape the fact that it's you making a film, so you may think it's the same thing, but you are attracted to new and different challenges. You get super excited to conquer new territories, and once they are conquered you set out for new ones. Or this desire to rely on someone who we can trust and is faithful, yet also have desires totally opposed to this expectation from our partners.

Slant: As you often do, you use a complex visual scheme to tell your story—from the overlapping images and dialogue. How did you conceive of your film visually?

TT: It's hard to put the finger on it. I'm not saying I don't know, but it's difficult to describe because it's very much a step-by-step process. Usually it's guided by my affection for the potential of cinema to represent the subjective and subjectivity—how film can capture an experience from simultaneously an objective and subjective perspective. You can cut from the point of view of a character to an outside narrator. I conceive of a scene from the perspective of how things feel for the characters, and how are they seen/felt from the character's interior perspective. That's not a visual point of view, but how a person can experience a fragment of time—how seconds can be stretched to a longer time frame in a film even though they are short. Or how time flies by, because so much happened and it was so intense. I'm trying to really relate to our inner experiences when I try to conceive visuals. The multi-screen aspects, when we tried to combine a sense of the multitude of life's experiences and the mess/chaos that we live in everyday. But at the same time, how we put this puzzle together in a seemingly fit and coherent order…I'm really fascinated by that. The day I just had was emotionally and visually overcrowded by experiences. Now I can tell you what I lived through in a way that make senses. I personally organize the images and connect them in my head. I follow the train of thought over action. I don't care for the objective much.

Slant: Why did you select Hanna's character and not Adam's to be the apex of the triangle?

TT: It's probably because I'm most attracted to her [laughs] as a protagonist. I feel close to all three, in terms of what they represent as human beings. I have things in common and connect and deeply sympathize with each of them. But with her, there is maybe the greatest sense of being the most searching of the three. She's constantly hunting for life experiences that are substantial. And she is in constant reflection about it. So stepping into her head was the most joyful and entertaining of the three of them. But at a certain point, we enjoy all three perspectives, but she's the most unpredictable one. That's what keeps movies alive.