TOM TYKWER


Director, Managing Partner

TOM TYKWER was born in Wuppertal, Germany, in 1965. When he was just eleven, the film enthusiast shot his first Super-8 films. He started working in repertory film theaters in 1980. In 1988, he became the programmer at Moviemento, a cinema in Berlin. Tykwer kept himself financially afloat as a script reader and by making television portraits of various directors. After two short films, BECAUSE (1990) and EPILOG (1992), he shot his first feature film in 1993, DIE TÖDLICHE MARIA (DEADLY MARIA).

In 1994, along with Stefan Arndt, Wolfgang Becker and Dani Levy, Tykwer co-founded X Filme Creative Pool, a company that produced fourteen films over the next seven years. Among them is DAS LEBEN IST EINE BAUSTELLE (LIFE IS ALL YOU GET), with a screenplay Tykwer wrote with Wolfgang Becker in 1995 before writing and directing his own second feature film, WINTERSCHLÄFER (WINTER SLEEPERS, 1996/97).

LOLA RENNT (RUN LOLA RUN) followed in 1998 and became X Filme's first international success. Germany's biggest box office hit that year, the film performed spectacularly around the world, taking in $7 million in the US alone. LOLA became the most successful non-American film in US cinema history.

For his fourth film, DER KRIEGER UND DIE KAISERIN (THE PRINCESS AND THE WARRIOR), Tykwer again worked with LOLA's lead actress, Franka Potente, and the film turned out to be an outstanding debut for the newly founded distribution company, X Verleih AG. Celebrating its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 2000, the film has since been seen in more than twenty countries and also won a silver "Lola," the German Film Award for Best Film.

In September 2000, Tykwer directed his first film in English. HEAVEN, an X Filme coproduction with Miramax starring Cate Blanchett and Giovanni Ribisi, opened the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2002. At that year's German Film Awards, HEAVEN won silver for Best Film and Remo Girone was nominated in the Best Supporting Actor category. The film has since rolled out internationally throughout 2002 and 2003.

In August 2002, Tykwer worked with Natalie Portman and Melchior Beslon on the short film TRUE.

Tykwer is involved in the following projects as a producer: LAUTLOS /SOUNDLESS (directed by Mennan Yapo), ICH DICH AUCH (to be directed by Christiane Voss and Katja Dringenberg), EIN FREUND VON MIR / A FRIEND OF MINE (directed by Sebastian Schipper) and UNDEREXPOSURE by Oday Rasheed, an Iraqi feature film.

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