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"In Berlin, I tried to catch up with some films, and of course as a filmmaker it gets more and more difficult because you always have business to do," confesses Tom Tykwer. "So I would sneak away. Last year I saw The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau, 1925), also called The Last Man. It was amazing. The print looked like it was shot on 70mm or IMAX or something, it was so sharp and such nice contrasts and so rich. And I saw Sunrise, which is one of my favorite films ever."

Director of the breathlessly visceral romantic thriller Run Lola Run and the contemplative and dreamy Heaven, Tykwer was in Seattle to promote the upcoming release of his latest film, Perfume. Based on the novel by Patrick S�skind, an international bestseller and veritable phenomenon in Europe, it's an askew murder mystery set in the slums of 18th century Paris, where an orphan with a near supernatural sense of smell and a near inhuman lack of empathy becomes obsessed with scent to the exclusion of everything else. His pursuit of the most beautiful smells turns him into a serial killer who murders remorselessly for the sake of an art only he can truly appreciate.

But in the introductory small talk, he discovered that I had attended the Pordenone Silent Film Festival. Suddenly my questions were put on hold as he questioned me about Pordenone and what I liked about silent film. It was no mere idle chit chat. As his films attest, Tykwer is concerned with the texture of storytelling and the exploration of ideas through images and performance. The silent cinema is perhaps the purest form and it came up throughout the interview. He even used it as a segue to the business at hand, namely Perfume.

"I've done something like a silent movie," he says. "There's, like, hours of no dialogue in this film." Okay, not quite hours, but it made a great jumping off point for an interview that centered on, among other things, the way you communicate the sense of smell in a visual medium.

You have a main character who hardly speaks at all. Ben Whishaw gives an almost completely physical performance. Even when he's walking down the street, he gives off a sense of desperation. His adrenaline seems to be pumping every time he gets out and starts smelling things, as if he has to find a way to capture it. How did you work with him to get this performance? These are certainly not the kind of tendencies you associate with a killer, the visual presentation of a murderer.

To this concept, a story about somebody who is a murderer but at the same time is a kind of hero of the story, we needed somebody very much capable of an ambiguous quality. I really sought out many actors, tested a lot of people, and it was always clear we can't even start thinking about preparing the movie seriously before we have found the really right one. And then, I think after more than a hundred people that I either had met or seen tapes of or whatever, I was sent to see Hamlet on stage in London at the Old Vic Theater. It was a new production, and he was Hamlet, like 23 years old, the youngest Hamlet ever at the Old Vic and he was amazing. He was so different and so specific. There was something so peculiar about a Hamlet who is kind of a very, let's say, one of the nicer guys that Shakespeare has written. But the way he put him there - I loved the fact that he was also doing something very contemporary about it, and very confusing.

Then even more came out in the audition. He presented Grenouille in a way [in] that [he's] a very modern character who's locked into his body and the body at the same time is expressing all this locked in feeling. He wants to express himself and he doesn't know how. He wants to connect with society and he hasn't learned how. He is like a very shy and nervous animal, always ready to jump. Jump away rather than to jump and attack but, if it's necessary, also in order to attack. He was really able to carry the ambiguity that I was looking for, between somebody who is both innocent and dangerous and both a boy and still something like a dangerous animal. There is something dark about him always and something very sweet or boyish or soft and vulnerable and that mix was super hard to find.

Of course, he's a wonderful actor in so far as he has an instinct, a physical instinct, that goes pretty far, and he's still intellectually absolutely capable of everything you want to express in the movie, with what kind of universal subtext he wants to touch, and yet you don't forget about him completely in order to make that character become the medium. Because the movie completely stays with this guy even though he really leaves our realm of acceptable behavior quite often, more so during the later course of the story.

On the one hand, his character is a serial killer, except that serial killers by definition kill to exert power over people. He treats these women like raw materials. He's not killing them so much as he's sacrificing them for this thing he's creating and it makes a really strange twist on the idea of a serial killer.

That's what it's supposed to be. I mean, you know, I think it's the fascination of the entire project and the material. You are bound to stay with someone who then breaks all the rules of the regular protagonist, you know. Especially for film, much more so than for literature, it's nearly impossible to make that person still stay with us and be close to the audience and let him do all those killings because these people are really innocent people that he's killed. He's not even killing bad guys. He's killing beautiful, totally innocent young girls. There's really nothing to like about these deeds.

But I was really determined to find a way to show it exactly the way you described it. I always thought that he isn't even aware of himself as a killer. He, of course, obviously doesn't enjoy killing. It is for a greater good, in his eyes, which is the idea of we're all part of a larger sculpture of beauty. So they are like the mold of that sculpture. Therefore, he also needs them always behind as part of a sculpture, not in a throwaway gesture. And that's how we wanted to film it in order to achieve the feeling that you can't really take him seriously as a murderer. You rather take him as somebody who's obsessively building something, creating something.

There is that sense that they are raw materials in his art. At the same time, the way that scent just takes over him is almost like a drug and his chase for the perfect scent is like a drug addict chasing the perfect high. In that sense it's not quite as pure.

As pure as what?

As pure as the idea of the artist sacrificing everything around him for his art.

I don't know about other artists, but I know about filmmakers. Most filmmakers that I know, and actually most film critics that I respect, for them, film really has a drug-like dimension. And it is something that to a degree also makes us these obsessive collectors. I very much relate to Grenouille as a collector in the most traditional meaning and, of course, in the most obsessive, compulsive meaning - that he just wants to have, he wants to know every scent existing. I don't know about you, but I know you're going to Italy to go to some weird silent film festival so I totally know that you know what I'm talking about. It's about picking out flavors that you haven't had yet. The problem with us, of course, being these film nerds that we are and having seen so many films, is that it gets more and more interesting and you get more and more ambitious to pick one of those flowers you haven't had yet in your collection. I totally understand that this is the similarity between Grenouille and at least film lovers and filmmakers.

So I understood what he was about and I understood it on a level that was really substantially sympathetic. It's not that conceptually I understand what he's going for; I understand from my heart. I, of course, disagree because, fortunately, I've had some better education and know that it's not really right to kill in order to pursue your favorite beauty object. I know that, for instance, in order to receive recognition or ultimately to be loved in whatever way, we are able to do quite crazy and disturbing things if they ultimately get us there. So many crimes are committed because of the same motivation.

If you take a sociological perspective, he grew up, basically, without ever learning any kind of compassion. From the moment that he was born, he was essentially discarded, sent to an orphanage that makes Oliver Twist look like Oliver was in paradise.

[Laughs]. I've seen David Lean's film again and it's really a beautiful orphanage. It's huge. They have a lot of space there, and I was always felt like, we have to really make this like... horribly, fucking full. I mean, there's just bodies everywhere. There's nowhere to move anywhere and it must stink and they're all in their pee and these clothes that they never change, and blah, blah, blah. It is what also I was so happy and excited about when I read the novel, that finally somebody picks up and turns around the tradition of 18th century novels where you always end up in an aristocratic world and in the upper class. You really go into this street life and these mud shit holes that 98 percent of people were living in. Because there was no sewer systems that we have now - they didn't have them then. Everything was just thrown out into the street. People were wading in shit and pee and fish guts and puke and whatever it was. It was a nightmare and I thought that was really exciting to show.

All of your films have a visceral visual style and a focus on the textures of the objects and images. Here, because you're trying to show what he's experiencing through his sense of smell, you show all this filth around him, but in an incredibly beautiful way. That creates an odd dichotomy because you have this ugliness and horridness and this really delicate, beautiful way of looking at it.

I love that. I mean, I love the fact that you look at filth and it's beautiful because, in a strange way, it is beautiful. And particularly taking over the subjective perspective of the character and trying to be in his mind and see the world not through his eyes, but experience it through his nose. For him, as somebody who is a collector, there is no good and bad. As the voice-over says, he did not differentiate between what are commonly considered to be good smells from bad because he was just collecting them.

For at least 25 years of my life, I was just watching any kind of film just because it was film, not because it was good or bad. I just wanted to see everything. Everything. Everything. Because it felt like even the bad ones are interesting to understand the good ones. There's always something interesting in the worst film ever and then you take the really bad ones and discuss them so long they become interesting. I wanted that perspective to become part of the entire approach of the film.

I'd like to ask you about Heaven, your previous film. Heaven is directed from a script by Krzysztof Kieslowski and Perfume is an adaptation of a novel. All your previous films have been your own original scripts, if I'm not mistaken.

Well, this is also my script. I mean, I had two co-writers, but I really put a lot of effort into making it. I can't really think of myself not being involved at all in the writing. But, yes, I know what you mean. It's different material. Also, in Heaven, we'd been really working a long time on this script together, but I didn't want the credit for it. It is really only the material itself that attracts me because it needs to touch something that I have a very subjective and personal relationship to. Kieslowski's script just did it. It was one of those scripts that I read and I felt like, "Wow! That's the one. That's the script I've always wanted to write but was never able to."

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