Tom Tykwer's third feature film, Run Lola Run, was about the form of his leading lady, Franka Potente. His fourth feature, The Princess and the Warrior, is about the form of his first city, Wuppertal, Germany. All filmmakers must come to terms with their first city; they must say what it is or what it has done to them. The secret of their art is encrypted in the phantom topology of the city whose streets and buildings emerged from the blur the very moment words entered their infant mouths.

The Princess and the Warrior is an act of revenge. It's not the violent revenge of a jealous lover or the emotional revenge of a bitter son/daughter; Tykwer doesn't hate his first city--he's not returning home to dynamite buildings that brutalized him (for this type of revenge, please watch Djibril Diop Mambety's brilliant Hyènes). No, Tykwer's revenge is that of a janitor who's ready to wage a war against a space disordered by time and its creepy signs: dust, rust, and cobwebs with their desiccated insects. Mop and bucket in hand, Tom Tykwer enters the deep past, wipes away the grime of the ages, and imposes a neat narrative on the disfigured city. When his work is done, he steps back and says, "This is the essential city--the core crystal city upon which all my other, later, bigger cities are built on." (Tykwer currently lives in Berlin.)

"'Wuppertal' is actually the name of the river," Tykwer explains, "and 'tal' means valley, and so it is the valley of the Wupper. The city is really around the river, and runs next to the river for about 15 miles. There are about 400,000 people in this city, and I left it 15 years ago. I went back to it for the possibility of making this movie in the mood of a person who is represented by Sissi [played by Franka Potente], who doesn't have a sense of the difference between fantasy and reality. She imagines the world as a strange fairy-tale forest, but still, on the other hand, having very obvious roots and rules in reality. The job she does [in the mental hospital] is heavy reality, but the way she approaches the exterior world is like a child who just discovers everything. This is how I experienced my youth. I had tough realities and the ability to escape this not-so-beautiful place into a dream of the place."

Somewhere between dream and reality is Wuppertal, whose buildings, streets, and stairs form the stage for the story of Sissi and Bodo--the shy princess and the sad warrior. Sissi works in a metal institution, the home for those who cannot "bear too much reality." Bodo (Benno Furmann) is an unstable and unemployed ex-soldier who lives with his brother Walter (Joachim Król). Walter and Bodo are planning to rob a bank and flee to Australia (the land of the dream time, according to native Australians). Fate brings the princess and the warrior together; they're a match made in heaven. But there are numerous knots and plots to sort out before the pure beings (air, the princess; water, the warrior) can fuse into a perfect and complete whole.

"Wuppertal to me is a dream-like city," Tykwer elaborates. "It is exactly the same thing that the characters are--strange at first, even difficult--but at the end you see the city; its beauty comes out. This is what I wanted to show, the beauty of the city of my youth." The city's beauty becomes the beauty of the film. This is where The Princess and the Warrior succeeds: Its structure is defined by the pattern of the city.

The center of the movie is the center of Wuppertal--a single skyscraper. This skyscraper is the bank that the melancholy brothers are planning to rob, and also the point from which we can see everything. "That is the only skyscraper in Wuppertal," Tykwer says at the end of our dreamy talk. "It was built while I was growing up and was the pride of the city. I like it a lot. It is very '70s, and I put the guys [Bodo and Walter] on top of it so that we could have an overview of the city and the story. From the top of this building we can see very far--in both the real sense and the dream sense."