Theatre director

A theatre director or stage director is a director/instructor in the theatre field who oversees and orchestrates the mounting of a theatre production (a play, an opera, a musical, or a devised piece of work) by unifying various endeavours and aspects of production. The director's function is to ensure the quality and completeness of theatre production and to lead the members of the creative team into realising their artistic vision for it. The director therefore collaborates with a team of creative individuals and other staff, coordinating research, stagecraft, costume design, props, lighting design, acting, set design, stage combat, and sound design for the production. If the production he or she is mounting is a new piece of writing or a (new) translation of a play, the director may also work with the playwright or translator. In contemporary theatre, after the playwright, the director is generally the primary visionary, making decisions on the artistic concept and interpretation of the play and its staging. Different directors occupy different places of authority and responsibility, depending on the structure and philosophy of individual theatre companies. Directors use a wide variety of techniques, philosophies, and levels of collaboration.

Tom Tykwer

Tom Tykwer (German: [ˈtɪkvɐ]; born 23 May 1965) is a German film director, producer, screenwriter, and composer. He is best known internationally for directing the thrillers Run Lola Run (1998), Heaven (2002), and Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006), the action thriller The International (2009), and collaborated with The Wachowskis for the science fiction film Cloud Atlas (2012) and Sense8 (2015).

Early life

Tykwer was born in Wuppertal, West Germany. Fascinated by film from an early age, he started making amateur Super 8 films at the age of eleven and later helped out at a local arthouse cinema to see more films, including those for which he was too young to buy tickets. After graduating from high school, he unsuccessfully applied to numerous film schools around Europe and moved to Berlin where he worked as a projectionist. In 1987, at the age of 22, he became the programmer of the Moviemento cinema and became known to German directors as a film buff.

Career

In Berlin, Tykwer met and befriended the filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim, who urged him to create stories from his own experience and suggested that Tykwer record arguments with his girlfriend at the time, and turn them into a short film. Because (1990) was screened at the Hof Film Festival and well received by the audience, which inspired Tykwer to continue pursuing filmmaking. He made a second short film, "Epilog" (1992), that plunged him into personal financial debt, but gained him valuable technical filmmaking experience. Tykwer wrote the screenplay for—and directed—his first feature film, the psychological thriller Deadly Maria, which aired on German television and saw a limited theatrical release in Germany and the international film festival circuit.