Trivia
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Spoilers (1)
Tom Tykwer hated the empty space on the wall and asked production designer Alexander Manasse to paint a picture of Kim Novak as she was in Vertigo. But Alexander didn't remember what she looked like, so Tom suggested he painted her from behind. Alexander completed the picture within fifteen minutes.
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During shooting, Franka Potente could not wash her hair for seven weeks because the red hair color was very sensitive to water and would have got lighter with every washing.
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The two sentences at the opening ("The ball is round" and "The game lasts 90 minutes") are famous quotes by German soccer coaching legend Sepp Herberger.
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When Manni says Shrimp in Florida he is actually giving credit to the person who wrote the movie. It is a family nickname of this uncredited person.
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The blind woman that Manni borrows the phone card from is Moritz Bleibtreu's mother, Monica Bleibtreu.
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The shot where the roulette ball lands on 20 was not a trick shot - the crew simply filmed the ball dropping into the wheel, and it hit 20 on one of their first takes.
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Hans Paetsch, who speaks the narration at the beginning, is Germany's most popular fairy tale narrator. His characteristic voice is easily recognized by anyone who grew up with fairy tale records in Germany.
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It took nearly five weeks to persuade a supermarket in Berlin to allow them to shoot the robbery sequence.
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This film contains about 1581 transitions (edits, dissolves, fades, wipes, etc) in 71 minutes of action (i.e. excluding the credits, and pre-credits sequence). This equates to an Average Shot Length of about 2.7 seconds. Interestingly, the editing is relatively slower towards the end of the film. For most contemporary films, the opposite is the norm.
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Lola bets to the number twenty, the first and last story last twenty minutes and twenty minutes is also the time she has to get the money.
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The money bag, stolen by a homeless man, has Russian lettering on it - "Malossol Original". It's actually a bag for Russian Caspian caviar under the brand "Malossol Original".
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In the film, Manni needs 100,000 marks. In 1998, the exchange rate for marks was 1.789 making this sum equivalent to $55,897.15 in the US. At the end, Lola winnings amount to 126,000 marks ($70,430.41).
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The decoration on the wall of the teller is a bill from Slovenia, which was in circulation between 1992-2007 (before replaced by Eur).
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There are many spirals in the film (stair cases, bar behind phone booth etc). This is because director Tom Tykwer was a fan of 'Alfred Hitchcock''s Vertigo.
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The colors red (Lola's hair, numerous cars, telephone) and yellow (the phone box, supermarket, tram) appear very often in the film, these colors were selected by the director to signify danger. The reds are mainly in Lola's scenes and yellows in Manni's.
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For the shot of the crowd spelling out the title, 300 extras were shot forming each letter separately, and director Tom Tykwer spent about a month compositing the shots together in post-production. It would have taken thousands of extras to spell out the entire title in a single shot, and the production couldn't afford to hire that many.
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Spoilers
During the third sequence after the head on car collision a moped rider rear ends Ronnies car and lands on the windsheilds. Most viewers do not realize that this is the man who stole Lola's moped, so he gets his comeuppance in the end.
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