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Filmmaker Tom Tykwer was a 20-year-old repertory-cinema manager in Berlin when he first heard about the publishing sensation Perfume in 1985. He refused to pick up the book at first. "It was too much the thing to do, everyone said you have to read it," he says today, speaking on the phone from Los Angeles.

Tykwer's curiosity was ultimately piqued by his film circle's verdict on author Patrick Suskind's dark fable, the story of an 18th-century perfumist, an orphan of the Paris slums, who makes life bearable by capturing the transcendental scent of beautiful, murdered virgins.

"They all said that it was a great book that could not possibly be made into a film," the director remembers, laughing.

Tykwer finally read the book, consuming the 256-page volume in a day. Of course, the maverick cineaste believed his friends wrong. "I never believed that Perfume was about smell, so therefore impossible to film," the German filmmaker says in lightly accented English. "It is a vision of 18th-century European life that begs to be put on the screen.

The book has action, beauty, murder, humour. . . . Perfume is, in every sense, sensational."

Tykwer was hardly in a position to act upon his enthusiasm in 1985. "I had 25 applications for European film schools," he mentions, chuckling again. "They all turned me down."

As it turned out, European filmmakers agreed with Tykwer's friends about Perfume's cinematic potential, despite the novel's extravagant success (more than 15 million copies sold). Stanley Kubrick famously pronounced the novel "unfilmable." Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) sniffed and passed. Ridley Scott walked away.

While Suskind's property gathered dust, Tykwer made steady, then sudden, career headway, moving from programmer at Berlin's Moviemento Theatre to script reader, TV segment producer, then breakthrough auteur of the international hit Run Lola Run (1999), a success that excited a crucial, transatlantic friendship.

"After Lola, I got a call one night from a man who said he was Dustin Hoffman," Tykwer recalls. "I said, 'Yeah, sure,' but it was him. He had just that day seen my movie and wanted to talk to me. He said if he could ever be of help, he would enjoy the challenge of making a great film with me some day."

Suskind's allegedly impossible-to-film novel would be that challenge. Co-starring Hoffman and Alan Rickman, and showcasing an unknown actor (Ben Whishaw) in what would be the most expensive European art movie ever made ($60-million U.S.), Perfume was a storied, controversial shoot.

In addition to working on the screenplay and directing, Tykwer composed music for every scene, playing soaring orchestral passages over loudspeakers for his film's climax, a convulsive, swaying orgy involving hundreds of extras in a Spanish public square.

Tykwer presided over the sequence, which took days to shoot, with a fever for detail that recalls Hollywood's most famous Teutonic "footage fetishist," Eric Von Stroheim.

Recalling that scene today, the filmmaker makes his exacting methodology seem as sensible as switching on a light before entering a darkened room. "It was the big scene in the movie," he reports. "The extras had to know how important the sequence was. The music was crucial to creating and keeping the proper mood. It was a very challenging scene, so we required numerous takes."

It comes as no surprise that Tykwer found the meticulous Hoffman "full of ideas and energy, everything I look for in a [collaborator]." The American actor once stayed up all night to play a scene in Marathon Man that required he look haggard, prompting co-star Laurence Olivier to remark, "Oh, Dusty, why don't you just try acting?" Hoffman, who plays a master perfumist, would be the first and easiest part to cast in Perfume. The film's lead role, however, the part of the depraved olfactory genius, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, would keep Tykwer up at night for 12 months.

"For a year, I looked at different actors for Grenouille," the filmmaker says. "He had to have a look that was haunted, a face that could turn from an innocent young man into the Marquis de Sade in an instant. No actor I saw was just right. However, the moment I saw Ben [Whishaw], I knew, this is Grenouille! It was a hard part to play, he was alone, silent, playing against [the on-set soundtrack music] much of the time. Many said it was an impossible part. I believe he did a fantastic job."

Indeed, Whishaw's versatility is such that he has portrayed two of rock 'n' roll's most famous, and very different, creative personalities inside two years: Keith Richard in Stoned, in 2005, and one of seven Bob Dylans in director Todd Haynes's upcoming biopic, I'm Not There.

As to whether Tykwer has proved all his old film friends wrong by successfully translating Perfume to the large screen, the box-office jury is still out. The film enjoyed good reviews and record-breaking returns when it opened in Germany. Still, the filmmaker expects that his film will encounter some negative response in North America. "Some people will be disgusted by it," he has said. "Some will hate it. Then there will be those who will be strangely moved by it. I like my films to inspire debate."

In fact, the singular filmmaker who learned his craft as a teenaged cinema manager, locking himself into theatres late at night to study films alone, finds that he is arguing with director heroes who turned down the chance to make Perfume.

"I do not believe that Stanley Kubrick ever really thought that Perfume is unfilmable," Tykwer says, growing agitated. "Kubrick made 2001, after all. Kubrick once said, 'If you think it, you can film it.' I believe that most strongly."

Perfume opens tomorrow in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal.

Special to The Globe and Mail