Süddeutsche Zeitung, Berlin page
February 2, 2000
By Steffi Kammerer
(Translated by Beate, with the help of Kerstin and Han)
Stalingrad on the outskirts of the town: French director Annaud is shooting Europe's most expensive film near Berlin
The mass grave is not even 10 meters away from the bus stop. It can't be seen, though, because the set is protected by an enormous wall. Photographers are trying to somehow take pictures using ladders. A rusty cannon. Burned-out Russian limousines. Five nooses dangling from gallows in the wind. The charred remains of a collapsed house. A woman wearing a baseball cap is arranging a steel helmet on a cross. Written on the helmet in black is: "Sergeant Alfred Berg, regiment 389, born May 5, 1912, died September 19, 1942."
Precision work for the inferno
War has broken out in Fahrland near Potsdam. Stalingrad. The hell - made in Babelsberg. And as it should be in times of war, everything is top secret. The filming is closed to the public, grim men with dogs are guarding the set. Enemy at the Gates, such is the working title, is a production of superlatives. It is the most expensive movie ever to be produced in Europe with a budget of roughly 180 million German marks [about 90 million dollars]. It is directed by Oscar winner Jean-Jacques Annaud (The Name of the Rose); with Joseph Fiennes (Shakespeare in Love) and Ed Harris (Truman Show) world class actors signed up.
After having searched for suitable filming locations for months in the Czech Republic, Romania, Poland and Hungary, the US film giant Paramount Pictures decided in favour of Brandenburg last June. Here the Amerians were able to find everything they needed together in a confined space: a Volga (produced in a flooded brown coal area in the Lausitz), old studios and factory halls in the museum village of Rüdersdorf, and in Fahrland perfectly run-down barracks with collapsed roofs and faded cyrillic graffiti. The indoor shots will be filmed in the Babelsberg Studios. For the studios rich in tradition Enemy at the Gates means the big breakthrough, they are already dreaming of regular visits from Los Angeles. Rainer Schaper, one of the general managers of Studio Babelsberg, expects the project to become a door opener in Hollywood. "If I can make Annaud happy here, I hope that others will soon be knocking at our doors as well."
The shooting began two weeks ago, after 73 days of filming the epic movie is scheduled to be finished in April. The scenes showing the vast number of deaths will begin in two weeks. Then the battle about Stalingrad will be filmed. Till then the set builders will have their hands full. On a scale of 1 : 1 they are reproducing the destroyed city centre of historical Stalingrad on the barracks set. About 170 workers are busy setting up fronts of buildings riddled by bullets and blackened by fire. Burned-out tram wrecks are laying around, a 20 meters high plaster-Stalin is swaying on its pedestal half-crumbled. Workers on a hydraulic ramp are additionally hitting it with hammers. The inferno demands precision work.
About 7,000 extras have been engaged for the production. Their photos, labeled with numbers, are hanging on the walls of the casting agency on the Babelsberg Studio grounds. There are the "German Tank Commander", the "Russian officer, good and healthy looking", 10 deserters, German communists and collaborators. And above all many dead persons are required.
Annaud's project is the third movie to be filmed in Germany about the defeat of the sixth army under General Field Marshal Paulus. The first was filmed at the end of the fifties, directed by Frank Wisbar: Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben? ["Dogs, do you want to live forever?"]. Then in 1992 Joseph Vilsmaier [my note: a well-known German director, also directed The Comedian Harmonists] filmed the massacre about the town at the Volga. While Vilsmaier had widely been doing without mass scenes, in Annaud's film there will be real battalions going to war. Extras as camera fodder.
Wounded people will be needed in masses as well. Iris Müller, the casting boss, is proud of her collection of invalids: men totally without legs, with amputed thighs or missing feet, one even sits in a wheelchair. Annaud has helped to select every one of the extras personally. "There had to be many faces fitting into the era", she says. The extras are from everywhere from Germany, many are sacrificing their vacation. "This project is really much bigger than anything we have known in Germany so far."
Hand grenades and anti-tank mines
Most of the extras are young men, they only understand the significance of Stalingrad from school if at all. First they had to learn how to fight and die, stuntmen from America had given them lessons. Well, actually it isn't that complicated, says Iris Müller, you only have to practise it long enough. "Shooting, falling, dying". Actually she wanted to have professionals, preferably soldiers from the Bundeswehr [the German army]. But the Minister of Defence was against it.
She also selected children, women and old men, because not only will the story of the battle itself be told, but also the true story of the Russian child soldier Vassily, who fought as a sniper in Stalingrad and was hailed as a hero by the Russians. In order to save his native country, he hid himself in a labyrinth under the town, and duelled there dramatically with his opponent, a German major. The classic tale of good and evil. Of course there is a bit of love in the script, too.
For the town of Fahrland the filming seems to be the most important event in its history. 2,500 people live here. There is a school, a kindergarden, a supermarket. Well, and this ruin of a set of barracks. Until 1945 soldiers of the Wehrmacht had been stationed there, until 1991 there had been 25,000 Russians. Ernst Ruden lives directly next to the set. He is a farmer as well as the vize mayor of the community. He doesn't care the slightest about the film and has not yet seen any of the stars. But he is happy that finally something is going to happen with the military ruins. "When the film people have gone again, at last a part of the set will be free of munition. Off the roads there are still hand grenades and anti-tank mines laying everywhere, and who knows what else."
In order not to annoy the people of Fahrland too much with the constant explosions and the shooting till late into the night, half the town got a job somehow in the production. The plumber installed the loos, joiner Gänserich built 40 mirrors for the make-up artists and the volunteer fire-brigade deliver 5,000 liters of water to the set daily, the Wendland's, the proprietors of the local inn, provide the workers with good plain cooking.
Farmer Ruden will watch the film when it's completed, he says, but he can understand it when others don't do it. "There the father or grandfather have died in Stalingrad. They do not want to watch it that closely." He tells that indeed a battalion had been sent out in 1940 to Poland from the barrack which is the set today. "Only a few did ever come back". He himself had been four years old back then, but he will never forget the sight of how the young soldiers went out of the barracks with horses and waggons for 2 entire days.
