Metropolis by Ellie Midwood

Author:Ellie Midwood [Midwood, Ellie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-01-31T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

Margot fell in love. Not with Lang – she wasn’t quite that mad yet – despite all of his rather charming, she had to admit, attempts at flirting with her in between the takes when he wasn’t busy rampaging through the set and screaming at everyone (Margot included) who couldn’t get his infamous “count” right.

“On one-two-three, you look toward the camera – that one,” Lang commanded through his megaphone with a finger pointed at the platform that Margot shared with Freund, her new mentor and the man she quickly grew to admire for being such a tireless innovator when it came to attacking the accepted limits of lighting and camera movement, “and pull back slightly; four-five-six-seven, you lift your arm to your face, shielding it with it. A terrified expression comes over your face. You clasp your chest. On eight-nine-ten-eleven, you step back, faster and faster; you turn and run toward that camera,” his finger pointing at Günther Rittau, the second cameraman, “all the while throwing glances back.”

The count sometimes went up to fifty and was different for different actors, all participating in the same scene. At first, Margot thought such an unorthodox technique of directing the actors to be frankly ridiculous. However, the closer she was getting acquainted with Lang and his ways, the more she realized that he was simply obsessed with keeping literally everything and everyone under control. When the crew left in the late evening (and quite often, at night), Lang remained on the set, in order to prepare it for the following day. When they arrived back at Babelsberg early in the morning, he was already there, marking on the floor with the colored chalk the position and movement for his actors and cameras. When Margot asked Karl Freund, the gentle giant, whether their boss ever slept, Freund only chuckled mysteriously and replaced the cigar into a different corner of his mouth.

“He eats pep pills instead of his meals, whenever cocaine is not available,” followed the simple explanation.

But somehow Margot didn’t believe that it was only the drugs that provided the tireless director with such phenomenal energy. Much too often she saw Lang’s face being illuminated with the ecstatic, triumphant joy whenever the technically-impossible scene was not only filmed but came out even better than he had envisioned. He challenged everything – darkness, light, the possibilities of superimposing real actors against miniature sets, the most fantastic special effects and drove everyone to distraction until he came out the victor. No, it wasn’t the drugs that kept him riveted to the set night and day. Drugs were merely the crutch. Lang genuinely loved Metropolis – greedily, obsessively – and such a powerful feeling was contagious. Margot fell in love with it too, before she knew it.

It was that love that made Margot tolerate not just autocratic but sometimes outright abusive behavior of the director and follow him, swallowing pride and sometimes even tears and beg him stubbornly to explain to her what it was exactly that she wasn’t doing right.

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