When the prison inmates swore.
In the words of this movie’s instigator Εdgar Reitz: The story takes place in a time when people were still children. This was exactly how I approached the film. When I joined the production team, the budget for sets wouldn't have covered even the prevailing idea: a backyard with children playing at a representation of the military campaign in a refuse dump with vegetable crates. We agreed that I would make some representative samples of set elements, costumes and weapons, and that we would try to find additional funding. In a huge suitcase we packed a helmet, a sword, an ornamented embellished robe, a black-figure crater and a sample panel of wickerwork, woven by the inmates of a prison near Lake Ammersee where we would start shooting. All four of us went to Cologne to meet the director* of the WDR, who admired Reitz's work, and we emptied the suitcase onto his desk. To get rid of us he promised to increase WDR's participation, if I remember correctly, to 50,000 Marks, which he finally did. Naturally, the money went for the construction of the Argo, but the biggest expense was the wages of the prison inmates who wove our wicker sample. They swore and cursed the evil hour that brought them such labour.
*Dr Günter Rohrbach, director of West German Broadcasting
THE GOLDEN THING
DAS GOLDENE DING / ΤΟ ΧΡΥΣΟ ΠΡΑΓΜΑ
DIRECTED BY:
Ula Stöckl, Edgar Reitz, Alf Brustellin, Nikos Perakis
SCRIPT:
Ula Stöckl, Edgar Reitz, Alf Brustellin, Nikos Perakis
