The screenplay by Peter Schneider was based on the short story "Der Mauerspringer" (The Wall Jumper). The hero, the young East Berliner Kabe, comes and goes between East and West Berlin passing over and under the wall with ladders and hang gliders or on routes used by agents. Besides the counterintelligence agencies waiting for him, there are his women in both sectors of the city.

The basic set of the film was a long section of the wall with all its ancillaries: checkpoints, floodlights, guardhouses, watchtowers, trenches, minefields, booby-trapped zones wired with automatic firearms, and wolfhounds. At the same time we had to find public places and streets in West Berlin that would do for plausible locations in the East, where there was no way to get a shooting permit. I went to the East many times to get a feeling of the atmosphere and on each visit I bought a few typical products at a supermarket because we had to set up the household of Kabe’s eastern companion. Having read the script carefully I took all precautions and not a single photo.

Once I finished the "research" I combed the west side of the wall to photograph construction details since we knew that it had been erected with prefabricated components, and to locate a large site where we could build ours. The creepy thing was that the best location was a vacant lot 150 meters from the actual wall. When we finally erected the set our workmen's favorite joke was to respond to the confused old ladies who had to pass through our checkpoint set to visit their relatives, that the wall would be extended and they had to be back before sunset.