The idea was Mayer’s. A newspaper report about a toilet attendant’s suicide had prompted him to write the story. Originally it was to be directed by Lupu Pick, as part of a triptych, with Scherben and Sylvester as the flanking panels; the protagonist was to be played by Pick himself. A disagreement put an end to the plan, and Pommer assigned the script to me at Jannings’s suggestion. Then he granted the project a budget three times higher than we’d submitted. Why? The appeal of the American market. The size of their exhibition circuit. But also in retaliation for Hollywood’s invasion of our market. Anyway, this was the thinking behind the millions thrown at Lang for his Die Nibelungen. Ufa is staking its existence on cracking the American market. Pommer’s program will cost too much to recoup itself in Germany alone.

Of the one million six hundred thousand marks set aside, Jannings is pocketing six hundred thousand. Most of the rest is funding an arena for formal experiment.

This is fine with Pommer; if the film doesn’t represent something exciting and different, then why on earth would the Americans buy it? Especially given that the story is one that a non-German mind will have trouble comprehending as any kind of tragedy at all. As Pommer put it in his closing remarks at our first preproduction meeting: “Please invent something new, even if it’s crazy!”

Our plan is simple. The whole script has been modified to be based on the continuous movement of the camera.

Mayer toyed with the notion in his script for Sylvester, but Pick did little with it. For the dramatic shot of the clock just before midnight, Pick and Seeber, his cameraman, constructed a two-level platform with wheels, a huge thing that looked like one of the old Farman bombers stripped of its wings, though they never took it any further: the camera could now slowly close in on an object. Could it turn? Climb? Descend? Swoop?

Those questions obsess Mayer as much as the rest of us. His scripts are dramatic poems—a detailed narration of the shots and pacing, the film imagined in verse. For him the camera is not just a helpful optical device but an extension of his senses. He tests each shot he imagines with a viewfinder Freund gave him; such is his persistence to comprehend more about what we’re doing. Late at night he appears at my house, a squat man with a vaguely Oriental face, waiting impatiently for the door to be opened so that we might resume our discussion. He works day and night. He takes such long walks to sort things out that his neighbors call him the Mailman.