The office is dark, with one small window. On the back wall I’ve hung a Chinese tapestry in blue and gold of a brooding spirit spied upon by two heraldic beasts. I spend the entire morning fussing around my workspace, cleaning up. Once I can see my table and chair and desk, I’m open for business.

The first meeting of the day is with Mayer, about script changes. He wants the camera to close in rapidly on the buttons of the doorman’s coat at the moment the uniform is stripped off. That seems to me a good example of a moment when the camera should not be moving. He’s constantly egging on the metaphysical meaning of every object. The doorman’s umbrella is his sceptre; the stripped buttons, a pseudo-military degradation; the revolving door, the whirlpool of life. To couple such objects with camera movement is to make them all the more ham-handed.

He’s sure to argue about this. His images are about intensity, not subtlety.

His childhood was a chapter from a Dickens novel. He was born in Graz, a Jew, the son of a man obsessed with gambling. When he was sixteen, his father, after losing a bet, asked the children to stand in the street and then killed himself. Mayer alone was responsible for his three brothers. During the day, he fixed barometers and advertised for an optician on street corners; at night he was an extra in peasant theaters and sang in choirs in Linz. He brought his brothers to Germany, seeking greater opportunity, and, during the early months of the war, earned a living drawing Hindenburg’s portrait on postcards in coffeehouses.

He spent the war years in a desperate battle with military psychiatrists. He was a pacifist. To avoid prison, he needed to prove himself mentally deranged. He would not become a soldier, not only because he refused to see his brothers sent to an orphanage but also because he refused to learn the “craftsmanship of murder,” as he put it. He was unabashed about speaking that way around veterans. For a while after we met, he called me the Flying Ace.

He said he refused to kill for a Fatherland gone mad. Apparently, his psychiatrist even tried hypnosis, under which he made Mayer repeat phrases like “I can kill.” The psychiatrist became the model for Dr. Caligari.

Mayer and Janowitz, his Czech friend, wrote Caligari in the winter of 1919 in Berlin, during the last days of the revolution. They were oppressed by the Molochs running the munitions factories, the icy “turnip winter,” the casualty notices in the newspapers. Their haunt, like mine, became the amusement park in the Kantstrasse, where the sideshows were so appalling that one couldn’t wrench one’s eyes from them. Horrible lusts were abroad. Hunger and misery festooned with electric lights and mechanical music. Adolescent girls tracked by sad-eyed shopkeepers wearing their one good suit, and occasionally lured into hansom cabs.