Going to film school has it’s perks, the longer we attend, the more these perks reveal themselves. The last perk our class here in Bonn got to experience, was on our excursion to the great and troubled city of Berlin. Using their vast network of contacts, the AIB was able to organize a private, behind the scenes tour of the Studio Babelsberg, the site on which films from Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’ all the way to Tarantino’s ‘Inglourious Basterds’ have been filmed. The tour was an amazing experience for all of us filmmaking hopefuls, the studio is one of the last remaining lots that has the ability to cover the entire filmmaking process. We stepped into the construction house, where we saw men hard at work, creating and designing the set pieces for the numerous films in production and set to shoot in the near future. We walked through a very new and modern room, containing a state of the art, ‘hot wire’ foam sculptor for set pieces and decoration. We adventured through two large warehouses full of timeless set dressing and props, wondering through hallways of lamps, newspapers, typewriters, and weaponry, as well as stepping into a perfect replica of an eastern German home. For some of us it was awe-inspiring to step into the same sound stage that such incredible movies had been filmed and soak in the sheer vastness of the film making world.
The highlight for me, and I won’t speak for everyone, was our tour of the outdoor permanent set in the back lot of the studio. The designers were hard at work preparing for a night shoot for a new film with Vince Vaughn called ‘The Business Trip.‘ This would have been interesting in itself, but this particular shoot made the experience that much more memorable, for it wasn’t a regular scene on a Berlin street. The posters strung from building to building bore strange pictures of men’s crotches in tight leather, this was the first tip that this was no normal setting. We then walked past the windows, covered with large posters of strangely sexual scenes, bars with large amounts of beer, and finally the kicker, a small shopping stand selling whips and chokers. This was not to be a normal Berlin night on this street, in fact Vince Vaughn and his co-star were about to accidentally wander into a gay S&M street festival. We all joked that we wanted to be extras in the scene, that was supposed to shoot that night, but in reality we all secretly wished we could. To say the least, when the release of this new movie comes around, I think a group reunion will have to take place and we will all go see the midnight premiere.
The rest of our experience at the studio, I spent imagining what it might be like to come back one day to shoot my own film, as I am sure many of us did. Standing at the sight where such amazing films had been shot, was almost too much to handle as I became caught up in dreams and suffered the consequences of returning to reality. With the tax incentives, the experience of the Studio Babelsberg, and the wonderful atmosphere and energy of Berlin and Germany as a whole, I doubt any of us would deny the chance to work there in Potsdam, it may even be a new goal.
Written by Maxx Grummer
