Babelsberg Lives
by Caroline WyattThe German film studio Babelsberg, which made a star out of Marlene Dietrich, is enjoying a renaissance, defying predictions that German unification would lead to its collapse. Now one of the world's oldest studios is successfully bringing movie -- and TV -- glamour back to Potsdam. Our correspondent, Caroline Wyatt, took a peek behind the scenes during the making of the latest Babelsberg epic, a true life movie called "Hostile Waters".
Inside one of Babelsberg's enormous studios, the set falls quiet as the cameras roll. This is a key scene in "Hostile Waters", a made-for-TV movie based on a true story of Cold War conflict. The film crew are packed tightly inside a claustrophobic reproduction of a Russian nuclear submarine, in this international co-production between the U.S.A., Britain and Germany. The Dutch actor Rutger Hauer stars as the movie's Russian hero. He says filming here at Babelsberg was a hard-headed commercial decision.
HAUER: "You know, in this profession the language is film, it's exactly the same anywhere. It's just sometimes the money's tighter. Independent films, as we all know, have a harder time getting made. Documentary people - you gotta pray, ya know, that they live because all they do is beg. They don't get any money. It's all about making money."
Babelsberg's history as the studio where Fritz Lang made his masterpiece "Metropolis" may attract the tourists, but to attract today's filmmakers, it is cost and quality that count. In the hall where Marlene Dietrich made "The Blue Angel", another part of the "Hostile Waters" set is gradually taking shape. For the film's director, David Drury, there's a certain thrill in making a Cold War action movie in a studio once behind the Iron Curtain.
DRURY: "It's so drenched in history and the history of this century. The Babelsberg studios itself, of course, Marlene Dietrich and "Metropolis", you get a certain sense of that."
But apparently the German film industry is less swayed by the glories of the past. The exodus Babelsberg experienced in the 1930s, when its greatest talent fled the Nazis and helped build Hollywood, is still a problem. Reinhard Hauff, head of the German Film and TV Academy, says his students would still rather go to Hollywood than make movies at Babelsberg.
HAUFF: "For them, this generation, it doesn't mean anything what happened in the thirties and after the World War. This was the East German film, and we didn't care about the East German films and they didn't care about our films, so there are no sentiments with the Babelsberg studio."
Babelsberg's well-trained craftsmen are still one of the studio's main draws, plus the fact that many other German studios are fully booked making soap operas for TV. The head of Babelsberg, the German director Volker Schloendorff, believes this studio's future lies in international co-productions for the small screen.
SCHLOENDORFF: "Television is incredibly alive. Here in Germany it's worth hundreds of thousands of marks, and it's our aim to accommodate, to offer them the best possible infrastructure and, once they are happy here, I think other European TV production will come here."
Modern day icons like John Travolta and Courtney Love may turn up for the annual Berlin Film Festival, but it's still an uphill struggle luring Hollywood to make movies in the former East Germany. Yet some actors here, like heart throb Til Schweiger, believe German cinema itself is experiencing a renaissance. That, he says, could feed through to Babelsberg, more than fifty years after it lost its greatest talent.
SCHWEIGER: "There was nobody left. These good guys, like Billy Wilder, they went to the States. Then we had directors like Wim Wenders and Volker Schloendorff and they made movies for themselves. But now we have young directors who say, `Hey, we're going to do movies for a bigger audience'. Nobody did that before."
Though Babelsberg studios may never again rival Hollywood, it is at least heading towards breaking even. And just seven years after the end of the Cold War, that's no mean feat.
Reporter Caroline Wyatt is a correspondent for the BBC in Berlin who will soon become their Bonn bureau chief.
