PROBLEM SOLVED

MRH : One way that you succeeded in telling the story without any footage was to create an onscreen narrator, and have him go through key moments in history, and at the same time, act as a guide for the audience. It's a very clever device that works extremely well.

Carl Schmitt : The making of [Life Goes On ] is so unique because all the other films I know about from the Third Reich were completed before 1945, but this has a message which goes right into our time.

The UFA was built or setup for doing propaganda films; that was the studio's original purpose. And between WWI and WWII, they had a bit of breathing space to become really cultural during the Weimar Republic, where all these famous German films come from.

Then in 1933, the Nazis transformed it again into a propaganda machine; so what people did there was propaganda. The purpose was to lie, to change reality, to change facts; but in the end, reality came quicker than expected. They had one car for the whole production. They had no building materials. The people lived in the sets, because the sets, which are artificial, were in better shape than the bombed-out houses in Berlin [just five miles away]... That's the kind of weird world we wanted to capture.

If you see the normal National Geographic documentaries, you have eyewitnesses, you have archival materials, and then you have a recreation. We tried to do it in a different way, and all of our recreations are shown as recreations.

WHAT'S OLD IS STILL NEW

Mark Cairns : I don't know if you get them in Canada as much as you get them in Britain, but there still are documentaries about the war [in which] the recreations were done in a certain rather po-faced way, and I was always rather worried about recreating something being mistaken for the real footage.

For instance, whenever a piece of news about WWI is shown, they show footage of fighting in the trenches, and it's a pick to bear in mind that there was never any footage shot of the actual fighting in the First World War, but no one ever tells you that's a recreation you're looking at. They show this kind of creaky silent movie footage and people believe it is real, and it's not; it couldn't be, because no one was standing up with a hand-cranked camera while soldiers were going over the top at the front.

I wanted the recreations to have a certain style; I wanted the film to be about filmmaking, and essentially about the people who made musicals and comedies during the war who weren't serious people; they weren't in a serious situation, but they were sort of flippant people living in their own world.

I think Carl came up with the idea of having an onscreen narrator, and I came up with the idea of having him experience moments of the war: he would be lead us through it, and experience it for us in lieu of what we didn't have, which was footage and documentary evidence of the actual filmmakers, and the actual subject of the documentary.

MRH : I guess the digital technology at this point has progressed so that you could literally recreate that, because some of your ideas are very clever. There's one moment where Dieter Moor is standing on a street, and there's a camera and tripod towards the front, and he gradually walks forward, and you realize the tripod is a real practical prop, but the transitions between effects layers are very graceful as he moves from what's essentially a green screen photo to a practical set with a few nearby actors.

Mark Cairns : We worked closely with a postproduction company, Magna Mana Production in Frankfurt , who became co-producers of the film. They were just fantastic. I wanted to create this world where film was being manipulated; it was a visual metaphor for what propaganda does, which is manipulate the truth.

There's a scene where Dieter Moor is standing in a ruined street, talking at the very beginning of the film after he's picked up a newspaper, and the camera moves back, and the whole scene breaks up as a model effect. It has some CGI effects on top of it, but that's practically done live. It was an old UFA technique, and I was using some of the old 1920s and 1930s techniques pioneered by the UFA studios... to create this hyper-reality.

MRH : One of the strangest moments within the film's WWII time-frame is when you highlight Goebbels' frustration with the dissent that was going on in live theatre; so the only theatre permitted by the Ministry of Propaganda was puppet theatre, which is crazy.

Mark Cairns : Yes. I actually wanted to visualize that a bit more, but our budget wouldn't run to it, but it was a very apt comment of the control of filmmaking: you can control the puppet, and of course he was the puppetmaster of propaganda. Theatre was dangerous because the actors could change what they were saying, but a film was controllable.