Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was based on the novel of the same title written by his first wife, the successful German novelist, Thea von Harbou. Lang had visited New York for the first time in 1924, and upon seeing the skyscrapers and imposing skyline of the American city, developed his vision for the film. He and von Harbou devised the story in the years following World War I, and the film includes many socio-political themes that reflect the struggles of this period. These include the threat of fascism, industrialization, the rise of communistic thinking, and an investment in modernism.
Lang also drew influence from the story of the Tower of Babel from the Bible. The city of Metropolis itself becomes the cinematic version of this ancient story of a city rising to greatness on the backs of the lower classes. Lang often used Christian symbolism as a way of representing the narrative journey of his films, and their ethical implications.
Lang was also insistent upon particular scenes looking as real as possible. He employed 500 children from the poorest neighborhoods in Berlin to stage the scene of Metropolis flooding. He purposefully kept the water at a cold temperature and actors were told to throw themselves in front of the streams of high pressure water while filming. Additionally, actress Brigitte Helm was surrounded by real fire while filming the scene where the robot version of Maria is burned at the stake. These outrageous conditions meant that the budget skyrocketed to five times the original amount, and actors were exposed to harrowing conditions. Ironically enough, these conditions mirror many of those critiqued in the narrative of the film.
Additionally, Lang pioneered many innovative filming techniques that would be influential in the filming of science fiction and fantasy films for years to come. In order to make certain images appear bigger, he worked with Eugen Schüfftan to make mirrors project the images of smaller models many times over, a method that would come to be referred to as the Schüfftan Process and would be employed by Peter Jackson as recently as for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
When Metropolis was first released in the United States, Lang was less than pleased with the outcome and said, "I love films, so I shall never go to America. Their experts have slashed my best film, Metropolis, so cruelly that I dare not see it while I am in England." Years after the film's release, after the Nazi Party had taken over, Lang would, ironically enough, end up directing several Hollywood movies. By that time he had conflicting thoughts on Metropolis, his best-known work. In a 1998 interview, Lang said, "You cannot make a social-conscious picture in which you say that the intermediary between the hand and the brain is the heart. I mean, that's a fairy tale—definitely. But I was very interested in machines. Anyway, I didn't like the picture—thought it was silly and stupid—then, when I saw the astronauts: what else are they but part of a machine? It's very hard to talk about pictures—should I say now that I like Metropolis because something I have seen in my imagination comes true, when I detested it after it was finished?"
