MATCHING A CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVE TO THE MOOD AND STYLE OF CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD
Long inspired by the classics, and, in particular, the atmospheric film noir genre typified by films such as "Casablanca," "The Third Man," "Out of the Past" and "Notorious," Soderbergh decided to shoot "The Good German" in the noir tradition--not only thematically but technically.
Though his use of black-and-white cinematography is the most visually striking retro element, the director also employed vintage camera lenses, an old-style score, simulated rear-projections for background shots, and the traditional swipe cut to shift scenes, favored by directors of that era. He confined filming to the backlot and limited local sites, and supplemented his sets with archival footage--some of it shot in Berlin just after the war by legendary directors Billy Wilder and William Wyler--that provided not only the necessary historical backgrounds but helped set the tone with its undeniably authentic bleakness.
Additionally, Soderbergh directed the actors in a style of performance that, as Jacobs describes, "was markedly theatrical and really harkens back to that 1940s style of acting." Says Soderbergh, "it's the antithesis to the way actors perform today. It's a very outward way of acting; not so introspective or self-reflective."
"You're acting towards the camera, rather than acting and letting the camera catch you," Clooney notes the fine distinction. "There's very little internalizing; everything is right out in front and very direct. It's definitely a different style from what any of us were used to."
At the same time, "The Good German" is very much a modern movie, with modern sensibilities. Says Cosgrove, "Everything has a 1940s feel, but the subject matter and the language is very contemporary and the story itself is peppered with ideas too provocative to have been approached during that period."
"What if," suggests Soderbergh, "filmmakers working in Hollywood in 1945 had the same creative freedom we have today? What if there was no Hayes Code and they were able to be as blunt and realistic as we are in depicting some of the dramatic or physical elements like violence and sexuality? Most of our reference points about how people behaved during that period are based on movies from that period, which are not an accurate representation of how people behaved. There were terrible moral compromises being made in that environment. It will be interesting to see how audiences will wrap their minds around the blending of these two ideas."

CREATING POST-WAR BERLIN ON THE BACKLOT: TRADITIONAL FILMMAKING TECHNIQUES RECAPTURE THE 1940S
"Steven takes different approaches to different projects," says Gregory Jacobs, who collaborates here with the director for the 14th time. "'Traffic,' for example, was all hand-held and more of a run-and-gun technique, while 'Ocean's Eleven' and 'Ocean's Twelve' were his take on a big Hollywood production. He found the perfect way to tell this story by shooting it like a 1940s movie, using one camera rather than two, with shots that are very formally composed. A lot of scenes were covered in master shots, whereas today it tends to be wider coverage and everyone gets their close-ups and reverses. This time he designed very specific masters that cover a lot of the scene and went in for close-ups as needed, the way they used to do it. Watch a movie like 'Notorious' or 'Casablanca' and you'll see it."
Studying script continuities and reading script supervisors' notes from 60-year-old productions, Soderbergh learned how his predecessors worked within the practical restrictions of the backlot. "It was really challenging and fun at the same time," he says, acknowledging that, "in many instances, we had to do what they did in the 1940s. We had to cheat the way they cheated. Sometimes we read and discovered how they did it and sometimes we had to figure out on our own how they must have done it."
One modern cheat was Soderbergh's use of high-contrast color stock. Having shot black-and-white film on his 1991 thriller "Kafka," he knew its tendency to be slow and grainy, and so opted to shoot "The Good German" on color stock, then pull the color out, as George Clooney recently did with "Good Night, and Good Luck."
Soderbergh was joined by another longtime collaborator, production designer Philip Messina. Working for the first time with black-and-white and almost exclusively with backlot sets, Messina found these tight parameters alternately limiting and liberating. "Black-and-white doesn't reflect subtlety as color does, so we needed to use a heavier hand with texture, detail and aging in order to make it read," he says, noting that early camera tests helped to get the painters and construction crew on track. Messina also prepared by taking digital photos of works in progress and converting them to black-and-white with Photoshop. "Things that looked overly theatrical in color were absolutely gorgeous in black-and-white."
That lack of subtlety worked in his favor when Messina needed to create shadows behind broken windows. Instead of cutting the glass, he spray-mounted strips of black felt to the backs and got the same final effect, admitting, "I don't think you could get away with that in color, but in black-and-white it was convincing." Existing structures that were inappropriately peach or pink-hued did not require repainting because in the final print they appeared gray.
As Messina explains, "We tried to build everything and not rely on CG. I walked onto the lot thinking, 'I need a German nightclub, a Russian checkpoint,' and so on, while looking at New York Street or Philadelphia Street and wondering how we were going to do it. But once we got into it, things began to fall into place and we started seeing Berlin."
The destruction in Berlin was haphazard, often leaving wholly intact buildings right next to bomb-blasted lots, so production took a similar approach. Leaving existing facades largely unaltered, they built additional structures in various stages of wreckage on parking lots or in the open spaces between them, creating portions of what, on film, looked like whole streets.
Confining themselves to the lot required very strategic camera placement and planning, as Messina outlines: "Most of our shots are either one or two angles on a scene, and that's how we were able to pull it off. For example, for a scene at a bus stop, I constructed pieces of a blasted building that Steven shot through, and the borders of the building masked everything we didn't want to see. Rubble is very liberating. It saves you from having to justify a piece of architecture because you can just say, 'Well, let's pretend the roof has fallen in.' In the process, you've made a perfect frame for what you want to see. Steven did a nice pullback and took it right to the edges of what we had built. Otherwise, you'd be looking right off our set."
Says Soderbergh, "It was designing the movie to within an inch of its life, telling Phil 'I will only see this side of the set, I will only pan from there to there.'"
This is the opposite of how the director and production designer usually work. Messina is accustomed to providing 360-degree coverage options on his sets to allow for Soderbergh's on-set spontaneity. "But the great thing about Steven is that he's okay with limitations," remarks Jacobs. "If you tell him he can only pan this far, he'll find a way to make maximum use of that. Here, everything was tight. Phil was taking parts of a set we had shot on the backlot and using it on stage, doubling and tripling up walls, which is how they did it back then. We moved the same pile of rubble from one set to another with a crane."
Among the exterior sets created on the backlot were the bus stop, the Russian checkpoint and the back entrance to the Bugi Wugi Club where Jake and Lena first see each other again and where Jake and Tully later get into a fight.
Extending and enhancing the new material was archival footage of Berlin street life shot right after the war by numerous sources, from European and American film directors to the U.S. Army, and kept at the National Archives in Washington, DC, the Imperial War Museum in London and similar archives in Paris and Moscow. Much of it had to be cleaned up before it could be used, and the bulk of it was in color, requiring Soderbergh to convert it for his 21st-century black-and-white film.
Footage shot on location by Billy Wilder for the 1948 film "Foreign Affair" was still available and used for some of the driving scenes in "The Good German," as in the opening sequence when Tully picks Jake up from the airport.
Production then briefly ventured off the lot to nearby locations. "We found Potsdam in Pasadena," says Jacobs, revealing that exteriors of a private home served as Berlin's Hof Palace, site of the Potsdam Conference, while the Mayfield Senior School provided its interiors. In nearby La Canada, scenes of the woods and Havel River were filmed at Descanso Gardens. Los Angeles' historic Tower Theater stood in for the interior of a movie theater in the French Sector and a church was used for scenes at a hospital. The Twin Springs Design Center became U.S. Occupation Headquarters. Finally, San Bernardino International Airport was transformed into Berlin's Tempelhof Airport, circa 1945.
Antique props were obtained directly from Germany. Says Messina, "We had a shopper in Berlin who sent us a sea crate full of everything from vintage toilets to telephones, light switches, signs and stoves--things we would never find here. He sent pieces of tile that we reproduced and built into the kitchen walls of Lena's apartment."
Adding ambience were tanks and military vehicles and vintage cars. Among the most striking was a 1937 Rolls Phantom 3 (V-12) that had actually belonged to Field Marshall Montgomery, who put 360,000 miles on it during the war. The filmmakers also acquired the use of a 1936 Chrysler Airflow Limousine, documented to have been driven in Potsdam during the conference, and a 1937 Packard LeBaron towncar, both of which are the only models still in existence.
Soderbergh's commitment to traditional technique extended to his use of camera lenses.
Examining continuity reports from Michael Curtiz films such as "Mildred Pierce," he determined, "They were basically using five lenses--a 50mm, a 40mm, a 32mm, a 28mm and a 24mm--and we pretty much stuck to that. As technology developed, lenses have improved and one of the things that has happened is that now there's a coating to reduce flares when there's a light pointing into the lens or kicking off of something. We were trying to find lenses that didn't have this modern coating because we wanted those anomalies they used to get. Panavision pulled some of their early lenses for us. Some people would consider them not as good, but, in our opinion, for this they were better. It absolutely had an impact."
The fact that Soderbergh functions as director of photography on many of his films, "The Good German" included, accelerates the pace of the production process, as those in his regular crew can attest. "Steven moves fast," says Messina. "He doesn't fall behind schedule; he gets ahead."

COSTUMING, AND LESSONS ON HOW TO WEAR A PROPER HAT
Costume designer Louise Frogley worked with black-and-white on "Good Night, and Good Luck" and, like Messina, found the palette more liberating than challenging. She could use red shoes if they were handy, knowing they would appear black on film. "We put all sorts of mad combinations together without regard to color," she says. "For contrast we relied on texture and patterns."
Raised in post-war London, "playing on bombsites," Frogley was still surprised by the degree to which Berlin had been destroyed, and crafted the wardrobe accordingly. "Everything was based on logistics and economics. It was a world of desperate poverty, grime and filth, lack of water, lack of food, and lack of privacy or personal safety, and you see that reflected in the clothing. Women would wear turbans or scarves because they couldn't wash their hair. They would wear bulky coats even in the summer to make themselves as unattractive as possible in an atmosphere where rape was commonplace. People often carried their valuables with them in rucksacks. They didn't have much clothing and what they had was old."
At the same time, "People in the black market had money. You'd see prostitutes wearing the latest fashions, nail polish and high heels, provided that they had someone powerful taking care of them. It was a totally corrupt environment."
Frogley patterned George Clooney's wardrobe after war correspondents of the time, who favored dark shirts with lighter ties. "Technically, they weren't supposed to wear dark shirts but they did it because they liked it," she explains. "Jake would have done the same just to buck the system. He'd loosen his tie, leave his jacket unbuttoned and his hat cocked to one side, things no other officer would have done."
For Cate Blanchett, the key was elegance. "Lena would find a way to be chic within her limits," says Frogley. "She didn't have much money and would have to buy dresses on the black market, but they wouldn't be the latest styles. Still, she'd be more naturally tasteful than her roommate, Hannelore, who's coarse and generally not as well put together."
The designer's largest challenge, by volume, was assembling period military uniforms for the four occupying armies. "We had them made all over the world and a lot of it doesn't match but that's okay because they didn't match at the time either," she reveals. The Soviet uniforms, in particular, were coming out of a transitional stage in the early 1940s, wherein medals and insignia denoting rank were being gradually restored after years of being banned in an effort to convey equality among the troops--a concept that, by the 40s, everyone agreed had fostered more inefficiency than morale.
Moscow-born Ravil Isyanov, who plays General Sikorsky, helped the costume designer identify the various Russian military medals she had assembled, to determine which of them would be appropriate for the general to wear.
Frogley found it humorous that so many of her young extras had no idea how to wear their pants or their hats correctly for the time and says, laughing, "We had tremendous trouble getting them to keep their trousers up, because the style now is to wear them lower. We had to put suspenders on them so they couldn't be adjusted and still they tried, every time we turned around. They also needed hat lessons--back goes up, front goes down, pinch here--otherwise they'd wear them on the back of their heads. They were just naughty."

THE MUSICAL ELEMENT
Another essential period element in the film was the score, which, Soderbergh states,
"is as important as casting and as integral as production design and costume design. "I knew I was burdening Thomas Newman with an incredible task. The good news is that his father wrote this kind of music. It's in his DNA."
Newman is the son of the late, famed composer and conductor Alfred Newman. Newman Sr. and his contemporaries, such as Max Steiner and Dimitri Tiomkin, provided Hollywood films of the 1930s, 40s and 50s with notably dynamic scores. It was Steiner's contention that a score should enhance and support the emotional content of a scene. This is the point of view Soderbergh wanted for "The Good German," and the reason he selected some of Steiner's work as a temp score during production.
"There was temp music I had in certain scenes that were expositional," says Soderbergh. "When I sat down with Thomas, he said, 'I think we need to go in a different direction with this underscore because the temp music is not letting me hear the dialogue the way I need to hear it, or to understand the importance of what the characters are discussing.' So he went in a different direction, which literally makes you listen to the dialogue differently, and created something absolutely perfectly in that idiom. It lifted the whole movie up.
"The score is spectacular and complements the movie so well, not only emotionally, which you would expect, but in the way it helps express the narrative," the director explains. "That's especially important in a story like this, where there is so much subterfuge and so much depends upon what is being said or not said…known or not known."

THE FILMMAKERS

The Good German" is director STEVEN SODERBERGH's sixteenth film, following "Bubble," "Ocean's Twelve," "Solaris," "Full Frontal," "Ocean's Eleven," "Traffic," "Erin Brockovich," "The Limey," "Out of Sight," "Gray's Anatomy," "Schizopolis," "The Underneath," "King of the Hill," "Kafka" and "sex, lies, and videotape." In 2001, Soderbergh received the Best Director Academy Award for "Traffic."
He also wrote, directed, photographed and edited "Equilibrium," starring Alan Arkin, Robert Downey, Jr. and Ele Keats, one of a trio of short eroticism-themed films released as "Eros." Michelangelo Antonioni and Wong Kar-wai directed the other two segments. The film had its premiere at the 2004 Venice Film Festival.
In 2000, Soderbergh and George Clooney formed Section Eight, a film production company based at Warner Bros. After their inaugural production, "Ocean's Eleven," they executive produced "Far From Heaven," written and directed by Todd Haynes. The critically acclaimed homage to 1950s melodrama starred Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid.
In 2002, Section Eight released three films: "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," directed by and starring George Clooney, with an ensemble cast including Sam Rockwell, Drew Barrymore and Julia Roberts; "Insomnia," directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Al Pacino, Robin Williams and Hilary Swank; and "Welcome to Collinwood," written and directed by brothers Anthony and Joe Russo, with an ensemble cast including William H. Macy, Isaiah Washington, Luis Guzman, Jennifer Esposito, Sam Rockwell and Clooney.
Section Eight opened four films in 2005, two of them going on to the Academy Awards.
"Goodnight, and Good Luck.," directed by and starring George Clooney from a script by Clooney and Grant Heslov, received six Academy Award nominations: Best Actor (David Strathairn); Best Director (Clooney); Original Screenplay (Clooney and Heslov); Cinematography (Robert Elswit); Art Direction (Jim Bissell) and Best Picture (Heslov). "Good Night, and Good Luck." had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival where Strathairn received the Osella Cup for his portrayal of legendary CBS anchorman Edward R. Murrow while Clooney and Haslov received the award for Best Screenplay.
"Syriana," starring George Clooney, Matt Damon and Jeffrey Wright, received two Academy Award nominations. George Clooney received the Oscar for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role while writer-director Stephen Gaghan received a nomination for Best Original Screenplay for his adaptation of the book See No Evil: The True Story of a Foot Soldier in the CIA's War on Terror, by Robert Baer.
"Rumor Has It…," directed by Rob Reiner and starring Jennifer Aniston, Mark Ruffalo, Kevin Costner and Shirley MacLaine and "The Jacket," directed by John Maybury and starring Adrien Brody, Keira Knightley and Jennifer Jason Leigh also were released in 2005.
Other Section Eight productions include "Ocean's Twelve," which reunited the entire cast of the 2001 hit "Ocean's Eleven," plus Catherine Zeta-Jones and internationally acclaimed actor Vincent Cassel, and "Criminal," starring John C. Reilly, Diego Luna and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Gregory Jacobs, who had collaborated with Soderbergh on ten prior films, made his directorial debut on the film, which was screened at the 2004 Venice, Deauville and London Film Festivals.
Soderbergh's additional credits as producer include Greg Mottola's "The Daytrippers"(1997) and Gary Ross' "Pleasantville" (1998). He was executive producer on David Siegel and Scott McGhee's "Suture" (1994), Godfrey Reggio's "Naqoyqatsi" and Lodge Kerrigan's "Keane," which played at the Telluride, Toronto and New York Film Festivals.
In 2003, Section Eight and HBO produced the television docudrama/political reality program "K Street," starring real-life political consultants James Carville and Mary Matalin. Co-starring in the project were a mix of actors, including John Slattery and Mary McCormack, as well as real-life politicians. In January 2004, Section Eight and HBO premiered the fiction series "Unscripted," which detailed the lives of a small group of aspiring actors.

PAUL ATTANASIO (Screenwriter) wrote the screenplays for "Quiz Show" and "Donnie Brasco," both of which received Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay. He also received the British Academy Award and the London Film Critics Circle Award for "Quiz Show," and was honored as Screenwriter of the Year by the National Association of Theater Owners.
Attanasio is currently an executive producer on the award-winning Fox series "House M.D." He previously created the acclaimed NBC series "Homicide: Life on the Street," winner of three Peabody Awards.
Attanasio was formerly the chief film critic of the Washington Post.

JOSEPH KANON (Author) began his career in publishing as a reader for The Atlantic Monthly. He went on to a series of editorial and managerial positions, including president and CEO of E. P. Dutton, and executive vice president at Houghton Mifflin as head of Trade and Reference Publishing.
In 1995 he wrote his first book, Los Alamos, a historical thriller set during the last months of the Manhattan Project. The book was a best-seller, translated into 18 languages, and won the Edgar Award for best first novel. Subsequent books were The Prodigal Spy, The Good German, and Alibi.

RETURN TO PREVIOUS PAGE