The sci-fi movie Fritz Lang admitted was “silly and stupid”
There are some sci-fi movies that simply elevate the beloved genre overnight. George Lucas popularised the ‘geeky’ form of storytelling with his Star Wars franchise in the late 1970s, revolutionising not just sci-fi but cinema in general, just a few years before James Cameron and Ridley Scott would change the genre further with Alien and The Terminator, respectively. But, all these filmmakers share one thing in common: they were all inspired by the great Fritz Lang and his 1927 film Metropolis.
Pushing silent cinema to its utter limits, Lang’s two-and-a-half-hour masterpiece predicted the future as being dominated by flying cars, skyscrapers that cast dark shadows on the streets below and robot assistants who assisted in our day-to-day living. Drawing from the futurism art movement that grew in the mid-1910s in Italy, Lang’s film told the story of a futuristic city whose social classes are sharply divided.
Thanks to its striking set design, which featured pointed skyscrapers and jagged industrial buildings, Lang’s film quickly caught the attention of fans and critics yet failed to recoup much of the staggering €21million budget when taking inflation into account. In spite of this, the art world was jolted awake, with filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock and Ridley Scott going on to be heavily influenced by the movie.
Yet, there was one iconic figure who truly “detested” the masterwork, with none other than the film’s own director Fritz Lang, hating what he’d created.
“I was not so politically minded in those days as I am now,” Lang stated in Who the Devil Made It by fellow filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, “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…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?”.
Lang might have hated the film, but this didn’t stop Ridley Scott from using it as a prime influence on his own 1982 film Blade Runner and Christopher Nolan taking aspects of it to better his own filmmaking craft. Calling the film a “key touchstone” of film history, Nolan, no doubt, looked to Lang’s film when he was making 2014’s Interstellar, starring Anne Hathaway and Matthew McConaughey.
Take a look at the trailer for Metropolis below and head back in time to a wild vision of the future.
