World War I is coming to Netflix with the release of the new movie version of the classic story All Quiet on the Western Front.
Based on the 1929 book of the same name by German journalist and soldier Erich Maria Remarque, German Director Edward Berger has brought the harrowing and heartbreaking tale of German soldiers on the front line to the small screen.
Berger is the third director to adapt the novel since 1930 but he is the only German director to do so and this is the first time the story is being told entirely in German, with German talent at the helm.
Despite having a limited cinema release and finding its home on Netflix, All Quiet on the Western Front is no small movie. It is a war epic, bringing to life the journey of 17-year-old German soldier Paul Bäumer (played by Felix Kammerer) in the trenches, inevitably including some seriously brutal battles and conditions experienced by soldiers on the Western front.
The movie mainly takes place in France, with earlier scenes set in Germany but Berger told Newsweek that the majority of filming took place just outside of Prague in the Czech Republic in mid-2021.
Berger also shared that the trenches, which are the main setting of the film, were built from scratch.
"So we started in Prague, in and around Prague, we built the trenches in a big airfield, about an hour outside of Prague," Berger said. "So we dug the trenches there and built a crater and the other craters and mounds and the burnt trees.
"That was basically around Prague and for the main reason that Prague has very welcoming, and great crews, but also it is slightly more economical to shoot there," he said. "Also, because you will find buildings that aren't all renovated [there].
"It's very hard to find that in Germany where everything is renovated or in France where the actual historical locations would be. So Prague just felt like, after all the scouting, felt like the right place to go."
Berger also told Newsweek about filming the impressive battle scenes that feature throughout All Quiet on the Western Front.
Filming one scene, in particular, was "overwhelming," Berger shared. He was referring to the moment in which men in the German trenches are run over by French tanks, a hard-to-watch scene for audiences at home.
In the end, some German soldiers are able to stop the oncoming tanks by throwing a grenade through the tank door, killing the men inside.
"[The tank scene] was incredibly overwhelming because sometimes I thought we'd break under the weight of it, or then the sheer amount of it and it almost felt not possible to wrangle all of it but luckily, we had broken everything down beforehand and had done a lot of storyboards and it basically storyboarded everything," Berger said.
As for the battle scenes as a whole, Berger said: "We had hundreds of hours of meetings with everyone involved, stunts, SFX, production design, costume. You know, 'How many costumes do you need?' 'How often are they gonna get bloody?' All that stuff needs to be planned."
He also said the crew and and the actors had to be careful not the let the intense battle scenes affect them too much emotionally.
"The cameraman and I on in the mornings when we went to set with, we sometimes almost felt like, 'This is too much to take, we can't anymore' and I almost wanted to cry, to be honest," Berger said. "There are some mornings and other mornings he wanted to cry and so we just propped each other up and said, 'We can do this.' and then eventually, we decided let's just do one shot at a time because otherwise, it gets too overwhelming.
"First of all, because it's always so bloody and so dirty and it just creeps into your mind, it just sort of infiltrates your thoughts and you don't want to let it get to you so by saying let's do one shot at a time, it's almost like creating a wall around you and your emotions and just shutting it off and focusing on the technical and saying 'Alright, let's achieve this one shot and then once we have that, let's just deal with the next one,' that it just felt like piecemeal, almost like if your plates too full but your parents tell you you need to finish it so you take one bite at a time and eventually you have it done.
"But then during the edit, I also noticed that it had really left some traces on me and I basically went to the lake every time every day I drove home and stopped by a lake and just sat on it for half an hour and so to come back to earth a little bit."
Other filming locations for All Quiet in the Western Front included Barrandov Studios on the southern outskirts of Prague as well as the towns of Milovice, Králův Dvůr, Libušín, Vinařice, Benátky nad Jizerou, Lišany, Chotýšany, and Luštěnice.
According to IMDb, sections of All Quiet on the Western Front were also filmed in Belgium and Germany.
All Quiet on the Western Front is streaming on Netflix now.
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