Tom, how did you get to know Til Schweiger?

Tom Zickler: That was in 1995 when I was still at the university. He’d heard that there was this madman in Babelsberg who had made a few films. Til wanted to start his own company and make a film. We are the same age, and when we met it all just clicked into place. The screenplay he put together with Thomas Jahn was great. “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” was our first film and we’ve been making film ever since for the last 20 years.

Getting back to “Traumfabrik.” ARRI is coproducing. How did that come about?

Tom Zickler: It was a big risk for us. During the intense eight-month preparation period, the executive producer, technical and costume people were already involved and of course had to be paid. It was one of the closest financial calls I’ve ever had in my career. We actually didn’t finish until about a week before we started filming. By that time, we had already accrued costs in the seven-figure euro region. Especially when you’re making a historical film it’s important to get your math right, because everything costs a lot of money. “Traumfabrik” is the first production of the newly founded company Traumfabrik Babelsberg. The stakeholders are Studio Babelsberg and myself. As we couldn’t finance the film alone, the idea from the very start was to find partners. I’m really happy that Pantaleon, HerbX, Bully Herbig’s company, and of course Studio Babelsberg are working with us, and that Funkhaus Berlin Nalepastrasse also came on-board as a co-financier. And it was very important to us to have ARRI as coproducer and equipment partner. We knew that the lighting work would be far more extensive with this studio-shoot concept than with a normal feature film. It meant spending a week hanging up the lights and trying them out for another week so that we could then make good progress when all the hundreds of extras arrived. Because we needed a great deal of lights and equipment, I talked to Josef Reidinger (General Manager of ARRI Media) about ARRI coming in as a coproducer. That was a godsend for the entire project. The amount of lighting and camera equipment required was enormous.