“My friend Robert Siodmark who at the time was working for Neue Revue as advertising agent, one day stormed into Romanische Café enthusiastically announcing that he wanted to make a film as an uncle had given him five thousand marks. Kurt Siodmark, Robert’s brother, had then the brilliant idea of shooting a film with ordinary people – a stroke of genius as our five thousand marks would not be enough to pay for professional actors. Also the fact that the film was shot on Sundays had its good reasons: during the week we had to work and Sunday was the only free day we had. More or less we were all amateurs: Fred Zinnemann worked as assistant cameraman, Edgar G. Ulmer as assistant director for Siodmark, and Moritz Seeler, a scholar who compensated his technical ignorance with his great flair for cinema, was our producer. The only professional was cameraman Eugen Schüfftan (in America he changed his name in Schufftan and in 1961 he was awarded the Oscar for best photography for the film with Paul Newman, The Hustler)”.

(Billy Wilder in Hellmuth Karasek, Billy Wilder, Mondadori, Milan, 1993)