Natural Interiors

Greed [1924] was, up to that time, and perhaps even to now the only film in which there was not one set in a studio used. I had rented an old uninhabited house on Gower Street in San Francisco, furnished the rooms in the exact way in which the author had described them, and photographed there with only very few lamps, and the daylight which penetrated through the windows. Of course this was not to the cameraman’s liking, but I insisted — and we got some very good photographic results. In order to make the actors really feel the characters they were to portray I made them live in those rooms.”

— Erich von Stroheim, as quoted in Hollywood Scapegoat (1950)

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