The Criterion Collection

Director Volker Schlöndorff declined producer Franz Seitz’s requests for him to adapt The Tin Drum many times, as he thought the novel was so narratively complex as to be unfilmable. He changed his mind after his own memories of childhood seaside visits began to give him ideas for ways to visualize the book’s beach scenes.

Schlöndorff found the linguistic complexity of Grass’s German text so daunting that he was inhibited in his attempts to adapt it. He found a way around this problem by writing the first draft of the script in French, with the help of Jean-Claude Carrière, then translating it back into German (pictured here).

Schlöndorff was convinced that David Bennent would be perfect for the role of Oskar when, to “screen test” the boy, he took him to Oktoberfest and observed the expressiveness with which he responded to his surroundings.

David Bennent’s real-life father, the actor Heinz Bennent, also appears in the film, as the grocer, Greff.

While scouting locations in Poland, Schlöndorff found that Grass’s novel was immensely popular there, although it had been banned by the government because of the scene in which the Red Army enters Danzig and commits rape.

Schlöndorff counts the low-angle photography of Alexander Dovzhenko’s Earth as a key stylistic influence on The Tin Drum’s aesthetic.

The sequence in which Oskar throws himself down the steps to stunt his growth was visually devised by cinematographer Igor Luther, who positioned Bennent where the camera normally rests on a crane and fastened the camera at a lower point on the rig to film him.

Actor Fritz Hakl (center), who plays Bebra, became very jealous of Bennent (right) because the latter shared many romantic scenes with Mariella Oliveri (left), and Hakl had become infatuated with her.

The glass-shattering effects for Oskar’s screams were often accomplished by simply having someone off-camera shoot the object in question with a rifle.

The movie ends at a point well before the book’s conclusion because Schlöndorff felt that, in the novel, Oskar’s transformation after deciding to grow again erased his sympathetic qualities and greatly reduced the dramatic pull his tale would have on an audience.

Curtis Tsui is a producer at the Criterion Collection.