“He speaks little and slowly, taking long pauses to think. He thinks slowly and consciously. He takes time because he knows what his objectives are. In the midst of a noisy, boisterous, irritating chaos, at its busiest centre, Potsdamer Platz, there is another world. It is almost a miracle to find an office in which silence and calm stability reigns. It is Grune’s office at Ufa. Today he has seen five hundred faces. He chooses every walk-on role himself. He’s dead tired. Yet he is ready to spend two hours talking about a short scene in the script which has to be changed and once again his words are so clear, placid, sure and calm, as if he were sitting in the shade of old oak trees on his land in the country. He is self-assured and, after five minutes, anyone has faith in him, in his goodwill and in his artistic capacity. They would have faith in him, even ignoring the fact that they are sitting in front of the director of Die Straße and Schlagende Wetter.

Very rarely have I seen a man with a vision which is so mimetic. There are indeed few directors who are capable of rejecting a scene twenty times in a script submitted by their own screen writer until he ‘gets it right’ – and he does. Very seldom does the writer believe the rejection to be justified. (…) Thousands of words wasted… Grune doesn’t speak more than ten words. And if the writer has learned something, then a miracle happens. The most terrifying work for a script writer, the destruction and rebuilding of an edifice which was already there, in this case delights him because even destruction becomes a productive process when you are working side by side with such a fertile mind as this.

Like all consistent men, he sometimes seems inconsistent. He never may be pushed but quite often he may be convinced. A scene is suggested to him. He still doesn’t see it. He rejects it. Yet during the day the author visualises it more clearly. The following morning he is able to re-enact it – obviously clumsily, in amateur fashion, but he manages it. Grune pauses for five, ten minutes, then corrects here and there certain nuances which might ring falsely, and accepts the rest. I have the feeling that, generally speaking, only with Grune have I learned to mould a scene in a way which is real, to the point where my visual and mimetic capacities are fully realised”.

(Willy Haas, Zusammenarbeit mit Grune, Film-Kurier, no.218, 16/9/1925; now in Willy Haas. Der Kritiker als Mitproduzent, by W. Jacobsen, K.Prümm and B.Wenz, Berlin, Hentrich, 1991)