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I Want My Opera House: 10 Insanely Ambitious Movie Projects

Great cinema is driven by great ambition. Without ambition, movies wouldn't exist. Because every project that finds its way into the production stages - even those that don't turn out right in the end or fail to succeed at the box office - is loaded with ambition: somebody has to pursue the dream that one day this thing will get into a theatre and people will watch it. Almost every picture will have that person somewhere in its midst. It must, otherwise what's the point?

3) Metropolis (1927) (Dir. Fritz Lang) 

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Considered today a pioneering achievement in the science-fiction genre, Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis was plagued with a notoriously troubled production. Lang was said to be an extremely demanding director who would seemingly stop at nothing to get his vision onto film exactly the way he saw it in his head: he would often shoot the simplest of takes hundreds of times.

The construction of Metropolis‘ city is, of course, one of cinema’s most ambitious attempts at creating a world from scratch: this was made possible through extremely complex miniatures built to achieve the vast and intricate nature of its director’s ideas, but Lang’s insistence on using real flames for the film’s most famous sequence (an actor’s dress caught fire as a result), and the fact that production took an entire year to complete, drove his performers mad. Luckily for Lang, the film was lauded as a “technical marvel” upon its release. Job done.