Fritz Lang
Fritz Lang is a film director with a cult-like following, even today. He is best known for his film Metropolis (1927) and always went to great lengths to achieve exactly the effect he was looking for in his work.
Metropolis was a film set in the future, which explores various themes from industrialization to capitalism and Marxism. Another famous film by Lang is M (1930), a horror story about a serial killer. Both of these films raise questions about whether the fundamental ideas of our society are stable and both are considered masterpiece for the artistry and meticulous attention to detail that Lang invested into his work.
He was born, Friedrich Lang, in Vienna December 1890, to Catholic and Jewish parents, although his mother converted to Catholicism when he was a boy. Lang went to university in Vienna to study civil engineering, but eventually switched to art. He spent three years travelling between 1910 and 1913, returning to Europe in time for the First World War. After spending a year studying in Paris, he was drafted by the Austrian Army to fight in Russia and Romania. Recovering from injuries and the horrors of war, Lang started to write down some of the ideas that would form the basis of his films in 1916.